Slipstream (50 page)

Kingsley and I got married in the late spring of 1965 after we’d been at Maida Vale for a year and a few months. The boys brought us breakfast in bed on the wedding
morning – clearly a gesture of peace. We were married at Marylebone town hall in the presence of my brother and daughter, Cyril Frankel, Bill Rukeyser and Tom Maschler. Cape gave a party for
us, and then we had a dinner in a private room at Prunier. Afterwards we took a train to Brighton for a two-day honeymoon. The first morning there when we walked out on the pier, the sideshow men
offered us free turns at everything because they’d seen our pictures in the papers. One afternoon, we went to watch the wrestling, and a huge man who got into difficulties shouted to
Kingsley, ‘Help me, Lord Jim.’ Kingsley said he’d never been confused with Conrad before.

Dolly Burns invited us to stay with them in France, at the Hôtel du Cap Eden Roc on Cap d’Antibes. In those days Kingsley was happy to travel with me. He got on very well with Bobby
and was fascinated by Dolly’s flamboyant behaviour. He also enjoyed grand hotel life. The first evening we sat in the bar in extremely comfortable chairs drinking Paradis, a champagne
cocktail laced with raspberry juice. After a short while Bobby said, ‘Well, what shall we talk about?’ and Dolly immediately answered, ‘Sex is the most interesting subject in the
world.’ Bobby sat urbanely smiling while little pecks were made at this subject.

Dolly, I suppose, was in her early seventies. She’d lost her figure, but still had elegant little legs. Her hair was impeccably dressed, and
her makeup operatically
applied. She looked like a luscious, slightly overripe fruit. She was bossy, used to getting her own way in everything. She’d brought her chauffeur and the Rolls which he was only allowed to
drive at fifteen miles an hour while she shouted at him to go slower. But she also had an endearing side: she was a romantic, vulnerable, naïve, and generous, as well as being extremely shrewd
about money matters. She only read the
Financial Times
and
The Economist
: the arts in general meant nothing to her. One afternoon she took us to see Chagall who received her, I think,
out of respect for her father, whom he knew. It was an uneasy afternoon. She went only because he was famous. She had no interest in his work. He was courteous and bored. Kingsley was also bored.
In those days he had no interest in pictures, either. None of us spoke French and I sat looking at the pictures like illustrations of dreams in fairy stories, too shy to attempt any
conversation.

Dolly had a passion for collecting people who were famous or good at something. Her dream was to be the hostess of the most desirable salon in London, in the South of France or in Jamaica where
they had a house and went regularly. But she was also conducting a sort of affair with a Russian who composed music – I can’t now remember his name. He ‘happened’ to be
staying in Nice and she used to visit him in the afternoons. She was also genuinely devoted to Bobby, who seemed impervious to her bossiness, the endless dinner parties and her ruling of the
various roosts.

She invited us to spend three weeks with them in Jamaica – all expenses paid. We went in a banana boat, one of the most enjoyable experiences of travelling for me. The boat, besides its
cargo, carried about 120 passengers, among them Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, and a lady-in-waiting. The captain, a Northern Irishman, whom we liked very much, told us that she loved the
trip and came on his boat every year. The first two days it was rough, but after that it was marvellous. I saw my first flying fish. The captain ran the ship with admirable attention to every
detail. Each
week he made a complete tour of everything. Once a wardrobe door in our cabin was sticking. He noticed it, and it was mended within an hour.

We stopped for a few hours at Trinidad – no time to see anything of the island, but I do remember the largest blue butterfly I’d ever seen, which took to the air with the heavy
difficulty of a bomber. In the far distance it was just possible to see the coast of Venezuela, and the sea in that direction was a gamboge yellow from the silt of the Orinoco. It was a deeply
glamorous sight.

We disembarked at Kingston, and took a train across the island to Montego Bay where Dolly had her house.

Neither of us had been to the Caribbean, and if we hadn’t gone on the train we’d have thought that Jamaica consisted of beaches of bleached sand and palm trees. The centre of the
island had landscape like the north country in Britain: dry-stone walls and fields with sheep. Only the villages were truly Jamaican: houses made of wood and corrugated iron, red dirt roads, busy
women and indolent men.

Life with Dolly there was exigent. Every morning we had all to repair to Doctor’s Cave, the smart place to swim. We lunched at home, after which there was a siesta. Every evening there was
a full-dress dinner party, either in Dolly’s house or in the houses of her guests. The same people rotated in different dresses in different places. Despite being frowned upon, I managed two
small sorties from this regime. One was to visit an old lady who lived on the hillside and attracted hundreds of humming birds by dint of innumerable honey feeders. It was wonderful to see these
bejewelled, belligerent little birds so close. The second escape was with someone I met at a party. I’d been asking about the Lookback Lands, a remote and wooded part of the island where
lived people who hadn’t anything to do with the rest of the island. The man said he had access to a helicopter and would show them to me if I liked. So he did, but all I could see were
mysterious little paths winding through the forest. After a while I remarked that I’d never been in
a helicopter before. ‘Neither have I,’ he replied. He must,
I suppose, have been having me on but I didn’t think so at the time. I sat silent after that, trying to comfort myself with the thought that if he’d got the machine into the air, he
must be able to get it down.

After about ten days, Kingsley grew restive, and in the end had a row with Dolly. I can’t remember what it was about, but he came storming into our room saying that we’d have to
leave, he couldn’t stay after what had gone on between him and Dolly. I pointed out that as he wouldn’t fly, we’d have to wait until the banana boat came back to fetch us.
Impasse. Then Dolly
and
Bobby came into the room, Dolly apologized with tears in her eyes, and a lot of making up went on. We ended our time there staying a night with John Hearne, the
Jamaican novelist.

Kingsley said he’d never stay with them again and I agreed with him. When we got home he said we must send the money for our boat tickets, which we did.

We made two journeys that had a profound effect on me. The first was to Nashville, Tennessee, where Kingsley had been invited to lecture at Vanderbilt University by the professor of English,
Russell Fraser, whom he had met and very much liked when they were both teaching at Princeton. We went over in the
Queen Mary
, and stayed a week with the Keeleys at Princeton. Why on earth
were we going to Nashville, they kept asking, when Kingsley had been asked to go to several other universities in the North? We had discussed this, and decided that as we’d never been to the
South, this was a good opportunity. I was also anxious to see some of the Ambrose Bierce country, as I very much admired his stories of the Civil War.

Russell met us at the railway station. He’d been lucky, he’d found us a house, he said. A member of the faculty was on sabbatical, and her house had been rented for us. The moment I
walked into it, I knew it was going to be awful, but Kingsley didn’t seem to notice. I was tired after the long train journey, and hadn’t the guts to say at once that we didn’t
want to live there. ‘There’ was
a small detached house, chiefly on one floor, with two attics that we could never have used since they were stuffed with the
owner’s belongings. The owner was there to hand over, and so was the black lady who cleaned the house. ‘You’ll have to give her something at Christmas,’ she said as the maid
was standing by. ‘Just something cheap and gaudy – anything will do.’ Deeply ashamed, I glanced at the maid. Her expression was impassive, and she didn’t meet my eye. We
were shown how the appliances worked, and they left.

It was a drab and tasteless little place, and I was soon to find out that almost nothing worked – the fridge, the cooker, the deep freeze, the television hardly waited for the sounds of
their owner’s departing car to break down. The house was about two miles from the campus, and the first thing I had to do was to hire a car. It was one of those chrome-trimmed cars that give
off an electric shock when you open any of the doors. However, apart from driving Kingsley there and back twice a day, I had to shop with it, since the only time I tried going for a walk, the
police stopped me as a suspicious character. Apparently respectable people no long walked anywhere, they drove. I’d been put forward to lecture at Finch University, one of the then two black
universities in the US, and I went to be interviewed.

My generation in England hadn’t had much to do with black people. We’d seen black US soldiers in London during the war and actors in American films, so it was a revelation to see
countless young, beautifully groomed black students. They said they’d have me and I desperately wanted to teach there, but it proved impossible, as I couldn’t combine it with driving
Kingsley at arbitrary times of the day. I regretted this more and more, as the rest of our life there was entirely confined to the whites, whose attitude and behaviour to blacks was uniformly
horrible. So I drove Kingsley in the mornings, went back and worked on my novel –
Something in Disguise
– fetched him home for lunch, drove him back to work, then went to the
supermarket before fetching him again.

The main part of Nashville reminded me of the Edgware Road
in London, and the rest was an endless suburb. We had to drive miles for any real country. We were asked out a lot
in the evenings. There were stringent rules about alcohol left over from the Prohibition and engendered by the Baptist culture of the South. ‘Liquor by the drink’, or being able to buy
a drink in a restaurant, came in just before we left. But there were very tiresome rules about where and how we could buy or drink alcohol. At dinners, caterers were generally used, except by us,
the Frasers and another couple we met and liked;
boeuf Stroganoff
with iced tea is refreshment I still can’t face today. Desperate for some exercise, I joined a gym, and after a few
weeks the German wife of the other self-catering couple said she’d like to join me. When I said I had a friend who would like to join the club, the secretary asked me whether this person was
– well –
coloured
? Because, if so . . . I wanted to say, ‘No, she’s possibly the daughter of an SS general, but she’s not black,’ but of course I
didn’t.

There was heavy snow that winter. Kingsley had very little time after his university work to write; we hated the awful little house more and more, and both of us became homesick and depressed.
When we went to parties where drink was available we both drank too much. The Frasers provided relief, but otherwise we lived on letters from Monkey and Mart.

We’d made a plan with the Keeleys to go to Mexico for two weeks when Kingsley’s semester finished, and we decided to stay longer, if we could find a good place to hole up and finish
our novels. I wished, afterwards, that I’d asked to go to Kingsley’s lectures, as I knew he was a wonderful teacher, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. We spent one weekend
with the Frasers in a log cabin in woods about two hours’ drive from Nashville that I enjoyed, including a visit for lunch to a beautiful house owned by a couple the Frasers knew. It was an
untouched early nineteenth-century building: even the wallpaper, faded and beautiful, was original. There was talk of puff adders lurking in the corn. But otherwise there was no country in our
lives.

What depressed and partly isolated us most was the racism, and the realization that the North and the South were deeply and frighteningly divided. The last straw came when we
gave a small party in our house for Kingsley’s class. He spoke to one of the girls – an eighteen-year-old – about the fact that in the North black people were educated, were
doctors and lawyers, and she replied, ‘Ah, but, you see,
here
we know how to keep them in their place.’

‘
Eighteen
! And she thinks that,’ Kingsley said despairingly. After that evening, we just wanted to get the hell out.

There was no shortage of country in Mexico. We took a train from Nashville to St Louis, and then the splendid train from there to Mexico City – two nights and three days – where we
met up with the Keeleys and spent a couple of days. My chief memories are of a fragment of an Aztec cloak made of feathers in the museum, and an earthquake when both Kingsley and I thought
we’d had a stroke. We played with some lion cubs that were carelessly enclosed in the middle of a public park – they were boisterously friendly, but with truly awful claws.

Then we hired a car and drove about for two weeks. The only ugly part was Acapulco, a Hollywood film-style film resort where a suitcase was stolen off our roof rack within thirty seconds. We
decided to stay on in San Miguel de Allende, a small, beautiful town thousands of feet above sea level, where we lived richly at low cost in a small hotel kept by a Spanish grandee whose English
was peppered with 1920s slang – ‘By Jove! It’s jolly to meet some English chums.’ There were innumerable servants, but as each person’s job consisted of watering the
geraniums, or laying the wood fires in bedrooms, or fetching the bread from the market, or feeding the birds, nobody was being ground down by their work.

The town was full of what Kingsley called ‘very, very naughty little boys who, unshod and with minimal ragged clothes, none the less looked and were the picture of health’. They
scrambled about, laughing, teasing us and each other, and running away in mock fright if noticed. The best bar sold tequila with a large worm in
each bottle and there was a
stone trough beneath the drinkers’ feet into which they could piss without having to leave their barstool. There was a cathedral, whose architect, a Frenchman, had included every decorative
device known to architecture. It was like a monstrous white wedding cake.