Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  It might be supposed that two Englishmen living abroad and so close together would make an effort to meet, if only for the pleasure of deciding they despised one another. But the English are more complicated than that. It might next be thought that simple snobbery accounted for much of this exaggerated desire for privacy. But when it is so well disguised beneath self-effacing amiability it becomes anything but simple and contains equal measures of defensiveness and arrogance which foreigners generously persist in reading as a curious national reticence. Jayjay and I later acknowledged we were conscious of living on the ‘unfashionable’ side of Cortona – meaning there were so few other foreigners in our immediate area that we could claim still greater exclusivity for ourselves, this becoming a further reason for not socialising. In the earliest days of our joint project we adopted a particular tone of reminiscence for alluding to the distinguished minority status we shared. Now Cortona … (and one could detect the note of disdain creeping in) … We could remember a down-at-heel Etruscan hill town full of hunchbacks and slightly sinister tall, dark streets. In those days it had had about two hotels, one of them being the Garibaldi in Piazza Alfieri, run by those two ancient sisters now long dead. And do you remember Il Sozzo, Mr Filthy, who ran that minute restaurant up at Torreone? He looked like a Charles Addams character and had maybe three tables. You gave your order and if you were unlucky he left the kitchen door open and you could see into the black and cobwebby cavern where grimy children were set to work with bundles of kindling to light the grill. But when the food arrived, my God!, unbelievably fabulous, especially the grilled porcini: great thick meaty ceps drizzled with the greenest olive oil … Il Sozzo was dead too, of course; and anyway nowadays the place would be condemned and closed by the USL, ‘the Oozly’, the sanitary gauleiters of the new age. Really, Cortona had changed out of all recognition and was fast becoming a year-round rabble of foreigners, what with full-time American universities and German and Brit culture-groupies. And increasing numbers of them were not tourists at all but residents of one sort or another. They were either daubing in Mediterranean primary colours or developing crackpot theories about the Etruscans or writing heartwarming accounts of how they had restored their delicious Tuscan farmhouses. And as for the yonder side of Cortona, between the town and Lake Trasimene, well, places like Pergo and Montanare had practically become foreign ghettoes. What we could remember as slightly sordid village streets with a small grim branch of Despar selling flyblown salami and ammonia-laced floor cleaner were now aglitter with BMWs from Munich double-parked outside delicatessens selling Sauerkraut and Bauernbrot …

  In fact, such an account of an imaginary ice-breaking conversation between Jayjay and me would be misleading precisely because the British are so complicated. Written down cold like that it would make us sound like elderly grandees lamenting the arrival of the Johnny-come-latelys. It would also imply we were oblivious to the idea that in a stunning villa somewhere nearby might live an even older and grander foreigner who could remember mules and carbide lighting and could not distinguish between us and the latest interlopers. (And what, meanwhile, of the Italians whose land this is and who bear the whole damned lot of us with such fortitude?) But because we are more complicated, Jayjay and I had put inverted commas around such exchanges. They weren’t about Cortona at all but concerned a mode of description – self-consciously snobby, deliberately overstated – that was parodic of the type of Englishman we might have been, but thank God weren’t. And while this parody was going on we were sniffing each other out with antennae minutely attuned to the finest shades of accent and attitude. In fact, as it quickly turned out, we neither of us gave a damn about what went on over the next range of hills. So far as I was concerned I had been spending so much time either on my travels or writing them up that I had neither the spare energy nor the inclination to hobnob with people an hour’s drive away. Besides, anything beyond the immediate neighbourhood was too unreal. These days when I glanced up from my writing table I hardly saw the chestnut forest below without it turning into a coco-palm plantation, even as the entire Tuscan backdrop shuffled itself chimerically into an equally familiar and fond coastline of the South China Sea. Where was I? Neither here nor there. The palimpsest of a lifetime.

  Which left the puzzle of the lorde. The Italians, of course, are keen on titles. I don’t mean they are interested in aristocrats, especially, but their useful system of social formalities leads them to bestow ranks on half the people one bumps into while out shopping. On any day one can hear the local mayor addressed in the street as sindaco, a time-server in the police as maresciallo, an accountant as ragioniere and virtually anyone who can distinguish a cog-wheel from a pair of compasses as ingegnere. Even I, to my very British humiliation, was addressed in the Co-op as maestro the day after that wretched newspaper article appeared. So it never occurred to me that this English lorde might actually be a bona fide member of the aristocracy until one afternoon when I was inspecting the vines on my terrace for scale insects and something caught my attention down by Hawkwood’s castle at Montecchio. The castle had been restored quite recently and was lived in now and then by a Roman lady. For all its landmark position it attracted little attention so it was all the more surprising this afternoon to see the little road beneath its walls appear jammed with people, sunlight flashing off glass or chrome. Even binoculars revealed little detail beyond two glossy black limousines and some police motorcycles. A few days later gossip supplied an explanation.

  ‘I’m surprised you weren’t there,’ said the barman as he tamped a fresh measure of coffee into the holder and locked it into the espresso machine. ‘You being English and everything. That was your Queen Mother coming for an hour to visit our castle. The paper said she’s as old as the century and likes a drink. Good for her, I say. Corretto?’ He pushed my coffee across the bar and waved a bottle of spirits inquiringly over it. I shook my head and drank the coffee unlaced. ‘The paper also said she stayed the night near here, but security was tight and they wouldn’t say where. Around here we all know she stayed with that English lorde. Ghezzi was in next day and his sister cleans for someone in the Valle di Chio and she said it was obvious. How often do you see Rolls Royces and Carabinieri outriders in these parts?’

  So I assumed the lorde was the genuine article after all and wondered vaguely who he was. But then time passed and all this fell rapidly out of my memory. (A little local excitement. Her of all people. Well, well.) By the time I met and began working with Jayjay I had forgotten about the Queen Mother, while the lorde existed in quite another dimension, fuzzily in the background somewhere beyond the circle of farmers I knew in the immediate vicinity. I began to be drawn into another and quite unexpected world, that of pre-war Suez and its pornography rackets. And then one morning, after a productive session in which he was in expansive mood, Jayjay offered me a lunch-time gin and tonic before we had a bite to eat.

  ‘Only I can’t offer you a decent gin, I’m afraid. I dropped the Gordon’s yesterday and all I have in the house is some cheapo standby stuff I keep for impoverished hacks and scribblers such as yourself.’ And he produced a bottle whose label said ‘Lord Gin’ and displayed bogus coats-of-arms and references to London. It was enough to jog my memory.

  ‘Talking of fake lords, Jayjay, did you know there’s one living around here? The Queen Mother is supposed to have stayed with him a year or two ago.’

  ‘Really? Possibly there’s some confusion here. She certainly stayed with me.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Right here in this house. And luckily I had plenty of undropped Gordon’s, not to mention Dubonnet. But there are always bodyguards and ladies-in-waiting to be considered. Reggie Wilcock, to name but one. Lord Gin’s quite good enough for Reggie. He was here too, of course. Page of the Presence. The one thing about the House of Windsor the tabloids always miss, bless them, is that it’s far and away the campest show in town. Did you never read that story in Woodrow Wyatt’s diary where Reggie and Bill Ta
llon, the Page of the Backstairs, were a bit slow getting the Queen Mother’s evening meal up to her? She phoned down and said, “I don’t know about you two old queens, but this old Queen would like her dinner.” They’re a riot. Just like the Royal Yacht Britannia used to be in its heyday. Talk about cruising. It positively shrieked its way around the world.’

  ‘In any case, Jayjay, you’re not a lord.’

  ‘Of course not, no more than you are. But you know what they’re like around here. I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to make it clear that I’m not a British aristocrat living incognito, so obviously that’s exactly what they think I am. I’ve made it perfectly plain that I’m as common as muck and I thought most of my more savvy local friends had realised it was one of those self-perpetuating jokes, when I suddenly found myself doing a bed-and-breakfast number for the Queen Mum. My credibility at once dropped to zero and my social status rose accordingly. I am now a lorde and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

  ‘But how come you know her?’

  ‘I’ve known her for years, on and off. We’re hardly intimates and she has a wide circle of friends. She really did come to see Hawkwood’s castle and I happened to be a handy bed. She is well over ninety, after all. We originally met through Anthony Blunt in the very early fifties when he was Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Or it might just have been the Queen’s Pictures by then. I’ll tell you some time. It’s not very interesting.’

  ‘So you’re the lorde.’

  ‘How we become our own myths. Look at Jeffrey Archer. Now there’s a man for whom I have a sneaking regard.’

  ‘Another of your acquaintances?’

  ‘Oh no. No, all I meant is I recognise a fellow artist in the sense of someone who made himself up as he went along. Brilliantly, too. He has been everything: policeman, MP, novelist, baron … Call-girls and the Old Vicarage, Grantchester. All of it him, none of it him. I love it. People set far too much store by vulgar consistency. To maintain a consistent character from one end of your life to the other takes just as much energy and subterfuge and self-deception as it does to slip into interesting roles as they’re offered. More, probably. One easily gets carried along by the sheer thrill of transgressing.’

  And lo! the stews of Suez.

  *

  Three days went by before Jayjay ventured to look again for Mansur, three days of hesitation filled with premonitory whiffs as of bridges bursting into flame beneath him.

  – Funny, isn’t it, how one believes one is carrying on a stern inward debate about whether to do something when all the while the decision has long since been taken? It must have been obvious to everyone but me that I was withdrawing from the job at Anderson & Green. I would clock in on the dot each morning, race through the work and absent myself for the rest of the day. It was only a matter of time before ‘Pusser’ Hammond or somebody more senior gave me my marching orders. And then what? I didn’t have a bean to my name other than the ridiculous salary they were paying me. Young, irresponsible and led by my hormones as I was, I nevertheless realised I had to live on something. I was just beginning to like Abroad very much indeed. I didn’t want to go home a virgin, not in any sense, and for me Eltham reeked of virginity.

  – So I went back to Mansur and yes, I paid his price and no, unlike his Turkish huntsman I felt no compulsion to repeat it. Still, sixty years after the event I can admit without a blush that it was far from traumatic. And to pre-empt your two foremost improper questions (ever the stickler for detail) the answers are ‘On the Caramanli’s roof’ and ‘Brylcreem borrowed from Simpkins’. In fact it was over almost before I knew it, in true Arab style, and had I been an ‘Ouled Nail’ I could have gone back to my tent thinking I was quids in after a good night’s work. As soon as it was done I could see things were on a different footing between us. Mansur was now prepared to trust me because by the standards of his own culture I was compromised. As the passive partner I was in a position of shame, and anything I later decided to do or say that went counter to his interests could in theory be nullified by the threat of public exposure. Now it was up to him to keep his part of the bargain, and he was as good as his word. I think he knew that I had yielded for political reasons even if curiosity and an unfocused libido had played their part. So he wasn’t obliged to despise me while claiming affection. –

  *

  Mansur leads the way through a butcher’s shop lit by a Primus pressure lamp. In the white actinic glare the few remaining chunks of unsold camel meat glitter with bluebottles. The small boy in a robe and round white skullcap who is supposed to keep the flies off with a whisk has fallen asleep. A milky gleam of eyeball shows beneath a half-closed lid; his cap is skewed to reveal patches of ringworm on his scalp the size of shillings. The evening hubbub of back-street Suez is a pervasive surround. There are people at the rear of the shop, people in the passage leading inwards into the warren that lies unsuspected from the street. They recognise Mansur, exchange greetings with him, glance with only brief curiosity at his European companion. These are courtyard regions of naphtha flames and candles, of limp piles of fodder with tethered goats standing amid pellets of dung. Children squeal, a wireless plays, feeble lights reveal dim tiers of balconies rising on all sides on which glow charcoal braziers and cigarette tips. Above it all the unexpected night sky is a rectangle of stars. The air enclosed by these steep buildings is heavy with cooking smells, excremental, alive. Jayjay experiences a not disagreeable sensation of being led out of his depth.

  Mansur has explained everything. Jayjay has an hour. He must swear to be silent. Not a movement, all right? They reach a doorway where an old woman is sitting, deeply shawled, in a heap of robes. A paraffin lantern stands on a splintered deal table. The floor beside her is strewn with empty cardamom pods. Mansur greets her and as she looks up to return the greeting the shawl falls away from her face to reveal the dark blue tattooes of tribal markings above her nose and beside each wrinkled eye. With one thin hand she twitches the shawl back across her chin in the token gesture of the Moslem woman who is touchingly too old to bother, while she thrusts the other out incongruously to reveal a watch with a foxed dial which she taps, glancing at both Jayjay and Mansur. Everything is agreed. Time is rationed. The woman gets to her feet and finds a stub of candle which she lights from the oil lamp and hands to Jayjay before leading the way over to one wall. Where the building’s front and side join, a hole eighteen inches wide and four feet high is disclosed behind a sheet of sacking which the woman holds aside for him. As he squeezes past her he smells the cardamom on her breath.

  Having been briefed by Mansur he knows what to expect. The black slot he is in is between two walls, although it is unclear whether the outer one is completely false or merely that of the adjoining building. Unpointed cement has oozed from between the mud-coloured bricks on both sides and hardened into protruding tongues that catch at his clothes. After a few yards he finds rough stairs cobbled together out of more bricks and carefully climbs. The flame he carries illuminates very little beyond its own tiny dazzle. The cramped passage continues at the top of the stairs and here he notices a small source of light around which some bricks have been removed. Placing the candle on the floor he looks through this chink into another world. It is a room in bizarre contrast with his side of the wall, being furnished in a style he thinks of as Louis Farouk. There is a vague Frenchness about the lace curtains in the window, the chintzy wallpaper curling along its seams, the heavy carved wash-stand and the flounced pillows on the bed. The Egypt of her new king, on the other hand, is unmistakably represented by the two stiff chairs upholstered in gold velveteen and a writing table with heraldic legs, its surface protected by a rectangle of green American cloth. Clothes are heaped carelessly on it. Above the head of the bed is a lighting fitment: two shaded bulbs springing from a riot of acanthus leaves done into a gilt plaster-of-Paris plaque. From the way light is falling on the bed Jayjay deduces that his own viewpoint must be from behind the acanthus spray of a simila
r light fitment along the wall beside the bed. Only an aperture thus ingeniously disguised could remain undetected so close to the protagonists of this stolen spectacle.

  In the next hour Jayjay watches the same girl with three different clients. She is about his own age, with large breasts and heavy dark hair – probably Greek, he thinks. He is rigid with embarrassment and excitement. Nothing in Eltham has prepared him for this, and neither have his most vivid imaginings accurately foreseen the effortless reality of what takes place beneath his fascinated gaze. In order to distract himself from his guilt at thieving these private scenes he splits into several observers. The first of these takes note of all sorts of peripheral detail about the room and its occupants: the way the light falls, the holes in socks. The same observer quite lucidly speculates about how he might never have guessed from their faces – had he glimpsed these entirely ordinary-looking people walking along Rue Colmar in plain daylight – that they lived another life after dark. Maybe everyone did, and it left no more discernible mark on their diurnal selves than eating dinner? A second observer is not speculative at all. He feels his entire being oozing through the aperture like ectoplasm in order to participate in the activities scarcely four feet away. Like an inflamed Tinkerbell he is everywhere, alighting briefly on this membrane and on that, flitting from breast to scrotum, from buttock to nape, committing everything to indelible memory. And above and behind these observers yet another presides who, despite Jayjay’s neophyte ignorance, recognises the isolation in these encounters. These are closed people transacting brief and urgent business. They are in no sense lovers. They are more like electrified globes, sealed fates that bump into one another, discharge themselves and leave behind a certain residue of sadness. It does occur to this observer that sadness might always be attendant on the act, regardless of the absence or presence of love.