CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  Those accused of murder have usually, even if they didn’t intend it, killed. This act seems, in a curious way, to have drained them of violence. In all but the most rare cases they have killed the one person they are ever likely to kill and are no longer dangerous. Sometimes they speak of what they have done in strange and unforgettable words. I remember one young man who had killed his mother starting his statement with, ‘I have either raped a prostitute or killed a peacock in paradise.’

  The advocate goes to Brixton Prison and crosses the compound where the Alsatian dogs and the ‘trusties’ eye each other suspiciously. He is shown into the blue-painted, relatively cheerful interview block. The man who comes to him in the little glass-walled room, who takes a cigarette gratefully from his solicitor’s clerk and laughs obediently at his nervous jokes, must live with the fact that he caused a death. The advocate explains the trial to his client, asks him how many of the police statements he challenges and leaves after shaking the hand that killed. The idea that, if the advocate doesn’t succeed on the question of what was intended in an isolated moment of emotion, his client will be taken out and ceremonially slaughtered by some part-time pub-keeper in a dark suit seems monstrous and unreal. A judicial killing is always premeditated and so, perhaps, more shameful than the crime itself. Ruth Ellis shot her boyfriend outside the Magdela pub in Hampstead in the mid fifties and I can’t say that I felt personally stained or humiliated by the tragedy, nor I’m sure did the public feel so outraged that they could only be satisfied by the blood of that distracted and neurotic girl. However when Ruth Ellis was hanged I remember hiding the newspapers from the children, ashamed of what was being done, so it was said, on our behalf.

  When one Home Secretary, I think it was Reggie Maudling, toyed with the idea of a death penalty, an intelligent civil servant said, ‘Where would you get the hangmen? Would you advertise in The Times?’ Hanging is the act of brutality which we commit with the help of some ghastly surrogate. Years ago I remember one husband in a divorce case who was accused of a series of cruel sexual perversions. It was also suggested that he had some secret and undivulged source of income which he was keeping from his wife. When asked about this he said that the answer was an Official Secret. Pressed further he admitted that he was a part-time, assistant hangman. Against all rules of legal etiquette I turned him out and refused to concern myself in his case. It is on such people that those who support the death penalty must depend.

  I have said that most murders are spontaneous and not the result of long-term planning. An exception to this rule was the case of my best friend at Oxford, the support and inspiration of the Pacifist Service Unit, Doctor Henry Winter.

  Continuing my journey backward I had reached some sort of plateau of adolescence. I had taken a flat in Maida Vale when separated from my wife. I wasted long hours sitting, as I had once sat when I was teaching the models English, in dress shops or waiting in hairdressers. I became, for a while, emotionally attached to the telephone. I was in that exhausting state when every evening has to be planned and the tangled skeins of living kept separate. The crimes I was involved in, the murders I did, were perfectly clear to me. My own life seemed confused and chaotic. I remember getting up in my flat around dawn and thirstily filling the bathroom tumbler. Too late I discovered that I had drunk a pair of mink eyelashes. It was, I suppose, a time of life everyone passes through, although for me it had been postponed because of the pressure of family life.

  The children had reacted to our parting with an unexpected calm and lack of surprise. Their lives had started at that grown-up level which I had momentarily abandoned. There is much about that period I remember with great pleasure, including a girl who worked in a tropical-fish shop. She used to drive me to work in her firm’s van and I would sit in the front as we crossed the Parks with huge tanks full of angel fish sloshing in the back. I remember the vanished places to dance, ‘The Arethusa’ and the ‘Ad Lib Club’ high over Leicester Square and ‘Annie’s Room’. The tunes of the period of Help and Love Me Do, which seem so much more remote than the time of Blue Birds Over the White Cliffs of Dover or You Are My Sunshine, float back into my mind. There is nothing about that time which I particularly regret. It is only important that I should describe accurately how things were when Henry Winter came to see me again after a long time.

  My links with the past were growing frail. Oliver Pensotti had vanished, having long ago left the country. I had a postcard from him from Portugal and a pair of cuff links from Rio, but these communications kept his address a secret and after them I heard no more. My friends seemed to be the actors or directors I worked with. We became involved during a production, saw a lot of each other and then slowly drifted apart. I had begun, once more encouraged by Nesta Pain, to write some radio pieces about my childhood. My mother disliked my doing this. Like her father’s suicide and her husband’s blindness she felt, understandably, that they were private matters which should not be generally discussed. I went to the country to see her often, but there was always something held back between us, a sort of reserve which didn’t melt for a long time. It was as though she were still occupied in caring for my father. We sat together in the garden, but she was suspicious that I would want to break in on her continued solitary pursuit of their joint way of life. My children, who were not going to write anything, met her without inhibition. They often went to stay with her, rescued my old books and model theatre from the attic and seemed grateful that life in my father’s house was proceeding as usual. His death, like his blindness, was largely ignored.

  At that time I felt conscious of the lack of a guiding light. There seemed to be no one whose instincts were infallibly right, or to whom I could turn at moments of personal or artistic confusion. When I was assailed by these thoughts I remembered Henry Winter, imperturbably pursuing the good life as a doctor in the West Country. I must, I told myself, see Winter soon, but the meeting was, for one reason or another, constantly postponed.

  Late one wet afternoon some theatrical occasion, a read through perhaps or part of a rehearsal, was going on in my flat. Actors and actresses were drinking white wine and talking only of the news in their world, which is, in its way, as small and protected as the world of lawyers. There was a ring at the bell and when I opened the front door I discovered Henry Winter, standing in the rain, a sort of plastic mac over his tweed jacket, and he was smiling with his habitual look of modesty and withdrawn wisdom.

  I felt as I usually did when I saw him in those days, somehow guilty and corrupt. I got rid of the actors and actresses as quickly as possible. In their presence Winter sat smiling but silent, and I felt that his calm and useful existence compared favourably to the empty excitement of putting on any sort of show. It was not long before we were alone and I said, ‘I’m sorry about those people. I’m afraid they’re rather boring.’

  ‘Are you? I found them interesting enough. But I wanted to ask your advice.’

  ‘My advice?’ What could I tell Henry Winter who had surely found, in the village where he practised, the still centre of understanding.

  ‘Yes,’ he said and astonished me with, ‘I want to know how much I’d have to pay my wife, after a divorce.’

  Then he told me the story. It seemed that Winter had fallen hopelessly and obsessively in love with a woman who cleaned at the local hospital. She wasn’t young, in fact she was a middle-aged woman with a number of children and she lived with her husband in the Council Houses on the outskirts of the village. The husband was Winter’s patient and the good doctor prescribed sleeping pills which would keep the man drugged while his wife silently left the house and made her way through the sleeping village to the surgery. There, with Winter’s children asleep upstairs, they made love on his medical couch.

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ was the only sort of lawyer’s advice I could give him. ‘You’re bound to get found out.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. In fact I’m quite prepared for it. That’s why I want to know how much I’ll have to pay
my wife after the divorce.’

  ‘So you’re treating me like a real lawyer.’

  ‘Real enough to answer my question. It’s only the practical things that matter now.’

  Like, I thought, the drugs for the husband and the fact of having a couch in a downstairs room. I told him that he’d probably have to give his wife a third of his income and support his children.

  ‘That’s all right. We can live on what I’ll have left. Annie, that’s the woman from the hospital, isn’t at all extravagant. She came to the village when she was a child, with the gypsies.’

  ‘They’ll strike you off the Medical Register.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m going to work abroad anyway. Probably South America. There’ll only be one problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Seeing nothing but insoluble difficulties I was astonished at Winter’s calm.

  ‘That’ll be if Annie doesn’t want to come with me. I mean, if she wants to stay with her husband. There’ll only be one answer then, won’t there?’

  I didn’t ask him what the answer was. I didn’t feel that I could bear to learn more about Winter’s troubles. What had happened? How could it be that life in his placid village was more frenzied than any I had heard of in London? And how had it come about that my friend, the man I depended on most for perpetual and untapped wisdom, had moved away into the shadows of his extraordinary drama and, worst of all, come to see me only because I was a lawyer?

  ‘You know,’ I said and poured him a glass of white wine, ‘I used to think you had the secret of the universe.’

  ‘It’s extremely unwise,’ he warned me, ‘to think that anyone has that.’

  Not much later he put on his plastic Pakamac and went into the rain.

  What happened then I only read about in the papers, although some further details were given to me by Henry Winter’s wife who was, with some reason, bitterly angry. I also learnt a lot from his partner, who now knew that for the last three months of his life my friend was going on his medical rounds, cheering up the elderly and comforting the children, with a sawn-off shotgun worn in a holster under his jacket.

  He had asked ‘Annie’ to leave her family and go with him to South America, but she was never willing to do so. When, at last, he showed her the passports and the money he had for both of them she resolutely refused to go. He killed her with the shotgun and then drove into a wood where he swallowed most of the drugs in his medical case. It was some time before they found his body, but when they did so he was still holding the passports.

  I think about these things often, but I cannot explain them. I can only suggest that Henry Winter suffered terribly and unusually from having rejected the violence which was made available to us all at the age when we went to Oxford.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was in the middle of the sixties that I had the opportunity of learning the true meaning of farce.

  Laurence Olivier had started the National Theatre at the Old Vic with its far from luxurious offices in a row of prefabs around Coin Street. Kenneth Tynan played the part of the dramaturge or literary editor of the outfit and formed, with Sir Laurence, a somewhat uneasy partnership. Henry Winter had gone back to study medicine at Oxford after the war and when I visited him I first met Ken Tynan, whom I watched giving a one-man performance of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart on a barge. Later we had met at the Edinburgh Festival at a somewhat disastrous congress of playwrights. Dramatists flew in from all over the world to assemble in the MacEwan Hall, where Ken Tynan organized a most inappropriate happening in the city of John Knox. A naked girl model from a local art school was wheeled round the hall on a camera trolley. After this event the world’s distinguished dramatists, together with Mr Tynan, flew away to the South and the unfortunate girl was left to face in the Sheriff’s Court a rigorous prosecution for indecent exposure. I remember that at this congress Ken Tynan preached his usual sermon on the virtues of Bertolt Brecht and announced that Beckett’s plays were filled with ‘privileged despair’.

  Tynan was extremely gifted, but the godmothers present at his birth had bestowed on the infant Kenneth irreconcilable gifts. One had brought him the Puritan conscience (essential to the life of the libertine) which led him to overvalue Brecht and pass his unreasonable strictures on Beckett. She gave him his faith in socialism and his urge to be called ‘Ken’. This godmother caused him to regard pornography not so much as a diversion but as a duty and led him, in later years, to approach sex, and write of such matters as the history of knickers down the ages, with the sort of apostolic zeal with which the Early Fathers of the Church discussed the Immaculate Conception. She gave him a small bundle of her ‘governess’ words with which to chastise those who strayed from the paths of righteousness. From then on he was able, in his criticism, to ‘chide’ Arnold Wesker, to ‘grow testy’ with Peter Hall and generally to be specially ‘irked’ by those writers who were his friends, including me.

  The second godmother never liked the first and was eager to undo her good work. She came with the well-thumbed essays of Max Beerbohm, The Unquiet Grave, most of James Agate’s Ego and some back numbers of the New Yorker stained with genuine drops of the first Dry Martini served to Dorothy Parker in the Algonquin Hotel. ‘The stern rebukes,’ she said, ‘which my tedious sister has given you to utter shall be translated into a prose style so remarkably elegant and seductive that many will be deceived. She may have made you a Roundhead, but at least I shall arrange to have you always dressed as a Cavalier.’ She then left, leaving the infant Kenneth Death in the Afternoon, the Michelin Guide to the Restaurants of France and a packet of handmade shirts.

  The third fairy godmother entered the room in the shape of a microphone swung from the darkness into a beam of limelight, behind which rolled the cast list of the Mercury Theatre, New York. ‘For the confusion of both my sisters,’ this godmother boomed eerily, ‘I shall make you permanently, enthusiastically besotted with show business,’ adding, for good measure, ‘My name is Orson Welles.’

  I owed Ken Tynan a debt of gratitude, read his accounts of acting with great admiration, and followed him through a career which had its eccentricities. I remember an election-night party when his stern Socialist enthusiasm was made less convincing by the fact that he had included, among his guests, a number of life-sized waxwork young ladies dressed as nuns, who were to be found seated on the lavatory or lying, in abandoned attitudes, about the bed. I remember spending a good deal of the evening talking to the lady who hired out these figures. ‘Her girls’, she made it clear, didn’t accept invitations to just any old party, and when they did go out she went along as a chaperone. Ken Tynan also had a device which I believe he had written up for called a ‘self-regarder’, a sort of mirror which was suspended over his bed. One night it fell unexpectedly, almost putting an end to his distinguished career as a dramatic critic. In due course, and with his usual missionary zeal on the subject of sex, he conceived the idea of Oh, Calcutta! and invited me to the dress rehearsal to give the project legal advice. It seemed that a ‘dress rehearsal’ meant that the cast still wore certain articles of daily use, such as their spectacles, bandages and corn plasters, although otherwise disrobed. It was a show which made me regret the power of his Puritan godmother to wean him away from the sensual delights of writing fine prose.

  My debt of gratitude to Ken Tynan was largely due to his asking me if I would like to translate a Feydeau farce called Puce à l’Oreille for the National Theatre. He also introduced me to Jacques Charon who was coming over from the Comédie Française to direct the play.

  I knew nothing about farce until I read Puce à l’Oreille, and had no idea what a deadly serious business it is. Feydeau’s plays are really tragedies played at a high speed, and the plot of Othello for instance, with its typical Feydeau prop of a lost handkerchief (in Puce à l’Oreille it’s a pair of braces), would make excellent farce material.

  The world of farce is necessarily square, solid, respectable and totally sur
e of itself, only so can it be exploded. There is nothing comical about a trembling masochist being kicked on the behind, or a sprightly and permissive collection of Swedish teenagers being caught in the wrong bedrooms. These events must occur only to the most dignified and highly moral persons. It is impossible to be funny about funny people and Feydeau’s characters are triumphantly serious.

  They are also mature, and completely self-satisfied. They have settled, on the whole gratefully, for security, marriage with the director of the Insurance Company, a few nights out at the theatre, and a few safely uncompromising glances at the husband’s best friend. It’s all sound, predictable and a little dull. The husbands are not quite in their first youth, in bed they have become indolent or worse. The healthy, grown-up, but still somehow schoolgirlish wives ‘breathe virtue’, Feydeau said, ‘and are forthwith out of breath’. They very much regret that it’s hard to take a lover without deceiving your husband. And the husbands still envy their bachelor friends and still cast a wary but interested eye towards the scurrilous hotels they pass on their way home from the office. Feydeau’s plays start, like all great drama, at the moment when these small longings become alarming reality.

  For then, of course, the world of common sense whirls and dips like a drunkard’s bedroom. The first small domestic misunderstanding, the gentlest of white lies, brings down a series of disasters as inevitable and appalling as a Greek tragedy. By then, the husbands and wives and mistresses and lovers have become so inextricably confused that it’s hard for them to tell if they’re being faithful or not, and there’s no time for them to jump into the vaguely longed-for bed as everyone’s running far too fast.

  Through all this, like hats desperately held on in a high wind, the characters must retain their common sense. Kicked, unexpectedly embraced, shot at, taken for mad, they continue to behave quite rationally: conduct which, of course, greatly increases the lunacy of the situation.