– Well, you can imagine the scandal in a place like Eltham. It even got into some of the Fleet Street papers. If you’re sufficiently zealous I’m sure you could dig it out of the archives and check it: I may have the odd detail wrong. Possibly, seeing how low-church my mother had sunk by then, it wasn’t a font christening at all but one of those baptisms with total immersion. I suppose that would provide a better opportunity for drowning babies. But when I read the accounts the thing that leaped off the page at me, other than the fact that my own mother had star billing in a humiliating story, was that the baby’s name was the same as mine. It was about to be christened Raymond. It took me straight back to the events that had led to my hurried departure for Suez.
– To put it briefly, my mother had found out about me and Philip, and by the most improper means. Foolishly, I was keeping a diary in which I was confiding my adolescent anguish. I’m afraid I’d even called it ‘Liber Amoris’ in imitation of Hazlitt’s equally frantic and vulnerable account. You can imagine the sort of things I wrote in it. Awful poems, declarations, blacknesses, with occasional ecstatic triumphs: ‘Spoke to him today! When I gave him TS’s notice about the Junior Colts XV our hands met …!’ The whole thing was ridiculous and extravagant and gusty. Of course it was. I was a teenager, after all, and besotted beyond reason. My mother must have been snooping in my room one day when I was at school and found the diary. It was inexcusable that she read it, but then I was stupid to have associated religious people with moral scruple. She went quite cuckoo. She tore straight down to Mottingham and confronted me at the school gates, waving it and shouting Leviticus in my face. I managed to get her away before she could storm in to demand that the headmaster uncover the identity of the boy with whom her son was having this filthy alliance, this bestial coupling, this … and so on and so forth, most of it at the top of her voice, to the edification of my schoolmates and the local citizens. Thank goodness I had never named Philip in the diary: I referred to him only as ‘IB’, after Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved. A childish but effective code.
– Life at home became impossible. Dad tried to act as a mediator but you could tell he just wanted to run off to the office where nobody shouted passages from the Old Testament and everything happened quietly and purposefully. He did make an awkward attempt at father-and-son intimacy, trying to convey that he’d heard these things, harrumph!, happened, and, er, they didn’t strike him as all that terrible since they mostly blew over as soon as a chap got out into the world, you know, girlfriends, decent job, plenty to do. I’m afraid we’ve got to face it, old man, your mother’s a bit, er, hah, unwell at present. I’m wondering … I’m wondering if it really mightn’t be better, all things considered, and seeing that you’ve got the School Cert. to worry about, if …? ‘You mean, Dad, you’d like me to move out? To go? Leave home?’
– He blustered, but that was indeed what he meant. Talk about injustice. I wasn’t the one rampaging around shouting imprecations. It obviously never occurred to him that it was his wife who ought to be removed for a while. It’s true I could see he was miserable about sending me away but he evidently felt that once I was out of the house my mother would calm down and could eventually be talked around, enough at least so that I could come home again. You’ve got to remember that in those days psychiatric help was pretty crude. It was mainly straitjackets or great draughts of that horrible-tasting stuff that used to stink the house out, paraldehyde. My father wanted peace at all costs, and the price of peace was having his son leave the house. I don’t think I ever quite forgave him. At the same time my mother informed me in a conversational aside that a seraph she knew had told her I was a child of Satan. So I went and stayed a couple of months with some cousins over in Hither Green. I could easily commute to school from there, it was only two stations away. But it was the beginning of the end of Eltham for me. –
A child of Satan?
– That’s what she said. She also called me the Devil’s Officer, I remember. I think she was confused to the point where extreme religiosity and her work in the Censorship in the First World War had become entwined. I believe she thought I had been recruited by the Devil and that my wretched diary contained his coded instructions for infiltrating the Earth with his shock troops. Sort of fifth-columnists. And since this ‘IB’ was clearly someone I knew at school, she would occasionally show up there even after I’d been exiled to Hither Green, earnestly warning anyone who would listen that Eltham College was the lair of the Great Beast. I’m glad to say this tended to make people laugh uncontrollably but the police were sometimes called to have her removed. If it made my position at school pretty vile so it did for a wretch named Irwin Bretton on account of his initials. The ribbing he got was doubly unjust since he was a famously dim piggy boy whose only known interest was in making cranes out of Meccano. He had quite a bad time of it without, I suspect, ever fully twigging the nature of the accusations. Just as well, probably. The teachers were sympathetic enough and so were my friends, but some of the other boys … Well, you know how children are.
– But why me? Why would my mother take against her own son unless she already had some long-standing grievance or dislike of me? Surely even the violent antipathies of the insane generally have particular roots, whether imaginary or real? It’s true we’d never been close, she and I. I was certainly more so to my father, though as must be clear to you by now we were in no sense a close family. I sometimes wonder if it didn’t date right back to my infancy when her brother was killed in the war. Apparently that was when she started becoming fiercely religious. I tried to think of a specific heinous act I had committed but could only come up with the usual childhood misdemeanours that had caused a bit of a scene at the time. I even wondered whether I was perhaps not my father’s child at all, and ‘Satan’ just a lunatic’s pseudonym for someone she’d met at a bus stop. Had she enjoyed a hasty dalliance even as she was engaged to my father, for which she later experienced guilt? And was that why she never really showed me much maternal affection? I shan’t ever know and it hardly matters now. The poor woman simply got barmier and barmier. Thanks to paraldehyde she flew off the handle a bit less and instead would hold long, earnest conversations with people like Elijah while she did the crossword. In fact I believe Elijah told her the answers. It sounds fanny here on a summer’s day but at the time it was miserably frightening and upsetting. I felt I’d been betrayed by both parents while my love for Philip had been exposed and defiled. When I realised Philip’s identity was still a secret that aspect of the thing seemed less melodramatically bad; and as for defilement, I converted that adroitly into a soothing feeling of private martyrdom. This was a love for which I’d been publicly mocked, reviled, made to suffer, yet with Christlike fortitude I’d borne it all … You can imagine. The net effect, of course, was to add still further to the sacred status Philip held for me. I must say it became nearly impossible to resist telling him what I was going through on his account and that the least he could do was take me in his arms and let me cry on his shirtfront. But resist it I did, thank goodness. As for the trahison des parents, by the time I read the reports of my mother and the christening it was nearly ten years since I had seen either of them and that whole overwrought era had receded and become a good deal blunted. By then what I actually felt was sorrow. For my mother, for my father, for us as a not very successful family unit. From time to time I can feel it even now.
– But in the meantime I had been banished to Hither Green. My mother wrote to tell me how sorry she was that I was a child of Satan and would need to be burned in everlasting flame. My father wrote to Anderson & Green. I reclaimed and burned my incriminating diary. The liber if not the amor perished in flames. And at the end of all these writings and inveighings and burnings there was I, silent on a dock in Tilbury with a brand-new trunk and mixed feelings, as well as a Benson watch and fifty pounds from my father who tried not to cry as he tucked the envelope into my top pocket. So yes, by the time I arrived in Suez I was pr
etty glad to be out of it. That description I gave of my excitement at being abroad was accurate enough, even if it said nothing about the various traumas that had obliged me to be there. But since I was looking forward to seeing Philip imminently on his way through Suez I suppose I had all the motive I needed to stick it out. –
*
I took what I had heard back up the hill. This shocking revelatory morning had been capped by Jayjay informing me that he was dying. It was official, he said, and swore me to secrecy. He would tell Claudio and Marcella in his own good time. ‘Nobody’s indispensable,’ he said with a smile of remarkable sweetness. ‘They are when you haven’t yet finished their biography,’ I retorted. Oh Jayjay … No wonder you threw caution to the winds this morning and broke your silence. And there I was until only a matter of hours ago still complaining that you weren’t coming clean, that your life was boring me, that my own was more insistent.
Sometimes I have this pressing desire to visit the bees and watch them on their sorties. Their unreflecting industry is an antidote to human messiness and travail, the love and tears of it all that billows up like cannon-smoke at Waterloo to obscure friend and foe and even the sun that might otherwise guide us home. At their busiest period in summer the worker bees live only a matter of weeks before they are worn out and their sisters (for they are all females) on corpse duty tug the bodies out of the hive and dump them on the entrance sill. Nobody’s indispensable. Most mornings there are two or three dead bees lying on the threshold of their home as evidence of brisk housework. The whole community gives off an intense healthy smell hard to describe because it has such a wide range of associations. Of honey and sweetness, naturally, but equally of good housekeeping. There is a piercing cleanliness about it. Being obsessively clean, bees much dislike the smell of human sweat. To wear stale clothes while beekeeping is a solecism that greatly increases the chance of being stung. Even in the cool of dawn, summer hives diffuse their scent into the still air so powerfully they can be smelt fifty yards away. If work itself has a smell it is surely one of the components of this hive-scent and carries with it a faint hint of reproof, even of menace. These are creatures doing their living at a hectic pace and in their own arcane way. Our factory is our home, says the smell: you disturb us at your peril. Only those as clean and hard-working as ourselves have any right to the fruits of a labour that costs us our lives.
I often stand by the hives, sniffing this industrious incense that in some way slows the heartbeat. In fact, so restorative are bees that I invariably regain the one thing they conspicuously lack, a sense of humour. I know I am back in kilter when I can say to them: ‘I’m sorry, girls, but it has to be said. When all your many virtues and talents have been duly listed and praised, we’re still left with one unignorable drawback: you’re dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. There’s so little flexibility programmed into you. I have only to move this hive two yards to one side and most of you will be unable to find your way back home again. Even a single yard would be enough to confuse you and, if it were winter, a good few of you would freeze to death inches from your own front door. That, I’m afraid, is dumb. You’re going to have to do better than that if you ever want to take a step up the evolutionary ladder.’
To stand beside a beehive and laugh at its occupants for being easily disorientated may at best look like a small consolation. At worst one would sooner not speculate.
13
The sense of shortening time was confirmed by an almost imperceptible change in our arrangement. The sessions Jayjay and I had together were as frequent as ever but now less open-ended. After a couple of hours he would begin to tire. Six months was the span his doctors were predicting, the last part of which could hardly be expected to yield much in terms of work, and I had already inescapably committed two months of this precious allowance to my other book. With much difficulty I had arranged a further series of vital interviews in places as far apart as Hawaii, Canada and Australia where judiciously retired members of the old regime were living high off the hog. These were men, and in two cases women, who had reluctantly agreed to talk to me only after mutual friends had leaned quite heavily on them. The least appearance of casualness or date-breaking on my part would be as fatal as if I were to hint that my real mission was to write some sort of journalistic exposé. Now I would have to leave in a week’s time. I explained this apologetically to Jayjay.
‘I quite understand,’ he said. ‘The tug of the exotic, the light of tropic suns. Mind you, I feel it’s a little unseemly going on with this beachcomber act of yours when you’re easily old enough to be a grandfather. One only hopes you don’t do a Crusoe in cut-off jeans.’
‘Would that I could. This is a trip for well-cleaned shoes and a polite smile. Something you need never again affect.’
‘Only you, James, would have the appalling taste to turn a death sentence into a stroke of fortune. Still, thank you so much for pointing out the silver lining I might otherwise have missed. However, and joking apart, I’m perfectly aware you have your other work to do and must go. Don’t worry about it. Besides, there’s not so very much more I can tell you about myself now. I feel as though I’ve said it all, for what little it’s worth.’
‘But the great and the good? The Henry Kissingers?’
‘Oh, they’re easily dealt with. Still, you may remember that even before you agreed to take on this chore I did tell you that my first thirty years were the ones that counted. Probably true for most people, in any case. When I look back now the things of my life that seem most valuable and formative are all from that period and the recent half-century is a blur by comparison. That, I’m afraid, was the era of the great and the good. Not that I haven’t enjoyed much of it immensely. But it’s an odd irony that one should recall more fondly the process of learning how to live than doing the actual living. True of sex, too, I’m afraid. It was a revelation to start with but degenerated into a mere pleasure.’ Jayjay looked reflective for a moment then suddenly waved an elegant hand to indicate the beamy sitting-room, the terrace beyond the open French windows, the famous garden. ‘What am I going to do with all this stuff?’
‘It depends on your spirit of malice, Jayjay. You can always leave this place to someone with the proviso that it is converted for agriturismo. That way you can ensure the Valle di Chio will be made privy to the bayings of pink foreigners on holiday losing their tempers with their kids. It will be highly instructive for the locals about cultural difference, especially if the foreigners are British. You know, the whole rigmarole that begins with always getting up too late to go anywhere or shop properly. There’s the mother who vaguely feels she wants to see Fine Art and the father who’s grumpy at having to pretend he does, too, although he’d far rather sit in the shade and get pissed because it’s so damned hot. Those excursions with the children in the back of the car, surly with computer games, barely appeased by promises of ice creams and swimming pools … Yes, I think you could do worse than leave that as your legacy to the neighbourhood.’
‘Heavens, James, what an unspeakable father you would have made.’
‘It’s true.’ I have never told Jayjay about Emma. I am indeed an unspeakable father.
‘But I don’t feel at all vindictive, and least of all towards the Valle di Chio which has given me generous shelter these last twenty-odd years. Well, these are my problems, not yours. A week, you said? We’d best return to Egypt at once and finish up there.’
‘Before we do, Jayjay, could I just get something straight about Adelio? In the light of your recent revelations, that is.’
‘Were we lovers, you mean?’ he pre-empted me with slight impatience. ‘No. Not exactly. I shall explain all, while at the same time glumly registering how depressing it is that from now on you will inevitably suspect my motives if I betray the least interest or concern for any male below the age of sixteen. You don’t have to protest,’ he added, raising a conciliatory hand. ‘It’s a sign of the times we live in. Once those stupid categories have been imposed no
-one is allowed to fall between them. Pseudo-science has spoken. If you’re not this you’re that. One can never again be something quite other.’
A further sign of the times was that Marcella came in to ask if I wanted coffee. Hitherto she had let us fend for ourselves but I could see she was now keeping a firm eye on Jayjay. I had no doubt that if she thought I was over-tiring him she would ask me to leave. Nor was he any longer allowed coffee on his previous awesome scale. Apparently the doctors had told him that at his age the body’s metabolic rate is quite slow, which is why they were able to talk in terms of six months rather than three. They alleged that gingering things up with large doses of caffeine was quite the wrong thing to do in the circumstances. These days Jayjay had to make do with tisanes, and he would stare sadly at the bloated sachet as it floated at the rim of his cup like a corpse in a pond, diffusing a thin ichor. The world divides itself into coffee-and tea-drinkers and the two seldom overlap.
*
– By the end of May 1941 Crete and the Balkans were in German hands and Axis forces were again massing on the Egyptian border. Once more things looked bad for us up in Alexandria and they suddenly looked worse still when the Germans began bombing the city. Churchill had already warned Mussolini that if he bombed Cairo the RAF would bomb Rome but Alexandria was obviously considered fair game.
– That first raid was chaos. We were told to stay put while they tried to evacuate civilians. But the more the sirens went and the Germans tried to hit the harbour and the main station, the more I realised nobody knew what to do. There were no real contingency plans. Or if there were, the right people hadn’t stayed to implement them. My only thought was for the Boschettis. I left SOE’s warehouse in Sid Dix’s charge and went straight to their flat. There, parked right outside, was the Hungarian Count’s Delahaye. I roared inside brandishing the Webley revolver I’d been issued and which I’d never loaded. I found everyone huddled on the kitchen floor, including Bathory-Sopron who had an antimacassar wrapped around his head. I was amazed to find anybody there. I assumed that the Italian legation would have taken care of its own but to be fair no-one really knew what the hell was going on, the wretched Italians least of all, given that they were now being blitzed by their own allies. The Count, meanwhile, turned out not to be injured, merely petrified. I got the family out of the house and into the Delahaye, grabbing a spare tin of petrol I had in the back of the Fiat. At the last moment the Count tried to get in. He still had the antimacassar wrapped around his head. I was suddenly infected with Adelio’s loathing of the man. I shoved the muzzle of the revolver into the area of his moustaches and told him to start walking. I then hopped behind the wheel of his car and tried to head out of town, hoping to reach the Damanhur road.
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