Basil Street Blues (31 page)

Our cook was a morbidly cheerful character who refused to take offence at the family’s barrage of insults. ‘Go on then, knock me down! String me up!’, she would cry in ecstasy. And then, to my grandmother: ‘I know you don’t really mean it, madam.’ She went on joking in the kitchen until she eventually forced a smile from my grandmother. This did not recommend her to Fraser, Basil, Yolande or Old Nan, all of whom were on shouting but not speaking terms with Adeline. If only she would spend less time gossiping with the cook, they sighed, they might get a few meals.

Our gardener still came too, his pale face and wavering smile lighting up as we shouted at him that he was a ‘damn fool’ and a ‘bally idiot’ after seeing how he had planted, in a straight line, all the weeds we had dug up the previous week. We were also visited by a daily woman who came weekly. She was a remarkable diplomat. With her understanding smile, the appropriate exclamation, a supporting shake of her head, she managed the all-but-impossible feat of getting along with everyone. We called her a ‘treasure’ until, after many years of loyal service, we found she had been steadily stealing our cutlery, china and still-unbroken pieces of Lalique (the Narcissus mirror with frosted glass, the lotus cups, the bowl with sirens, the Avalon vase). By the time I got back from the army to live at Norhurst again, almost the only Lalique left were the eagles, fish and sparrows with which Yolande had decorated the dogs’ graves in the garden.

Everything was agonisingly familiar to me. The passing of the hours from All Saints Church; the squabbling birds congregating on the lawn for their meals; the leaping red and grey squirrels, the hovering multicoloured dragonflies, all darting here and there; the garage with its music and cider and lurking treasures; the magical tea chests arriving from India with their silver foil under wooden casing, and when they were excavated, like an Egyptian tomb from under the stairs, the bitter-sweet smell of Rajmai tea.

Each morning the family would plunge down Castle Hill into the mêlée of Maidenhead, then lumber slowly up carrying heavy bags of shopping – only to find when all was unloaded in the kitchen that they had bought the same things again and again. The air trembled with recrimination and dismay.

There were changes. Our parrot, the female Mr Potty, had flown out into the trees one day while her cage was being cleaned and though we stood below calling, making bird noises, whistling, swearing, she merely swore back, then flew away.

We were reduced now to one dog, a labrador called Don, whom my Aunt Yolande dragged gasping over the fields and round the Thicket each long day. If she got back in time, we might play tennis together in the late afternoons, rallies rather than games as each of us was frightened of the other one losing. We began playing at the children’s playground, occasionally bicycled over to some courts at Cookham (where I once caught sight of Stanley Spencer
en plein air
), and then we played at a private court belonging to Yolande’s friend Cathie. This was the Cathie who appeared in family photographs in the South of France during the early nineteen-thirties. But we were nervous of going to the court in her garden too often, not liking to ‘trouble’ her, though the court was never used. Yolande would telephone, and we pedalled across, darting down the garden from tree to tree, and later darting back again along the line of the bushes so as not to be seen. It was not, I think, Yolande’s shame at our poverty that drove her to avoid her friend so assiduously, but dread of Cathie’s sympathy.

My grandmother welcomed me back from National Service as if I had been in hand-to-hand combat, thanking God and the Mother of God for the miracle of my survival. She wanted to hear my news, my special news. ‘That child tells us nothing of what’s going on,’ she would complain to the cook and the gardener. ‘Just like a bally clam. I don’t know where he comes from. He’s a proper mystery.’

‘Oh do leave the boy alone, Di,’ Fraser would interrupt before tumbling out to the garage to find another celebratory bottle of cider.

They all seemed to me significantly older, especially my grandmother. As she meandered from room to room, rattling the door handles, rearranging the cushions, her head full of empty plotting, she looked so small and bent. Yolande, I noticed, could hardly bear to glance at her – the thin grey curls under a dilapidated hairnet, the old powdered and lined face, the bloodshot eyes, her feet in their slippers misshapen with bunions. ‘It’s high time you went aloft,’ she would shout to herself. All her Maidenhead friends were dead, but she lived on. ‘Are you decent?’ she always cried through my bedroom door. ‘Are you visible?’ I would hold my breath, knowing I could be invisible but not indecent enough yet. Then, with a sigh, she would wander away, heavy with her uncommunicable love.

An important new feature at Norhurst was our massive television device. It was unlike any other television in the world. My Uncle Kenneth had bought this portmanteau of a set which we stood, a substantial piece of furniture, in the middle of the hall. From a porthole in this object, when the right buttons and knobs were pushed and twisted, a picture could be projected on to a large screen. This screen had to be unpacked and raised up each evening, then folded down at night and put away under the stairs with the tea chests. It was a magnificent contraption – I have never seen anything like it. Our hall, which was the largest space in the house, was converted into a cinema in time for the six o’clock news each evening. It took an hour to prepare the screen which was responsible for new bumps, bruises and cuts ranged across my grandfather’s head. But television became his passion, and after a few weeks none of us could remember what we had done before it arrived. He would sit himself behind the machine studying the controls, endeavouring to focus the images, while the rest of us chimed eagerly in with our advice. Old Nan, whose eyesight was failing, sat in a garden chair at the foot of the staircase, crouching forward so as to be almost touching the screen, the outline of her imposing form appearing as a shadow on the corner of all pictures. She watched everything, commented on nothing. Yolande never watched and was audibly contemptuous of the rest of us for sitting hunched up in the dark. It was impossible for any of us to go to any room without passing in front of the screen. My grandmother would actually stand in front of it, achieving an almost total eclipse as she complained to us of the dust created by the contrivance, or simply asked what we would like for lunch next day, switching on the light so as to make sure we heard her. She had found a new way of driving Fraser frantic.

I did not stay long at Norhurst after leaving the army. Smout, my colleague in redundancy, had discovered that we were entitled to special allowances at Colindale, and while we waited for this bonus to come through, I remained there. In my bedroom, still reading Proust, I could hear the whistle of the trains passing along the valley beyond All Saints Church on their way to London and wished I were on one of them. We lived at the respectable end of Maidenhead where nothing happened. But at the other end lay the ‘Maidenhead Riviera’ with its nightclubs and hotels, expensively lined along the Thames, in particular the notorious Skindles where couples were said to spend illicit weekends, and the smart Guards’ Club in whose grounds 260 false wedding rings were later unearthed. The Maidenhead Public Library, near the centre of town, was midway between our respectability and that bohemianism. After a day there, as from a launching pad, I would sometimes take off on my bicycle and look across the Thames with its twin bridges, the red-brick Brunel railway viaduct with its two shallow semi-elliptical arches, and the white-stone eighteenth-century bridge, with its seven small water-arches, that carried traffic to London.

Before I made my way over these bridges, I tried to reconnoitre a literary career from Norhurst, offering my services in the role of book editor or reviewer to our local paper,
The Maidenhead Advertiser
. In fact the paper carried no book reviews, but this did not deter me. Surely, I appealed, they needed for this enterprise, the creation of a book section, someone like myself – young, unencumbered by university degrees, with a bit of legal and military experience to hand, and already deep in Proust.

I am still waiting for an answer.

*

This reversal spurred me towards London. Maidenhead, it was clear, was a bit off the intellectual map. There was no virtue in the place. But getting a foothold in London was not easy. At first, I could find only intermittent quarters in the Chelsea consulting room of my mother’s doctor. On his dark leather couch, the only other occupant a dimly suspended medical skeleton, I passed my nights, rising at dawn to avoid the eager invalids who came beating at the door. Then I stayed with Griffy Philipps at a mews house in Mayfair belonging to his mother. I slept in the attic beside a water-tank, wrapped up on cold nights in brown paper – something between a tramp and an undelivered parcel. In the morning I would descend a ladder to the comfort of the drawing-room where I was transformed into a man of letters in his study.

Griffy at this time was working in the City. I must have murmured something one evening about Rajmai Tea, asked him perhaps whether he could find out anything about it. This obviously took time, but he was at last able to pinpoint it on the map at Boorbarrie and Behora, and, possibly under the impression I was passing on a hot tip, though probably from a feeling of friendliness, or even, I like to think, acting under the spell Rajmai cast on the imagination of all who heard its name, he bought some shares. ‘It was better than a seat at the opera,’ he writes to me. ‘The company staggered from one disaster to the next, but like a lifeboat it always recovered and came back for more. In no particular order I remember floods, strikes by boatmen and porters, rock-bottom tea prices and lastly the Chinese invasion.’ At the risk of insider trading, Griffy was receiving unusual dividends.

It was my mother’s doctor, Larry Heyman, who at last found me a more permanent place to live. He was an Irishman with a weakness for the arts who lived with his wife and daughter in Jubilee Place off the King’s Road. He was immensely proud of his daughter who was training to be a ballet dancer. She would go in and out of the drawing-room on pointe, showing off her amazing
entrechats
and
fouettés
, performing complicated capers back and forth while her father looked on benevolently. His wife Irene appeared to me a fabulous creature in the high Spanish style. She had been painted by Matthew Smith in Chelsea Cloisters. This portrait, executed in vivid reds and making her appear to be bleeding luxuriantly to death against some flowers above the fireplace, lit up their otherwise gloomy house. When my mother told me at the hospital in Munich that she missed the King’s Road, I could tell she had her friend Irene Heyman in mind. They spent much of their time in secret laughter, probably about men. Once they asked me whether I would mind their using my new address for something they wanted to insert in a newspaper. A week later I received a stiff note from
The Times
saying they did not accept personal advertisements of this kind. Irene seemed to have little involvement with humdrum domestic life. On one famous occasion, having bought her daughter a cat, she heard it purring and shouted out in alarm: ‘Look out! It’s growling.’

Larry Heyman was considerably older than his wife. His hand trembled as he reached for the whisky glass. He enjoyed pontificating in a stage-Irish voice on matters of dance, literature and painting, and passing on titbits about various artistic patients. But he was a kindly man and, having a surgery at Nell Gwynn House, he persuaded the management to let me have a small flat at the back of the building where coincidentally both my mother and my Uncle Kenneth had put up during intervals in their careers.

In my late ’teens I had begun trying to write in collaboration with my father; then in my early twenties I attempted to base my novel partly on my family; finally, when I reached my mid-twenties, I found a subject that had no connection with my parents. It was at Nell Gwynn House that I wrote my biography of Hugh Kingsmill. I had first made contact with the Kingsmill family through his publishers and was invited to meet them for dinner at the flat of one of his daughters, a strapping ex-chorus girl who, after the appearance of my book, became a nun. In my nervousness I arrived too early. Pacing the street I could not fail to notice that the building was in flames, with flashing fire engines outside. However, I was too polite to volunteer help, suspecting that there may have been some culinary disaster about which it would be tactless for an aspiring biographer to inquire. When things had cooled down, I went in. The evening threw up some photographs of Kingsmill’s death mask, his smouldering tobacco pouch and other impedimenta, though little of direct literary use. But I refused to be daunted.

Kingsmill’s widow Dorothy, once a revue dancer then a dressmaker, nursed literary ambitions which, after Kingsmill mislaid her unpublished novel on the platform of an underground station, found indirect expression in her work as a lay analyst. She was reputed to have freed the novelist Antonia White from a writer’s block by liberating her from her husband, the editor of
Picture Post
Tom Hopkinson, and then marrying him herself. When I met her, she had persuaded Tom to take up the editorship of
Drum
, the picture magazine for young Africans, and they were about to sail for Johannesburg. Dorothy acted very flirtatiously that evening and kept calling me an ‘angry young man’. Our relationship eventually made me one.

Once I had been given permission to write the book, I went to see Hugh Kingsmill’s elder brother, the ski-pioneer and Christian controversialist Sir Arnold Lunn (they were sons of the Methodist travel agent Sir Henry Lunn, Kingsmill writing under his mother’s maiden name in order to distance himself from his father and distinguish himself from his brother). ‘My wife,’ Sir Arnold warned me, ‘doesn’t function too well in the evenings.’ She was, he added, ‘beyond organising sandwiches’. So the two of us went out to dinner, leaving Lady Mabel in bed. She was, I understood, an insomniac. But left to herself for hours on end in the dark, she would sometimes drop off out of sheer boredom. The Lunns were to be away next morning for some eventing in Switzerland, so it was essential that Lady Mabel rest. After dinner we went quietly back to the flat so that Sir Arnold could present me with one of his books essential, he confided, for my biography. Lady Mabel had nodded off. We moved among the half-packed trunks and suitcases like ghosts, Sir Arnold leading with a candle in his hand. He quarried out the book, signed it, and handed it to me with a whisper. I breathed my thanks, then fumbled my way out. On the staircase outside, plunged into total darkness, I felt for the light button and, pressing it, released a fearful peal of bells into the Lunn sleeping quarters. I saw the light flash angrily on under the door and, coward that I was, I fled. Looking through the book when I got back to Nell Gwynn House, I saw it was full of Swiss mountains but without a mention of Kingsmill. My view that he was an unjustly neglected author had been confirmed.