Going Up

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by Frederic Raphael


  Harry Gordon had a birthday in June. We left the children with Siobhan and drove the Gordons in our new car up to Granada to hear Andrés Segovia give a solo concert in the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra. We stayed the night at the Alhambra Palace and drank gin fizzes on the long, narrow terrace that stood high above the plain. Somewhere out there in the haze was the village where Garcia Lorca lived and was murdered. The Granada Palace’s many bedrooms opened off long, wide corridors that reminded me of the one along which Monica Vitti ran, with elegant awkwardness, when she realised, early in the morning, that Sandro was not in the room with her. She ran and ran until she came to the deserted public rooms. In the last of them, she saw Sandro with the call girl whom they had seen, and pitied, if not despised, in an earlier scene. Beauty was not enough for him, nor was happiness.

  On the day Hemingway died, 2 July, several people, some I did not know, came to the Villa Antoñita as if they needed the comfort of some kind of informal formality. One was a guy who wrote pulp fiction short stories. Harry Gordon said that he had ‘a problem with Jews and blacks’: he didn’t like them. Charlie Reiter drove up in a black VW with his beautiful blonde opera singer wife, Anne. He had written a stream-of-consciousness novella which he gave me to read. Barnie Rosset’s Grove Press was almost certainly going to publish it. The story was about a man, in New York on business, who is treated to a black call girl by whoever he just closed a deal with. She is very good-looking, cool and articulate. They have dinner and he gets to know her, he imagines, a little too well for the occasion to remain a commercial fantasy. She comes back with him to his hotel, but he cannot bring himself to treat her like the sexual treat he has been promised. He tells her that he likes her too much to want to go on. She says, more or less, ‘And how about what I want?’ It was well done, although I could imagine Bob Gutwillig wanting work done on it. Harry Gordon liked Charlie less than I did; he regarded him as some kind of a ‘reproduction Ivy League dude’. Charlie and Anne looked like the perfect handsome couple, but she, it emerged, was more interested in her career than in being a wife. Like many opera singers, she was disciplined, dedicated and implacably self-involved.

  Porter Sneyd also brought some of his work for me to see. He had a wispy beard, like a cashiered mandarin official, and wrote very short, ‘experimental’ stories; part of the experiment appeared to be that they dispensed with grammar, plot and characters. Porter’s wife, whom he called ‘Mitch’, was scrawny in appearance and even in voice. I had no idea what they lived on, perhaps a disability pension. ‘Mitch’ had some unspecified chronic debility. They rented a small house up in the foothills towards Mijas.

  Later in the summer, Charlie told Harry Gordon that he went to call on the Sneyds and found that Porter had gone to Málaga to sign some papers. ‘She was lying there on the couch, in some kind of a wrapper, and she told me how Porter never did it any more and she probably never would herself and that’s what she was thinking about, if I really wanted to know. So I thought, why not do her a small favour? What harm could it do? I did it strictly for her sake, but you know what? It felt good.’ Charlie’s book got published, but I never heard that he wrote another. He went to live in California and became a union executive, edited the local magazine and became fat. He told Harry Gordon that he was very happy with the way things turned out.

  There was an outbreak of smallpox on the Costa del Sol that summer. We asked Siobhan whether she had been vaccinated. She had not. We urged her to go to Dr Verdugo as soon as possible. She announced that she preferred to ‘battle against it with my own resources’. She certainly looked very well. When my parents came to see us, my mother described her as ‘blooming’. Siobhan told Beetle that she found Spanish food very fattening; she had had to let out her skirts. The obvious question had to be put: ‘Are you by any chance pregnant?’

  ‘Impossible. Out of the question.’

  ‘Impossible in what sense?’

  ‘There’s no way whatsoever I can be pregnant.’

  My parents’ visit added tension to the household. Irene was only fifty years old, but her skin was too delicate for the beach. The days were long and very hot. We went out in the car and we came back. I persuaded Salvadora to come and cook the occasional meal of her remembered specialities, but Irene had small appetite. One evening, when we were at table, Paul leaned across and kissed Beetle on the arm. My mother burst into tears. If my father was embarrassed by our looks of amazed exasperation, he felt obliged to defend his wife. I cannot recall what was said to have made her unhappy, but it was not admitted to be jealousy. Was she distressed by Paul’s show of spontaneous filial affection of a kind that I had never offered? The scene was charged with unsaid things. I had two small children and I was about to be thirty years old. When, in his terse, tight-lipped way, my father made it clear that Beetle and, more particularly, I had not welcomed them as warmly as they had wished, I heard myself say, ‘Why don’t you fuck off out of my life and leave us alone?’

  A Wild Surmise was published that summer and received even better reviews, in smarter places, than The Limits of Love; but it did not figure on the bestseller list. When Tom Maschler came down to Fuengirola to visit us, he promised, with aggressive candour, that I needed a more forceful publisher than Desmond Flower and his son Nicholas, who preferred motorbikes to books. The S Man had been bought by Penguins, with a £750 advance. It seemed a lot, but my share was soon gone. Tom was about to move to Jonathan Cape and was able, and willing, to play the part of literary patron. With favours to dispense, he was invited to meals in the houses of all the so-called writers in Fuengirola.

  By some means, Tom acquired a packet of hash from Morocco and proposed that we all get together, smoke pot and use the Gordons’ tape recorder to preserve the consequent conversation. It was a kind of chaste orgy in which we were all expected to make raw revelations. We smoked the stuff and sat there, for quite a long time, trying to be daring, or not, and then we stopped. When the tape was played back, it proved only that people under the influence of marijuana were likely to be very slow on cue and deliver themselves, peditentim as the Latinists say, very slowly, of confessions of little or no interest. The only memorable event of the afternoon was that Harry Gordon tripped on our doorstep and broke his big toe.

  At the end of his week’s stay, Tom asked the Gordons whether he might borrow their house and their cook, Pepa, for a big dinner with which he might return the hospitality of his various hosts. There were about ten of us at a well-loaded table. At the end of Pepa’s feast, Tom leaned back and said, ‘That’s the first time I’ve had enough to eat since I got here.’ I walked out of the house and into the village and down to the waterfront. Then I walked back again. I doubt whether Tom had remarked my exit.

  As August approached, we had to leave the Villa Antoñita. Siobhan was now so prominently pregnant that, while never admitting her condition, she said that she had to go back to Ireland. We did not seek to detain her; but her fare had to be paid. So did the high-season rent for the Villa Sol, one of a tight trio of charmless bungalows at the west end of the village, not far from the tall tower of the Café Somio, where music thumped on till two in the morning. We parted from the sulky Maria and took on a smiling one. Needing money, I had asked the bank to send us money, as usual. The new manager replied that he would be happy to oblige as soon as my account was in funds. Selwyn Lloyd, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, had imposed a rigorous credit squeeze. When Beetle’s father, who had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease, died of pneumonia, Jonty Smulian, an American whom I hardly knew and who had fought in the Israeli Defence Force in the 1956 war, lent me money for our fares to fly home from Gibraltar.

  Jonty was a friend of Aubrey David, an entrepreneurial architect who was filling the campo between Fuengirola and Mijas with more or less fancy villas. Aubrey liked clean lines and, at first, dispensed with banisters for the white marble staircases. Every architect, it seems, fails to take some detail into account. Aubrey discounted the quanti
ty of liquor that a well-heeled rentier (and his lady) might be expected to swallow before lurching upstairs to bed and the heavy consequences of a missed step. On the sloping plateau between Fuengirola and Mijas, Lew Hoad, the Wimbledon champion of 1956, later opened a tennis farm. Aubrey’s elegantly landscaped courts were divided by pools that might have been cadged from the Alhambra and into which loose shots regularly plopped.

  For our few days in London, John Nimmo lent me his Austin A 40. He also offered me some money. He was a very kind man whose generous friendship I never properly honoured. He had a friend called Joe who had been a close friend of Ken Tynan’s until Ken became too grand to acknowledge him. My financial problems were eased somewhat before we returned to Fuengirola. Stella Richman promised that there was no shortage of work for me when I wanted it. The Best of Everything had been produced, with Terry Alexander and Gary Raymond, and had been well received. I arranged to meet Stella in Sainte-Maxime in late September, when we should be driving back to England, to work out the timetable for my new ATV contract. Meanwhile, she advanced me enough money to repay Jonty Smulian.

  I had written The Graduate Wife in a state of nervous unease, fearful that Beetle thought of me less as an artist than as a husband who was failing to provide a home for his family. She denied that what I feared was true; her patient vexation confirmed it. Nothing of my dismay was reflected in my new, cold, very English book. Whatever the confusion of my emotions, my brain stayed clear. I moped, but I also worked: whatever their state of mind, writers have to write. I allayed my own dreads with the precision with which I spelt out the complacency of my Oxonian characters.

  Desmond Flower declared the finished novel too good to be one of a pair. He proposed to publish it and The Trouble with England separately. What was needed after that was a big book to match The Limits of Love. Tom Maschler’s replacement at Penguin had been appointed too late to abort its paperback publication, but Tony whatever-his-name-was let it be known that he had no appetite for what he chose to call ‘intellectual’ fiction. Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae, as the new top man would never tolerate anyone to say.

  In mid-September, we left the Villa Sol and the insistent nocturnal beat of music from the Somio. For a few thousand pesetas, Harry and Charlotte Gordon had bought a high plot of land that jutted out, precipices on three sides, a burly buttress at the base of the mountains that rose above Mijas. On the narrow neck that connected the property to the road, there was a little church dedicated to San Anton. Otherwise, the site was unapproachable. Harry proposed to build a house with two studios. He needed masons to do the basic structural work, but he would design the place himself and make the doors and windows. I envied his practical competence and his piano-playing. To fund construction, he and Charlotte were going back to work in New York. He had small hope of selling his paintings, but he had been offered a ‘creative’ job in an advertising agency at almost $20,000 a year.

  I lacked the means or the appetite to continue living in Spain, but I dreaded our return to England. We would have enough to keep us, but I had small prospect of earning sufficient money to provide anything that would please Beetle as much as the Old Mill House had. She was willing to find a job, but that solution was also, it seemed to me, a criticism. I had to hope, and prove, that it was not really what she wanted. The children kept us together, and apart.

  We crossed the border into France late on a Saturday night. On the Sunday morning, Beetle woke with a temperature and a fierce sore throat. I cannot remember in what hotel in what small town we had stopped. I can, however, see myself, as if on a spool of film in my mental cutting room, running down a long, straight street of shuttered houses and shops in search of a pharmacie. I found one that was open and pleaded for an antibiotic, as if my marriage depended on it. Whatever they sold me proved effective. By the time we reached Sainte-Maxime, Beetle was well enough to face Stella and Victor, who were holidaying with their small son, another Paul.

  I had sent word to Richard Gregson of where we would be staying, so that he could tell Stella. There was a message at the hôtel Chardon Bleu to call Gareth Wigan at the John Redway agency. I suspected that Stella Richman was not, after all, going to be in Sainte-Maxime; it augured ill for the promised contract. It took some time to get through to London. Beetle took Paul and Sarah to the beach. When at last we were connected, Gareth told me that Richard was out of town on business. He thought I would want to know that a producer called David Deutsch had seen The Best of Everything on television and wanted to buy the film rights and commission me to write the movie script. Was I willing to come back to England to talk to him? He assured me that David Deutsch was a very nice man, the son of Oscar Deutsch, the founder of the Odeon cinema chain. He worked for Anglo-Amalgamated, which had agreed to back the project. I could rely on the terms being fair and, more important, the film was likely to be made. Oh, and did I have a pencil? Stella Richman had rented a house in Sainte-Maxime; she had asked him to give us the address and phone number. She had agreed that I should do three more plays for ATV. She could pay me a little more than she had before.

  I could imagine Karl Marx’s ironic smile. Had he not said that economic circumstances determine the consciousness? My fears of inadequacy were purged. It was shameful and it was exhilarating to have the prospect of giving Beetle what she wanted and what I wanted to give her. What I have always least liked about myself, the urge to self-abasement, was banished. For whatever less than Lawrencian reason, I was restored to virility and self-assurance. Fiction might be what mattered most; the movies were my salvation. I told Beetle that we would go back to England, see Mr Deutsch, collect his money, get a new station wagon, in which Paul and Sarah would be able to stretch out and sleep, and then drive to Rome and rent somewhere where I could write the script. We spent a couple of easy days with Stella and Victor Brusa, who was pleased to compile the best picnics ever eaten on the sands of Sainte-Maxime, and then we drove up to Calais.

  Lindmann

  XXV

  DAVID DEUTSCH ASKED us to celebrate our deal (I was to get £3,000 for the screenplay) by having dinner with him and his wife in their flat in Park Royal, a tall new block off Melrose Avenue. When she opened the door, I saw that Mrs Deutsch was the same beautiful Clare who had whispered admiration of my performance in ‘Joe and the Boys’ when she was married to Raymond Stross. She was – she told me quietly – much, much happier now. David’s enthusiasm for our project led me to presume that the initiative was wholly his. It is at least possible that Clare had something to do with the fact that they watched my little play on television. David had no objection to my writing the movie in Rome. I assured him that I wrote better when I was near the Mediterranean. We would come back, if he wanted that, after he had seen the first draft.

  Our new car was a Standard Vanguard, more powerful, as well as more commodious, than the Ensign. Before we left England again, we found time to drive down to Colchester and look at a few properties in the area. My mother was glad to take care of Paul and Sarah. It was as if what I said in Fuengirola had never been said; nor did it ever need to be repeated. I was about to be paid more in the next year than my father, who had just retired from Shell, had ever earned in a similar period. I did not think it important, but there it was. He and I never again had a sour discussion of the kind that had so embarrassed Beetle.

  I had no urgent wish to return to East Bergholt, but nice houses with gardens were cheaper on the unfashionable Essex–Suffolk border than in Sussex or Surrey. After one quick visit, we made an offer of £4,000 for a whitewashed brick Georgian farmhouse behind a garage in Marks Tey, on the London side of Colchester. Now that I could flash the simulacrum of a steady income, we should be able to get a mortgage, but it depended on a favourable survey. I had done enough, I hoped, to convince Beetle that, in due time, we should have a permanent roof in England. I was in no hurry to live under it.

  The big new car impelled me to drive eastwards across France in order to enjoy the autobahn
down into Italy. I felt a twitch of triumphant transgression in crossing the frontier from which my grandfather Max had escaped fifty years before. Our one German night was mildly disturbed by rowdy voices in the street: French soldiers who had had too much too drink, but wanted more. We stayed in Heidelberg, where Willie Maugham went to the university, long enough only to allow a radio to be slotted into the car and then we headed south. Memories of the war in which I never had to fight led me to bypass Rome and head for Anzio, the site of an Anglo-American amphibious operation intended to outflank Kesselring’s defensive line in front of Monte Cassino. The landing took the Germans by surprise, but the cautious American general Lucas failed to press on inland. The Germans regrouped, contained the bridgehead and inflicted heavy casualties on the soldiers pinched within it. Post-war Anzio turned out to be a rebuilt town of shuttered and charmless seaside houses and chalets of the kind to be seen in, as the Linguaphone had indelibly put it, ‘centinaia e centinaia di stazioni balnearie’.

  We drove back to Rome. The most suitable and affordable flat was on the ground floor of the 6,000 block on the Via Trionfale, at the top of Monte Mario. Its owner, a contessa of indeterminate age, arrived to vet us in a black Fiat Millecento, no very grand motor, driven by a chauffeur in brass-buttoned black livery, wearing a peaked cap. Both might have been characters in flight from Alberto Moravia’s novel Il Conformista. La Contessa regarded three-year-old Paul and fourteen-month-old Sarah with indulgent smiles and handed us the keys.

 

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