Slipstream (52 page)

We went to Prague after Dubc˘ek’s fall, at the instigation of the British Council, to meet other writers, and Kingsley was to give a lecture. We took the train, as
usual, and were met and installed in a hotel in the city centre. We were appointed a guide and a car with a chauffeur. The first intimation of conditions occurred when our guide said hurriedly as
we left the hotel for the car, ‘Please don’t ask me any questions that are political.’ Of course we didn’t.

At home, Kingsley was one of the most disciplined workers I’ve ever known. No matter how bad a hangover he had in the morning, he would come down in his dressing-gown and eat breakfast
– which he often made himself. He went through a stage of enormous fry-ups of almost anything he could find in the fridge or the larder. I remember Mart eyeing one of these one morning and
saying, ‘Dad! Your breakfasts are just a cry for help.’

The household was full of family jokes, imitations of people, fantastic stories of what had happened to them. Monkey’s use of language and his eccentricity were deeply appreciated by
Kingsley. He once came across Monkey in the bath doing a frightful caricaturish impression of a Glaswegian businessman, murmuring to himself, ‘I strrrike a verrrry harrrd barrrgain.’
Kingsley’s faces – ‘Sex life in Ancient Rome’, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Halifax acknowledging the rather muted cheers of the crowd – were always being added to. Even my
mother got marks for her impression of our genteel ironing lady, who managed to mince while she was ironing.

Kingsley loved sitting at the large table in our coach-house kitchen, arguing with his sons – he’d become wilfully right wing, nearly turning me into a socialist
– and with Sargy, who loved arguments of almost any kind. Certain people set him off. Colin Welch, the journalist and critic, was one. One day, without warning, he and Kingsley improvised a
Somerset Maugham radio play about tea planters in Malaysia. Colin’s quiet, lugubrious voice was the isolated tea-planter’s wife and Kingsley supplied all the explosive jungle noises
that punctuated her ruminations on the native girl standing at the end of the garden with a baby in her arms – ‘Who is that girl? I wish I was at home in dear old Cheltenham.’ One
day, when we were staying with Bruce Montgomery, who wrote music and thrillers and eventually died of drink, Kingsley suddenly enacted a whole B-feature wartime movie. It included a destroyer
coming up the Thames directed by its Nazi captain, an air raid with anti-aircraft guns and bombs dropping, a refugee waiter letting off carrier pigeons from his window-sill, and triumphant German
newscasts of the event. It went on for about twenty minutes and was a masterpiece – we cried with laughter. Sadly it was never repeated and there is no recording, as there is of his Roosevelt
one.

Every Sunday, the boys and whatever guests were staying would go to the pub and come back for a late lunch, which I’d made. Kingsley never liked food with the exception, sometimes, of
curry, so I made a good many of those. He disliked the authentic. ‘This isn’t very nice’would often be the pronouncement on any dish that had a homemade sauce as opposed to a
bottled one.

His dislike of food, I learned, was largely because his mother had piled his plate when he was a child and made him eat everything on it. I began to see the dangerous frontiers he was forcing me
to cross. Mum had made the food; he didn’t want it. I made food and was imperceptibly turning into someone unnervingly like her. I noticed that as he drank more he ate less, and this worried
me. Giving him presents was difficult as well. Drink, of course, was
always acceptable and, for a time, records, but gradually he listened to less and less music. He told me
that when he was about twelve and going to the City of London School, his parents gave him a satchel as their joint Christmas present, and he cried. ‘It’s
useful
,’ he wept.
I did once hit the jackpot when I gave him the Longer Oxford Dictionary, secondhand, but volumes and volumes. ‘It’s like being given a yacht!’ he cried – delighted for once.
He’d long stopped getting any pleasure out of giving me presents – usually asked Jack Ogden, a jeweller we knew, to find something for me. One was a little ring set with one cut garnet
that I still wear.

Kingsley and I had both known John Betjeman separately and when we were at Lemmons he used to come and stay. He and ‘good old Kingers’, as he called Kingsley, made each other laugh
all the time, and we – Sargy, Monkey, sometimes Mart and I – all got the benefit. ‘I
am
enjoying myself!’ was a habitual cry from John. Although this was true to some
extent, he was someone who acted a role. He enlarged and dramatized the sunny aspect of his nature to conceal his intense anxiety of the other, always present, darker side. He and Kingsley used to
do mock television interviews, with Kingsley asking earnest, daft questions. John invented a fictional neighbour of ours who had a downtrodden wife called Avril, and many notes and postcards were
sent from and to her. I once spent two or three days with John while he filmed a documentary about Norfolk churches – I’d been commissioned to write a piece about it for the
Radio
Times
. It was fascinating to see how quickly he got the unit working with him to feel amused, respectful and protective. The impression he gave was faintly clerical, sometimes raffish. He had a
watchful melancholic eye and a beautiful voice, which might erupt suddenly into eldritch laughter.

When he’d started to be incapacitated by Parkinson’s, I took him once to the Tate Gallery to look at the Turners. A wheelchair was waiting for him on arrival, and the gallery staff
clearly knew and loved him. After we’d had our fill of pictures, he said he’d take me to lunch in the restaurant there. We went down to it in the lift,
but as I
wheeled him into the restaurant he suddenly said, rather loudly, ‘Look at that disgusting old man in that chair! They shouldn’t let them out when they’re like that – really
they shouldn’t!’ The whole room stopped eating and talking, and stared. ‘Put me with my back to the wall, Avril, won’t you?’ It was a kind of pre-emptive strike
against what I suppose he felt people thought of him.

The last time I saw him was when I went to tea with Elizabeth Cavendish, his companion and lover since 1951. He sat in an armchair and looked at me and murmured, ‘No pain, no pain.’
He was entirely, sometimes wildly, generous in spirit and heart as well as in ordinary practical ways. ‘My greatest sin is guilt,’ he remarked during our Norfolk sojourn.

More and more people came for weekends to Lemmons. Pat Kavanagh, our new literary agent at A. D. Peters, was a frequent visitor, and her partner at the time, Jim Durham, an Australian
psychiatrist, came very often. The Welches, the Conquests, Paul Johnson and his wife, Marigold, Huw and Jay Wheldon, the Keeleys, and for one night Elizabeth Bowen. I remember taking her up
breakfast in bed, and with one swift look at the tray, she said, ‘You’ve forgotten the marmalade spoon.’ Much in awe of her, I rushed down and got it. The Fussells and their
children, Tucky and Sam, came – I remember one Christmas when we were twenty-five and overflowed into the cottage. Sam got chickenpox and sped about the upstairs landing like a small white
greater-spotted ghost.

I don’t know when, exactly, the premonition that all this was going to come to an end – was in some way doomed – came to me. The situation was masked in a way
by drugs. Our doctor discovered me crying one Sunday morning when everybody else had gone to the pub and I was peeling innumerable potatoes. He prescribed Tryptosil and Valium in what today would
be regarded as over-generous quantities. I stopped crying and slept heavily at night.

In the spring of 1972, still unable to start a novel, I went to interview Cecil Day-Lewis for a piece that Beatrix Miller had commissioned for
Queen
. I knew he hadn’t been well, but
I was horrified when I met him. He was sitting in an armchair in his study with a rug wrapped over his knees. He looked gaunt, had lost a lot of weight, and his face was grey. In short, he looked
very ill. Jill brought us some coffee, then left us for the interview. This was long – I think two sides of a tape – and chiefly uneasy, because his illness so predominated in my mind
that I could hardly think of anything else. He was a professional so we got through it, asking and answering questions about his work. I had lunch with them. He said he’d felt rotten for some
time, had been in and out of hospital, but they didn’t seem to know what was wrong.

I went home really worried. It was clear to me that if he got any worse the situation for Jill was going to become very difficult, if not impossible. Their house was all stairs, with the bedroom
two flights up from the kitchen and a lavatory on a half-landing. If, therefore, he couldn’t be nursed at home, he’d have to go to a
hospital ward. I worried about
him all the time I was getting supper, and when it was over, I went to my study and looked up the number of his GP in Greenwich – I knew his name because it had been mentioned several times
that day. My mother, who’d recently broken her hip, had been nursed afterwards by Dosia’s eldest daughter, Tessa. She was now well on the mend. I could move Cecil into her room. There
would be a bathroom
en suite
and Tessa to hand if she agreed.

Which she did. I rang up the doctor, explained who I was and asked what he thought about Jill and Cecil coming to stay with us. ‘If you can manage it, it would be the best possible thing
for them both,’ he said. I went to Kingsley and explained what I wanted to do. Kingsley had never been particularly fond of Cecil, but he was always generous about people in need of help, and
he agreed readily. So did my mother. How to get Cecil and Jill there? Luck was on my side. When I rang Jill to thank her for the lunch, and ask how Cecil was, she said she’d been offered a
week’s work at Elstree, very near us, but she was worried about leaving Cecil all day. I asked her if they’d like to come to Lemmons so conveniently near her job. She’d ask him.
He was delighted. The next day, we moved my mother upstairs, and prepared the room. Monkey installed a record player, and we put in flowers and books.

They came on a fine April day and he settled, taking to Tessa at once, as I had known he would. Here is something I wrote about him afterwards:

After a week, I asked him if he would like to stay longer. ‘I should like to stay for months, and I’m very anxious to give Jill a rest,’ he said. It was agreed then that he
should stay as long as he liked. During the second week he asked Jill to get him a cheap notebook, as he said he wanted to write a poem for the household.

I asked him after a day or two how it was going, and he said it was difficult to work on a quarter of a cylinder. When it was finished Jill gave us each a copy. When I showed it to Kingsley, he
wept, but apart from what it seemed to tell him, he said objectively that it was a bloody good poem.

Kingsley had become increasingly fond and admiring of Cecil, and used to drop in to have an evening drink with him. Cecil would implore him not to do or tell one more funny thing as Kingsley
made him laugh so much he thought he’d have a heart attack. We celebrated three birthdays in his room: first Kingsley’s, then Cecil’s and then his son, Daniel’s. I think his
own gave him pleasure. He sat, beautifully dressed as always – he had the looks and presence to carry this off until the end – and we piled his bed with presents. He opened each one
with either gallantly feigned, or perhaps true and simple, excitement.

He saw nearly all of his oldest and closest friends during the last six weeks. He grew visibly weaker and at times had periods of great melancholy, almost despair, but he always tried to conceal
them and his spirit remained undimmed. He never complained and he never lost his courtesy and consideration for those around him. He did not discuss his illness and we all felt that if he wanted us
to talk about it, he would have asked. One day, when I’d finished reading to him, he said, ‘You’ve been remarkably kind to me.’ And not looking up from the book I said,
‘I do love you, you know.’ There was a silence, and when I did look up I saw he was regarding me steadily. ‘I know,’ he said. And at once, all the guilt, the bitterness, the
folly fell away, and we became – as really we should always have been – loving friends.