A World of My Own (9 page)

It was two years earlier when, quite by chance, I found myself sitting beside the Queen during a service in Windsor Chapel. The officiating clergyman preached an absurd sermon and I found myself in danger of laughing. So, I could see, was the Queen, and she held the Order of Service in front of my mouth to hide my smile. Then Prince Philip entered. I was not surprised at all that he was wearing a scoutmaster’s uniform, but I resented having to surrender my chair to him. As I moved away the Queen confided to me, ‘I can’t bear the way he smiles.’

I encountered King Ibn Saud in a small by-street in Westminster. He was wearing his robes and dark glasses and had apparently just left his young mistress at a tobacconist’s, where she lived over the shop. I was impressed by the great courtesy he showed her as he walked backwards to his taxi with his eyes fixed on the windows of the upper room.

I found myself in the company of a young Princess whose father the King was dying in a castle surrounded by watchers. Her life was endangered by his death. Suddenly there was a noise through the wall of his room, like a long whistle and then a sigh. ‘That is the noise of dying,’ I told her.

It was essential that the watchers should not know that the King had died, so immediately gay music began to be played within the castle.

I said, ‘You must escape now, before the watchers know.’ I tried to assemble the batteries for my electric torch, for it was dark outside, but the batteries were old and used up. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘it’s nearly day.’

I looked out of the narrow window and saw the watchers far below. It was essential to escape not only the watchers but the dwellers in the castle, and at least temporarily we succeeded. We found ourselves in a field of grass where there were the ruins of an old monastery. We walked through the ruins, but there were tourists there and I heard one say, ‘Surely that’s the Princess. I recognize her hair.’

I caught the Princess up outside the ruins and I told her we must get away as far as possible before
someone reported us to the watchers. ‘Take off your beret,’ I said to her. ‘They will say you are wearing a beret.’ Presumably we escaped, for I remember no more.

Writing plays only a small part in the World of My Own. Once I came up with an idea for a short story called ‘The Geography of Conscience’, about a woman in Canada—an Irish Catholic who was going to rejoin her husband in Italy. She telephoned to her bishop asking permission to use contraceptive pills and he told her to follow her conscience, so she took one. Then she found herself in Rome in a totally different moral climate and she began to have a bad conscience about the pills. The story was intended to be a comedy and it needed to have a third twist of the geographical conscience. The idea seems a possible one to me still, but I have never found in the Common World the necessary third twist.

An idea for a novel also came to me. The scene was a rather large, ruined old house, and the story would pass from room to room, always avoiding the attic,
until the reader began to wonder what there was in the attic. Only in the last chapter would we see inside. The attic would be littered with scraps of old newspapers, and in putting these together the reader would finally discover what the novel was about.

The opening sentences of the story were all that made their way across into the Common World.

As in the Common World, writing in the World of My Own has an almost nightmare side. On May 3, 1983, I started revising a typescript of my book
Getting to Know the General
. I found it impossibly bad. There were long, rambling sentences that led nowhere.

The next night I was working on my novel
Monsignor Quixote
and I realized that a whole long stretch of it was boring. I decided to amputate this whole section, but that would entail completely altering the end with the monsignor’s death, and what other end could the book have?

In June 1965 I was rehearsing a play which I had adapted from a rather bad translation. My experience as actor-director was very similar to what I had experienced in 1964 in the World which was not My Own, when I was working on
Carving a Statue
. Peter Wood, who had directed that play, was now again directing, and Ralph Richardson was again playing
the principal part with his usual flamboyant, false
bonhomie
and determination to get his own way. He continually wanted to revert to the old literal translation, which I had changed, and he had made his own marks in the text, which he didn’t want me to see. There was one boastful moment when he put on his Edwardian-style hat, which was phosphorescent in the dark. I became more and more bored and irritated with the whole business. I told Wood how badly Richardson’s part as ‘the detective’ was translated. He disagreed and I realized that my adaptation would soon, by agreement between himself and Richardson, be abandoned, so I told him that in two days I would leave for the South of France. There were no protests. I repeated, ‘In two days—and I shall be happily lunching at the Colombe d’Or in St-Paul-de-Vence.’

I had somehow against my will been persuaded to allow my suppressed novels,
The Name of Action
and
Rumour at Nightfall
, to be published. I had insisted on writing introductions to show my reasons for suppressing them and to demonstrate how bad they were. All the same, I was very worried and I imagined
the fun the critics would have with them. I thought of forbidding any paperback edition, but apparently it was too late for that.

On May 5, 1973, I had an awful experience which I am thankful never occurred in the Common World. I had sent a love scene in a new novel to my secretary to make a draft, but her draft was full of gaps—that was only tiresome. What was awful was that, as I read the scene aloud to the woman I loved, I realized how false it was, how sentimental, how permissive in the wrong way. She too knew how bad it was and that made me angry. I threw it away. ‘How can I read it to you,’ I demanded, ‘if you interrupt and criticize? It’s only a draft, after all.’

But I knew that the whole book was hopeless. I said, ‘If only I could die before the book is published. It’s got to be published to earn money for the family.’ The thought of Russian roulette came to me. Had I recently bought a revolver or was that a dream? My mistress tried to comfort me but it only made things worse.

A strange experience remains printed on my brain like a newspaper headline—‘The Suicide of Charlie Chaplin’. It began with a rumour of my friend’s death. I was in a great crowded cinema and I expected that at any moment an announcement would be made. I was even a little afraid of a panic among the audience at the news. However, later, the rumour was denied. A ring came at my flat door and when I opened it Charlie was assisted in. He really looked a dying man. Apparently he had taken poison but presumably not enough, and he made a gesture to indicate how much as he lay down. The poison had come from a tin. I asked his companion to give me the tin—‘It might prove useful for me one day.’ It was an ordeal to watch Charlie slowly dying, as I believed, but the situation suddenly changed—he recovered and was able to leave without assistance.