While we were in Austria, Griffy arrived for a couple of weeks and he was able to explain to me that we were at a lakeside resort called Velden which had once been frequented by socialites from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was now haunted by émigrés returning from the New World. At the further end of the Wörthersee, in which we were presently bathing, was Klagenfurt, once a prisoner-of-war camp. Griffy told me that he had been shocked to see one lady who had a death camp number tattooed on her arm. Velden, he thought, was one of those places where a large Jewish community lived before the war, many of whom, like the Hessel brothers, now returned each year. Despite this Germanic piece of scholarship, I noticed that whenever Griffy and I went out to lunch beside the lake, the two of us would land up with three portions of food due to Griffy’s habit of confusing zwei with drei.
Egon Hessel was a leathery sort of man, of medium height, with a crumpled figure and creased features – a smiling, paper bag of a face he had. He could easily have disappeared in a crowd. But the crowd around us was very aware of him because of his wealth. He was a generous, level-headed man, a rock in this fermenting sea of social life and a contrasting figure to his brother Walter with his wicked air of scandal and fountain of gossip. My mother, I think, saw Egon as representing an appealing form of security; and he was attracted to her because she brought a transparently innocent sparkle to his life. They seemed to trust each other. That, at any rate, was what Griffy and I decided as we ate our way through our curiously large lunches.
Griffy had taken to calling my mother ‘Madam’. At various stages of our holiday, often quite late at night and from the edge of the dance floor, he would cry out in an anguished voice: ‘Steady, Madam! Steady!’ But my mother had little grasp of steadiness, and perhaps it was we who needed more unsteadiness. It was as if she were younger than we were, as if she were providing us with an education that we lacked. ‘This is where Madam excelled,’ Griffy writes to me.
She was always on the lookout for some fun. She was game to try anything and if it involved a party she would do her best to see that things went with a swing. This ability to enjoy herself was infectious and a wonderful tonic for others. I think she had an uncomplicated and almost childlike approach to life and was not much given to great thoughts about herself or her future. Although she had left Sweden long ago, it never left her. I have learnt never to be surprised at anything which a Swede may suddenly do.
Griffy surprised himself later by marrying a Swedish girl (a friend of one of my cousins) and becoming something of an expert, he believes, in Swedish ways. But at the various stopping-places used by the Hessels as they moved like a travelling circus through Europe, Sweden was represented in its purest form by my grandmother Kaja. She had always dressed up and gone out to my mother’s parties, and continued doing so. Though she was not quite at ease in these exotic caravanserai, she wanted to see Ulla safely settled at last. She often looked, I thought, like redoubling Griffy’s cries for caution, and made something of a confidant of the remarkable head waiter at the hotel restaurant at Velden. He was a man of terrible dignity and momentous tact with the appearance of an archduke and the spirit of Bernard Shaw’s wise waiter in You Never Can Tell. I think he impressed my grandmother as the one obvious aristocrat among this miscellaneous throng of middle Europeans.
The following summer, when Egon and Ulla reached Munich, my mother summoned me urgently. She had gone into hospital for an operation to remove one of her ovaries and her womb. Though the operation, for which Egon was paying, was successful, it had a lowering effect on her. It was as if she were at last heeding Griffy’s appeals to steady herself. She told me that she did not want to go on with this life of perpetual travelling. She wanted to return home. Home was now London rather than Stockholm. Home was Chelsea. She missed the King’s Road. Over the last eighteen months or more, she reminded me, she had been receiving a number of nice letters from David Nares. He had promised to be more friendly to her in future and not call her ‘Mrs Nares’ when summoning the salt and pepper. He also promised to be more generous and let Kaja come to stay. He had written repeatedly that he wanted her back at Chelsea Embankment, and she had decided that she wanted to go back. But how could she tell Egon? He had been so kind to her. Lying in her hospital bed, rather tearful, she told me that she was not up to telling him. Would I do it for her before I left Munich? Why didn’t I explain everything to him that evening over dinner? It would be an immense relief to her.
I was then twenty-two, but an inexperienced twenty-two. This was one of the penalties I was paying for all my mannerisms of maturity and that patina of sophistication I had acquired as a protective carapace. I dreaded the prospect of speaking to Egon, but I did so that evening in a half-empty restaurant, explaining away my mother’s decision as a post-operative condition, but one that would persist. I could see he was surprised and I believe he was hurt. As a rich man, he could never be certain that people really liked him and not his money. Though my mother enjoyed much of the brightness that money switched on, she was never commercially-minded, and Egon liked that. He hardly said anything that evening.
Before the end of the year, and after a short spell in Stockholm, my mother was back in London with David Nares. Then, early in 1959, she left him again and, employing me as her travel agent, returned to Egon Hessel in Mexico. Both return flights were disastrous. At Turners Reach House, everything soon reverted to pomposity and drink. Despite what I had drafted in my letters trying to negotiate some common ground, they remained completely incompatible. I had achieved, in a more devastating form, what I had accidentally done while Mr Owen was absent from the divorce court: prolonged an irretrievably unhappy marriage.
What did I feel about this? The answer is that I did not fully recognise at the time the part I had played in it all. Being then in my twenties and quite familiar with the rapid changes in my parents’ lives, I was not so worried on my mother’s behalf as I later became. I had no moral objections to anything she did. Life, it seemed to me, was a matter of trial and error, and error had legitimacy. I thought of facts and the factual lure of fantasy more than of faults. My own anxieties arose from inaction and experience delayed. Like my grandfather. If I did not really understand my mother’s life, it never occurred to me to condemn it.
But what went wrong the second time round with Egon Hessel? For some time I wondered whether he had deliberately lured my mother back so as to seize the initiative and end the relationship on his own terms. I do not believe he wanted revenge, though his shock and disappointment in Munich could have damaged his feelings. I asked my mother afterwards what happened and she said Egon found out that she had altered the date of her birth in her passport. Looking through so many birth, marriage and death certificates for this book, I am amazed how regularly men raise their status and women lower their age. I have my mother’s passport from that time in front of me and can see that she has changed the year of her birth from 1916 to 1918. It seems a harmless vanity, though maybe some customs official noticed it and caused them embarrassment as they crossed from one country to another. But if Egon saw my mother as luminously innocent, perhaps this deception was significant to him, symbolically changing who she was. In any event, his feeling for her altered ‘when it alteration found’.
After another short spell in Stockholm with Kaja, my mother returned to London and by the end of 1961 was living in Ebury Street, not far from Sloane Square and the King’s Road where she felt at home. In February 1962, David Nares presented a petition for divorce on the grounds of desertion. It was uncontested, and David found himself free to marry for a fourth time on his fiftieth birthday. Two or three years later, when working on my biography of Lytton Strachey, I came across a letter from his father Owen Nares to Strachey and sent him a photocopy of it. ‘I’m in good heart,’ he replied, ‘and now that I’ve risen to dizzy heights at Crawfords am reasonably affluent, though heaven knows what will happen to us all when Wilson’s recent measures begin to bite. Why not come and have a
drink before they do?’ We met at Turners Reach House and discussed, man to man, Harold Wilson’s six months’ freeze on wages and dividends. David had already fired off a couple of explosive letters to newspapers and had another, he told me, in the barrel – mercifully they were not the sort of letters he needed any help in writing. This was the last time I saw him. We did not mention my mother and there was no sign of his wife.
Though still only forty-five at the time of her divorce, my mother never remarried. Apparently she had no need to do so – no financial need. Egon had promised to pay her a quarterly allowance. I cannot remember how much this was – something between four and five thousand pounds a year. But unlike my grandfather’s arrangement with Agnes May Babb, this was an unwritten agreement and no one knew how long it would last.
17
Flight into Surrey
My father (unlike my mother) was very commercially-minded, but unfortunately he had no money. He found the post-war world difficult to understand. Everything appeared topsy-turvy, and he could not manoeuvre round it. After the failure of Editions Begh, he retrenched at Norhurst, still married to Marlou. Then he went west to work as sales manager for a company called Concrete Construction (Wales) Ltd, with its headquarters in Pontlliw. Though it had been my uncle who read architecture at university, it was really my father’s interest and, guided by this enthusiasm, he now attempted to make a career in the building trade. Pending success, he lived modestly at a boarding house in Swansea, working at our history of the world at nights so as to save money he might otherwise have spent in pubs or at the cinema. How we actually began this grand enterprise I cannot now remember – perhaps it was after one of the occasions when my father was teaching me the correct way to drink wine. I visited him two or three times and remember reading Joyce’s Ulysses in the back bedroom there (I was reading Proust in my bedroom at Maidenhead). Then I would go further west to stay with Griffy Philipps at his father’s house near Carmarthen. Sir Grismond Philipps, Lord Lieutenant of Carmarthenshire, looked like a Grenadier Guards’ version of the Italian film actor Vittorio de Sica whom we had all seen in Bread, Love and Dreams. Griffy sometimes referred to his father as ‘the Commanding Officer’ and, on returning to Swansea, I tried out this formula on my own father as a means of circumventing the difficulties of ‘Daddy’ or ‘Basil’. He took it pretty well and was soon signing his letters to me ‘C.O.’, while my mother became ‘Madam’.
Grismond Philipps followed his son’s habit of calling me Hagga. He was an amusing man, with a sophisticated style of humour, who enjoyed teasing me. Initially I found this rather disconcerting until, noticing my discomfort one day, he remarked: ‘I only tease you, Hagga, because you’re so good-natured’ – after which he could tease me as much as he liked. He continued doing so to the end, and even a little beyond by bequeathing me a brace of stuffed parrots (alleged Flaubertian parrots that later turned out to be commonplace pheasants).
My father came once to collect me from Carmarthen and drive me back to Swansea. ‘The first impression on seeing him was that he had very blue eyes and was extremely talkative,’ Griffy writes to me. ‘He was a most unlikely Old Etonian and very hard to categorize. He appeared to possess an optimism and an ability to cope with unpromising circumstances. To me he always seemed a generous person, blessed with enormous energy and probably putting too much trust in the wrong people.’
Before the war the C.O. had been famously able to ‘talk anybody into anything’. Now he was obliged to talk himself into anything. It was his way of coping with what Griffy calls ‘unpromising circumstances’. I remember him telling me one evening, in his dingy room in Swansea, of the genius of his partner in the construction company, the jewel-like virtues of concrete, and the dawning success awaiting them just over the Welsh horizon. The room itself seemed to glow with early rays of this throbbing success as he strode excitedly up and down, filling it with his splendid vision of the future. A couple of years later the concrete construction had collapsed and the brilliant partner was revealed as a dark villain.
This fall of concrete broke up his marriage to Marlou. She was striving to find a secure place as a publisher in Paris while the C.O. had been driving desperately round Wales, covering 100,000 miles in two years, selling concrete constructions to people who didn’t want them. Fighting all the way, he was enormously successful as a salesman – and that had really been the trouble. Concrete Construction (Wales) Ltd simply buckled under the volume of reluctant orders that poured in. The bad debts rose, the company sank, and the geniuses became fools.
At the end of his life the C.O. kept on his mantelpiece a photograph of only one of his wives, fiancées and girlfriends of a lifetime, a picture of Marlou. She is glancing down, her sultry looks partly concealed, her raven hair falling a little forward, her hooded eyelids appearing to guard some secret. That is how I remember her.
The parting between them was wholly amicable. They simply could not find a way of living in the same country. Marlou asked the C.O. for a peculiar acquisition at their divorce: the right to use one-and-a-half of his Christian names as her future surname. She became, at Editions Mondiales and elsewhere, Madame de Courcy, that ‘de’ adding lustre to her career.
Ten years later I wrote to Marlou asking her for information about various penseurs whom Lytton Strachey had met at l’abbaye de Pontigny in 1923. She gave me the facts I needed and offered to introduce me to André Maurois. But Maurois was ill and died before I could meet him. Then, in 1968, after publishing Lytton Strachey, I sent her a copy and she asked me whether she might act as my agent in France. I happily agreed. But when my British publisher raised contractual objections, I was obliged to rescind this agreement. I did not realise how swiftly the wheel of fortune spins. Then in her early sixties, Marlou needed my help, and I could not give it to her. Whatever we did, it did not quite work, and there trailed behind us vague shadows of regret.
Back again at Norhurst for a spell, the C.O. was reduced to selling carbon paper. Even then his optimism did not dim. It seemed obvious to him that, with the advances in typewriter technology and the increasing use of the written word, carbon paper was set to proliferate into the twenty-first century. He was on to a winner. He could even see a way, our verse history having run into the buffers, of writing a bestseller on carbon paper, he jubilantly told me – a prose work that would dramatise an imagined board-room battle between the ‘Stable Standby’ and the ‘Finer Flimsy’ as a metaphor for contemporary culture. In short, he was labouring at a novel during the Maidenhead evenings.
By 1957, though still pursuing fiction, he was back in the building trade. Timber, he explained, not concrete, was the stuff of the future. He’d been a fool not to have spotted this earlier. He was now blessed with a business partner who had a genius for all things wooden – a Pinocchio figure he appeared in my imagination. In any event, the future was bright.
Though I still needed my father’s help during the nineteen-fifties, I noticed that he was beginning to want my approval. While lying angrily becalmed at Maidenhead, he would sometimes take me off in his car to some public house, and later in my bedroom I would make notes of our conversations. These notes then reappeared as chunks of narrative below the printed surface of A Dog’s Life, in that vast unseen mass of my novel that was never published. The character emerging from this narrative is someone who regularly goes through a transformation scene that, despite its familiarity, always takes me off guard. Alone with me, he is a serious and sensitive person, but as soon as we enter the pub he suddenly changes into a figure of burlesque. ‘Now I think I’ll have a sherry today,’ I record him as calling out to the panic-stricken barman.
Have you a good amontillado? On holiday in Spain we used to drink the Tio Pepe. But while I was in France I rather lost the habit, I must confess, and now I prefer the medium dry. The French, of course, never were great sherry drinkers. Still, there’s no place quite like Paris… Oh yes, we’ll sample a couple of your amontillados – looks as if you’ve
talked us into it. Ha! Ha! [To me] Here you are, an amontillado sherry. See what you think. Wash it round the roof of your mouth with your tongue – that’s the correct way, so the experts tell us. Don’t gargle! [To the barman] This is my son and heir. The one that inherits the overdraft. Ha! Ha! Says he wants to be one of those writer-johnnies. I ask you! Still, stranger things have happened I don’t deny – though I tell him we all have to ditch some of our fancy ideas in life. He’s not got much taste in wine yet, I’m afraid. Said he liked a Sauterne the other day. I told him it’s just a woman’s wine, though you can taste the grape in it, I grant you. You’d never think he’d had a French stepmother. Of course we’re divorced now…
This is hardly an exaggeration of our pantomime performances in pubs played out against the struggles of a barman desperate to get free, the rising clamour of the drinkers rhythmically thumping their glasses, and myself, the straight man of the act, staring fixedly into the distance. I daresay that the copying of it down was an act of revenge for my embarrassment.
When I left the army at the beginning of 1958, the C.O. was temporarily ‘cooling his heels’ at Norhurst. He took me several times to different pubs to have a serial conversation. It was impossible, he explained, to talk at Norhurst in case someone heard him. Not that anyone ever listened to anything he said, but they were uncannily quick at picking up the wrong end of the stick. Then he came out with the reason for his nervousness. He wished me to meet someone. In fact he rather thought I’d like her. But we would have to be discreet for reasons he would later make clear. Anyway she wanted to invite us both to her flat ‘not a stone’s throw as the crow flies’ from Maidenhead railway station. She was a damn good cook, so it was not an occasion to be missed. She might not be a literary genius, but she’d read a few things in life, and was a good sort. We fixed a date.
Basil Street Blues Page 23