CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  ‘Oh, who did you hear that from?’

  ‘From Angela. She said she was bringing Peter instead of you.’

  ‘Peter? Who’s Peter?’

  ‘Peter Pargeter. Don’t you know Peter? I think Angela’s really keen on Peter. So we shall have two love-birds with us on our trip to Ireland, won’t we?’

  ‘And who the hell,’ I said when I got through to the Air Ministry, ‘is Peter Pargeter?’

  ‘Please,’ said Angela, ‘don’t be angry.’

  ‘But who is he? And why should he be getting my banana?’

  ‘He’s just someone terribly sweet who’s come back from India. As a matter of fact, this’ll interest you. He used to work in films.’

  I said I found that absolutely riveting and I supposed she had told her Uncle Arnold that she was going to marry Peter Pargeter.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Angela. ‘As a matter of fact I did. Look, a chap can’t go on talking in the Air Ministry’s time. There is a war on.’

  ‘The war’s over,’ I said. ‘Or hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘There’s a war,’ she said, putting me right with a good deal of quiet heroism, ‘in Japan.’

  The Crown Film Unit had a new director whose name was Alexander Shaw and he looked like the nicer type of Roman Emperor. ‘I thought you might like to go up to Glasgow,’ he said, ‘and write a script about a new attitude to town planning.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I will.’

  ‘It’s an important subject for peace time.’

  ‘I think I’d better go away,’ I told him, ‘and be a barrister. That was what I was always meant for.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Alexander Shaw looked genuinely concerned, ‘that you haven’t been happy here?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been very happy. But not any more.’

  ‘You’re back,’ my father said. ‘That’s good. You can give me a hand with the earwigs.’

  I installed a paraffin heater and a card index full of leading cases in my bedroom. I reopened Potted Torts, I memorized the case of the unfortunate woman who found a snail in her ginger-beer, I wrote short notes on ‘easements’ and I defined murder; I distinguished ‘Justification’ from a ‘Plea of Fair Comment’ and I defined ‘Malice’. Now and then, in the silence of my room, I opened my mouth and yelled, ‘Angela!’ very loudly. As a way of exorcizing pain it was totally ineffective.

  Chapter Eleven

  I finished Charade and sent it to various publishers. My heart sank regularly as it came thudding back through the letterbox. Daniel George was then art editor at Jonathan Cape and he wrote me an encouraging letter and even took me out to lunch at the White Tower, but he wasn’t able to publish the book. As the rain fell on the sodden garden and dripped in the shrubbery, as my father felt for the knob on the wireless and my mother looked at me with infuriating pity and said, ‘Poor boy. He’s had his book back again. He seems to take one step forward and one step back,’ I fell into a mood of bleak despair and grief. My life, so far, seemed to have been a complete fiasco. I had lived twenty-three endless years and what had I to show for it? An unpublished novel, an inglorious war and a disastrous love affair.

  I had no courage to go to London so I spent my time on the common and in the local pubs. I went to tea with Mrs Cox and ‘Bill’ Baker and there saw an improbable sight. An old friend of theirs, the French cook, playwright and bon viveur, Marcel Boulestin, had died and in some way and for some reason which wasn’t entirely clear to me, had managed to bequeath his entire wardrobe to ‘Bill’. Clothes were then in short supply so Mrs Cox’s friend, a tall and angular woman, was glad to wear the outfit of a small, stout boulevardier, striped trousers and a coat with an astrakhan collar, as she went about her gardening or shopped in Henley-on-Thames.

  I made other friends who lived near to us. There were two artists both called Jim: Jim Fitton and Jim Holland. They not only had a great deal of talent in common, but they had been influenced by Grosz cartoons and drew in a satirical and realistic manner. We used to go with their wives to dances in village halls and do the ‘Hokey Cokey’ and the ‘Palais Glide’. Jim Holland was especially kind to me; he introduced me to various magazine editors for whom he drew and, when the Great 1951 Exhibition came, he got me a job writing captions for the ‘Hall of Coal’, which was undoubtedly my least glamorous commission ever. There was a magazine called Our Time edited by a remarkable poet called Edgel Rickward for whom I began to write film reviews. Naive as ever, I didn’t realize that it was a Communist magazine and when I got letters saying that ‘The Party in Wimbledon’ didn’t like the tone of what I wrote I thought that some people in the suburbs had met for a few Saturday-night drinks and taken the opportunity of discussing my notices.

  So I read the leading cases on Contract and got deeply into Criminal Procedure and drove my father’s Morris Oxford round the narrow lanes to visit the Jims, or Mrs Cox or, with increasing frequency, a place which could usually be relied on to produce an eventful evening, Wyn’s Cottage. The story of Wyn Henderson might provide a novel in itself, written perhaps, by Joyce Cary. Wyn and her cottage became, just after the war, a large part of my life: and it was due to a meeting there that I was transformed, in a remarkably short time, from an unhappy young scriptwriter and novelist to a middle-aged professional man with an overdraft, a family of four and very little time to wonder if I were happy or not.

  But let me try and describe Wyn Henderson. I have no idea how old she was then, in fact I never knew her age. She had the face, bright-eyed with a tip-tilted nose, of a pretty child and the waddling, ungainly body of a fat, middle-aged woman. She had been part, if she were to be believed, a vital part, of the Bloomsbury world; but she had abandoned London and her friends in the Charlotte Street pubs to work with the Pig Board in Henley. She had been, again if she could be believed, the mistress of many notable people, millionaires, surrealist painters, actors and musicians. She had been a close friend of Havelock Ellis, who taught her to pee standing up, an art she often used to practise as we staggered out of the White Hart at closing time. She must have been an unworldly woman because from all those relationships she had preserved no money, no presents and certainly no fur coat. She moved about her cottage, which was lit by candles and a smouldering wood fire, wearing an old black dress and a string of large amber beads, cooking bowls of spaghetti and pouring out little ‘drinkies’ of the Algerian wine her visitors brought her. She was always cheerful and could talk endlessly of her friends and conquests in the thirties. Mrs Cox took all her stories with a grain of salt and viewed Wyn Henderson with a certain wariness and suspicion.

  Wyn Henderson’s later years were no less dramatic than her pre-war prime. After Dylan Thomas’s death she became a close friend of his widow Caitlin, with whom she travelled round Europe and lived for a while in Italy. At last, ill and exhausted by an eventful life, she returned to England and went into a hospital, I think it was in Cambridge, to die. Before she died she decided to be received into the Roman Catholic Church and a comparatively young Dominican monk visited her to give her religious instruction. The sight of this monk had a totally revitalizing effect on Wyn. She made a rapid recovery, left the hospital and in almost no time at all had married the monk, who applied to be released from his vows.

  Many years later the ex-monk was teaching English at Chichester. Hoping to see Wyn again I drove down to talk to his students. I found her, mountainous but not looking very much older, sitting immobile in the corner of the room, still bright-eyed, still telling endless stories of the writers and the painters she had known. He was then in his fifties, and as we parted he told me that Wyn meant everything to him and that she was the only woman there had ever been in his life. He died before she did.

  All of this was in the future, although it might have encouraged Wyn if she had known about it as, at the end of the war, she moved through the hospitable gloom of her tiny cottage. I met her two sons, both in the Air Force, one of them married to a nie
ce of Virginia Woolf, a thin and remarkably silent girl who sat in the shadows like an echo of the Great Days of Bloomsbury. Other visitors were the sculptor Naum Gabo, and Harry the local poacher, a man who managed to bear a close resemblance to Lady Chatterley’s lover, and often arrived with gifts of venison and pheasant. He would help Wyn out of the pub at night and support her as she did a ‘Havelock Ellis’. Another visitor to Wyn’s cottage was a poet and novelist called Randall Swingler. We used to go in my father’s car to Watlington, a place which combined the distinction of being the smallest town in England with having more pubs per head of the population than I believed possible. Randall Swingler told me a great deal about a friend he had who lived in Oxford. She turned out to be that Mrs Dimont whom I had visited years before with Henry Winter and who, it seemed, was now separating from her husband.

  So, in those first days of peace we drove with the car’s mudguards brushing the white cow-parsley in the hedges, and drank in the beer tents at local shows and gymkhanas, and took a bottle of wine over the dark fields round Henley and swam in the sour, reed-filled river and waited for the Brave New World.

  My father had told me about the Great Liberal Landslide before the 1914 war and the joy he had felt as the Government seats fell. After our war we had our election. The Jims and I had volunteered as drivers and I trundled my father’s car through remote villages and round the suburbs of High Wycombe pulling out Labour voters. There was an extraordinary feeling of hope and suppressed excitement. Were the clichés about the age of the Common Man about to come true? Were peace and justice to be ushered in by Penguin New Writing and Army Education? These simple-minded beliefs could almost have been justified on the morning after the election, when the Labour victory reminded my father of his beloved Landslide. The history of politics in England since that heady moment now seems, in spite of some achievements, to be a record of disappointment. The fruits of victory turned out to be the Age of Austerity, with the gaunt Sir Stafford Cripps telling us all to tighten our belts. The entry into the promised land was indefinitely postponed and ‘The Just City’, we were told with increasing irritation, would prove far too expensive to build.

  In that curiously unmemorable period after the war I wasn’t, I’m sure most people weren’t, thinking about tightening my belt or even about bread rationing. I was enjoying, in a small moment of triumph, the fact that the Bodley Head had agreed to publish my Charade. I waited as patiently as I could for the year it would take to get printed to be over, for the certain future when its success would make me rich and cause Angela Bedwell to ring up and say it had all been a most ridiculous mistake, marriage to Peter Pargeter was unendurably dull, and could we meet and play bar billiards? My father said, ‘I felt just like you when the fellow agreed to publish Mortimer on Probate. Don’t let it put you off the exams, dear boy. That’s the great thing. Always have something to fall back on.’

  So I continued to fall back on the law, the great, Gothic structure of authority, with its stone buttresses of power and its ancient ecclesiastical ornaments, as though it were a mattress. I went to lectures in a basement under Chancery Lane and sat at the back of the class rereading the proposed blurb of Charade while a small red-faced barrister yelled at us about the elements of the criminal law.

  ‘If you climb down my chimney, Mortimer, during the hours of darkness, simply to gain entry, what offence have you committed? And now I add a gloss. Let us suppose,’ (here he addressed the class at large) ‘as seems highly probable, Mortimer climbs down my chimney by night with the felonious intent of raping my cook, what offence has Mortimer committed then?’

  I gazed at the lecturer, my mind filled with the blurb of my book which I was rereading for the ninetieth time. Was this really what being a barrister was all about? I tried to picture my soot-stained self struggling with a huge, aproned Irish woman on a kitchen range. The mind fortunately boggled and it was left to the rest of the class to cry, ‘House-breaking with intent to commit a felony.’

  In due course I passed some exams and while waiting to do others I went to Paris. The Age of Austerity followed me there, wine and cigarettes were on coupons in France. But I was elated by my first post-war escape from England. Having missed my Irish banana with Angela I had to make do with other new experiences, bleeding steaks criss-crossed with burns and Portuguese oysters in La Coupole, which has remained, since I ate there in those days with Tommy Motte-Smith and his far more masculine mother (I had discovered them both in some strange Parisian exile), my favourite place to eat in the world.

  Later I managed to get myself a job teaching English to a number of Parisian models who wanted to get work in America. I used to sit on a small gilt chair at the back of the fitting-rooms and try to get the girls to concentrate on Somerset Maugham’s short stories. Their attention was hard to retain. They were excited by the distant sound of the austere ice breaking and the coming tide of long skirts, frilled petticoats and flounced umbrellas which was to be that year’s noticeable contribution to the Brave New World.

  So it was a time for long walks from the dress-salons of the Right Bank to La Coupole, where the oysters and mussels and sea-urchins nestled in their beds of seaweed. More often I stayed alone in my bleak hotel bedroom in St Germain and drank rationed vin ordinaire, opened a tin of sardines and tried to get some sort of tenuous grasp on the law of Resulting Trusts.

  The art director at the Crown Film Unit had been Teddy Carrick and he had given me an introduction to his father, that creator of never realized theatrical dreams, Gordon Craig, who had been the hero of my toy theatres, and whose designs were always in my mind when I tried to do theatrical drawing in the art room at Harrow. I found him, an old man with long white hair, some sort of a shawl round his shoulders, in a dusty studio where the Nazis had not disturbed him, surrounded by his models and drawings for vast, brooding, epic productions. He sat surrounded by his memories of Irving and his mother, Ellen Terry, on the gas-lit sets of the Lyceum, and of his love affair with Isadora Duncan. I brought him English tobacco and for a while breathed in the smell of old theatrical magic, the excitement of a stage-struck childhood I seemed to have lost and wouldn’t recover for more than another ten years.

  Then I left Paris and went back to face the Law of Real Property.

  Charade came out eventually with a jacket designed by Jim Holland and got the sort of enthusiastic notices which would amaze and delight me now; then I supposed it was what always happened. Daniel George wrote a review in the Daily Express saying ‘Not for thirteen years have I found so certain a touch’, and I was ungrateful enough to wonder what he had been reading for thirteen years. The notice I remember most clearly was written somewhere by Val Gielgud, who was then Head of Radio Drama. ‘The book,’ he said, ‘contains the sort of fumbling round the skirts of sex which passes for sophistication in adolescent minds.’ Mr Greenwood of the Bodley Head told me that Charade was selling well and I suppose I must have made about a hundred and fifty pounds out of it altogether. I sent a presentation copy to Angela with an inscription, nicely combining tenderness, courage and irony, which I had dashed off in a couple of months, but received no reply.

  The book was out, but nothing seemed to have changed. It’s often said that my old schoolfellow, Lord B., awoke and found himself famous. I feel sure that he woke up and didn’t find any huge improvement in the quality of life. His sister Augusta was still having trouble with her husband, one of the housemaids was pregnant again, there was a good deal of anxiety about the overdraft and the mortgage on Newstead Abbey, and his Lordship was unable to catch the waiter’s eye in the coffee house. The success of Charade was transient and it removed few anxieties. However it did mean that from my early twenties I have been able to think of myself as a professional writer, and I haven’t had to wait long and heart-breaking years for publication. The troubles came later, in years when my writing seemed to be advancing nowhere, when I felt myself bumping painfully up against my own limitations, when I despaired and thought that t
he voice in which I had once spoken was lost forever.

  Life became enormously uneventful. I took to riding about the common on a small and extremely docile horse. It was a hot summer and, as my father recorded in his log, he took the first prize for peas and pompon dahlias at the local flower-show. ‘Peaches are very fine (though only about two-and-a-half dozen on both trees). Splendid runner beans. We made 13 pounds of plum jam (Czar). We noticed one of the Neapolitan cyclamen in flower for the first time at the north of the copse.’ It was some time during the summer that I rode past Wyn’s cottage and, peering over the hedge, saw Mrs Dimont crouched in the front garden, painting a coal-scuttle.

  *

  No marriage I could possibly have contracted could have been more inconvenient from my father’s point of view. He was the doyen of the Matrimonial Bar, and I couldn’t marry Penelope Dimont without being dragged (as people used to say in those far-off days, when co-respondents were kept off the Queen’s Lawn at Ascot lest they might scorch the turf) through the Divorce Courts. In addition she had four young daughters who menaced my father, to whom all visitors were unwelcome, with a mass invasion of ready-made grandchildren. Clearly he had to do something about these threats to his peace and security, and with the mixture of guile and effrontery with which he had managed to settle so many heavily contested Probate actions, he chose to proceed, not by pointing out to me the dangers of marrying Penelope, but by persuading her that I was a hopeless proposition. He took her for a walk and told her that I had no money, few prospects and no sympathy for anyone who got ill. With her assets, a fine and attractive family, some bits and pieces of furniture and her own small car, he was quite sure that she could find better fish from a wider and richer sea.