CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  Now Sally, my own small daughter born in May 1950, a month when my father noted that the camellias were flowering well, staggered after the other children. They were sent off on the hunt my father had planned, with the clues in verse leading from the fowl-run to the stile in the West Field, back to the orchard and on to a dozen other hiding places, to end where a string, tied to a bush, could be pulled, to drag from the brackish leaves and sour-smelling mud of a tea pond a biscuit tin containing the treasure, a humming-top, perhaps, or a bag of mint humbugs.

  So through all times of doubt and boredom, during the gloomiest custody cases and in moments of deep frustration, when the film studio vanished or the half-completed novel felt as though it should never have been begun, my father’s house and garden were there as a show that never closed, a solace and a kind of drug. Life in the garden was never uneventful; drama of a kind was always taking place. An owl might be trapped in the fruit cage, or my mother, veiled like a widow, wrapped in a Burberry and carrying a puffing funnel of smoke, would be going bravely through the orchard to delude the bees into thinking their hive was on fire and to rob them of their honey.

  In April 1955 my father was able to dictate: ‘We pricked out the blue salvias and potted up the seedling dahlias. John telephoned us to say that Penelope had a baby boy born at 8 a.m. Smith has made up a hotbed in the cucumber frame and sown grass on the old rose beds. We bought hoops for the children who are coming to stay and went on planting out rhododendron seedlings.’

  It was Penelope’s sixth child, her and my first son after a long line of daughters, an event to take its natural place in the chronology of the garden.

  Apart from my father’s house and garden, stability in a shifting world was provided for me by Henry Winter. He had gone back to Oxford after the war and started the slow process which led to his qualifying as a doctor and he was now a GP in a quiet West Country village. He had a pretty wife, children whom he treated with unfailing courtesy and helped with their Latin, and a huge collection of gramophone records.

  When I visited Winter he would drive me on his rounds and I would sit in the car or in village pubs while he reassured the old men, cheered up the young mothers or carried out endless, minute inspections of ailing children. Everywhere he was welcome and, as with all good doctors, his presence alone caused relief from sickness. When he had finished work we would drink beer together and discuss the old days in the Paddington Pacifist Unit. In the evenings he would play Mozart or Haydn (Brahms’s Fourth Symphony had receded, with some embarrassment, into our romantic past) or part of his huge collection of Blues records.

  Went down to St James’s Infirmary

  Saw my baby there …

  Laid out on a long white table …

  So white so cold so bare.

  The mortuary lament would ring out from his house, and Winter would light his pipe and tell me about the extraordinary pregnancies and the gossip from the cottage hospital. I enjoyed my visits to Winter, but was never sorry to get back to London. One of my novels had been selected, to my amazement, by the Book Society. I was writing another (which turned out to be my last) in which I seemed, after some misspent years, to be rediscovering some sort of identity. Penelope and I had been asked to write a travel book about Italy; it was a necessary commission because it was the only way we could afford to go there. There was, I was beginning to feel, a world outside. Although I admired Winter’s life of obscure professional dedication and total peace of mind, I knew I couldn’t share it. In his presence this knowledge of my different ambitions made me feel vaguely tarnished and I was glad to get away.

  The house we rented in Positano was up exactly four hundred and thirty-six steps from the beach. The town, too small to be spoiled even today, is shaped like an opera house and at night the houses glitter like stage boxes round the horseshoe of cliffs. We had to climb from the orchestra stalls, from the bar of the Bucca di Bacco with its intimate view of the beach and the crowds passing by, up to the gods, to our small, square, bougainvillaea-covered house in the cheapest part of the auditorium. From there we could see far, far down the stage of grey volcanic sand, the backdrop of sea and the big white steamer passing slowly and with imperturbable punctuality on its way to Naples or Amalfi.

  We had put our noses out of the door of beleaguered England before, clutching what always turned out to be too few travellers’ cheques. I once got paid an extraordinary £100 for a brief. Much to my clerk’s horror I tore open the envelope containing my fee (‘I don’t think your father would ever have opened a letter addressed to his clerk, sir’) and we went straight to Paris, which I was determined to enjoy and was disconcerted by the deep pleasure Penelope took in finding fault with the Champs Elysées and the ‘Nouvelle Eve’ club where I suppose the girls might have looked better-tempered and which saw off, anyway, most of the fee for my divorce. We had driven to Rome and crashed the car in a valley of Romansh-speakers in Switzerland. We had stayed in the South of France and lain out on a beach unwisely and spent the next three days shivering with sunstroke in a dark room, spraying the mosquitoes and counting our money. We had driven through the Camargue in the hope of seeing a flamingo, but we were quarrelling at the time and when my wife spotted the flamingo she kept it to herself. Every trip abroad seemed to end sitting on a bench in a public park, clutching small presents for the children with nothing left to buy a drink. Sealed up in England during the long wartime years had made us ineffectual travellers.

  Positano was the first foreign town we lived in, the first place out of England where we kept house and learned a new language to buy groceries, order meals or manage a simple and boring conversation without jokes. The older girls drifted away from us with doubtful Italian Counts or on the back of waiters’ Vespas; the eldest became so enchanted and so expert at the language that she spent most of her adult life in Rome and became one of the few English people to discover the existence of a small, discreet bar somewhere behind the High Altar in St Peter’s. The younger children sighed in the sun and my daughter confused the place with Scotland. I carried my infant son up and down the four hundred and thirty-six burning steps to the beach daily. He wore the sort of white hat which old men put on for playing bowls, he was covered with mosquito bites and seemed extremely grumpy. When the children became ill we called in an Italian doctor who came puffing up to the house, sat down, borrowed our clinical thermometer to take his own temperature, swallowed a handful of our Disprin imported from the Swiss Cottage Boots and went away, apparently feeling a good deal better.

  Seeing me staggering up the stairs with my arms full of child, Tennesee Williams, pressing back against the wall, would look at me with large eyes full of pity and genuine concern. He was staying at Ravello, in the Villa Cimbrone, with Arthur Jeffries, who came from an American cigarette-manufacturing family and was one of the few inhabitants of Venice to run his own gondola, complete with gondoliers wearing his personally designed yellow uniform. His gondoliers were in constant rivalry with Miss Peggy Guggenheim’s gondoliers, who wore a uniform of a different colour and lived on what Mr Jeffries persisted in calling ‘The Wrong Side of the Canal’.

  In spite of our manifest heterosexuality and the position of our house on what was, on any showing, the Wrong Side of Positano, Arthur Jeffries befriended us and, in due course, we received an invitation to his pocket-sized palazzo in Venice. He was an endlessly generous host; every day the gondola would be made ready, a long and elaborate process, and we would be taken over to the Lido where lunch would be served, by the gondoliers wearing white gloves, in the shade of a yellow-and-white-striped tent. Arthur Jeffries would ask us politely about our writing and then tell us long, unhappy stories of his short-lived love affairs with Able Seamen from various visiting British battleships.

  One day a balding, good-looking man came across the sand towards us, limping slightly. He was someone whom I had noticed the other passengers shunned on our motor boat journeys to the Danieli Hotel. As he sat down to lunch with us, Arthur
Jeffries introduced Oswald Mosley. Accustomed from childhood to denouncing Fascism, certain that he was at one with the enemy who had made the war a reasonable necessity, I should of course have got up, protested, and stridden indignantly away to a restaurant. So ingrained are our English attitudes and so deep the anxiety to avoid a scene that I sat on, and in no time at all Mosley was talking entertainingly about French and English architecture and the house he owned outside Paris. I felt, as I listened politely, a new awareness of our good fortune in never having been put to the test like Frenchmen, who may have found it all too easy to stifle a protest in the presence of a cultivated Nazi of undoubted charm.

  Life at the Villa Jeffries brought other humiliations. I had at that time a rather squalid pair of swimming trunks, well used and somewhat gnawed around the crotch by moths. On leaving the Lido after one of our visits, I forgot my Jantzens, leaving them on the roof of the yellow-and-white pavilion where Arthur Jeffries took his lunch. Months later, in the middle of a damp London winter, Mr Jeffries invited us to dinner in his house in Eaton Square. There were his fine collection of primitive paintings, his priceless Oriental rugs and his solid-gold dinner service off which a party of about twenty-five murmuringly sophisticated people ate. Halfway through the meal he struck a bell which produced silence and the entry of a footman bearing a salver with a heavy gold cover. ‘A little something,’ our host announced to the assembled company, ‘which Mr Mortimer left behind in Venice.’ The cover was removed and the footman bowed to present me with my bathers, looking singularly inappropriate on the gold platter and more moth-eaten than ever.

  If I didn’t live in the English countryside I would prefer a North Italian town to anywhere, although Venice has never been my favourite city. To me it has the dead feeling of places which live entirely on tourists, and from the first visit to Arthur Jeffries I found a sort of claustrophobia in Venice and a limited pleasure in sitting in the Piazza San Marco listening to ten bands outside ten different cafés playing selections from Oklahoma in ten different tempi. On our last visit I lost favour by not waiting for the gondola to be got ready, and by setting out on foot to various churches and arriving maddeningly ahead. However Arthur Jeffries’ hospitality remained superb. Feeling that, perhaps because of our socialist views, we must come from the North of England, he got his cook to make what she proudly described as ‘Il Hotpot Lancastero’. Later, when our heterosexuality seemed to set us apart from his other guests, he said, ‘Cheer up, Mortimers. Next week a honeymoon couple are coming to stay. Then you’ll have someone to discuss baby food with, won’t you, dears?’ In due course the honeymoon couple arrived. He seemed like a nice, straightforward young lawyer fresh out of Harvard and she was the handsome product of an English girls’ boarding school. We formed a splinter group at dinner and, ignoring the other guests who were gossiping about the latest visit of the British Navy, we went into breast-feeding, private education and infant jealousy in considerable depth. We smiled at the honeymoon couple with secret understanding when they announced they were going to bed early and went up the marble steps of the Palazzo Jeffries hand in hand.

  A couple of hours later we were alone with Arthur Jeffries, drinking Sambuca. He was at his most sympathetic, describing the sad results of his sexuality which made it impossible for him to form satisfactory relationships. Indeed his tastes ran to young sailors who, once back in home waters, were perfectly contented with their wives to whom they no doubt gave the gold cigarette-cases with which our host invariably presented them. He was going to travel the world in search of someone, a Japanese perhaps, or an Indonesian, with whom he might manage to spend a second night. Permanence is, of course, the advantage of heterosexuality, we thought, feeling smug on behalf of ourselves and the couple upstairs.

  At that moment there was a cry of, ‘This is the real me!’ and the young Harvard lawyer appeared at the top of the staircase. He was wearing high-heeled shoes, a sequined evening dress, lipstick, mascara and elbow-length gloves as he tip-toed down the stairs and came pirouetting across the tessellated marble. After him, frowning malevolently, came his young wife, wrapped in a Jaeger dressing-gown calling dolefully, ‘Ronald! You’re wearing my clothes again.’ And this, we remembered, was only the honeymoon.

  We left Venice the next day and took the boat to Dubrovnik. Drinking plum brandy in the walled city beside that pellucid water, life suddenly seemed to lose its complexity. There was nothing to buy, nothing much to do and in those days, few tourists. I remember sitting in a garden after breakfast, listening to the buzz of wasps who seemed too amiable to sting and starting to work out a play. The young men and girls of Yugoslavia looked remarkably handsome and not at all inclined to borrow one another’s clothing.

  Arthur Jeffries, in spite of the affair of the bathing trunks, is a man I remember with great affection. I can see him now, reclining outside his tent on the Lido, working out the list of acquaintances he would ask to his London dinner parties, for I think he had no real friends although he was generous to many people. He was asked to leave Venice when his use of it became too scandalous even for the Italian police to tolerate. He toured the Far East in search of a companion but found no one. Years later we heard that he had committed suicide when he was staying, alone as usual, in ‘L’Hôtel’ in Paris; the refurbished and redecorated scene of the death of Oscar Wilde.

  ‘Someone I know in London keeps talking about you.’

  I was in the bar of the Bucca di Bacco in Positano some years later. It was littered with the friends we had made, including the tall painter who lived in a house full of doves and canaries where everything was beautiful except his works of art, and the blinded American ex-pilot who was noted for his speedy seduction of visiting Swedish girls; his dog was able to pick out the most beautiful and together he would quickly lure them aboard his boat for a trip to his house in the next bay. The band was playing the syrupy Italian hits of the time, and a retired Admiral from Naples was announcing his plan to include a life-sized model elephant in that year’s pageant of Positano history. This animal could be made to walk up the beach with the Saracen invaders and drop a realistic plastic turd onto the sand. Wide-eyed children were peering through the straw screens, and on the dark sands beyond them, beach-boys were trying to earn enough foreign currency to see themselves through the winter. The Mayor was sitting surrounded, as usual, by a group of young English visitors whose Sloane Square voices rang out above the music and the clatter of Italian. It was a man from this group who had spoken to me and my stomach contracted with a kind of dread as he repeated,

  ‘She’s always talking about you. Angela Pargeter. Angela Bedwell, as was. Rather appropriate name, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do think,’ and whispered, ‘I suppose you don’t happen to have her telephone number?’

  I wrote it down on the corner of a paper tablecloth, tore it off and kept it for a long time. One day I rang the number and heard Angela’s voice, apparently unchanged. ‘About time,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you ring up a chap?’

  We met for lunch. She had had two children and was living with them in a house in Kensington where she let out rooms. Peter Pargeter had been killed in a car crash in Ceylon where he was working on a film. We talked a lot about our children and their schools and the impossible character of her lodgers. We had several such lunches and then went to bed together one afternoon, comfortable and without discussion. In that considerate embrace much of the past seemed to be buried.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The shadow of the Crown Film Unit spread itself over the years which followed the war. The English, battered by the Age of Austerity, suffocated by the tightening of belts, bewildered by the loss of Empire and quite unable to explain why their defeated enemies gave every appearance of having won a tremendous victory, were clinging to the proud memory of war in fear of finding something worse. War movies continued to be made, and war books written. Men with short-backs-and-sides, blazers and cavalry twill trousers stood in s
aloon bars on Sunday mornings ordering pints of bitter, still saying, ‘Roger and out’. Public life in the decade after the war now seems to have been curiously muted, habits of obedience persisted and demonstrations and marches, everyday events in the sixties, were unknown in the bland, forgettable decade that stretched between V J Day and the Suez adventure. Severely shaken by the Blitz, the assured middle-class world into which I had been born remained intact until the mid fifties; then, like the ceilings in our Swiss Cottage house, cracks and fissures began to be noticed and, in no time at all, the plaster was falling. Those who had been children in the war, and so had not been called upon to declare their patriotism, had found their voices. Nourished on Ministry of Health orange juice and cod liver oil, they had grown up to find themselves unimpressed with the Battle of Alamein, and not particularly interested in the sight of Corporal Dickie Attenborough having the screaming habdabs on the night before the attack on the Pinewood lot. Bill Haley and the Comets, although themselves chunky, mature-looking men in tartan dinner jackets, had played Rock Around the Clock and caused the young Teddy Boys to riot down at the Elephant and Castle. James Dean had announced himself as a causeless rebel and been immolated in his Porsche. Whoever was young in those days it certainly was no longer me.