Country Girl: A Memoir (27 page)

I assured him that home life from that moment on would be more rigorous, and put the blame on some tearaways who would not be invited to my house again.

As it happened, the children were coming to the health farm for lunch the next day. I had arranged that they would have a cold chicken salad, while I persisted with the grapefruit. As they came
up the steps, Carlo lagged behind, and then in the dining room our voices had to be muted, since law-abiding people sat at nearby tables. I asked him in a hoarse whisper what in Christ’s name he was doing, smoking a joint at the end of the paddock. He was contrite, admitted to it, but said it was the evening of the dance and his friend Norrie had asked him if he would like to “turn on” before the dance. It was mostly to get the courage to ask girls up. His eyes, which were large and blue-gray, were now overflowing, and I could see that we had drawn attention to ourselves. Intending to be stern, I said that I would cancel their weekend home, which was soon due, but they well knew that I was sure to relent. It was a cheerless lunch, and they trotted off, very unfulfilled and without daring to ask for extra pocket money.

My mother visited once a year and did not like the tempo of the parties. Why, she inquired, had Joe Bushkin, whom I had met only once, hired a swankier piano for a particular Saturday jamboree? Why had I, on impulse, bought a second sideboard, when bottles and spare glasses could easily be kept under the table in the kitchen? Sensing wanton extravagance and sexual innuendo, she sat in the winged chair, her hair swept up in tortoiseshell combs, sizing up the guests. She would retire, waiting for my step, which would be some hours later, her lamp still on. I would go in, and once, sitting up in bed, reprovingly, she asked, “Are you or are you not a good girl?”

It was Sean Kenny who succeeded in persuading R. D. Laing to come one Saturday night. Laing, half Lucifer, half Christ, pale and aloof, sat apart, refusing food, seemingly bemused by his surroundings. But that, I told myself, was the outer him; there was the him who had written
Bird of Paradise,
with its jangled ecstasies, reminiscent of Baudelaire’s
Flowers of Evil.
In it he described a pivotal moment when, as a medical student in
Glasgow, he was on his way to the laboratory with the remains of a grotesque infant, wrapped in newspaper, and he went into a pub and had this sudden desire to unwrap the paper, to make them see, “to turn the world to stone.”

He came most Saturdays, maintaining the same half-mocking aloofness, and surprisingly, one evening a row erupted between him and Sean. I saw Sean bristle with rage, sleeves rolled up, goading him to a fight, calling him “Black Teeth Laing” and threatening to throw him down a long flight of steps. Laing met the barrage with the calm of a Buddha and afterward took a rug off the chair and went into the garden, where he lay down on the damp grass and slept. Later, when he came back in, he danced, alone and in a trance, like a reincarnated Nijinsky. That was the night he told his wife that he could not go home because I had taken his keys, the keys to his car and the keys to his house, and so it was that night I felt he had thawed somewhat.

The parties, which went on for almost two years, always ended abruptly. In the small hours Sean Kenny would curl up on a kidney-shaped sofa and, mid-sentence, fall asleep. This would lead to a sudden exodus: blondes, having lost patience with him, would holler out the addresses of other gigs in far-flung regions of London, even as far out as Petersham. I would be alone with him, which is what I wanted. Once, however, a predatory girl called Chrissie decided to sit it out; she and I knelt by him, the two pagan Marys at the foot of the Cross, a little spent, but indefatigable, not exchanging a word, looking at that face that, in sleep, was so boyish, the light from an oil lamp that sat on a ledge just behind him giving a soft brilliance to the dome of his head, his high forehead, and the blond hair that was tousled. He was fast asleep, far away from us, a deity newly varnished. From time to time he muttered something, but he did not waken. It may have been the chimes of the grandfather clock in the hall that caused her to remember the
hour, as suddenly she jumped up and asked abruptly where the phone was. It was in the kitchen, and I went on tiptoe to eavesdrop. I heard her say, “How’s Kafka?,” listen, and then slam the phone down. As she gathered her belongings, miffed at having to concede her place beside him, I asked who Kafka was. It was her dog, which her mother was minding, and she was in a foul mood at having been wakened at that ungodly hour.

Always when he wakened, Sean looked around at the chaos, glasses and dishes all over the floor, white lilies wilting, as faithfully he would say, “Have the people caused the flowers to die?” He would have a dram of cognac in his coffee, then pour a few drops onto the palm of his hands, which he rubbed briskly, and then inhale. I think I knew that he would not live long, life in its ordinariness was not for him, he was like a meteor which needed to consume itself. We would sit and listen to Dion on the record player, over and over again, the words that I hearkened to, “Sit down, old friend, there’s something in my heart I must tell you,” believing that he too had something to tell me. Then he would get up to go, making the same joke about coming the following Saturday, but only for the bread and the wine.

“But you will come,” I would say.

“Of course… darlin’.”

I lived for those Saturdays.

There were nights when people came unexpectedly. Richard Burton rang the doorbell one Monday evening, late, and said he was in the neighborhood, which was unlikely, as no one was in that neighborhood by chance in those days. Never on any stage have I been so mesmerized, so entranced, as I was that night, hearing Richard Burton recite Shakespeare, torrents of it. As a boy he had memorized those speeches and spoken them down in the Welsh valleys, and vowed that all his life would be
devoted to Shakespeare, a vow he reneged on and felt sorry about. He loved language and loved writers. He had written
A Christmas Story,
in imitation of Dylan Thomas’s
A Child’s Christmas in Wales,
to keep Dylan happy in Parnassus. A story of mine,
The Love Object,
was a favorite of his, one in which the spiritual and carnal ramifications of a love affair were laid bare. Maybe because of it, he took me to be more libertine than I was. He could not understand why I did not want to go to the “bed chamber,” wanting instead to sit and talk and be mesmerized. Men for me were either lovers or brothers; the lovers were more intimidating and often unobtainable, and though I dearly wanted to, I could never combine the two qualities in the same man. Richard Burton was a brother, and a bard brother at that.

At the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards, 1970s.

Increasingly I met people in the film world. Leslie Caron was intending to buy the rights of my novel
August Is a Wicked Month
for herself and Laurence Harvey to star in. One night she asked me to dinner in Montpelier Square, and I found myself seated next to Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando, with an intelligence so quick and lethal, his whole being taut, like an animal, ready to spring. He decided that he would take me home and, to my dismay, dismissed the chauffeur, despite my reminding him that black taxis did not cruise in Putney late at night. We sat in the kitchen, where he drank milk and I drank wine. Another bard. Stories. Of the vengeances he had wreaked on those who had thwarted him, including a judge who had sent him down for reckless motorcycling, and then, in boyish contrast, he spoke with reverence of Stella Adler, the acting teacher who had been his mentor and muse. He was playful and teasing, saying he wanted to ask me a question that I must answer immediately and with the truth. I could not imagine what it might be. I got more and more embarrassed as he teased out the suspense, merely saying in different, emphatic intonations that I must tell the truth. The question when it came was somewhat harmless: Was I ticklish?

It was a chaste night, as he ruefully confirmed in the letter he would write early the next morning, in the Connaught Hotel, where we went for breakfast. He took a long time puzzling over the words, in which he cast himself as Othello and, for good measure, gave me a spotted handkerchief, though it did not have the emblem of the strawberries. That, and a book by Abbie Hoffman.

We took a stroll in Grosvenor Square before he left to go to the airport, and quite unexpectedly he asked, “Are you a great writer?” The question, so sudden and daunting, caught me off guard. I did not want to boast, and yet I did not want to belittle myself, so that I heard myself say, “I intend to be.” Nearby there
were bucket swings, and he sat me on one and gave me a beautiful, dizzying, headlong push to the longed-for altitudes of language.

Each Monday morning I would go up to the top of the house to write. There was no connection whatsoever between the two worlds, the dizzy world of the parties and the wrenching world of the work. Then, in a dream, I came to see my divided self. It was still my own kitchen, only much larger, with red emergency bells along the wall, as if it had been converted to a hospital. On the long black stove were the pots of boiling water and shallower pans with hot sizzling goose fat. Without thinking, I picked them up and threw the contents over the throngs of startled, disbelieving guests. The era of parties was drawing to a close.