Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  By now I was in a high state of agitation. My baby was being strangled at birth. Aubrey Davies was not taking my calls and I was close to despair when I received a call from a man, who described himself as a freelance publicist. ‘I’ve read your book,’ he said. ‘I’d like to talk to you about promoting it.’

  I’d like that too, I said. We met that same evening in the bar of the Westbury. He was a slightly built Frenchman in his thirties with an air of energy and competence, and I took to him instinctively. We talked for a while about Hunted. He’d obviously read it with care, for he spoke perceptively of characters and scenes in it, and I began to warm in that onanistic glow a writer experiences when so indulged. Not only did this fellow have initiative, but also taste and judgement, I thought.

  ‘Now, as to publishing it … I don’t think you should promote it on the Lucan connection,’ he said.

  I was set aback. The book was about Lucan, there was no other way to promote it, I protested.

  ‘No, it’s really not a good idea,’ he said.

  ‘Why ever not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because …’ He raised his glass, took a sip, and reached out to replace it on the table, and all the while his eyes stayed fixed on mine, ‘Because if you keep trying to do so, one day you will be walking down a street and a stranger will overtake you from behind. Up his sleeve he will have a baseball bat and as he draws level with you he will slide it down till he is grasping the handle. As he steps past he will swing backwards at your leg with all his force. Your leg will be broken, but if he does it correctly and strikes the kneecap it will shatter. The knee is a complicated joint, difficult to repair. You will never be able to bend your leg again and you will feel pain for the rest of your life.’ He smiled at me pleasantly.

  The situation was unreal. My knowledge of publishing came from Father, who sometimes met his agent A. P. Watt for sausages and mash at the RAC club; no one had ever threatened to break his legs. Yet here in the Westbury this man was telling me I would be kneecapped! This was the literary world? I stared at him in dismay.

  Fortunately the above scenario did not come to pass. Six months later Hunted was bought by Simon & Schuster and published in the USA; it went into paperback and sold the film rights.

  My last conversation with David Gerring took place some years after all this. I’d remained fascinated by the case, as he was himself – he wanted to rename his pub The Vanishing Earl.

  Like Gerring, I was convinced Lucan had been gotten out of England; he had not committed suicide. Goethe has a poem:

  Wealth lost, something lost.

  Honour lost, much lost

  Courage lost, all lost.

  On that wet winter’s night, as he stood in blood-spattered trousers in Lower Belgrave Street, wealth and honour were already lost to Lucan, but courage remained to him. And he was a gambler, that was his profession and his deepest nature. He would always go for the outside chance rather than throw in the hand.

  But the murder and his escape had taken place five years ago by now. Where was he, and how was he surviving? That baffled me. ‘All right,’ I agreed with Gerring. ‘Let’s say it’s as you claim, Lucan reached Africa, but how is he living now? He’s incapable of earning a living or looking after himself, he scarcely knows how to boil an egg. His friends may have helped him escape, but they wouldn’t give him a pension for life.’

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ Gerring answered. ‘In the world of common villains that I know they’re tight with their muckers too. If one of their mates gets into trouble, they help him. The once! But if he then gets to be an embarrassment they have him taken care of, know what I mean?’

  He paused and added, ‘Not that I’d want to say anything to upset anyone, you understand.’

  25

  Earls Court

  Observing the uncertainty of Father’s life, I had resolved never to embrace writing as a career.

  ‘Yet as a job it has just about everything,’ I said to my old friend Peter over dinner. ‘It provides travel on the excuse of “research”. You can choose your own hours; you have no boss, the work itself is absorbing. It provides every thing one could possibly want except one – money.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily the case,’ Peter answered with considerable tact as he addressed himself to his order of pomodori secchi con mozzarella e rucola.

  He’d published several books by now, all non-fiction, slim and profitable. He was in London on a reluctant visit to promote the latest; his day had been a full one in every sense, but he was in boyish form. ‘Nothing like a good lunch to give you an appetite for a good dinner,’ he’d observed as we studied the menu in La Famiglia.

  ‘All my books were designed in order to make money,’ he explained. ‘I had to earn thirty or forty grand a year before Jennie and I had a centime to spend ourselves. However, what I’ve at last decided to do is write a book which is not going to make money …’

  As an ambition it was easier to achieve than most, I thought. For I was broke, the money I’d made from the film sale of Hunted was all but gone. On splitting up with Magda we’d decided to sell the mill and divide the spoils, and she had remained to handle its sale. But, though the economy in Britain was booming in the ’eighties, the same was not true of France. And though a number of potential purchasers had visited the mill, no one as yet had wanted to buy a property which had two sitting tenants, in the shape of the old sisters, occupying one of its buildings.

  ‘Why don’t you approach Frank Lowe for a job’ Peter suggested. ‘He picked us up in his executive jet last week and flew us to lunch in Nice. He’s running his own agency and is seriously rich and successful now.’

  I hated the idea of going back into commercials and reconciled myself to the fact that Peter was of no help with career advice but remained the best of dinner companions. We talked of people we knew in London and New York, most of them still in advertising, and what we’d read and done since we’d last met. He and Jennie had sold their village house and moved to a farmhouse in the Luberon, which they were living in while restoring. ‘A total nightmare,’ he said. ‘Cement mixers and rubble and no electricity and workmen who don’t turn up. It’s been going on for an entire year now.’

  I sympathised; doing up the mill had been the same. Over coffee I asked him about his book which was designed not to make money.

  ‘I’ve pretty much finished it,’ he admitted. ‘Ernie Chapman showed the draft to Hamish Hamilton, who’ve come up with an advance of £3,000.’

  ‘That’s really stingy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but they know they won’t sell many copies,’ he explained.

  Peter’s previous books had all been better deals than this; it was dispiriting to hear he was going downhill. I must be the one to settle this dinner bill, I decided.

  ‘What’s the book called? Have you got a snappy title?’ I asked while looking around for our waiter.

  ‘Quite a dull one, in fact. I’m thinking of calling it A Year in Provence,’ Peter told me.

  Finally I succeeded in catching Alvaro’s eye, then turned back to Peter. ‘Well, you have plenty of time to come up with something better,’ I reassured him.

  I was invited by the Broackes to their London home.

  Set behind a high wall topped with razor wire, only a stone’s throw from Harrods, I found an English manor house whose windows opened on to an extensive garden with a swimming pool and even a stream purling through the grounds. The living room was of matching size and opulence, almost overpoweringly big and grand. And so too were the Broackes, both had grown impressively since I’d last seen them in France. Nigel glowed pink with health and well-being, Joyce’s deep tan set off her ample jewellery to perfection – they’d just returned from a trip to India.

  The couple inhabited a different world from most, but were as hospitable and welcoming as ever. ‘Where are you living?’ Nigel asked, and I told him with Jenny Beerbohm at her flat in Earls Court.

  ‘The model who married …?’ />
  ‘ … Tony Beerbohm, head of school at Stowe, yes that’s the one,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t she have a child? I thought you detested children.’

  Not detested, I corrected him, but I had always found them quite boring. Maybe one grows more tolerant with age, I suggested.

  We agreed people do change with the passing years – some people. ‘Speaking of which, what news of Alex Howard?’ Nigel asked.

  I could tell him, for as it happened I’d run into his ex-wife, Arabella, outside a newsagent’s in the Fulham Road. Tall and gaunt, with long dark hair, she was wearing a sari which covered most of her, but what showed was a most peculiar colour; she looked as though she had spent weeks in a bath of cold tea.

  I’d always liked her, I found her artless eccentricity endearing, but I didn’t recognise her until she spoke, or rather shouted. Her piercing aristocratic screech, so like Mother’s, was unmistakable. Her colour was due to a combination of sun and hepatitis, she explained. She’d passed the last year living under a tree in India with her and Alex’s 15-year-old daughter, both of them under instruction from a guru.

  ‘I want to go back to live there, you should try it,’ she said, but I didn’t think so; the bathroom arrangements sounded less than satisfactory. We stood there chatting on the busy corner, surrounded by people, and I asked if she knew Alex’s whereabouts or what he was up to.

  ‘He’s in the East,’ she shrieked. ‘Haven’t you heard, he’s become a spy. Doing frightfully well.’

  Nigel chuckled at the news. Alex’s father had been in espionage, but neither of us had thought of it as a family business. I went on to ask Nigel what he was up to by way of work and he told me of his current activities as chairman of London Docklands’ development, and his plan to build a Channel tunnel. It wasn’t until I was about to leave that he revealed his intention to start a charity. I was struck, for, though he served on the board of a major housing trust, actually to found a charity of his own indicated a philanthropic commitment I hadn’t met before.

  ‘Well, I’ve done pretty well from life,’ he said. ‘But when a man gets to be our sort of age, Jeremy, he starts to think he’d like to put something back, to give something to society in return …’

  Talking in this vein the three of us strolled from the living room and through the hall to the front door. Outside, a roofed porch gave on to the street. As Nigel opened the door to let me out the three of us saw this was occupied. A bag lady with a shopping trolley loaded with possessions was asleep there. Coming out we woke her and she started up.

  Nigel didn’t hesitate. ‘Out of order!’ he pronounced.

  Joyce joined her voice to his. ‘You can’t sleep there,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Move along!’ Nigel ordered. ‘Quickly now! Move!’

  I knew that over the years the Broackes had contributed thousands of pounds, and in his case many hours of unpaid work to charity. But how curiously wrong people are in believing it starts at home, I thought.

  Jenny and I had been together for the last two years. Her flat was in a Victorian mansion block directly opposite the Coleherne, a notorious leather bar at the heart of London’s gay ghetto. Earls Court was the catchment area for Australians, poor Arabs, foreign students and transsexuals who, like opposing species of game, occupied the same territory and used the same watering holes, peaceably ignoring each other except for sudden eruptions of violence at kill-time when the pubs closed.

  Aged thirty-six, ten years younger than myself, Jenny was a statuesque, good-looking blonde – ‘As a model I got the tits and ass jobs’ – of high intelligence, who’d been denied an education; her three brothers had gone to Oxford but she had left school at seventeen. Her mother was Jewish, her father a left-wing writer and intellectual in Berlin. The couple had escaped Germany very late, arriving in Britain as refugees only just before the war. He’d been interned on the Isle of Man, she’d struggled to keep herself and two infants by making toys and doing anything that came to hand. When Jenny was born the war was over but things were just as desperate, and remained so. She escaped her family by becoming a model and she’d married Tony because he spoke in an upper-class accent, had a good job and because his name was spelled SECURITY. Wrong, of course, life’s an accidental business however you try to insure against it.

  Jenny and I shared a love of books and travel, the same need for time alone, and a strong sexual attraction. My previous relationships had always contained an element of rivalry, yet in this was peace and an unaccustomed stability.

  Her son, Edward, was eight. Having been a more than absent father to Sasha, I had never lived in the same house with a child, but he, like his mother, had a taste for privacy; mostly we kept to our own rooms, meeting up for meals. What made the experience fascinating was his talent for music. He spent his evenings listening to and composing classical music. His maternal grandmother, now old, shrunken and living in poverty in Italy, was possessed by the same all-consuming compulsion. Until her death at the age of eighty every moment of her day was passed in sculpting, writing or painting stones and fragments of tile with painstaking skill to transform them into art. The impulse of creativity flowed in her as a palpable force and her energy was phenomenal. And Edward had inherited the same mysterious dynamic.

  In Jenny’s flat I lived as a cuckoo in the nest, but the three of us cohabited easily. Money came in irregularly; at times there was cash for air tickets and hotels, at others we were flat broke. But in penury was a human warmth and closeness I’d not known before.

  Neither Jenny nor Edward came with me, but on Sundays I attended St Luke’s church in Redcliffe Square which, a hundred years before, regularly had accommodated 700 local residents at the morning service and an equal number of their domestic servants in the evening. The congregation now numbered sixty, most of them elderly women.

  John Barton, the vicar, was my own age, with a vivacious, pretty wife, and a son of five. He had moved to St Luke’s from a parish in Dover and a number of his former parishioners were now resident in geriatric homes in an advanced state of disintegration. John continued to visit them, as well as attend to his new parish, and over the course of two or three years I accompanied him on some of these trips to the country, stopping for a pub lunch on the way.

  I was aware his marriage had grown thorny, but during one of these drives he let drop that his wife had left him; she’d gone off with another man, taking their son. He mentioned the fact rather than announced it, and we spoke about it for a few minutes in a detached, very English way, as if we were talking about someone else.

  In the following fortnight John’s father died, closely followed by his mother. An only son, he was very attached to both. He buried them, then returned to an empty vicarage and continued with his pastoral duties. Partly organisational, these consisted mostly in aiding elderly pensioners, the unemployed and the homeless in their struggle with bureaucracy, and in comforting the sick and dying.

  ‘How can you continue to do this, now?’ I asked him.

  ‘I know I’m in shock. I feel unreal, as if I’m walking on the thinnest, thinnest ice,’ he admitted. ‘Sometimes I feel like tearing my clothes off in the street and howling at the sky.’

  ‘So what stops you?’ I asked.

  ‘Something,’ he said. ‘Grace, perhaps, and prayer.’

  I stood in awe of the faith that grounded him and gave him such stability. I wondered if it would do the same for me. As things stood, I doubted it.

  Whatever people say, lack of money exerts a pressure on a relationship. ‘The perils of the everyday,’ Jenny called them. And I too suffered from flashes of nostalgia for that carefree prosperity I’d enjoyed only a few years before.

  By now I’d published another novel, Angels in Your Beer, which had received fair reviews but sold few copies. The money from a film option had paid for a couple of summers in Spain for Jenny, Edward and myself, but was now gone. And I owed tax on it. It was disconcerting to see how, despite all my efforts to th
e contrary, my situation had come to mirror Father’s, who was still living in penury in his dank thatched cottage attended by the faithful Adriana.

  At a party given by a friend of Jenny’s I was discussing the shortcomings of authorship with a literary agent, Don Short. He – it transpired – had a lucrative trade selling celebrity revelations into mass-market paperbacks, and lurid exposés to the Sunday tabloids. I was saying to him very much what I’d said to Peter Mayle.

  The light was poor in the crowded flat, but I detected a faint gleam come into Don Short’s eye. ‘If you want some quick cash I know of something that might interest you,’ he said.

  26

  Claridge’s

  Judy Mazel leaned forward across the table in San Lorenzo to grip my wrist tightly. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m loved by millions of people all over the world, I’ve discovered the cure for fat and transformed their lives. I’m a rich, beautiful woman, the number one best-selling author in the universe. I’ve made ten million dollars, I’ve bought every item in the Valentino collection and what I want now are orgasms, Jeremy, orgasms.’

  She was apale blonde of thirty-eight, thin to the point of emaciation; the skin of her face was drawn tightly across the bones. She never laughed and I’d seen people drop their eyes from hers in embarrassment, disconcerted by the strain of her expression and the fierce intensity of her demanding gaze. She was the inventor of the Beverly Hills Diet; her book had been number one in the USA for thirty-four weeks and topped the best-seller charts throughout Europe, South Africa, Australia and Japan. She’d become internationally famous, a millionaire celebrity.