Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  Discouraged by the boat/train journey and the problems we’d had getting the huge rubberised bags across Paris, he was less thrilled by my plan than I’d expected. ‘So what am I supposed to do while all this is going on?’ he asked.

  ‘You can lose your virginity too,’ I suggested helpfully, but he remained cool to the idea. ‘It’s beastly inconsiderate of you,’ he complained.

  Dinner over, Calvert returned sulkily to our hotel room and the blow-up boat, and I set off alone for the Champs Élysées. Crowded with people en promenade, the wide avenue with its bars and sidewalk cafés looked a vision of glamour to me. Emerging from the subway, I’d hardly started up it before being propositioned by an Arab. Badly dressed, unshaven, with rotted teeth, it was obvious he was what Nanny called a ‘ruffian’. I thanked him politely for his alarming suggestion and continued on my way.

  Already in a state of considerable disquiet at the idea of what lay ahead, looking back I realise I was not as composed or discriminating as I should have been. And of the many women in the street which, if any, were prostitutes? How did you recognise one for sure? When a middle-aged woman in mesh stockings, high heels and a great deal of make-up swayed out of the crowd to murmur, ‘Bon soir, tu veux faire l’amour avec moi?’ I was wound so tight I said yes at once.

  I began to regret it as I walked with her to a nearby hotel. She had already told me the price, and when we’d climbed the stairs to her squalid room I paid her the 50 francs she’d asked for. ‘It’s normal also to give a tip,’ she said.

  A tip! Henry Miller hadn’t mentioned that. I explained about the long voyage downriver that lay ahead of me, I really couldn’t afford a tip.

  ‘Huh, Monsieur Minimum,’ she said scornfully. ‘OK, I must wash you.’

  I sat on the bidet while she did so. I was appalled by the woman I’d chosen, she was stout and old and hideous. Overcome by dismay, my heart was still thudding with terrified anticipation.

  Having done with washing me, the woman dried my already overheated parts with a skimpy towel. Then in a bored, vaguely resentful way she removed just her skirt, putting it on to a hanger before clambering a little stiffly on to the bed. ‘OK, come here,’ she said wearily, and spread her legs.

  I stared in awe, terror and horrified fascination at a huge black animal covered in coarse spiky hair, crouched upon her belly. ‘Come here!’ she repeated impatiently.

  I climbed on to the bed. So alarmed, so tense I could scarcely breathe, I positioned myself on top of her. Every muscle, every tendon in my body was stretched to breaking point. We lay there still, I did not dare to move.

  ‘Il faut faire jig-jig,’ she said crossly.

  Jig-jig! the time it takes to say the word already was too much. One jig … and that was it. Instant deforescence. It was all over in less than five seconds.

  Next day Calvert and I took the train to Roanne, some distance from the source of the Loire. Hauling our unwieldy baggage to the riverbank, we spent an hour inflating the several compartments of the boat with a foot pump, launched it and set sail downstream.

  My disillusion and disappointment with sex lasted for several days and the incident hung heavy between us, but our voyage down the river proved so magical it finally drove the unhappiness from my mind. The weather was hot and sunny, beneath blue unclouded skies we drifted through an idyllic countryside of trees and fields and cows, occasionally passing through a small town.

  Blown up, the boat turned out to be circular – it was impossible to steer. Wearing only swimming shorts, we sat opposite one another, straddling the inflated sides and using a paddle to keep the craft more or less in the middle of the stream. Towards evening, when the light filtering through the trees dappled the smooth surface of the water with shadows, we watched out for a riverside inn. Spotting one ahead that didn’t look too grand, we paddled hard cross-current to reach the bank and tie up there. We rented their cheapest room and ate dinner in the restaurant.

  It was too good to last, of course. In ten days most of our money was gone and it began to rain heavily. It continued to rain while we shopped for the cheapest food and camped by the riverbank. On the towpath a man ran his bicycle over the tomatoes we had bought for lunch. It went on raining and I became discouraged. The river had grown wider as we descended, it flowed more slowly now and was interrupted periodically by a barrage. I’d constructed a tent from the rubberised bags and groundsheet and lay under this reading Harold Nicolson while the boat revolved slowly as it drifted downstream in the rain. Every few miles it would bump up against a barrage. I’d emerge to help Calvert carry it round the obstruction and relaunch it below the barrier, then return to my book in damp ill humour. ‘You’re not even trying!’ he accused, and it was true. I must have been insufferable.

  A third of our floorspace was now flooded. I’d accidentally burned a hole in one of the inflated compartments with a cigarette. Part of the hull had collapsed and dragged behind us in the water, it was hopeless attempting to control the boat’s course. Calvert tried though, perched on the side in the driving rain and thrashing the river with his paddle while I sulked reading in my tent. A man after my Father’s heart, he was thoroughly cheered up by our adversities, he loved camping and challenging discomfort and hoarding our diminishing resources. Our daily rations were reduced to subsistence level so we could reach the sea.

  We got down to our last 20 francs with twenty miles still to go. I didn’t give a damn about reaching the sea by now. I told Calvert we were giving up and going back to England. He was furious. Burning with resentment he would not speak a word to me throughout our train journey to Paris. He seethed in angry silence, but as we were dragging those frightful rubberised sacks across the city his indignation got too much for him and he burst out, ‘Fifty francs! If only you’d controlled yourself we could have made it to the Atlantic!’

  All actions entail consequences – a lesson I was about to learn. Losing my virginity in Paris led to what Nanny called ‘ructions’, not with Father as usual, but with my housemaster.

  It was a week after the start of term. I’d gone to the doctor because I believed the wages of sin had found me out and that I had tertiary syphilis and was going mad. After a deeply embarrassing test he assured me the infection was not as serious as I’d feared. ‘Give you some tablets. Clear it up jolly quickly. But we do need to know you know … I mean, some other chap’s got the same little problem as yourself and we have to know where it’s coming from and to help him too. Who was it, Scott? Come on, it’s best you tell me.’

  I hesitated, ‘Actually, it wasn’t a school chap sir,’ I said.

  ‘Not a local chap, surely?’

  ‘Actually it wasn’t a chap at all, sir,’ I told him.

  A girl! He was shaken by the news, though his reaction was as nothing compared to my housemaster’s. Mr MacDonald was a shambling, untidy man with a moustache, who spluttered when angry. He was already exhibiting signs of strain as he received me in his study. A few minutes later he seemed completely to have lost control of himself. ‘Filthy, degraded thing to do,’ he raged. ‘You’re vile Scott, you have put your person where I wouldn’t put the ferrule of my umbrella!’ He paused, choked by the enormity of what I’d done and struggling to master his emotions. ‘I’ll have to beat you, of course. Bend over that chair.’

  I did. He did. And not for the first time. I’d been beaten for smoking, for drinking, for cutting sport and for reading Henry Miller. Now these were six strokes too far. I ran away from Stowe, never to return. I was just sixteen years old; I had one shilling and two bars of nut chocolate in my pocket, and I was headed for Paris to become a barman in a nightclub and write a novel about lowlife, like Henry Miller.

  6

  London

  The setting in which I found myself was underground, grimly Dickensian and chilly … a series of low, arched vaults built of ancient blackened brick, poorly lit by naked sixty-watt bulbs. The job was gruelling, we started at 7.50 am and knocked off at 5.00. I was paid t
en shillings per week. It wasn’t Paris and it wasn’t a nightclub, but the premises of a wine shipper, Brown, Gore and Welch, situated beneath the street 200 yards from the Tower of London.

  On the run from Stowe I had walked to London in three days, keeping to secondary roads as I thought I might be pursued and caught on the obvious routes to town. To get to France I needed money and fresh clothes; the only person I could count on for these was Nanny.

  To my vast relief, when I reached our family house in Gilston Road Nanny was alone; Mother was with Father in Yugoslavia, brother David was away at boarding school. ‘Goodness gracious, where have you been, Jeremy? I’ll run you a bath, you look like you’ve been sleeping under a haystack,’ Nanny said as she let me in.

  I hugged her; she was the only person I could hug without awkwardness. ‘Were there any telephone calls?’ I asked apprehensively.

  ‘It’s been going the whole blessed time,’ she said crossly. ‘What a commotion! I won’t answer the dratted thing.’

  She made up the bed in my room and ran a hot bath from the infirm geyser in the house’s only bathroom.

  ‘Will you lend me the money to get to France?’ I asked her.

  ‘Why ever are you gadding off to foreign parts again? The rest of you are always doing that, and look at all the good it does them.’

  ‘I have to get to Paris, Nanny.’

  ‘We’ll see about that in the morning,’ she told me firmly. ‘Now I’ll make you something to eat and you get a good night’s sleep. You look just about done in.’

  Next morning at 10 am she served me a breakfast of fried eggs, fried bread, bacon and fried tomatoes. Afterwards I sat in a collapsed armchair in the familiar run-down comfort of the big drawing room, read the paper and looked out at the garden and thought what joy it was to be free again.

  I lingered there for three days. Seduced by ease, by tranquillity and the reassuring rhythm of regular meals and midmorning coffee provided by Nanny, I dawdled on my flight to France and I was caught. The school had contacted Father in Belgrade and Mother flew back to London.

  There were ructions. ‘Your housemaster’s written. He says that in twenty-five years he’s never known a boy who’s got less out of the public school system than you,’ she announced.

  They gave up on my education. ‘You have to work, but you can bloody well learn a trade at the same time,’ Father told me in the course of a stormy telephone call from Yugoslavia. He’d arranged this job for me through a friend in the wine business.

  There were five of us working in the vaults under Mr Twort, the head cellarman, who dressed in a crisp brown overall and rimless spectacles. The rest of us wore heavy leather aprons as we manhandled the wooden hogsheads into position for treating or bottling. Neither the work, the methods, nor the machinery had altered for a couple of hundred years. Bottling was done by hand, holding the bottle to be filled beneath the cask’s spigot, then passing it to a man who operated a pump handle and crude metal piston to push in the cork.

  My workmates all lived near by in the East End, walking to the job each morning in flat caps. They could not have been nicer to me and I liked all of them enormously. At 10.30 am and 3.30 pm work stopped for fifteen minutes and we were each given a pint of Chablis, doled out into tin mugs by Mr Twort. Every evening most of us went home wearing a rubber hot-water-bottle filled with the same non-vintage.

  Living at Gilston Road my social life was restricted by my income, but by now I’d met a few people my own age; I went out some evenings and on those nights when I had no invitation read Sartre, Jean Anouilh and Christopher Fry. This quality of life deteriorated severely when Father returned to live at home; it was upsetting for everyone.

  He gave up the British Council to take a job on the Daily Telegraph, where he’d worked before the war. Moving back into Gilston Road, he instituted a regime which he followed daily without deviation. Rising at 7.30 am to take a cold bath, he left the house after breakfast to walk to Fleet Street, always wearing his mountaineering rucksack; he walked home in the evening, covering nine miles every day. After dinner with the family, always a frugal meal, he retired to his study to drink and write until 1.00 am. He’d published three novels since the war and was working on a fourth. He slept on a sofa in his study under a single blanket and without sheets. The sofa was not quite long enough for him to stretch out, his feet rested on an orange box set up at the end. Though there were several empty bedrooms in the house, this was the arrangement he preferred.

  Mother and he quarrelled continuously, not in a series of different rows but invariably the same row which had been going on for as long as I could remember. The root of the difference between them lay in the fact that Mother had money and was niggardly, while he had none and was wasteful. They had been fighting over the subject for at least fifteen years when, during a particularly mean and detailed exchange, he interrupted her mid-sentence to say, ‘Hold it! I know you’ve told me before, but explain to me again, what is the difference between capital and interest? Isn’t it all just money?’

  Their characters were opposed in every way. Mother enjoyed seeing friends and her many relatives. Father hated going out. After one party at which he’d behaved particularly badly Mother had sat silent and chagrined in the taxi home, but he’d been full of beans. ‘Well,’ he’d said, grinning with uncharacteristic glee, ‘They won’t ask us again!’

  Endemically rude himself, he was outraged by rudeness in others. For the Telegraph he had to organise a dinner for 400 guests at the Savoy on election night. The great and the good and more-or-less everyone of note were sent invitations. Father brought home the reply he’d received from Evelyn Waugh. Printed on stiff card, obviously in a bulk run of many copies, its nonchalant message read: ‘Mr Evelyn Waugh thanks you for your invitation but regrets that he is unable to do whatever it is you have suggested.’ I thought it delicious, but Father was speechless at the slight.

  Whenever possible I went out in the evening. If I returned home late, there would still be a strip of light beneath his door. Removing my shoes, I’d creep upstairs, avoiding the treads which creaked and the two eaten away by woodworm. One night he caught me. ‘Come in here,’ he ordered. ‘I want to talk to you about your future. What do you intend to do with your life?’

  I knew he would not warm to the few notions I had. I muttered something about getting through two years in the army first.

  ‘That will teach you discipline and already you know something about weaponry, but you should prepare the ground now. I’ve had a word with your cousin Graham. You’ll have to get your hair cut, but they’re looking for the right sort of chaps.’

  Graham Eyres-Monsell was Uncle Bobby’s only son. A friend of Kim Philby, he held a job in Military Intelligence, where he’d worked throughout the war. That Saturday I went to call upon him at Kinnerton Street off Belgrave Square. The place he lived in had been a morgue. ‘This is where the stiffs were stored,’ he explained, showing me into the living room. ‘I thought of keeping the loculi but it complicated the placement of the furniture.’

  He was a large, pale-fleshed man in his mid-forties, with a soft face and a loose mouth full of long yellow teeth. He served tea from a silver teapot in delicate china cups. ‘So tell me about yourself,’ he proposed, sitting down beside me on the sofa.

  I did so, launching into a history of my accomplishments designed to impress him. He listened carefully, looking at me intently as I elaborated on my familiarity with rifle, Sten gun and automatic pistol, my experience of grenades, gun-cotton and practical demolition, going on to reveal the training Father had given me in hand-to-hand combat, silent killing and garrotting …

  ‘Ah yes,’ Graham interrupted, perking up, ‘You like garrotting?’

  ‘Well … yes, but I haven’t actually killed anyone yet,’ I admitted.

  ‘How would you garrotte me?’ he asked keenly.

  The skill was obviously important. I didn’t want to get the answer wrong. ‘It works best at an angle, so
from behind while you’re seated, you’re bigger than me.’

  ‘What would you use?’

  ‘My belt,’ I suggested.

  He nodded enthusiastically, ‘Go on, then.’

  Did he mean do it? Now? Surely not, I thought wildly. So I continued, speaking knowledgeably of spring coshes, throwing knives, bronco kicks, and that moment of especial intimacy which comes when you break your opponents windpipe with a tightly rolled newspaper, but after a while I grew unnerved by the fixity of his unblinking gaze. My speech faltered and ground to a halt as I felt his plump pale hand inching upward on my thigh.

  I stiffened – but sadly not in any way that would have cheered Cousin Graham. He took it well; he was not in the least insistent, but neither did he waste any further time. Once he had regained his composure he said, ‘I’m sorry, Jeremy, but I don’t think that I can be of help. I’m afraid you’re just not the sort of man we’re looking for.’

  I caught the number 14 bus home, where I had to tell Father I’d been rejected. I’d failed the first requirement for a job in Military Intelligence: To be prepared to do whatever is necessary to achieve the end required.

  Leaving the cellar I went to Bordeaux, where I was attached to Bouchard Père et Fils to learn about claret, to Beaune to learn about burgundy, finally to Epernay for champagne. Work in each place consisted of the same manual jobs I’d been performing in the cellar – filtering, bottling, but mainly rolling casks and stacking crates – interrupted by tastings ‘upstairs’ and occasional lunches in the directors’ dining room. The wine trade was a small, self-consciously snobbish profession and those in it stayed pretty much drunk during the day, not falling about but well oiled and insulated from the world.