Basil Street Blues (30 page)

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.

Sonia was a well-built woman of thirty-eight who pretended to be petite and rather girlish, it seemed to me, while at other times affecting ladylike airs. She had been obliged to work in a shop at Maidenhead since the dissolution of her marriage, and had a son, to my irritation also called Michael, who had recently gone to what the C.O. described as ‘a really rather good minor public school’. It was an impossible evening. The C.O. was dreadfully anxious that we should be immediate friends. He was like an intrusive theatre director, full of gusto and hilarity, putting us right, urging us on, speaking our lines for us until neither of us could behave naturally. The more the C.O. enthused, the more silent I grew, the more wrong notes Sonia seemed to strike. We simply could not hit it off and more than once got into a terrible mix-up over which Michael was being singled out for praise.

In my unpublished novel, I gave an unflattering portrait of Sonia which, because of the guilt I felt for being so disobliging, rises to moments of Dickensian excess. I quote from it, not as an accurate description, but as evidence of my hostility.

She is a large woman. Her head is large and so obviously are her arms and legs. Her hips are very large indeed. The texture of her face is mottled and spotted like a Spanish Omelette. But its principal feature is a nose of great prominence bent upwards at a sharp angle like a bottle opener. Above it are a pair of wandering eyes of an indiscriminate pastel, round and wobbly as two lightly-boiled eggs. Her pallid complexion is offset by deep black hair which has sprouted into a fuzzy mass.

Why was I so aggressive? Was it because the C.O., then in his fiftieth year, could apparently attract all sorts of women, and I could not? Or did I resent the feigned admiration he kept pumping out of me? Or was it simply that Sonia and I did not very much like each other? As he drove me back from this disastrous first evening, the C.O. was bubbling with enthusiasm. And I was so laconic that he had to supply the answers to his own questions.

Good-looking woman, isn’t she? Yes, I always believe in choosing attractive women in life. Pretty good cook, too, don’t you think? That soufflé! You must come over again when you’re not too busy with your masterpiece. She obviously took a shine to you. Told me so. Can’t imagine why. She’s had a pretty rough time of it and coped bloody well. I’ll tell you all about it.

That ‘rough time’ was an allusion to Sonia’s marriage and divorce. Rather to the C.O.’s chagrin, Sonia often spoke in dramatic style of her ex-husband: how violent he was, what a bully, how deranged – ‘a thoroughly nasty customer’, my father concluded. All this seemed to be borne out when he turned up one evening at Sonia’s flat and made a scene. The police were called and the C.O. described the rumpus to me in his special low voice. But the police were apparently powerless to do anything ‘unless he’s committed a few murders recently’. Something would have to be done.

For several weeks the C.O. had been confiding to me how the family was ‘driving him crackers’, how he could not spend much more time at Norhurst ‘getting ticked off like some infant in swaddling clothes’. But things were looking up since he met this prodigy in timber and been made sales director of Seamless Floors. Now he had a spot of cash in his hands, he was going to change his life. Not that he would jump the gun. But he had decided to take the plunge. In short, get hitched up again. To Sonia. He didn’t like to think of her alone at night while this madman roamed the streets. Of course it would be impossible to marry in Maidenhead. They must do it somewhere he wouldn’t find them. The C.O. had already alerted estate agents.

They were married on 2 September 1958. It was a strange day. ‘We’ll lead him a merry dance if he tries to follow us,’ the C.O. grimly announced, referring to Sonia’s ex-husband. He dreaded telling the family at Norhurst and left it to the last minute on the grounds of not breaching security. ‘I only hope she’s a bit better than the last lot,’ Adeline said by way of congratulations. We set off early from Maidenhead, driving at a furious pace but by a circuitous route out of Berkshire and up to Hendon in Middlesex where the ceremony was to take place. The C.O. and Sonia were in the front of the car, I and my new stepbrother (the other Michael) sat in the back with orders to look out for pursuing vehicles. On the marriage certificate at Hendon Registry Office, the C.O. described himself as ‘Sales Manager (Timber Buildings)’ and gave as his home his new partner’s address in north west London which enabled him to claim residence in Hendon. Sonia put a line through the box marked ‘rank or profession’, and we two Michaels signed up as witnesses. After a furtive celebratory lunch, we struck southwards, zigzagging into Surrey where the C.O. had rented what looked at first sight like sheltered accommodation next to a cemetery. The day ended with the exhausted couple planning redecorations to their new home.

Over the next few years I used to go down intermittently for Sunday lunch. Sonia, I thought, was soon showing signs of boredom with life in Surrey. In any event the redecorations were never finished. She would attempt to prise exciting news of London from me. But though I did take myself to cheap seats at plays, concerts, films, I had little that was interesting to tell. I felt grateful when she changed her line of questioning from myself to my mother. The C.O. would listen sardonically, giving an occasional chuckle, as I described a few of my mother’s goings and comings. Sonia wanted to know whether I had really drafted my mother’s farewell note to her husband and, if so, what I had written. I reproduced it to the best of my ability. Soon afterwards she wrote a very similar note herself when taking her leave of the C.O. Though I never knew the details of their separation, I got an impression that after half-a-dozen years both of them were happy to be shot of one another. The divorce petition came to court in 1966, and I see that the C.O. did the gentlemanly thing by allowing his wife to be the petitioner and appearing himself as respondent. But the document makes curious reading. For the co-respondent is Sonia’s previous husband, the ‘madman’ from whom we had made such a dramatic flight, and back to whom, after this interval of marriage, she now escaped from the C.O.’s insolvency in Surrey.

‘Is everyone still alive?’

I had forgotten this cry and the collective groan that, mounting in volume as it went from room to room, rose to meet it three mornings a week as our cook opened the front door at Norhurst. It was thanks to my Uncle Kenneth that we still employed a cook. By buying the house he had saved my grandfather £150 a year in rent, besides the heavy repayments on our double mortgage raised to pilot me through school.