Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

Soraya had a dramatic, fine-boned face and long dark hair. The daughter of a London hotel waitress and an unknown father, she’d worked as a telephone operator before she met Khashoggi. ‘I want to look at the house first,’ she said incisively.

  The horde of Bedouin seemed resigned to remain in the concourse until Allah willed otherwise; some had started to brew up and prepare a meal. Leaving them encamped there, we clambered into another of the waiting limos with Soraya and her Scottish secretary and drove off.

  Coming out of Cannes into the hills behind, just before the highway joins the autoroute, there was an exhibition of prefabricated homes beside the road. Three examples were displayed: California modern, French eighteenth-century, and Swiss chalet. We passed them on the drive to Mougins.

  Soraya inspected the villa we’d rented for her, assessing it in a moment. It was barely large enough for her children and nursery staff; the servants’ flat could accommodate another two, at a pinch four, and the pool house a further couple. She did not hesitate. Getting into the limo, we drove back to the display of homes where she bought the three erected by the road. Her secretary would settle in full in cash, she said, but they must be re-sited by the end of that afternoon in the garden of the Mougins house.

  They were. And it has to be said, the job was done not only efficiently but rather tastefully. The three contrasting dwellings set down on flower beds looked incongruous but bizarrely interesting. And the fourteen rooms they represented were perfectly adequate if the numerous occupants were wedged in tight. Unfortunately the houses had no running water or drainage, but the fifty desert Bedouin were used to harsher conditions than these; it would be a positive luxury for them to do their business squatting in the shade of the bougainvillaea, and the swimming pool was conveniently at hand for other uses.

  Most people wear a mask, an outer manner for the world to see. But spend more time with them and you usually get to glimpse behind it. With Khashoggi, you never did. His voice stayed low, its tone even, his face remained inscrutable. Short and rather plump, he was always starchly dressed in the very latest resort wear, yet he had dignity. His poise was total. He listened well, didn’t interrupt and spoke rarely, but when he did, others paid attention. I never got the faintest notion of who and what he really is. His attitude to life seemed wholly pragmatic. The fifteen-strong crew of his yacht were all British. We have the reputation of a seafaring nation, was this the reason he’d hired them, I asked.

  ‘No, the British make the best servants,’ he said.

  Standing with Magda among a crowd of people on the Carlton terrace one day, I was talking to Sandoz when Soraya hurried over to say, ‘Adnan’s invited everybody to lunch on the yacht. The crew’s off and there’s no food. Come – we have to cater.’

  It was already past noon but there was no question of telling him lunch would have to be in a restaurant. What is the point of being a multi-millionaire if your whim can’t be gratified on the instant? Soraya was skilled in this sort of emergency. We piled into a limo and crawled the croisette followed by a back-up car, stopping at every restaurant. ‘Whatta you got?’ she demanded in each.

  The second limo was stowed with assorted dishes and we in the lead car were clutching cold lobsters and salad bowls and accelerating towards the yacht marina when Soraya shrieked, ‘Stop! That’s Jack Nicholson!’

  She’d never met him, but darting from the car she asked him to the lunch party. He came. Lots of people came, all invited in the same random fashion. A hostess in the south of France once said to me, ‘I love to entertain, but it’s so hard to get the guests.’ The Khashoggis experienced no such difficulty, any celeb or wannabe would do.

  I stayed on deck throughout that lunch party on the yacht. It had been going on for a while when I saw the director Roman Polanski attempt to come on board. Short and boyish, he was wearing a sweater and crumpled jeans, and had with him a teenage groupie picked up on the beach. They looked like a couple of ragamuffins and a crew member standing security at the gangway tried to shoo them away. ‘Not for you, son,’ he told Polanski. ‘Piss off!’

  Polanski blew up and a major row erupted. A frisson of pleasure ran through the crowd safe on deck as they watched the drama develop below. Among us, an ITN camera crew was watching the fun, though not filming it. I realised I knew the soundman. ‘So what are you doing here, Stan?’ I asked him. ‘This is news?’

  He shrugged. ‘Khashoggi asked for a film crew. ITN said they couldn’t use the item but Khashoggi said to fly down anyway, he’d pay.’

  Khashoggi was completely up front about his taste. ‘I like publicity,’ he explained. ‘It turns me on.’

  Sandoz had made one picture for each of the Hollywood majors; none of them proved keen to repeat the experience. No one was clamouring to cut a deal with him. As for Khashoggi, involvement in film production was a summer flirtation. He enjoyed the fantasy glamour of moviedom and the presence of so many good-looking young women and the attention it won him at the Film Festival; I don’t believe he ever intended to finance the picture.

  But he got a few months of entertainment from it – and a new employee. Recognising Sandoz’s notable talents as a fixer, he offered him a job. And so it came about that a tap-dancing Hungarian chancer relinquished the motion picture business at the age of forty-five to enter a more secure profession. An upwardly mobile Jewish boy, he embraced a new and rewarding career working for Khashoggi – a man whose principal business was providing weaponry to Arab countries dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel.

  And I was out of a job.

  22

  La Cagne

  The sun rose early in a clear blue sky, its first beams flaring on the peaks of the alps twenty miles away, still icy-white with snow, though here in the forested valley it was already summer.

  Magda and I were up before seven. This morning as usual I did not bother to shave but had a coffee and a piece of crusty bread, then was at work by eight. I wore a pair of khaki shorts from Prixunic, torn and not very clean, and a battered straw hat. Nothing else except a tan.

  I had made a major career move. I’d entered an older and more honourable profession than advertising, politics or movies. I’d become a stone mason – a builder. Kneeling there in my torn shorts I was constructing a curving flight of stone steps – in style rustique, as the French say, meaning crudely and rather badly – between the mill and the river coursing in the gorge below the house. I’d been working on the project every day for several weeks now; this was my job.

  And the mill was mine, or rather, Magda’s and mine. A year after we first clapped eyes on it we’d bought it from the two old English sisters who owned the place, and come to live in the south of France. I’d sold my share in the Garrett Company to do so. It had taken most of that money to buy the property and would require the rest to restore the place into three apartments; but once we’d done so we could rent or sell two of them and live on the proceeds. It was a gamble, but both of us were excited by the idea of a new and wholly different life. We’d committed – and the decision brought a tremendous exhilaration.

  I felt the sun hot on my bare shoulders as I worked. There is something elemental and deeply satisfying about building by hand, in choosing the right stone, packing in cement with a trowel, then fitting it into place. The activity occupies the mind at the same level as preparing and cooking a meal, and both provide the same outcome of tangible result. Previously, in advertising, at the end of any day I’d never been able to see what I’d accomplished during it. And, if I had actually achieved anything, I could be quite sure it would become unachieved and something else entirely by the following afternoon. Here, the section of stairway I built today had a good chance of standing for a century or more.

  There had been a wonderful feeling of liberation in quitting Garrett’s, handing back my credit cards and moving to this secluded valley. It was a relief not to have to eat almost every meal in a restaurant with people I didn’t want to be with. For so many years practical
ly everything in my life had been chargeable or paid for with Monopoly money. It felt quite odd to be using my own, with it came an adolescent thrill of independence.

  Here I worked through the morning, in the afternoons I lay in the sun and read: Proust, the Goncourt Journals, Madame de Sévigné, Flaubert, Jean Giono, Collette … To rediscover books was a revelation; they’d been all-important to me when young, essential as solitude. But for so long I hadn’t gone to church, or prayed, or read. I’d never listened to music or spent time alone. Now I did all these things. Most of all I read, and it was like regaining a whole section of who I was; I recovered it with a sense of astonishment and joy. I was happy.

  I’d gone to visit Mother and Nanny at Gilston Road to tell them of my planned move before leaving for France. The street, shabby and run down when we’d moved there after the war, had become fashionable now. Most of the houses had been restored and repainted, and those that hadn’t were encased in scaffolding and being done up. Not ours, however. The grimy paintwork had cracked into a mosaic of flaking scales like eczema and the ceiling plaster in the hall had fallen off to expose the laths.

  ‘Since Mr Baines retired, one can’t find anyone to repair anything these days,’ Mother complained. She had asked me to a meal, but when I arrived at 12.30 she was about to set off for the cinema. She thought I’d enjoy the film too.

  ‘Can’t we go after lunch?’ I asked. No, she explained. Seats for the first performance were only 30p; she always went at this time, taking a picnic to eat in one or other of the local cinemas two or three times a week.

  Unwillingly I accompanied her. The large auditorium was almost empty – which was as well, for Mother was a noisy picnicker, scrunching paper and talking loudly through the performance. ‘I’m going to live in France,’ I told her.

  ‘Really, darling? I’ve always thought it such a silly shape. Would you like one of Nanny’s lettuce sandwiches? There’s only one hard-boiled egg, I’m afraid,’ she said.

  Her responses were often unsatisfactory, for her mind was elsewhere, but where that elsewhere lay one never knew, though it was evident it was not a happy place. Twice she had become so withdrawn she’d had to return to the hospital overlooking Regent’s Park. My brothers visited her and so did I, though not often enough, for it was a miserable experience. She barely responded to anything we said and her muteness numbed the spirit and drained away one’s bright intentions.

  Father proved easier. Seeing him usually meant meeting on a railway station or some street corner in the rain, but this was my initiative and we met at Wheelers. He arrived in the poacher’s jacket he always favoured and the mountaineer’s rucksack which he refused to check, instead stowing it beneath the table.

  We lunched well. He enjoyed good food and wine, neither of which he tasted often these days. The fortune he’d made from Sea-wyf years before had pauperised him. It was a reprise of the rule that had governed his whole existence: success ruined him. Sports hero and head of school … Cambridge Blue … an Everest expedition … Arctic explorer … author of a best seller … by the age of twenty-four he’d already peaked. From there his life could only deteriorate – and it had. The success of Sea-wyf had revived it only briefly. Following that, he’d travelled the world looking for the ideal place to reinvent himself … and ended up in Mallorca. The honeymoon was brief, things started to sour almost at once. The sun disagreed with him and the laughter of village children swimming in the creek ruined his concentration and made it impossible to write. He maintained it was the local oil, in which everything was cooked, and garlic – of which he had an extreme, almost religious horror – that caused a prickly rash to spread across his body, but the affliction proved hard to treat. The local doctor had met no other human case, it was a disease caught only by trees. Worst of all – two years into the idyll – he discovered he was liable to supertax at 19s. 6d. (97½p) in the pound on the fortune he’d already spent.

  By the date of our lunch he’d been back in England for many years, sharing a cottage with Adriana in a windswept corner of East Anglia. Undermodernised and unheated, their nest was basic; there was only one bedroom and, downstairs, a single, large, low-ceilinged room. Father worked at night and, unable to do so unless alone, a tool shed in the garden had been converted into what few would describe as ‘living accommodation’, yet served as such for Adriana. After she had washed up their dinner things she’d retire to her hutch and remain there until allowed to reappear to cook breakfast for them both.

  People rarely change with age; whatever they are already they become more so. Father and Adriana saw nobody, no one was invited to the house. He remained malcontent as ever, still hounded by the tax man and oppressed by a weight of debt he never could repay. Sitting across the table from me in Wheelers he was broke, his refusal to ‘go decimal’ with the rest of the country made easier by the fact that he had nothing to go decimal with.

  In contrast, my own fortunes were riding high; I’d received the first tranche on the sale of my Garrett shares and was loaded. At the end of an excellent lunch of potted shrimps, sole Colbert, two bottles of Chablis, Stilton and port, I slid him a cheque – not a fortune but enough to sedate the Revenue, or take a trip or do whatever.

  Father eyed it lying on the table between us. ‘Quite a decent wine,’ he remarked, chewing on his port. ‘You remember I put down a pipe of Cockburn’s ’34 for you the year that you were born?’

  ‘Wasn’t it bombed in the Blitz?’

  ‘You got the two dozen that were spared,’ he replied defensively. A silence followed. He fiddled with the cheque; he seemed quite moved. I realised he was finding it hard to speak. Then, ‘Good of you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Will change things … hardly know exactly what I’ll do yet.’

  And a memory came to me. No slow dissolve but an instant flashback to Nice airport when I’d been eighteen, about to join the army, and he’d handed me a final payoff of £50 … and his words as he’d done so.

  ‘Father,’ I said, ‘Personally I don’t care what you do with it, so long as you don’t become a male ballet dancer.’

  He flushed … and then, most surprisingly, he laughed. It was a rare moment. In the rosy glow of after-lunch, briefly he turned into a normal human being and we could talk and joke together.

  The property Magda and I had acquired consisted not just of the building we were converting, but the mill further upriver which the old English sisters still occupied. We were buying the place and accompanying land on a French system known as en viager. The old sisters received a capital sum plus an annual rente viagère until their death, till which they had the right to remain as sitting tenants where they were.

  Beside the river at the bottom of a deep valley, the spot the mills occupied was of breathtaking beauty. A tall spire of rock reared up behind, part of the steep mountain range which fed the river. After a storm, and when the snows melted in spring, a torrent of white water thundered past our house. Its power was awesome; standing on the terrace you could feel the ground quiver beneath your feet and had to shout above the roar. In summer the river became a lazy stream plashing over the waterfall into the still pool below, hovered over by dragonflies, where we swam. The sunny air carried the scent of lavender and thyme and for three weeks in early summer the warm dusk of evening was lit by the pulsing glow of a thousand fireflies.

  It was an unimaginably lovely place, but I was uncertain how Magda – and also myself – would take to country living. In New York she had been the perfect partner. The few women I’ve been close to all seem to have come from disturbed backgrounds and dysfunctional families, but hers was particularly turbulent. Her father, a Polish cavalry officer, had been a prisoner of war in Germany. She was only seven when she’d escaped Poland with her mother, crossing Soviet-occupied East Germany on foot. Somehow they had got to England, then to the USA. Her parents barely spoke English; her father was unable to find work except on an assembly line. The apartment they lived in was poor, their friends Polish refugees in the
same circumstance as themselves, whose talk was all of the vanished life they’d known before the war. Money was always short but, ‘Remember who you are,’ her parents told her.

  She’d escaped her background by becoming a model. She passed for Scandinavian; it was a look in vogue at the time, there was no lack of well-paid jobs. While working in Paris she’d met a rich young French banker, member of a modish circle drawn from finance and haute juiverie, and moved in to share his apartment in Avenue Foch. Quick to learn, she spoke French fluently and became an able hostess. She had many skills, but one that struck me because I had not met it before was the ability to take one glance at a woman and cost her in seconds, correctly identifying the provenance of dress, shoes, handbag, watch and jewellery.

  She was a metropolitan animal and our time together in New York had been highly social; I wasn’t sure how she would adapt to a ravine five kilometres from the nearest small town. But she loved the sun and beach as much as I did, and right from the start we were involved in our joint project rebuilding the mill and clearing the overgrown land to lay out a garden. It was absorbing, wholly satisfying work. We felt well, ate well, slept well, and were never without a tan.

  We had realised a fantasy common to many with busy city lives; we’d escaped to Provence. At last we had leisure to read, to relax, to eat dinner alone together. Time to get to know the loved one …

  Aged thirty-eight, I’d dropped out. The friends of my youth were all still hard at work. Alex Howard was running a major advertising agency he’d started, which specialised in banks and financial institutions. Fisher was still a stockbroker … though no longer with the same firm but already conscious the move was not as satisfactory as he’d hoped. ‘One has to keep the old chin up etc., but what with three sets of school fees, it’s actually pretty worrying,’ he confessed.

  In contrast, Kim Waterfield had been riding high when I’d last seen him at a party shortly before we’d moved to France. For a while he’d been obliged to hide his helicopter in a haystack to save it from repossession, but he’d recovered and was again rich. The party where we re-met was lavish and stocked with a select mob of glamorous and modishly dressed people – of which Kim’s 21-year-old bride was unquestionably the most striking. What I knew about her came only from reading newspapers, in which her lurid story had unfolded over months. Aged just sixteen she’d married Clive Raphael, a millionaire entrepreneur who – she revealed to me years later – had Mob connections. The marriage was stormy and became physically violent. She left him. He asked her to fly with him in his private plane to Andorra … she refused. Two days later, with Raphael at the controls, the aircraft crashed in France, killing him, both his parents and another passenger in what may or may not have been an accident.