Going Up (35 page)

Leslie Bricusse must have been busy elsewhere (he was a juggler who would be ashamed to have only one ball in the air) when I was deputed to go and see Jo Janni in his flat in Burton Court, across from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. Some years later, when we were working together on
Darling
, he asked whether I remembered the first thing I ever said to him.

I said, ‘Probably, good morning, sir.’

‘No,’ Jo said, ‘the first thing you said was “What do you want to make this piece of shit for?”’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that I agreed with you.’

Leslie and I had done our best to put some new old jokes in the script, which was to be directed by the perky John Paddy Carstairs. His knockabout inventiveness had been exercised to good box-office effect on Norman Wisdom movies. J. P. C. had a sideline as the British mutation of Raoul Dufy. Leslie showed the diplomatic taste to add one or two of Paddy’s daubs to his collection. Our cosmetic work on
The Big Money
was received with pleasure by Ian Carmichael and with dismay by the picture’s production manager, who said it was unprofessional: by changing the scene numbers, we had dislocated his budget. Did we not know that if a scene was cut, you had to preserve the numerology by
marking it as deleted? One lives and learns in the movies, often things of very small interest.

Damon and Pythias
was trite, witless and overlong. Experience proves that there is one infallible way of being hired as a rewrite man. You make a damning list of the places where a script does not work, but you emphasise that, if your prescribed course of treatment is followed, a good idea can be brought to fruition. After I had chopped the script with a constructive hatchet and suggested a few unsubtle ways in which it might yet be a hit, I was clutched, like any life-saving straw. Sam and Sam offered me a ten-week guarantee of £200 a week for ten weeks. It was more tempting than a round-table discussion with Karl Miller and kindred cultural monitors, but I declined the commission.

The offered rate rose to £300, then to £400 a week. Even then I could not bring myself to cash in on the skill with which I had made myself delectable to the two Sams. Despite our poverty, I was set on going to Spain and doing only, or almost only, the kind of fiction I had always intended. I threw away my long spoons and made a silent resolve never again to sup with celluloid devils.
Damon and Pythias
was eventually made and released, to no recorded ovation, in 1962. It is not only the mills of God that grind slowly.

Until Miss Pearce broke her word, I had assumed that when what my father called ‘Christians’ gave their word they would keep it. We left Grange Road for the south of France in a heavily loaded car, but without heavy hearts. Paul, never slow to be displeased, was always happy when we were on the road. Before we set out, I sent the complete manuscript of
The Limits of Love
to Bob Gutwillig. He told me that, if I adopted the radical changes he was planning to propose, he might find me a good publisher in the US.

I cannot recall how much money, in traveller’s cheques, we had with us. Penury did not inhibit us from making our rendezvous with Joan and Baron at the classy La Petite Auberge at Noves, not far from Avignon. It had three stars in the Michelin, but dinner cost only £3 or so. Baron was
now keen to give Joan the luxury that Marxist austerity had denied her. While we were having drinks, M. Lalleman, the young
patron
, brought us menus in the garden. Beetle and I had been together for almost ten years, so I was careful to ask whether certain dishes contained garlic, to which I knew her to be allergic. Lalleman chose to tell me that I would never keep my wife if I sought to impose my tastes on her diet. I responded as Aeneas did, when abused by Dido, by stammering and being prepared to say many things. I could wish that I had risen to Guy Ramsey’s ‘Remember which side of the counter you’re on’, whatever the French for that might be, but I merely glared at him. I have never known any other restaurateur, of whatever starry status or bold address, talk to a customer as Lalleman did to me that bright evening.

La Petite Auberge was the first place to announce its luxury by serving a flower and the morning newspaper on its breakfast trays. Perhaps in part to demonstrate to Monsieur L. that we were still together, we returned a few times in later years. The décor became more and more elaborate and the prices with it. The
moment de déclic
came when, as we were shown to our table, the hostess took Beetle’s handbag from her and hung it, officiously, on a little hook affixed to the underside of the table, quite as if smart people would have known that it was there. I was not wholly sorry when Lalleman lost one of his stars, and then another.

Eizabeth David’s
French Country Cooking
in hand, I did most of the cooking during our month at the Villa Tethys at Le Canadel. It was no memorable pleasure to sit on the beach with Joan and Baron, who wore a snap-brimmed trilby. They were still together, but otherwise apart. Their fourteen-year-old daughter Jenny stretched, beautifully, on a flat rock. Eight-year-old Alan scowled and fretted and did not want to play cricket. Beetle looked after Paul, who scuttled around the sand, while I went and shopped for my evening culinary performance. When no one was up at the villa, I sat on the terrace and typed a few more pages of
The S Man
.

Baron had celebrated his new affluence by buying an 8mm camera. It happened to be running when, without having previously adopted an upright stance, Paul got to his feet on the marble floor and walked fifty-three steps. Baron had to go to London in the middle of the month. On his return, he presented me with a white chef’s
toque
, with a light-blue flash on it. The weeks went slowly. We seemed to have less in common with Joan and Baron by the end than when we met them at Noves. We have never again gone on holiday with other people.

I thought it would be quicker and cooler, and romantic, to drive to Spain through the night. The daytime roads would be cumbered with returning holidaymakers. We arranged a foam rubber mattress on the back seat of the Ford Anglia and set off in the early evening to drive first below Montpellier and Narbonne and then along the north side of the Pyrenees, past Pau, before reaching the border at Hendaye. The Guardia Civil at the deserted Irun crossing regarded us with unwelcoming suspicion. It seemed that they could not imagine anyone having an innocent reason for visiting Spain. In Franco’s kingdom, time seemed to have stopped in 1939.

The narrow
carretera
was pitted with pot-holes and loud with snorting, bald-tyred pre-war lorries. The bulbous green hillsides carried tall cut-outs of black bulls with dangling football-sized
cojones
. Pairs of glowering Guardia Civil, in shiny black helmets that looked like portable typewriter cases, patrolled – one on each side of the road – swinging their green woollen capes, antique Lee-Enfield rifles on their shoulders, the Caudillo’s occupying force. Since Paul was wide awake, we drove on through the day, exhausted and ill-humoured. The fragility of what I took for granted was abruptly evident. After a night’s sleep, I felt more exhilarated to be out of England than ashamed to be in a Fascist country. Driving the long road south with its many bumpy detours, I decided that I should never again work in tandem with anyone or think about money, no matter what Dr Jan van Loewen had to say. Spain might be in bondage; I was free.

Anna Freeman-Saunders’s house was in a dusty fishing village called Fuengirola, beyond loud Torremolinos on the way to Gibraltar. Calle Tostón
Diez y seis
had two bedrooms and a living room opening onto a patio blazing with geraniums and draped in purple bougainvillea; beyond the patio wall, the sea. The Calle Tostón was a long, tight row of one-storey houses with a three-storey apartment building at the end, just before the grey beach.

The day after we arrived, I started a new play.
The Roper House
was based on some of the things that Judy Birdwood had told me about her wayward, now dead, husband Rudolph. Nearly everything I have ever written has been based on what I have seen or heard. I have had little shame at using things I have been told. Something seems to impel people to tell writers their secrets, even when they can guess that they will make use of them, perhaps because of that. The novelist’s mind had better be full of the rags and bones of other people’s lives. It can take years for incidents to grow into a story. Some remain memorable, however trivial, but never germinate. I recall sitting in a flat in Girton House, Manor Fields, belonging to a man called Harry Matthews. I have no memory of how I came to be there. I had never spoken to him before and never spoke to him again. I was nineteen and proud of being in love with Beetle. Mr Matthews told me that he was very unhappy. He was sure that his wife was unfaithful to him with some young person who lived in Manor Fields. She liked young men. He was sure she would like me. Did he suspect me of being her lover? Why did he ask me to stay and talk to him about Beetle? Why did I feel that I was his soft prisoner, both wanting and not wanting to be free of him?

I finished
The Roper House
in less than two weeks. Its main character was an amalgam of Oswald Mosley and an architect of the same arrogant genius as Frank Lloyd Wright. I named him Stephen Taylor, after a menacing boy, and a fast runner, whom I had feared, for the usual reason, when I was at prep school in north Devon. Alone in the patio in the Calle Tostón, I did not give a thought to the Royal Court Theatre or to the playwrights
who had eclipsed me in Ken Tynan’s
Observer
play competition. As a writer, I have never imagined myself to be competing against anyone.

The day after
The Roper House
was done, I started a new novel,
The Trouble with England
. I typed ceaselessly until lunchtime, whenever that was. Beetle went to the beach with Paul. Tom Maschler had passed on Anna’s instructions to pay our cook, Salvadora Martin, 300 pesetas a month, never more. A widow with four girls to raise, Salvadora always wore black. Her husband had been a fisherman, killed in an accident at sea. There was no compensation. She arrived, all in black, in the morning either late or later, carrying a black bag containing what she had found at the market for our lunch. She lit the charcoal stove and fanned it into flame with a wickerwork paddle.

On sunny days (‘
oy so’
she would say, for ‘
hoy sol’
), Salvadora sang songs with a lot of
corazón
in the lyrics; on glum days, ‘
que lastima, que pena!
’ was the theme. Between two o’clock and three, she would call,
‘Señorito, la comida!’
Our diet included
lenguados, ritsoles, boquerones, tortillas, tomates
relleños, gambas, paella, almondegas con arroz, berejena y judías
, an edible Spanish lesson that covered the long concrete patio table. The absence of many of her teeth compounded the effect of Salvadora’s Andaluz accent. ‘
Lenguados no hay en mercado
’ (there are no soles in the market) became ‘
Langwa-o no hay en mercow
’. As we ate, Salvadora would say, ‘
Todo!
’, quite as if she really meant us to eat it all.
En verdad
, she cooked enough to be sure that black bag of hers left the house plump with what was left. It eased our consciences at paying her so little. She might be moody with us, but she was unfailingly, if teasingly, affectionate with Paul. ‘Pablo,
niño guapo, niño feo
’, her incantation had something of the contained heat of flamenco.

Fuengirola’s fishermen had to haul their boats up the beach because Franco persisted in denying their request to build a jetty. Early in the Civil War, the villagers burned the church and chased away the priest. No one talked about those days. Salvadora promised us that everyone appreciated
the
tranquilidad
that Franco had imposed. Anything was better than the disasters of war.

Several of the other houses in the Calle Tostón were occupied by
estranjeros
, expatriates, with artistic pretensions. Our neighbour to the right was a painter called Larry Potter, a graduate of Cooper Union and the first American black man we ever met. Slim, smart and glad to be out of the States, Larry admired Juan Gris before all other modern painters, and Herman Hesse more than Ernest Hemingway, who had been in Fuengirola that summer. Papa was writing up the series of
mano-a-mano
bullfights starring the rival
toreros
Luis Miguel Dominguin and Antonio Ordoñez. Larry’s neighbours were German, Hans and Juliana Piron. Professional translators, he was Jewish, she was not. They had come to Fuengirola from primitive, sparsely inhabited Ibiza. It was cheaper to live there than anywhere else in Europe.

Hans was about to go to Frankfurt for the book fair. He hoped to pick up enough work to feed him and Juliana and their children, Claudia and Juani, for the next year. Juliana told Beetle that work was not the only thing he picked up; he also had his ‘flirts’. She seemed philosophical about it; it did not occur to me that perhaps it suited her. Not yet forty, Hans had a heap of arty grey hair, boss eyes that bulged behind thick glasses and a prompt aptitude for laughing at his own jokes. Juliana
was
forty, just, blue-eyed and beautiful enough for age to worry her, a lot. Softening breasts hung loose under a dark-blue cotton dress. Claudia was eleven, blonde and had her mother’s blue eyes; Juani was more like his father. Juliana’s father lived with his money in Buenos Aires. He did not approve of Hans, but he did send expensive presents to Claudia. Hans had survived the Nazi occupation in Holland, where, he soon told us, he had been ‘in the Resistance’. Larry Potter said, ‘What it comes to is, he stole coal.’ Juliana cherished a receding dream of visiting the isles of Greece.

Larry Potter and Juliana were both asthmatic; they understood each other. While Hans was in Frankfurt, they got together. Larry had a lot of charm. He
even charmed a certain Miss Anson, the holidaying chairman of the Conservative association in Hemel Hempstead, into coming to a party he was giving. When he kissed her hullo, the matronly Tory lady said, ‘Imagine if the Blues could see me now!’ I was drinking some
anis seco
when a freckled woman with big brown curly hair, wearing a green knitted dress, came and pulled at my orange turtlenecked sweater. ‘What’s this?’ Her name was Charlotte Gordon and she was a sculptor, she told me.