Writing Home (16 page)

10 July
,
New York
. Why American is a foreign language: we lunch in a café near Gramercy Park, sitting out on a heavy, overcast day. I order a screwdriver and drink it quickly and ask for another.

‘I guess it’s kind of hot,’ the waiter says.

‘Yes,’ says Lynn, ‘and the glasses are kind of small.’

‘Yes,’ says the waiter. ‘That’s true also.’

No Englishman would say ‘That’s true also’ (although it’s a perfectly grammatical sentence), because it’s written not spoken English. Only Ivy Compton-Burnett would write it as dialogue.

21 July
. Mary-Kay rings from Geneva to tell the children their grandfather has died. Sam answers the phone, is told the news,
and then immediately announces to the room in his gruff eight-year-old voice, ‘He’s dead.’

William (six) now comes to the phone. ‘Can I pretend that I don’t know and you tell me all over again?’

19 August
,
Yorkshire
. Wake at 5.30 a.m. and hear a cock crow. A cock, unaware that it has turned into a cliché, unselfconsciously goes on maintaining a rustic tradition, fulfilling its role in the environment. The corn mill is restored, the drystone-waller demonstrates his craft, the thatchers bind their reeds and the cocks crow. Country craft.

And somewhere between sleeping and waking G. knocks at the door. I had the chain on and look at him standing there in the dawn. But I am not surprised, and he comes in and sits in one of the green chairs in the living-room and talks. And he tells me, or I know, that he has murdered all his family. And, gentle and friendly as ever, he has come, I know, to murder me.

8 September
,
Leeds
. ‘Las Vegas,’ says my cousin Arnold. ‘Then in November it’s Mombasa.’ We are waiting outside the crematorium at Cottingley, where his father, Dad’s brother Bill, is to be cremated. He’s telling me about his retirement, the package holidays he and his wife go on. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been to Majorca.’

All crematoriums are built on the loggia principle; long open corridors, cloisters even, the walls lined with slips of stone printed with the names of the burned. ‘Reunited’, ‘Loved’, and in one case ‘He was kind’, which is the sort of thing women who don’t like sex say of a forbearing husband. Among the names I spot Mr and Mrs Holdsworth, who lived opposite us in the Hallidays during the war and from whose nasturtium border we used to collect caterpillars.

Now the vicar arrives in beige frock and rimless glasses and bounds out of his car to shake our hands.

Two women wait in the sunshine. They are from Mount Pisgah, the chapel Uncle Bill used to go to. ‘Well, we still call it Mount Pisgah, only Mount Pisgah’s actually a Sikh chapel now.’ One is very tall, the other tiny, with kali legs. ‘He was a grand feller, your uncle,’ one of them says. ‘And he had beautiful handwriting.’

The hearse and the attendant cars are grey and low-slung, so that it looks more like the funeral of a Mafia boss than of an ex-tram-driver. As we come out of the chapel cousin Geoff, who always takes the piss, shouts at my Uncle Jim, the last surviving brother, and who’s deaf, ‘Head of the clan now, Uncle’.

‘Aye,’ Uncle Jim shouts back. ‘There’s nobbut me now.’

‘Nay, Jim,’ somebody says.

Geoff nudges me. ‘Give us your autograph.’

The funeral tea is held in the functions room of Waites, at the top of Gledhow Street. Cousin Arnold, who’s a retired police photographer, tells me about a visit by the stripper Mary Millington to Blackpool, where he now lives, and how she committed suicide soon afterwards. ‘I can’t understand why she committed suicide. She had a lovely body.’

I call at Uncle Bill’s house, 72 Gledhow Street, partly to refresh my memory as it’s what I imagine the set of
Enjoy
should look like. But it’s not as I remember it, all chrome and leatherette and the knight in armour holding the fire tongs on the hearth; now just a dull, cream-painted room that could be anywhere.

I take the train back. Through county after county the fields are alight. It’s like taking a train through the Thirty Years War.

14 September
, Supper with the Waltons and Russell Harty. William Walton has asked me to write a companion piece for his one-act opera
The Bear
, and I bring the synopsis along. Lady W.
thrusts it unread into her bag and only extracts it when Russell asks to read it. It’s quite funny, but it transpires that Walton didn’t want a funny piece so back it goes into her bag.

Walton is good for gossip, saying how badly Sargent conducted the first performance of
Troilus and Cressida
, how he had not read the score and conducted the second act at sight. Heifetz had been at supper with the Waltons and when the ladies had retired revealed he had been to rehearsal at Walton’s invitation and had seen that Sargent was trying to wing the whole thing. Sargent was about to do his first American tour, and Heifetz warned him that he would personally see it was a disaster unless Sargent made more of an effort to present this new work properly. Whereupon Sargent wept. But it was still an indifferent production and, though well received, took an hour longer than it should have done. I actually saw it given by a Co vent Garden touring company at the Leeds Grand in 1951 and remember being taken through some of the themes in a lecture by Ernest Bradbury. I heard my first operas that week, and a very odd trio they were: Vaughan Williams’s
Pilgrim’s
Progress
, Walton’s
Troilus
and Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
. Walton also says that Sargent had the original score of
Belshazzar’s Feast,
which he kept after the first performance at the Leeds Festival in 1931 and which has never been seen since.

Draft libretto for William Walton
,
14 September 1980

A grand seaside hotel in the twenties.

A young woman in black sits in the window, in sharp contrast to other guests in blazers and shorts on their way to the beach.

The hotel manager come in and tells the woman that unless her bill is paid that day she must leave the hotel. There is an argument.

Meanwhile waiters come in with very expensive luggage,
belonging to a millionaire whose yacht has just anchored in the harbour. The millionaire comes in and takes a seat while his room is got ready.

The young woman summons a waiter and tells him to move her seat further away from the millionaire. The millionaire is intrigued. He summons the same waiter, who is noticeably more polite to him than to the woman, and tells him to move his seat closer to her. The process is repeated. The increasingly disgruntled waiter has to move the chairs again.

The millionaire asks why she is moving. She says it is because she can smell money. She is allergic to the sight and smell of money.

The millionaire cannot smell money. He smells his hand but cannot detect it. He offers the young woman his hand to smell, and she very gingerly does so, and promptly collapses. The millionaire summons the waiter for some champagne. A glass revives her, but the sight of the millionaire tipping the waiter promptly makes her swoon again.

The millionaire asks her how she came to be like this. She says that she married a poor man, and they were very happy, but he worked very hard and gradually became rich. Making money took over his life. He used to come home smelling of money. They lived in a house that smelled of money. He dressed her in clothes, gave her jewels – all smelling of money. She began to suffer from asthma, rashes, fainting fits – all brought on by the sight and smell of money. Even signing a cheque fetched her out in spots.

Eventually her husband died, leaving her very rich. But, valuing her health, she could not touch the money, and besides it nauseated her.

The millionaire is overjoyed. He has spent all his life looking for someone who would love him for himself, regardless of his fortune. He approaches her, but she begins to feel faint.

Suddenly the manager appears with her bill. The millionaire orders the manager to strip, so he can put on his clothes. The manager, obsequious to a fault, does so and the millionaire, now dressed in the manager’s clothes, which do not smell of money, is at last able to kiss the young woman’s hand.

She says she cannot stand the hotel and wants to leave. Despite being in his underpants, the manager still insists that her bill be paid, but at the very mention of it the young woman collapses again.

The millionaire is furious with the manager, saying that he will settle her bill. She begins to revive, and as she does so the millionaire begs her to come away with him on his yacht.

‘Will it,’ she asks fearfully, ‘will it smell of money?’

‘No,’ says the millionaire. ‘It is a very petite yacht, and all it will smell of is the sea and freedom.’

The couple leave hand in hand, and as the yacht sails out of the bay the waiter clears away the champagne, complaining that neither of them has left him a tip.

18 September
,
Kenneth Tynan’s memorial service
. I wasn’t intending to go. I never knew him well, and when we did meet, during
Beyond the Fringe
for instance, I was generally in the shadow of J. I sent him
Forty Years On
in 1967, when he was dramaturge at the National, but he sent it back saying he thought it was for the commercial theatre (this was before the National went commercial). After
Habeas Corpus
he asked me to adapt Willie Donaldson’s autobiography and we had a meeting, but I was never easy with him or one of his fans. So I would have given the occasion a miss, only Kathy T.’s secretary phoned, ostensibly to inquire if I knew the time of the service had changed, which I took to be a three-line whip. So for the third time in three weeks I put on my grey suit, get on my bike, and go down to St Paul’s, Covent Garden.

Hoping I’m not early, I find the church packed and a scrum in the doorway. Peter Hall and Peter Shaffer go in ahead of me and march boldly down the centre aisle, but spotting a seat in the back row I slip in as Michael White moves up and down the aisles like an usher at a wedding. Note Kingsley Amis across the way, Larry Adler sitting in front, and then see Larry Adler also walking down the aisle and realize one of them must be Bert Shevelove. Tom Stoppard stands up at the front and surveys the house, and just before we kick off a little figure in black is escorted down the far aisle – Princess Margaret, seemingly attended by Christopher Logue.

The priest is young and on the plump side and, were he playing the part, way over the top. He apologizes, as parsons tend to do these days, that we are in a church at all and says that though there will have to be a prayer at the end of the proceedings, it will not so much be a prayer as ‘an opportunity for our private commemoration’.

Albert Finney reads a preface in his rich, plump actor’s voice, then George Axelrod, who’s inaudible. Alan Brien talks, but, as is the way of these occasions, more about himself than about the deceased. Then Penelope Gilliatt comes to the chancel steps, smiling, smiling and smiling. ‘Your Royal Highness,’ she begins – and that is the last we hear. It is as if a mouse is at the microphone. Still, she is plainly speaking, and the audience lean forward to catch the faint squeakings. People cough. A note is passed down the aisle, written as it turns out by Irving Wardle: ‘Tell her to speak up.’ It gets as far as Shevelove, who turns round and says in tones much louder than hers, ‘I certainly will not!’ and so Penelope whispers on before Tom Stoppard concludes.

Then out into the rain, with a vast crush in the doorway. Huw Wheldon grips my arm: ‘An impressive service, I think.
A fitting tribute. Unfortunate about that woman. One couldn’t hear.’ Codron is ahead of me in a white suit, and I note the newly gilded panel to Richard Beckinsale. On the steps Peter Nichols had already lit up, and there are people asking for (and getting) autographs. As I go for my bike I see Peter Brook surrounded by reporters, and it is his picture that is in all the papers next day, standing under an umbrella with Mrs Tynan.

Back at rehearsal Joan Plowright makes no comment on my being in a suit. Olivier had apparently been asked to speak but had declined, saying that he was unable to come and if he had been he was not sure what he would have said. They do a run-through of the play which is excellent, much better than I could have expected, and I begin to wonder whether it might amount to something.

20 September
. John Fortune was once in a TV show with Irene Handl. It involved colour separation, a technique then in its infancy, and the enthusiastic young director thought he should explain the process to Miss Handl at the outset.

Swathed in a fur tippet and carrying at least two Pekingese, the dumpy old lady listened patiently while he embarked on a lecture about electronics. Eventually she interrupts: ‘Excuse me, dear, but I think you’re confusing me with one of those actresses who gives a fuck.’

I October
, Telephoned by the
Evening News
to see if I have any comment to offer on the occasion of Harold Pinter’s fiftieth birthday. I don’t; it’s only later I realize I could have suggested two minutes’ silence.

10 October
.
Enjoy
now in its second week at Richmond. See it tonight, after four days’ absence, and find it has turned into
A
Girl in My Soup
, with the actors hopping from laugh to laugh with no thought for what’s in between. Several people, including Tom Sutcliffe in the
Guardian
, describe the play as ‘courageous’. Since the central character is in drag throughout, this presupposes that I spend my evenings idly running my fingers along a rack of strapless evening-gowns and adjusting my slingbacks. Now it can be told.

Next week a bad week for the play to open, as there are new plays opening practically every night, including one at the National by Howard Brenton,
The Romans in Britain
.

19 October
. About the only person feeling more sorry for themselves than I am this Sunday morning must be Lady Barnett. She was convicted of shoplifting last Wednesday and I was convicted the same day, though of what? I don’t quite know, since I haven’t read the papers. But sentence was pronounced again today, this time unanimously; it will be carried out, and
Enjoy
close, in about three weeks ‘time.’ You have cut the umbilical cord,’ says Lindsay A.