by Adam Sisman
After ceasing work on his script David was suddenly unemployed. In a few weeks’ time he was due to fly out to America to promote Coward-McCann’s edition of The Looking-Glass War and to appear at a trade fair in Chicago. Meanwhile he could not face resuming his novel. For want of anything better to do, he accepted an invitation from his Danish publisher to address a student meeting. In a Copenhagen hotel he came near to despair and had thoughts of suicide. But he delivered his talk, and caught the ferry across the straits into Sweden to speak at Lund University; there he met a very beautiful young student, with whom he went to bed. It was his first sexual experience that was wholly gratifying, and it made him astonishingly happy. The next morning she sent him off to Stockholm, where he was due to give a television interview; and there, half in a frenzy, he emulated James’s exploits in Paris the previous summer, taking woman after woman to bed, barely sleeping, drinking and drying out in saunas. Then he returned to Lund to spend three more blissful days and nights with the young woman who had finally awakened his dormant sexual appetite.
From Stockholm he had written several despairing letters to Ann: ‘I’m sick of England and English institutions, I’m sick of our neuroses & the flesh-eating & the infantilism, of all the painful, wasteful, sterile dishonesty – I’m in a fury and I don’t want to come back, certainly not before Chicago … You can say I’m ill or something – film or something …’29
In Chicago, taking part in a lacklustre campaign to sell British goods abroad, David received an urgent message from John Margetson, now serving as a diplomat in the Foreign Office. A telegram had been received in London from the British Embassy in Djakarta: ‘BRITISH CITIZEN, [illeg] CORNWELL, ARRESTED FOR GUN RUNNING AND CLAIMS TO BE FATHER OF A MEMBER OF YOUR STAFF’. Tony Cornwell had already been contacted and had declined to help.
This was the culmination of a sequence of memoranda and telegrams from Djakarta, informing London that it might be necessary to repatriate Ronnie from Indonesia urgently at public expense, in order to keep him out of detention. A memorandum from the British Embassy in Djakarta on 31 July 1965 provided a summary of a conversation between Ronnie and an Embassy commercial officer. Ronnie had mentioned that he had already signed a contract with the Indonesian government for the supply of 8,000 trucks from Italy, and that other contracts would come for two million barrels of oil to Japan from Indonesia and for the building of three ships. ‘When I asked him why, in the case of the oil deal, he was being used as an intermediary,’ the Commercial Officer reported, ‘he said that in government-to-government contracts there was nothing in it for anybody, whereas in private deals individuals could make a handsome profit.’ Ronnie had told the Commercial Officer that he had seen the President of Indonesia and presented him with a copy of his son’s book, The Spy who Came in from the Cold. (‘I should think this would get the prize for the most inappropriate gift of the year,’ the Commercial Officer added in parentheses.) Ronnie had further told the Commercial Officer that the President had paid for a trip to Algeria out of his own pocket and that, as a result of the truck deal, half a million pounds had been deposited in the President’s private bank account in Geneva. ‘Cornwell strikes us as a somewhat shady character,’ the memorandum concluded.
‘Perhaps, if things are desperate, I might after all be able to help,’ David replied to Margetson.30 He asked how much was needed to keep his father out of an Indonesian prison: it was only a few hundred pounds, an alarmingly small sum for a man of Ronnie’s ambition. David undertook to guarantee the required amount, and the local Embassy paid it.
For the past couple of years Ronnie had been wandering around the globe, chasing the big deal that would clear his debts and put him on top again, leaving a trail of unpaid bills. From New York he had moved to Canada, where he set up a bogus property company in a scam to take a Chicago building company for millions of dollars. A firm of lawyers just across the border in Buffalo was also involved.* His notional plan was to build a satellite town outside Toronto. Discussions continued for months while the interested parties sat around tables, looked at models, listened to projections and raised funds. Eventually it emerged that Ronnie had never had planning permission for the development; he did not even own the land; the whole project had existed only in his imagination.
After this scheme had collapsed, he had moved on to Hong Kong. For some months he took suites at the best hotels, before renting a villa in Repulse Bay. Ronnie presented himself as someone very rich, discreet and well connected. Modestly he let it be known that he was John le Carré’s father. He consented to sign copies of The Spy who Came in from the Cold for friends and business associates, inscribing them ‘with best wishes from the Father of the Author of this book – my son, David’. While Ronnie was resident in the Far East, David received a succession of typed letters from him: beseeching, commanding and some even threatening blackmail. In April 1965 Ronnie had written to Gollancz, explaining that he had been living in Hong Kong since Christmas. He offered his services in placing the publication rights for The Spy who Came in from the Cold in China and Japan.31
Ronnie was next heard of in Kuala Lumpur, renting a house from expatriates who had gone back to England for a sabbatical while he tried to start an airline. He soon moved on to Singapore, where he busied himself in trying to set up a football-pools scheme. Through an assistant in the Prime Minister’s office who happened to be a mason he obtained an official interview, presenting himself as the representative of the two largest (and rival) British football pools. ‘I represent Vernons and Littlewoods,’ he announced by way of introduction. He proposed that the state of Singapore should take a commission on earnings from the scheme. Satisfied that he had secured an understanding, Ronnie proposed a similar arrangement to the Tunku of Malaysia. To cover his accommodation needs while staying in that part of the world he offered to cut the owner of the Mandarin Hotel in on the deal, thus obtaining the use of a suite. When all seemed to be falling into place Ronnie returned to Liverpool via Ireland,* presenting himself in succession to the top brass of Vernons and Littlewoods. ‘I represent the Prime Minister of Singapore and the Tunku of Malaysia,’ he began.
Back in England, David embarked on a period of ‘six months’ madness’, when he slept with any woman who would have him. Some knew Ann, some did not; he avoided becoming emotionally entangled with any of them. Gradually, he thought, he could accumulate what he needed: a standard of reference by which to judge his own marriage. He envisaged that, by careful selection, he might return to his wife while keeping a mistress in London. He told himself that even if he did not learn to love Ann again, he would honour her as the mother of his children, learn to respect her again and perhaps find a new tranquillity. David was briefly reunited with the woman whom he had loved in Bonn; in a private moment she told him that she still loved him, but it seemed hopeless, and he realised that he had aged emotionally by at least fifteen years in the eighteen months or so since they had last seen each other.
After looking at many different houses in various parts of England and Wales, Ann at last found one that she wanted to buy: Coxley Manor, a former farmhouse of Jacobean origins a few miles outside Wells, facing south over the Somerset levels; Glastonbury Tor was visible through the trees. A prosperous farmer had added a Georgian façade, a grotto and a ha-ha to keep the livestock at a distance. There were also various cottages and outbuildings. It was a marked contrast to the Pilton cottage, only a few miles off, where they had lived ten years before. The family moved to Coxley in December 1965; David cautiously agreed to come for a fortnight at Christmas. ‘We are both hurt and wary, I suppose,’ he wrote to Ann beforehand, ‘and I for one don’t know what I am or feel, except that things can never go on as they were before we parted.’32
In mid-December David wrote to the Margetsons from Coxley. ‘It’s been a bleak year for the Cornwells, and I’m afraid that with the selfishness of self-absorbed people we have visited some of our troubles on you,’ he began. He thanked them for their loyalty a
nd understanding, sent his abiding love and hoped they ‘would be able to know us in the future with less pain and more reward’.
Things are still a bit shaky but less tense and I hope that you will fairly soon come and see us in our house, which turns out to be dry-rotted, wet-rotted, beetled and plain dangerous, so there’s masses to be done.33
While still in America David had been shown a rough cut of the film version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold. He told the television talkshow host Merv Griffin that he was in an unusual position for an author whose novel had been turned into a movie, of having nothing to complain about. The film remained true to the essence of the book: the dialogue of the script followed the text of the novel closely and in places even improved on it. Though by the mid-1960s most big feature films were being made in colour, Ritt had taken the bold decision to shoot the movie in black and white, evoking the bleak, colourless world it portrayed. The film would be a critical success, winning a string of BAFTAs as well as being nominated for two Academy Awards. Oskar Werner won the Golden Globe award as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Fiedler.
Princess Margaret attended the premiere of the film in Singapore. Hospitality in the Mandarin Hotel was provided by Ronnie, who wrote a long account of the party to his son. The cost was borne by the hotel itself, defrayed against the owner’s share in the football-pools scheme. It turned out that Ronnie’s activities were being monitored by the local Special Branch. A telegram to London from the High Commission in Singapore stated that a British citizen named Ronald Cornwell was trying to bid for £1 million worth of tin, apparently unconnected with the football-pools scheme. A short while later he was once again arrested, this time for illegal currency dealing.
While Ronnie was languishing in the Far East he received a handwritten letter from David, asking if he wished to return home – ‘Can you?’ – and how much would be the sums involved. ‘Knowing you, I suspect you want to return as a conquering hero rather than merely a solvent citizen – but surely there are things to be said for a less ambitious plan, if one can be devised. Will you lift the veil a little?’34
‘I am a slow writer and it seems that with each new work it becomes more painful,’ David told an interviewer from Playboy.35 Following the knock to his confidence from the reception of The Looking-Glass War, he seemed to struggle to find his equilibrium. The mayhem in his personal life cannot have made work easy. ‘I am so terribly incomplete and you have been so good while I was looking for the other bits,’ he wrote to Ann. ‘I don’t suppose I shall ever find what I am looking for, because if biographies are to be believed, no one does.’36
After a tentative start, David remained at Coxley with Ann, and gradually settled into a routine. One of the two cottages was converted into a studio for him to work in, while his secretary lived in the other. David renewed contact with Robin Cooke, now living in Bath. Though they would see each other regularly over the next few years, David never told his old friend much about what he had been doing: Cooke came to the conclusion that he kept different parts of his life very much separate.
David began buying antiques from a dealer in Wells, Eddie Nowell. The Cornwells carried out alterations to the house, installing new ceilings and fireplaces, and landscaped the garden; David had the ha-ha lined with concrete and flooded to make a canal. He bought the field to the south of the house and a horse to keep in it; for a while he went out riding regularly, until the day the horse threw him and he decided to stop playing at being a country squire. Ann acquired a large white dog, and kept geese.
As he had done in Germany, David would rise very early to write and then go for a long walk, before returning to eat breakfast and resume work. On one of these walks across the fields he came across a pigeon that had been eviscerated by a bird of prey, but not finished off; it was fluttering on the ground, struggling to get airborne, in evident distress. David could not bring himself to end the poor creature’s suffering by killing it, and walked away. His cowardice in failing to act haunted him thereafter.
When he was working on a novel it preoccupied him, even during convivial dinner parties. One friend from this period remembers him rising to his feet at the coffee stage, with the apology, ‘I’m sorry, but I have to leave,’ and later that night finding him seated in a deserted railway station, as he scribbled in his notebook.
His relations with Ann continued to be strained, especially after she found some condoms in his studio. She protested that while he was at Coxley he seemed to avoid being alone with her, and that while he was away he could seldom be bothered to telephone or write. ‘Your accountant, your lawyer, your secretary, your acquaintances, all rank before me,’ she complained: ‘I can’t exist on such scraps.’
An unexpected visitor appeared at the door, soliciting donations for a local charity: Sir Roger Hollis, David’s former boss at MI5, now retired, who lived near by. David invited him in; Hollis stayed an hour, and over coffee he talked distractedly and at length, without ever once asking his host anything about himself. At the time he was under investigation as a suspected Soviet agent: he bore the ordeal stoically, but it was clearly telling on him. He dropped by again, a couple of days later, and sat in an armchair reading The Times while David worked; and then three or four times more over the next few weeks. It dawned on David that Coxley Manor was a refuge for Hollis, a safe house.
To the relief of his publishers, David had abandoned his intention to write a novel without spies or suspense; he had reverted to his original concept of a spy thriller against the background of a neo-Nazi revival. He would set the story in Bonn rather than in Vienna. The plot would take the form of a hunt for Leo Harting, a low-ranking diplomat who has gone missing from the British Embassy with its most sensitive file. Harting is ex-Control Commission, one of the put-upon ‘temporaries’, a dogsbody treated with condescension by his senior colleagues. Alan Turner from ‘Security’ is sent out from London to investigate Harting’s disappearance. His interviews with Embassy staff strip them of their protective covering, to reveal underneath their vulnerability, snobbery, duplicity and hypocrisy. In retrospect David would say that he had planned to write a black comedy about British political manners. Secretly he allocated to himself the role of the driven and unhappy Turner, whose abrasive style grates against diplomatic decorum.37
In May 1966 Charles Pick proposed David for membership of the Savile, a London club in the heart of Mayfair founded in 1868 by some of the most distinguished writers and artists of the time, which had retained something of its literary and artistic flavour. In his letter of proposal Pick outlined his candidate’s qualifications for membership:
I have no reservations in proposing Cornwell for the Savile as he is a brilliant conversationalist, extremely modest, and, as one would expect from his writing, highly intellectual. I believe he would make friends very easily in the Savile and would contribute to the general spirit of the Club.
Cornwell is a generous person and I happen to know of two occasions where, anonymously, he has given help urgently needed. He is a person to whom friends could turn for sympathy and is quite unspoilt by his success as a novelist.38
David’s half-sister Charlotte, then sixteen and a pupil at Windsor Grammar School, came to him for aid. She had become pregnant after sleeping with her best friend’s elder brother, her first sexual encounter. Abortion was then illegal; besides, she was already six months pregnant. Her parents were no help: Ronnie was abroad somewhere, and Jean resisted her daughter’s attempts to discuss the matter; she moved house, rather than face the shame of her daughter’s pregnancy. David offered Charlotte a refuge at the penthouse during the later stages of her pregnancy. Ann offered to bring up the child herself, but Charlotte chose instead to give up the baby for adoption. David supported her throughout this ordeal.
Charlotte began working as a sales assistant at Harrods, followed by a stint as a trainee fashion buyer at Jaeger, but her heart was not in it. ‘Come on, Sis, what are you going to do?’ asked David. ‘
I think you’re creative – have you ever thought about acting?’ With his encouragement, she applied to drama school. This was the beginning of a successful career. Within a few years she would be playing leading roles at the Bristol Old Vic. For Charlotte, David was ‘the best brother a girl could have’.
Some time in the mid-1960s David was staying in a small hotel in Schleswig-Holstein, near the East German border,* when his telephone rang. ‘Is that David Cornwell?’ David said yes. ‘My name is Clark. Your father ripped off my brother. I’m downstairs – do you want a drink?’ In the hotel lobby was a tall, handsome man, radiating an almost violent vigour: the young Alan Clark, later a Conservative politician and author of candid diaries. He explained that he was in the area doing a story on the Iron Curtain for the Telegraph, and had spotted David’s name in the visitors’ book. Parked outside was a huge gleaming Mercedes 600, a prototype according to Clark. As they climbed in David noticed a packet of Bath Oliver biscuits and a bottle of Malvern water on the back seat. ‘I don’t eat foreign food very much,’ muttered Clark.
Over a drink he told David the story of how his younger brother Colin had been defrauded by Ronnie, with many amusing details. Far from resenting what Ronnie had done, he seemed to relish it. The two Englishmen found plenty to talk about. Clark was only a few years older than David: he too was married, with young sons. Like David, he kept a flat in London, where he spent much of his time, while his wife and children lived in a manor house in the West Country. And like David, he pursued other women – though, unlike David, he had no scruples about cheating on his wife. He was a wealthy young man, with extravagant tastes; in particular, he adored fast cars, which he drove with a gambler’s appetite for risk.