Another black American painter called Clifford joined us on the football field, usually when we were just about done. He had connections in Morocco and was well supplied with hash. It made him sleepy, even when awake. With a cry of ‘Time to get the lead out!’ he would watch the ball roll past him with the frowning attention a zoologist might give to a rare, spherical beast. Clifford lived with a small, fair, English girl called Valerie. She told me he was the best lover a girl could dream of having. He beat her from time to time, but the bruises were a price worth paying to have a real man.
When I went to the Massons’ house, down on the harbour beyond the Casino Bar in the middle of town, to see how his finger was, he was working on a big painting of goats spilling down a hillside. The floor was littered with charcoal studies he had made with, it looked, infallible spontaneity. A canvas on the wall was of three naked girls rolling on a set of cushions. ‘Braniff air hostesses, they volunteered to pose for me, so I thought why not? They took their clothes off like they did it all the time. Why? Probably because they did it all the time.’ Gene’s wife Helen was dark, talkative and devoted. Although outspokenly Jewish, they had children called Robin and Leslie.
After our football games and a Pepsi or two at the casino bar, Harry Gordon and I went and talked in his studio, smoking big cheap cigars imported from Fidel’s Cuba. I was British enough to be surprised at how Harry seemed to be on first-name terms with pretty well everybody: Andy (Warhol), Jack (Kerouac), Dick (Avedon), Jack (Kennedy, this time), and of course Marilyn. I never greatly enjoyed cigars, but I felt at one with Ernest as I puffed my Fidel y Julieta. We had been in Fuengirola for a few months when I felt a small lump at the back of my throat. The local doctor was called Verdugo, the Spanish for executioner. I did not feel the urge to consult him. I thought the lump would go away, but it did not.
Every few weeks, we would drive along the coast, past flat-faced Estepona and heaped San Roque, to Gibraltar where we could stock up on provisions unobtainable at Cayetano’s in Fuengirola: Lipton’s tea, crisp Peek-Frean biscuits and unrancid butter. The lump in my throat was bothering me enough for Beetle to insist I find a doctor while we were in Gib. I was directed to a throat specialist called Hamish Macpherson. A brass plate at the door, opposite Lipton’s said that he was ‘late of Guy’s Hospital, London’.
His surgery was a large, bleak room on the first floor. He looked down my throat and then at me. ‘You think you’ve got cancer, don’t you?’
I said, ‘It had occurred to me.’
‘Well, you haven’t. I know what’s wrong with you and I can cure it.’
‘Well, that’s … that’s … encouraging.’
‘Where did you have your tonsils removed?’
I said, ‘New York, when I was … five years old.’
‘I might’ve guessed. American medicine! What you have is a post-lingual tonsil, composed of scar tissue. Result of inept surgery.’
‘What … what does one … do about it?’
‘It’s a simple operation.’
‘Operation! We’re … we’re only in Gibraltar for the day…’
‘That’s all right. We can do it right away. Do you have ten minutes?’
He had already opened a cupboard and taken out a large battery to which he now attached two leads from an instrument with two metal arms that tapered to a point. It would not have looked out of place in a Spanish inquisitor’s tool kit. As I watched the point began to redden.
‘It’s quite a simple operation,’ Mr Macpherson said. ‘But it does require three hands. And, as you may have observed, I have only the two; so one of them will have to be yours.’
‘What exactly…?’
‘When my … instrument is red-hot, the tip, I shall insert it, carefully, so that it reaches down into the back of your throat and cauterises your supposed tumour. As the lump is composed entirely of scar tissue, it has no nerves; as long as you keep perfectly still, you will feel nothing whatsover. You may hear a slight … seething noise, but that’s all.’
‘What about, um, an anaesthetic?’
‘Not necessary. I told you…’
‘I know, but…’
‘If you insist, I can always give you a swab of cocaine.’
‘Please. This third hand…’
‘I want you to take these two pieces of gauze and hold your tongue, maybe not your favourite activity. Stick the tongue well out, keep still, open wide, and ready when you are.’ I swallowed. The lump was still there. I opened very wide and held my tongue. Mr Macpherson directed the red-hot iron to the back of my throat. There was a therapeutic sizzle and out came the iron. ‘There y’are, you’re cured. Let go your tongue, man, and have a swallow.’ I did. I felt nothing.
I said, ‘Well, thank you very much. What do I … owe you?’
‘Normally, that would be three guineas. But since you assisted with the operation, we’ll make it three pounds. What’re you proposing to do now?’
I said, ‘Go and find my wife and have a cup of coffee.’
‘Typical! You’ll drink it when it’s too hot and you won’t notice because of that completely unnecessary swab of cocaine and you’ll give yourself cancer of the stomach.’ I never smoked a cigar or a cigarette from that day onwards.
We arrived back in Fuengirola to find a letter from my mother (always a lively and fluent correspondent). Guy Ramsey had died. In an article in Bridge Magazine, Ewart Kempson, one of the ‘Aces’ in his classic handful of master players, reported that he had invited Guy to play in a weekend match in Norwich. After a ‘black tie’ dinner, he charmed the team, and their ladies, and won the pairs competition, partnering Kempson’s wife. On the Sunday night, Guy again played ‘with considerable skill’ and then sat discussing the hands they had played until 2.30 in the morning. Kempson ends his piece: ‘He died a few hours later. The doctor who was summoned found him writing to his adored wife. I shall always think of him as Guy Ramsey Sahib Bahardur. He was a gentle, kind, generous and extremely brave person. His end-play was a very happy one.’ As I transcribe Kempson’s dated words, my eyes fill with tears, as they did when I wrote to Celia fifty-five years ago.
Guy left no blazing mark on the world, but he is among those minor figures of whom friends and colleagues (Peter Green among them) continue to speak with affection and admiration. Perhaps too vivid a performer to be a novelist, he devoted all his energy to impersonating the urbane flâneur that indeed he was. As a journalist, he had flair and style, but he was too genial, perhaps too lazy, to be a careerist. He had small interest in politics and rejoiced in the England where the chivalry he had applauded in Ewart Kempson was commonplace. He loved to make a fine impression and tell a good story. The bridge world was salted with jealousy and backbiting. Guy had no time for cliquish rivalries; he took everyone on their merits, as English gentlemen always did, or were supposed to do.
Celia asked whether she might come and visit us in Fuengirola. I never wondered why she hoped to find us more of a consolation than her close friends E. Arnot Robertson and Marghanita Laski. She brought her young son Simon and stayed for a week. In her late forties, she seemed at once brave and somehow desirous of something that we could not, or would not, give her. She told me, meaningly, that if I was going to write many novels, I needed to have more experience of life than monogamous domesticity could supply. Perhaps she imagined herself as Colette’s Léa to my Chéri. As we waited in the rain for the bus that would take them to catch the plane in Gibraltar, she said, ‘I can feel the drops trickling between my tits.’
Harry and Charlotte Gordon went to Madrid to look at the pictures in the Prado and elsewhere. When they came back, Harry told us that the Academia Real had just made the last sets of eighty-four prints from Goya’s original etchings of the Desastres. The quality was still good, but they would never make any more. He had a spare set, if we wanted them. The price was just over £100. It was a lot of money, but a chance that we chose not to miss. I have two of the prints on my wall, but not in my
eyeline. Goya’s unblinking eye furnishes images too demanding to be kept in constant view.
Franco’s cruel Spain suited us. We were indeed passing rich on £10 a week. I finished The Trouble with England on a Friday and started A Wild Surmise on the following Monday. On Saturday mornings, we left Paul with Salvadora and went to the big covered market in Málaga where they sold chirimollas (custard apples) and fresh strawberries in March. After doing the rounds, we went to Antonio’s bar on the waterfront, where we refilled wicker-covered flagons with fundador, vino tinto and agua aguardiente.
Antonio tethered his donkey among the casks in the shadowy depths of his sawdust-floored bodega. He was a lame widower. His ambition was to emigrate to Australia. To get a visa, he had to go to Madrid with his small son. He could not afford to stay in a hotel. They arrived at the Australian embassy in the morning, in the clothes they had been in for thirty-six hours. The boy had soiled his pants. The Aussie official sniffed as they came in and that was that.
Fuengirola’s American population was not all artistic. Two of them were veterans on disability pensions. One was an ex-Marine with whom I played poker a few times. His pet phrase was ‘Up yours with a hay-rake, Jack!’ The other was called Chuck; he had only one lung and seemed resigned to lonely decline. Then he surprised everyone with the announcement that he was getting married. His bride was a young whore from Málaga. He had no illusions about why she agreed to the wedding: she would get a good percentage of his pension after he died. Chuck had already been married and divorced in the US. When his son sent him a Christmas present of two pairs of socks, he refused to pay the few pesetas duty on the package. ‘Spain, I don’t need socks.’ He married his puta in the new white village church (the ‘loyalists’ had burned down the old one) and lived for a while as happily as he knew how.
I read Lorca and Juan Ramón Jiménez. To improve my everyday Spanish I relied on paperback translations of Agatha Christie (‘Desde luego, señor Poirot…’). I rarely looked at a Spanish newspaper. One day, on my way to play football, I saw that the rooting pigs, and the garbage, had been cleared from beside the carretera. The whole village was being spruced up with whitewash and happy flags. ‘Porqué?’ ‘Porqué? Porqué mañana por la tarde viene el Jefe del Estado!’ Francisco Franco was coming to Fuengirola.
On the day itself, traffic was banned on the carretera. FRANCO was inscribed, again and again, in large whitewashed letters on the tarmac. The villagers lined the street, the children in their tight best clothes. The rein-forced Guardia Civil scowled. Just before Franco was due, a tall, slim old man in a straw hat, wearing an open, floral waistcoat, pointed white leather shoes and carrying a long polished cane, sauntered into view from the gypsy encampment to the west of the village.
In front of the alcaldía, the town hall, he came to the first FRANCO in the roadway. He tilted his head and put a careful toe in the O of FRANCO and did a little pivot. The Guardia scowled more than ever, but the king of the gypsies paid them no heed. He walked on, to the next whitewashed FRANCO and now he put that pointed toe into the eye of the A, never touching the whiteness, and did the same pivot. The tilt of his head seemed to ask what FRANCO was doing in the middle of his road.
The king of the gypsies sauntered to the side of the road only as the first motor cyclists came blaring into sight. They drove fast through the village and on towards Los Boliches (‘Lo Boliche’, Salvadora called it). Then came the first black limousine, then the second, then the third and the fourth and the fifth. In each of them sat a stiff, plump figure with a nasty moustache; uniformed acolytes beside him. Without slowing down, they came and they went, Franco and his four facsimiles. ‘Con mis ojos le he visto!’ Salvadora said, with my own eyes I saw him; but which was the real one, neither she nor we will ever knew.
A few days later, I went to collect Harry Gordon to play football and he said he didn’t feel like it. So what was the matter?
‘You haven’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Hard-edge is dead. It was in Time magazine.’
‘I never even knew it was sick. So what?’
‘So what? So every single one of the fifty-something paintings I’ve done since we got here is hard-edge. I had promises of interest from all kinds of galleries, including Sidney Janis. Now no one’s even going to look at my stuff. Looks like I wasted a whole year.’
Could a genuine artist choose to do what he did only, or even principally, because there was a market for it? I was not, of course, indifferent to cash, but I never wrote a novel for a mercenary motive and I have never changed a word in order to please or appease some putative reader. I made it a habit to rely on the movies and television to subsidise what really mattered to me. While we were on the Costa del Sol, I had the luck, engineered by Richard Gregson, to be hired by Fritz Gotfurt to improve an Associated British Pictures script that was about to go into production. Dickie Todd was not happy with his lines. There is a rule as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians that the closer a movie is to production, the higher the fee for remedial script surgery. I made three times as much as my advance on The Limits of Love in as many weeks.
Gotfurt was one of the earliest of many refugees from the German cinema. The best, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder among them, headed for Hollywood. Emeric Pressburger was one of the few who stopped in England, where he teamed up with Mickey Powell, whose career was fatally blighted in 1960, when he made Peeping Tom, a more truthful erotic myth than prudish British critics (voyeurs by trade) cared to countenance. Too cynical to advertise his cynicism, Fritz Gotfurt had been shrewd enough to quit Germany as soon as Hitler came to power. He had no pious hopes, as Wesker and others did, that man was redeemable. He had technical acumen, but no illusions about cinema as an art. Many small cigars had kippered and creased his complexion. He admired Dickie Todd more for his amorous adventures than for his heroic war record.
When Dickie announced his delight in the new lines I had given him, Fritz promised that I should never be short of work as long as he was around. The next job he offered me was to adapt his wife’s play, Little Ladyship, for the screen. I elected to stay poor and go on with A Wild Surmise. Not long afterwards, the cartero brought me a neat letter in which George Greenfield said that he had read The Trouble with England and thought it too slim to be published on its own. Would I consider writing another novella to furnish a doublet that he could propose to Cassell’s? They would want to follow The Limits of Love with a ‘booky book’ rather than a squib. Fortunately A Wild Surmise would be ready to supply it.
Its plot was based on a recent scandal in Spain. A large number of people had been poisoned, and a few had died, allegedly by the use of industrial oil, from Morocco, for making canned tomato sauce. In the end, which took some time to come, it was proved that the oil was innocent; Spanish tomatoes had been overdosed with toxic spray before they were cooked. I embellished the story and transferred it to San Roque, a fictitious South American country whose capital closely resembled Málaga.
The novel’s anti-hero was Robert Carn, based on my Charterhouse friend Robin Jordan, who had indeed emigrated to South America. The name Carn was dredged from my memory of my prep school in north Devon. I can hardly recall its bearer but even his pre-teen personality had the singular aura that distinguishes the maverick. Having said my piece about anti-Semitism and Jews, at length, I was determined not to be cornered into being a Jewish writer. At least half my books and stories contain no Jewish characters. I like to live, and write, in what my friend Joseph Epstein calls ‘the middle of my tether’.
Tranquil Fuengirola suited me very well. My stacks of pages proved it. We made trips to the pottery in Coín and to Ronda, high in the sierras, where we sat in front of a coal fire at the Hotel Reina Victoria and were served with a full British tea by a red-haired waiter. Ronda had the oldest wooden bullring in Spain. A deep ravine cuts the town in two. It is said to have been the real-life location of a scene in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which republican l
oyalists threw captive Fascists off the high scarp into the rocky abyss, unless it was the Fascists who did the throwing.
When my parents came to stay for a few days, we drove them to Granada to see the Alhambra. Larry Potter and the other Americans called my mother ‘Irene’ without hesitation. Larry gave her a little etching, of a reclining woman. He had nothing and he was very generous. Later he gave me a sketchbook thick with gouache cartoons in the style of Juan Gris. I have it in my desk drawer. Larry went to Paris soon after we left Fuengirola in 1960. I recognised him, under another name, in Jimmy Baldwin’s novel Another Country, when I reviewed it in 1963. His asthma made him vulnerable and he was, he later wrote to Harry Gordon, ‘flat on his black ass’. Larry died in 1966; he has since gained a measure of deserved fame as an artist.
The S Man
XXIII
EARLY IN 1960, Beetle was again pregnant. She was not disposed to have the baby in Spain. I now had hopes of making enough money to afford the rent of somewhere in England, even if it meant doing things I did not want to do. Our prospects changed with a telegram from George Greenfield. The Limits of Love had won the Lippincott Prize, which guaranteed an advance of $2,500; the same sum would be devoted to publicising the book. Confident that he would share my pleasure, I wrote to tell Bob Gutwillig about the Lippincott Prize. He responded that if I was going to be a success, there was no point in continuing to know me. I took it that he was congratulating me. Perhaps he was. I never heard from him again.
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