CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Read online

  On the nights when she didn’t come into the pub I hoped that Angela was writing to her father, washing her hair or, at worst, out to dinner with her Uncle Arnold. I had never invited her to anything before and, as Lillian refilled my glass and introduced me to Rodney Ackland, a successful playwright who, for some reason, she had managed to lure to the party, I was quite sure that Angela wouldn’t come. Then an even worse fear overcame me. She would come with Benny, the Aussie airman. He would be carrying a bottle of whisky which they would drink together in a corner, and rather early in the evening he would shout, ‘Thanks a bundle, cobber!’ and take her off to the Strand Palace Hotel. She would reappear a week later in the pub looking frail and more beautiful than ever. Perhaps – my thoughts grew gloomier by the glassful – she would eventually let me take her out to lunch and ask me to lend her fifty pounds for an abortion.

  When any middle-aged or even, let’s face it, old person talks about the promiscuity of the young, I wonder what they were doing forty years back. Today, teenagers seem determinedly monogamous, sticking to their steadies, however unsatisfactory, with unbelievable devotion and fidelity. Their mothers, perhaps their grandmothers, thought little of packing their overnight bags and fighting their way through the black-out to another shared flat, another tolerant hotel, to keep in touch with a floating and transient population of lovers. Neither was love as safe and harmless as it is today. In the years before the Pill, every month brought days of anxiety followed by unexpected relief or incredulous despair.

  ‘You thought we should have a party for a dream of yours, a kind of fantasy?’ Pensotti danced past me with a Free French AT, displaying her so that I should have no doubt about her reality.

  ‘It’s still early,’ I said. ‘Angela may have missed a bus.’

  ‘She may have missed a party. Don’t you miss one as well. Why don’t you go and talk to Lillian. She looks lonely.’

  On the way to Lillian I met Peter Brook, who had been at Oxford with us. It was a time of his life when the aloof OUDS never invited him to a production, but he did make a film of Tristram Shandy which was full of his talent. He had the most fascinating things to say, I’m sure, on the movies he had seen, the books he’d read and on the disastrous state of the English theatre. Had I been listening attentively I could have written them here, but my eyes were fixed on the door. I felt sick in my stomach, having organized a party for a reason which would never start to exist.

  It was then I heard a sentence to which I was to grow accustomed. ‘Terrifically sorry I’m late. I had to have dinner with Uncle Arnold.’

  Chapter Ten

  ‘The art of cross-examination,’ my father told me, ‘is not the art of examining crossly. It’s the art of leading the witness through a line of propositions he agrees to until he’s forced to agree to the one fatal question.’

  When I got to know about it I realized my father was a cross-examiner of brilliance and any ability I achieved in that direction was learnt entirely from him. But in those days I was hardly listening. We were going on one of our long Sunday walks, down a steep field towards the woods and Turville in the valley below us, the village where he is now buried. As we started down the hill he would say, ‘You’ve heard of the gatherers of edelweiss. On this hill we’re gathering momentum.’ It wasn’t one of his better jokes.

  ‘Opinions vary as to whether you should ask your most devastating question first or save it up as a bonne bouche at the end.’

  ‘Do they?’ My mind wasn’t on the art of cross-examination. I was carrying an extraordinary weight of happiness, like some bowl filled with a precious liquid which you hold and walk carefully lest it should spill. The fact of the matter was that I was sharing a room at the World’s End with Angela Bedwell.

  ‘My advice to you is to go in with your guns blazing. See if you can’t knock the stuffing out of a witness in the first five minutes,’ my father said, as I helped him climb a stile into the woods.

  It had happened, amazingly enough, at Oliver Pensotti’s house-warming party. Angela and I had talked and sat on the stairs and kissed occasionally. It was a Saturday night and she said she didn’t have to be at work until Monday morning and had nowhere particular to go until then. People came up and started to talk to her. Peter Brook, if I remember, came to invite her to the movies, and Pensotti moved up to her and whispered, ‘I hope, when you remember this party, you’ll decide the whole thing has been worth while.’

  By keeping a firm grip on her wrist I managed to prevent Angela from straying more than six inches from my side the whole evening. When I asked her if her plans included the possibility of her staying the weekend in one of the spare bedrooms in Flood Street she said, ‘But wouldn’t your friends take a frightfully dim view of a chap?’ It was the way of the fragile Angela to refer to herself in this tantalizingly masculine way. Anyone who had left the Services, I told her, for the reason volunteered by Pensotti, was hardly entitled to take a dim view of anything. Terrified that she might change her mind I steered her into the nearest bedroom, which happened to be the place where the guests had dumped their coats. I can remember nothing about that night but happiness, and the distinguished playwright, Rodney Ackland, standing at the door and saying to the departing guests, ‘Better not go in there. I think someone’s having his greens.’

  ‘I always ask a husband, or a wife, as the case may be,’ my father told me, ‘is there anything you have done in the course of your married life of which you are now thoroughly ashamed? The witness usually finds that a tricky one to answer.’

  ‘Why?’ We were walking through Turville now, towards Fingest and the pub where we should have tea and a slice of seed-cake.

  ‘Well, if the husband, or wife, says “Yes” then he or she has made a damaging admission.’

  ‘But if he says “No”?’

  ‘He shows himself up as a self-satisfied hypocrite and has lost the sympathy of the Court. By the way, what’ve you been doing?’

  ‘I went to Liverpool.’

  ‘Liverpool?’ My father gave the word a remote glamour as if I had said Popocatepetl or Persepolis. ‘What led you to Liverpool?’

  ‘I was looking for Chinese seamen.’

  ‘Chinese seamen? Not for their opium, I do hope. Remember the constipation!’

  ‘We want them to act Japanese soldiers. I’m writing a script about the Menace of Japan.’

  ‘Rum sort of business, the show business. I say, do try and get the hang of the art of cross-examination.’

  The first day I spent with Angela was Sunday, the day after Pensotti’s party. We got up late, had lunch in a pub and went to see The Magnificent Ambersons. Then she said she had to get back to her room in Hampstead. I felt unreasonably cheated, ridiculously disappointed, I already regarded a happiness I had never expected as my right, its continuance forever was the least I was entitled to. After all, she had said she didn’t have to be at work until Monday morning. But of course she had to wash her hair, write to her father, prepare for the overland safari and huge adventure of turning up at the Air Ministry at nine o’clock. As we parted at the bus stop I asked the sort of idiotic question which showed I knew less than nothing about the art of cross-examination.

  ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘how’s Benny, the Australian airman?’

  ‘Oh, he’s away for the weekend, actually.’ She smiled at me tolerantly. ‘I thought you realized that.’

  I spent a sleepless night groaning in Oliver Pensotti’s spare bedroom. Lillian didn’t help by saying, ‘Gone already, your little friend?’ In a black moment before dawn I hoped it was the end of my seeing Angela. The feeling of going around with a high temperature and the hourly expectation of doom was too much for me. I’d go back home and live in the country. I’d take up water-colours, read Thackeray and write the definitive history of Lord Byron’s schooldays. I began to list Angela’s imperfections. Weren’t her chin too large and her shoulders rounded? Her father was a General in Dorking and she was probably a Conservative
. What on earth did I want with a Conservative with a huge chin, and as for Uncle Arnold, a person would have to be a member of the Flat Earth Society to believe in the existence of Uncle Arnold. She also ordered exotic drinks like large whiskies and water when Charlie the prop-man’s sensible rules suggested that she should have been content with a half-pint of mild and bitter, preferably shared. I had decided all these things by six o’clock in the morning and by nine fifteen I had already rung the Air Ministry four times. When I got Angela at about eleven she ruined all my carefully-laid plans by saying, ‘I say, what about a chap coming to supper with you in Chelsea tomorrow night? Is that a good idea?’ Of course I agreed to the suggestion with the enthusiasm of Duncan accepting an invitation to stay the weekend with the Macbeths.

  Angela came to stay with me occasionally at Oliver’s. I never went to her room in Hampstead; I simply didn’t want to see the letters, the possible presents from lovers, the photographs on the mantelpiece. The time came when I could no longer stay at Pensotti’s. He said he needed the spare room. ‘For a friend?’ I asked him. ‘Possibly for an enemy. It’s best to be able to keep a constant watch on those sort of people.’

  We had had a friend at Oxford called Watkins. His father was a butcher and Watkins had worked very hard to get to Oxford. Once he was there he was overcome with an extraordinary lassitude and found himself quite unable to read anything at all. He would tell us about his father’s and mother’s marriage, which was in a frightful way as his father saved all the best cuts of meat for his mistress. About this time Watkins called on us and said that his mother had left his father and taken a house at the World’s End. Mrs Watkins offered me a room and Angela offered to move in with me, except on the nights when she was writing to her father, washing her hair or, of course, having dinner with her Uncle Arnold.

  It was a good room. It had very little furniture except for a big table to write on and a rather jaundiced-looking copy of the Hermes of Praxiteles which I had been carting around with me since Oxford (soon after I was married one of my stepchildren pushed it out of a window in Swiss Cottage and the yellowish god shattered into a thousand pieces). Halfway up the stairs was a bath with a geyser which made a sound, when you lit it, like an early warning for the destruction of Pompeii. As an addition to the Greek statuary, Angela brought some trophies of the chase which she said had belonged to her father. There were heads of shot wildebeeste and Thomson’s gazelle which she hung on the walls for decoration.

  On the good evenings, the wonderful evenings, we would play bar billiards in the King’s Head and I would admire Angela, bent over the table neatly sinking her shots whilst I blundered about and knocked over the mushrooms. Later we went to drink in the Cross Keys and staggered home to jump, as quickly as possible, between the icy sheets. In spite of the breakdown of her marriage, Mrs Watkins still had connections with the meat trade and, as a particular treat, she would cook various items of off-ration offal for our breakfast in bed. So fried liver, sweetbreads or heart would be balanced on our recumbent bodies in the faint light of a chilly dawn.

  Mrs Watkins, who was a cheerful and extremely hospitable woman, had an elderly gentleman friend called ‘Uncle Jim’ who kept a small, but prosperous Durex shop somewhere near King’s Cross Station. When we had a party Uncle Jim would, for no discernible reason, dress up as a Chinaman with a black skull-cap and a pigtail and go round serving tea to the bewilderment of the guests. When Christmas came near, Mrs Watkins bought a tree and Uncle Jim blew up some of his stock to act as balloons and give an impression of festivity in a time of shortage.

  In the bad times, when her shampoo, or her correspondence, or her relatives kept her away, I would sit alone with Hermes and change the girl in Charade into Angela. ‘In my dreams,’ I wrote, ‘that rather long, wistful, childish face hung always in front of me, filling me on that night, as on every night since, with the same feverish excitement composed, in almost equal parts, of melancholy and hope.’ As I sat alone writing this about Angela, the Thomson’s gazelle stared down at me, glass-eyed, their lips curled contemptuously over their bright yellow teeth.

  Nothing stands still and the flood of history, Auden said, if I remember rightly, held one moment, burns the hand. I could, I felt, have inhabited that room at the World’s End for ever, grateful for the nights when Angela rang from the Air Ministry to say she was free. Then she would arrive with her overnight bag and her little black dress, as though for cocktails in Kensington, to play bar billiards and drink at the Cross Keys. One night she said, ‘I told my Uncle Arnold I was going to marry you.’

  In all my thoughts about Angela, occupying as they did about 99.9 per cent of my waking hours, marriage had not, up to then, been included. Our family lives were kept strictly segregated. I spent most weekends at my father’s house in the country and most weekends, she told me, she spent with her father in Dorking. Marriage would mean her meeting my father and my being looked over by the General. I also feared that marriage would mean a lifetime worrying if she were really washing her hair.

  ‘What made you say that?’

  ‘Well, I’ve told my Uncle Arnold lots about you. Actually I lied and said you were in the Pioneer Corps. I don’t think he can quite take scriptwriters. Not that it’s not extremely clever of you to be one.’

  ‘Yes. But is there any particular reason why you should tell him now?’

  ‘It’s just that I happen to be feeling most frightfully pregnant.’

  I looked at her and saw a sight I had never seen before: Angela Bedwell crying into a small crumpled handkerchief. ‘Then we’ll get married,’ I said. ‘Of course we’ll get married.’

  ‘No. You don’t really want to. I mean, I’m not sure I really want to. The best thing for a chap is a hot bath and half a bottle of gin,’ she sniffed. ‘A most stupid girl called Rachel Hacker in the Air Ministry poured the gin into the bath and sat in it. Then she wondered why nothing happened.’

  It was, perhaps, a rare moment of choice, and if I took a decision it was one I was to regret bitterly in the months to come. I said, ‘The gin’s easy. The hot bath may be more difficult.’

  ‘Not if we light the geyser before we go to play bar billiards. We could do that, couldn’t we? I mean, wouldn’t that be marvellously efficient of us?’

  We did light the geyser in the most capable manner and came back to fight our way upstairs through a cloud of steam and a noise like the breaking up of the Titanic. Angela was boiled to a light shrimp colour and then we drank the gin together, solemnly and in almost complete silence. Then she stood up, carefully put a cigarette between the lips of the Thomson’s gazelle and lit it. Soon all the decapitated animals on the wall were smoking heavily. There was a species of elk who had, as I vaguely remember it, a cigarette in each nostril. After this fierce burst of activity Angela fell into a heavy sleep and then, as I lay beside her, she peed in such a prolonged manner that I was almost washed into the King’s Road. I got out of bed, had a long, and by now tepid, bath and sat watching her. Her oval face had a look of extraordinary innocence. I loved her, I thought then, more than I should ever be able to love anyone ever. And I had stupidly lost her.

  One day at Pinewood Studios I saw something other than the usual crowd of chippies, prop-men, directors, electricians and members of the Army and Air Force Film Units. There were not only the Boulting Brothers in khaki and Richard Attenborough and Jack Clayton strangely dressed in Air Force blue, and even Garson Kanin in American officer’s uniform, but a number of visitors who looked even more remarkable. The canteen was full of nuns. As I queued up behind one particularly devout-looking Sister for my plate of beans and bacon, she turned round and whispered, through a delicate cupid’s bow of a mouth, ‘It’s being a virgin that makes you so bloody hungry!’

  The war, of course, had ended and Pinewood, after its flirtation with the facts, was returning to the honest pursuit of fiction. The nuns were extras in the film of a Rumer Godden novel called The Black Narcissus. Elsewhere the piping tim
es of peace were being ushered in by movies of sensational happenings during the Regency, usually starring Margaret Lockwood armed with a hunting-crop and James Mason. The safe war years, when most of the decisions had been made for us, were over. It was time to think of the future.

  What on earth was I going to do? Get a job with the Rank Organization? Write a costume drama for Patricia Roc and Stewart Granger? Marry Angela? But then Angela had been remarkably busy during the last weeks. Uncle Arnold was staying in London and seemed to demand her company nightly. She had only a few days over for washing her hair. I spent most evenings alone, working on the last pages of Charade.

  However we had a journey planned. Since I was a schoolboy I had been confined to England, as Soviet citizens are now confined to Russia. I can’t say I had felt any particular claustrophobia, but now the seas were open and it was possible to go abroad. In Dublin, they said, you could order an enormous steak or even, and here was a delicacy I hadn’t seen for years, a banana. Mrs Watkins and Jim were planning a holiday in Ireland and Angela and I were going with them. We would rent a car and drive to the blue mists and white beaches of Connemara, drinking Guinness all the way and eating ourselves silly.

  ‘I hear you’re not coming to Ireland,’ Mrs Watkins said one morning as she plumped my breakfast, calves’ liver on toast I think it was that morning, and strong tea, down on my solitary bed.