‘What, none? A funny kind of biography that can’t illustrate its subject.’
‘If you can’t do it in prose it’s useless relying on pictures. I’m sick to death of my face.’
I narrowly avoid saying that he will never have to see it. ‘Well, if you insist. Though I might accept with better grace if we could substitute some prints from your feelthy archive.’ A shadowy thought at last takes on a clear outline. ‘You made real money during the war, didn’t you, Jayjay?’
‘Oh yes,’ he says, hitting me straight in the eye with that old Jayjay look, part mischief and part challenge. ‘Heaps of it. I never mentioned I wound up as the owner of three clubs in the Berka, did I? Including a donkey-trick one. We had a notice outside ours to score off the other joints which advertised theirs as being ‘The Original’. Ours said: ‘The Trick Is Original But Our Donkey Is Changed Every Week For Reasons Of Fatigue.’ Packed to the rafters each night. I’d even nobbled the district police commander so that rival clubs were frequently raided and closed. That’s a story in itself because it was tangled up with the conflicting jurisdiction of our own military police. But yes, I think on balance you can describe mine as having been a profitable war, all things considered, even if it was one that Captain W. E. Johns and Major James Bigglesworth would heartily have disapproved of. Still, I played my part in the war effort. I successfully spread a canard that Rommel was homosexual, backing it up with a staged photograph using a South African lookalike being rogered by an Egyptian bricklayer from Helwan. We ran off twenty thousand of those and distributed them all over Cairo. Another idea of mine was to put about the story that truly dedicated Nazis all consented to have one of their testicles surgically removed out of solidarity with Hitler. It was well known to Egyptians that Allied troops sang a song about Hitler’s having only one ball and this rumour of our enemies’ partial emasculation, whether or not it was completely believed, made for a lot of jokes in Cairo. There was even an article about it in a popular Arabic newspaper. Every little helped; and though I admit I took good care that my war service should be as inactive as possible, I did what I was asked to do quite conscientiously. But yes, I made a lot of money on the side. Yes, too, I made some invaluable door-opening contacts which I shall tell you about if there’s enough time. And finally, of course, I got to know Adelio and his family.’
‘So what happened to him? He’s the obvious loose end in the story so far. Where is he now?’
Jayjay made a vague gesture towards the view beyond the terrace.
‘He’s in the camposanto. He died in 1977. This is his house we’re sitting in. He left it to me.’
* Until quite recently it would have been possible to illustrate the book with one of these photographs. But a new Victorianism has once more rendered certain human bodies taboo and we must await a more enlightened age.
14
See how the wicked prosper and the ways of the evildoers triumph!
Such are the thoughts of a modern Jonah as he unwillingly makes his way from country to country, from appointment to appointment, whisked by private helicopter to a five-thousand square-mile ranch or by limo to a tower block owned by the interviewee’s corporation. Butlers usher Jonah into a series of drawing-rooms with exclusive views over a forest of blue gums, a panorama of ocean, the Chrysler Building or Hyde Park. Those are the Alps on the skyline. Your Princess Margaret has been to this little island resort of ours. If you like water we also have a place on a lake near Tashkent which I think you would enjoy: it’s still a bit rough but we’re slowly licking it into shape … Not only do the drawing-rooms have views of all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof but views of a good few of their rulers too, in the shape of photographs artlessly scattered about on bookshelves and unplayed Steinway grands. Jonah is pretty amused to see how many of the wicked appear to be close personal friends of kings and presidents and prime ministers. Here are beaming Saudi princes, African kings, American presidents; heads of states whose chief exports are inhaled or injected; the Pope himself and even in one case the late unimpeachable Mother Teresa.
Jonah is amused because they are a tribute to sanitising skills. What one normally hears about is the laundering of money, even though pecunia non olet and one might think it could hardly be deodorised further. But that is only the first step. The real challenge is the laundering of reputation. This is mainly a matter of waiting for Time the great healer to do his stuff, aided by astute donations to political campaigns and charities and the setting up of foundations for worthy causes. The days of crisis in distant hot countries, the firing squads and the curling tongs and the body parts in refrigerators: these are merely the malicious rumours of elsewhere and long ago, allegations much too dubious and far-fetched to be worth bringing before any august bar. The very fantasy of Judgement Day betrays the vanity of dead millions longing for redress. Forget it, says Jonah. You lose. Cherish all the fond hopes you may of earthly powers getting their comeuppance or of the spiritual superiority of the meek: they are merely analgesic. (Which of the billionaire oilmen was it – Hunt? Getty? – who made that quip? ‘Let the meek inherit the earth. We’ll still have the mineral rights.’) After all, these are the great and the good who set the world’s agenda, and the world is all that is the case.
Still, there is a wry interest in going from one interview to the next, asking carefully prepared questions that hover on the edge of propriety. One does not expect these people to incriminate themselves, thinks Jonah. Yet when their answers are compared certain striking discrepancies do often emerge and new lines of thought suggest themselves. Cast your mind back to the time of the Emergency. You will recall that plans for building the nuclear power station were never put out to proper tender and the deal was sewn up with General Electric and its lead banker, Citibank. Great sums of money were squirreled away in Swiss accounts. But then the regime had second thoughts about the need to keep up appearances because this was such a major project. They realised it would be advisable at least to go through the motions of canvassing another bid, even if retrospectively. American Express duly appeared, flexing its young muscles in the field of international finance, suggesting that a much better deal for the nuclear plant might be struck with Westinghouse while the US Government’s Ex-Im Bank provided long-term credit. At that time the President of Ex-Im Bank was William Casey, the ex-Director of the CIA. Suddenly the regime thought that Westinghouse plus the CIA plus the US Government looked a far more attractive alliance than General Electric and Citibank. However, the earlier deal had already been signed on the regime’s behalf by the Chairman of the national power company, and the same man could hardly now turn around and put his signature to a contract with a different company for the same project. So he had to be dumped, and quickly, because the US presidential election was due in November and if the Democrats won Casey would be out on his ear and lose his presidency of Ex-Im Bank. So a new chairman was swiftly appointed to the national power corporation who duly signed the new contract, and General Electric and Citibank were out of a job. Just in time, too, because the Democrats did win the election and Casey retired from Ex-Im Bank. But then, Westinghouse was represented in the new deal by Asia Industries, who were paying a large retainer to, well, William Casey, so the good fellow lost nothing and remained a close Washington ally of the regime’s.
Ah, but whatever happened to the gigantic sweeteners paid to the regime by both bidding corporations as well as by everyone else who wanted in on this lucrative nuclear power plant? And how come the plant itself was eventually built, at a vast overrun on budget and with more sweeteners at every turn, but never commissioned? It was mothballed as soon as it was completed and there it stands to this day, quaintly sited in a province of notorious seismic instability: a geological fact equally well known to local peasants and Westinghouse. If proof were needed that the chosen site was less than ideal it turned out to be not far from where a volcano erupted famously in 1991, temporarily altering the earth’s climate and reddening its
sunsets.
Whatever happened to all that money? Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, thinks Jonah as he is lunched beneath an awning on the island resort; as he hangs stuttering in the helicopter above an immense herd of prize cattle; as he is lofted to the top of the corporation’s executive skyscraper in Manhattan. Or is this Hong Kong? One needs to go to the boardroom window in order to check. No matter that the foundations of this business empire are grounded on a forgotten bedrock of graft as well as of solidified blood and tears, the people who live in the penthouse suite are charm itself. They betray only occasional microlapses from their habitual high standards of warmth and generosity, as though victim to one of those tiny strokes or ‘cerebral events’ that leave people blinking for two seconds in a high street or getting into their car, aware only that something has happened which they cannot name and then cannot remember. These tiny asides (a sudden steely look, a ruthless remark, the abrupt closing of a conversational topic like a book being slammed shut) are easily dismissed as quirks and idiosyncracies. That apart, the prevailing décor is wall-to-wall geniality, the children especially with their beautiful ponies and excellent reading grades and scaled-down off-road vehicles capable of forty miles per hour, handbuilt for them by the Sumibashi Corporation somewhere east of Eden.
I miss my friend Jayjay, Jonah thinks as he lies in a grace-and-favour hotel suite (the hotel chain is a wholly-owned subsidiary of his host’s). I miss him and I fear I may never see him again because he is dying. And this very morning I am going to cut short my trip and junk the last two hard-won interviews in order to hurry home before it’s too late. I also long to return to more threadbare circles, to life stories of normal peccadillos where people sell pornography for a living and live out their lives inefficiently in the grip of futile loves for other people rather than for powers and dominions. But then, Jonah tells himself, that is a foolish sentimentalism because the super-rich also have nightmares and inconvenient libidos; they too have a Rosebud stashed in an outhouse, hidden behind the broken Sumibashi toys. And anyway, most of the poor would cheerfully settle for an empire with foundations of blood provided the underpinnings were well enough buried and their corporate offices soared high enough into the blue sky, flashing with stainless steel cladding and an equally stainless reputation. Who wouldn’t opt for that change in fortune? Who wouldn’t want the sort of power that can get into bed with Westinghouse and cuddle up to the CIA and yield heaps of untraceable money? And if it means that a few no-hopers out in the sticks with their buffaloes have to be kept in line with petrol enemas and curling tongs, and occasionally their children need their eyes putting out by men wearing jungle fatigues – well, that sort of thing has always gone on at the lower end of the scale. They breed like flies, anyway, and in five years’ time even their own folks won’t remember their names. Redress? The very word has overtones of loser.
Jonah decides to curtail his interviews and fly back to Italy not just because he wants to see his friend Jayjay, although that is the chief and most pressing reason. It is also because he already knows too much to print, while nobody gives a damn about this sort of stuff anyway. It is a weary wisdom that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Who cares? And who wants to bring grief, lawsuits and possibly worse down upon themselves in a quixotic crusade that will benefit no-one? The dead are dead, and we are all earmarked for slaughter.
As he flies eastward across the Atlantic Jonah finds his interest in malefactors and their deeds dissipating like contrails in the thin stratospheric gale. By the time he lands in Rome Jonah is no more. He has been replaced by the pipsqueak British writer in sour trousers who booked the flight two months ago: the failed father and unworthy friend who deserted the dying subject of a biography he has yet to complete. He is also an inept beekeeper who leaves his charges to fend for themselves for six weeks in the swarming season. He may or may not try to do better in future – probably not, actually, as he is quite addicted to his wandering life.
*
I am shocked by the change in Jayjay in a scant six weeks. He has shrunk alarmingly and what I once pretended might be an incipient tan is now unmistakably jaundice. He is up and about, still contriving to be dapper even though his trouserlegs are emptier and in some odd fashion appear to move independently of the limbs within.
‘Riddled,’ he affirms cheerfully, catching my momentarily uncensored gaze. ‘What you see before you, dear James, is a goner. Mercifully it doesn’t hurt at all. Isn’t that odd? The quacks reluctantly admit that I’m festooned with tumours the size of grapefruit from uvula to arsehole, but damned if I can feel a thing other than weak. Pathetically weak. The good news is that I’ve ignored the quacks and gone back to proper coffee. I couldn’t be doing any longer with all those dead leaves and hot water. Tea just tastes wet to me. I’ve been feeling better ever since.’
‘You’re looking terrific, Jayjay. Years younger. A walking tribute to Lavazza’s Qualità Oro. A veritable elixir of life, that stuff must be.’
‘Ah, excellent. I can see that the high life of these last six weeks has done little to blunt our fundamentally sardonic nature. And I am looking terrific, it’s true. I caught sight of myself by mistake in the bathroom mirror this morning and thought, “There’s someone who has lived too long.” Evidently after a certain number of years we’re all condemned to look more and more like Somerset Maugham.’
‘As painted by Graham Sutherland.’
‘Exactly. You don’t think I should be taking all these frightful drugs the quacks want me to take, do you?’
‘I’ve no idea, Jayjay. Not unless you want to. What frightful drugs are they?’
‘Those things that kill practically every cell in your body and make your hair fall out. I told Dr Farulli they might suppress my libido and I couldn’t stick that at any price, not at my age. His face was a picture, as they used to say. I had a bit of a fight with Marcella over them but I won. Can’t see the point in buying myself a horrid extra month, can you?’
I am impressed by his spirit. Gallows cheerfulness takes effort and courage. We know it’s an act, but we also know that nearly everything about the face we turn to the world for eighty years is an act. We are all impostors. These things matter. We cannot allow standards to fall just because something as trivial as eternity is about to roll over and squash us.
‘I’ll tell you what is a bit lowering,’ he concedes. ‘You might think that as someone nears his end with all his faculties intact he would suddenly be able to dispense with all the blocks and inhibitions that had previously held him back. You might expect him to become as brilliant as he was capable of being, able to distil the experience of having been a unique individual who made his one passage through the world with a good deal of wry amusement. But no. If ever you were going to be brilliant it would have happened long ago. You just feel slack and grey and oppressed. Everything becomes the past, and the past becomes more dreamlike and inconsequential. You become mentally inert, which must be what the goofy mistake for otherworldliness. The entire process is disagreeable to a fault, so let’s change the subject. Tell me about the great and the good in your recent life.’
I give him a brief outline after observing that I doubt whether they are much different from the great and the good in his own life, about whom he has yet to tell me.
‘We must bring this tale to some sort of conclusion,’ he agrees, and makes a valiant effort to make it seem as though things have not changed since the expansive days of a couple of years ago when he would hold forth for hours at a stretch on the terrace. It is now the first half of April and although the sun is bright its warmth is thin. Nevertheless Jayjay muffles himself up and insists that we sit outside at the table with its inlaid ceramic tiles, the percolator fresh from the kitchen still sighing and spluttering to itself between us.
It is an astonishingly beautiful morning. The increasingly freakish climate of the last ten years is resulting in minor heat-waves in February followed by premature spring. The crocuses an
d violets and grape hyacinths have long since bloomed and gone; the apricots, peaches and almonds have likewise already flowered and are now in leaf. The wisteria that winds its tendons across the front and side of Il Ghibli and over the pergola is about to blossom. It is one of those mornings when one can imagine the ground almost trembling with the pressures in the soil driving sap along roots and up tall trees to burst in green flame from every twig. On all sides this force is squeezing fresh colour out of what only days before must have seemed dead sticks. Jayjay raises his increasingly hawklike face to the summit of Sant’ Egidio which today is leaning back and flying through small puffs of very white cloud. From somewhere down beyond the olives comes the intermittent muffled howl of a chainsaw as Claudio indulges his passion for lopping and felling.
Why here? I ask. Why this house?
*
– As soon as they could Mirella and the children shook the dust of Egypt off their feet and came back here to Italy. Their home was actually just the other side of Castiglion Fiorentino, in the hills overlooking Rigutino. What, about five miles from here? Hardly more. I tried to keep in touch with them but it wasn’t easy. The war was over but everything was chaotic and in a state of flux. It was obvious to me that the British had at best a limited future in Egypt so I decided to go back to England. Really, though, it seemed to me that I had come to the end of a phase in my life and it was time for a change. In one sense I was right: those nine years since 1936 had indeed been a formative experience. But I was wrong if I thought that a change would necessarily mean something radically different. I couldn’t see it at the time but from then on my life was essentially going to be permutations of things I had already experienced and thoughts I’d already had. I don’t know if that made me a case of arrested development. No more so than anybody else, probably. I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight: already past my prime had I been an Egyptian fellah or bedou, who were often old at forty and dead at forty-five. By sheer good fortune I had been spared disaster or an arbitrary death at a time when such things were commonplace. It was a miracle that I had escaped being blown to bits in Alexandria by only a couple of minutes. I remember getting back to Eltham all tanned and fit and excellently nourished and being obliged to wonder ‘Why me?’ London was a changed place. Eltham was a changed place. It was bleak and scrawny and full of bomb sites. People were pale and drawn and shivering: coal was well-nigh unobtainable. They certainly didn’t look like citizens of a victorious nation. Hardly a family hadn’t lost somebody. There were gaps in streets where the Luftwaffe had missed the Docks or else a V1 or V2 had landed. People were constantly finding incendiaries in their gardens. The poorer East End kids wore dresses run up from black-out material. And everywhere you went in central London there were little groups of young servicemen missing an arm or a leg or else blind, playing accordions or the spoons for pennies. They merely swelled the ranks of all the First World War veterans already shining shoes outside Charing Cross station or playing banjos or being commissionaires, taxi-hailers and door-openers for hotels. And I kept thinking, ‘Why me?’
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