Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  Chapter 12

  My mother was always careful to mark the difference between her standards of what was acceptable and my less steadfast opinions. In the year the war ended, in the year of the great Labour landslide, Brideshead Revisited was published and I read it with admiration and misty-eyed nostalgia for an Oxford which, like the Drones Club, never existed on land or sea. I was twenty-three, pulling out Labour voters in my father’s ancient Morris Oxford, but so intoxicated by Brideshead that I even suggested to my mother that there might be something romantic about the aristocracy, some magical charm surrounding the monarchy. ‘You don’t mean,’ my mother was laughing as she was to do when I told her I’d been made a part-time judge, ‘those people in Buckingham Palace? Really, do try not to be silly!’ So she put on her veil and, carrying a device which pumped smoke into the hive to make the bees drowsy, went off to take the honey. Despite the veil, the gloves and the smoke, she was frequently stung, a fate about which she never complained at all.

  More than thirty years later I was rung up by Derek Grainger at Granada Television and asked if I’d like to adapt Brideshead. Of course I would. Evelyn Waugh is one of the half-dozen writers to whom I owe most. His early books, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, seem perfect and A Handful of Dust a bitter masterpiece. Brideshead is perhaps too lush, too in awe of baroque architecture and the upper classes, to achieve the comic purity of his greatest work. But the fierceness of the religion gives the book its hard centre. I sat down to the job with great pleasure. Although Waugh was a true blue Tory and I’m a champagne Socialist, although he was a devout Catholic and I’m an atheist for Christ, I thought I could preserve the true spirit of his writing.

  Only two things caused me embarrassment. One is the scene in which the narrator has dinner with the awful Rex Mottram in Paris. Waugh relishes Rex’s failure to understand the correct way of eating caviare, or the proper manner of drinking brandy (not out of a great balloon-shaped glass, for God’s sake!). This type of snobbery seems to me truly vulgar. The other difficult time for me came when Charles Ryder heroically helps to break the General Strike. Deeply shocked, I tried to keep him as far from the General Strike as possible. I enjoyed writing the religious scenes very much; anyone who is prepared to sacrifice their happiness for a belief deserves sympathy and respect, and the end of the book is genuinely moving.

  A great danger in adapting books for film or television is that you lose the voice of the most important character, the author. Take Dickens out of Bleak House and you’re left with little but dramatic scenes and eccentric characters. Remove P.G. Wodehouse from the Jeeves stories and you have only some rather thin farcical situations. Brideshead is narrated by Charles Ryder. Quite early on we decided to keep his narration and the director Charles Sturridge added a great deal more of it from the book. In that way Evelyn Waugh remained where he should have been, in the centre of the story. This and the length of a television series, which can be far more literary than a film, gave, I think, the audience the feeling of having lived through a book. Almost everything in the scripts came from Brideshead and I was careful to keep the dreadful passage in which Charles Ryder says he ‘made free of her [Lady Julia’s] narrow loins’ to show that Waugh could write as badly as any of us if he set his mind to it.

  ‘We were at the head of a valley and below us, half a mile distant, grey and gold amid a screen of boskage, shone the dome and columns of an old house.’ Castle Howard was chosen to act as Brideshead and George Howard, its bulky owner, appeared, frequently wearing a voluminous kaftan and saying, ‘Let’s get down to make-up. That’s where the fun begins!’ The huge production, thirteen hours of viewing, delayed by strikes and a change of director, would be impossible today, when the so-called reforms of commercial television which took place in the Thatcher years have wrecked the system. The success of Brideshead was interesting. The book came out at the end of the war and it was hugely popular. In the grey dawn of the eighties, a materialistic, selfish and soulless decade, when we were governed by the Rex Mottrams of the world, it was again a great success. Everyone believed that, at some distant time, there must have been Arcadia. In an interview for the Paris Review Waugh said of the book that it was ‘very much a child of its time. Had it not been written when it was, at a very bad time when there was nothing to eat, it would have been a different book. The fact that it is rich in evocative description, in glutinous writing, is a direct result of the privations and austerity of the times.’

  He also wrote, in one of his letters, that he didn’t think that more than seven Americans would ever enjoy this book. Since it was made, the series has been revived frequently in America, where devotees gather for Brideshead parties and stay up all night to watch the whole series. No doubt to the acute discomfort of Waugh, in whatever sort of Catholic heaven he now occupies, Lord Sebastian look-alike contests have been organized in San Francisco and fair-haired young men are to be seen carrying their teddy bears down to the Marina.

  At its best, adaptation is carpentry. The torment and the excitement, the agony and the delight, come from catching an idea, as Henry James said, ‘by the tail’ and, god-like, creating characters and sending them on their destined way, allowing them the luxury of a little free will.

  Brideshead came on television near the time of the Laurence Olivier version of A Voyage Round My Father. In both he gave magnificent performances and in both he performed death-bed scenes I had written for him. When he played my father, he had a great deal of difficulty in remembering his lines. We would get to eight takes and end up in despair; but when this apparently stumbling performance was edited, acting of great truthfulness and power emerged. Later I adapted a story by John Fowles called The Ebony Tower in which Laurence played a rascally old painter who lives with two beautiful and sometimes naked girls in an enchanted French forest. By then his grasp of the lines had failed entirely, so my words were written on large sheets of paper and hung from the trees like Orlando’s second-rate love poetry in the Forest of Arden. In one scene the director asked Sir Laurence when he would start speaking. ‘I shall first speak,’ he replied with great dignity, ‘when I approach the dialogue.’

  I have always hated things coming out. Getting ideas, waiting for the arrival of plots, is breathtakingly difficult; writing is, by and large, a daily pleasure, provided you can convince yourself no one else is ever going to read it. Interfering with the preparation of a play or a television series is entertaining and it calls for great political skills to get your own way about the casting. You can enjoy the importance attached by actors to a writer until the rehearsals are over, the umbilical cord is cut and they and the play go off to live a life of their own. However, the process of watching people filming is about as exciting as watching your fingernails grow. Among a film unit on location a writer has no real function, feels like a spare prick at a wedding and is always standing on a cable or, worse still, in the shot; although boring and quite unnecessary, the process is neither painful nor alarming. The bad times come when the work pushes its nose out of doors, the audience is let in, the book is in the shops, the final speech has been delivered and there’s absolutely nothing you can do except wait for the jury to come back with a verdict. At that time – the period of Brideshead, the film of A Voyage Round My Father and the publication of Clinging to the Wreckage, an account of the first part of my life – the sentences were unexpectedly light.

  After these nerve-racking occasions we went off for the first time to a new found land, the place of Leo McKern’s birth, where air hostesses are known as trolley dollies and in Parliament the Prime Minister debates with the Opposition by flapping his lower lip with his finger and producing a derisory, bubbling sound. We went as a couple of Pommies prepared to whinge, who stayed to enjoy themselves (‘What goes on whining after the BA plane’s engines have stopped?’ goes an Australian proverb. ‘The Poms inside complaining about Australia’). We expected to find men with corks round their hats bolting down tinnies and yawning in technicolor ov
er sturdy Sheilas. In fact Australia is distinguished by magnificent wines, excellent restaurants, and writers and artists who don’t only bitch each other, but whose wives rush into print to bitch the wives of other writers for being a little standoffish and unhelpful on the holiday in Bali.

  The inhabitants of this beautiful, wild and underpopulated country are ruthlessly eccentric and determined to be nothing but themselves. In an Italian restaurant called Senso Unico in the Sydney Surrey Hills, we sat having lunch with an unlikely character called Fabian Lo Schiavo. He is the Mother Inferior of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and his friends, a gentle band with such names as Sister Mary Quite Contrary, Sister Matic and Sister Daisy Chain, who work as teachers, tenors or truck drivers, join him in such ceremonies as exorcizing the spirits of warships equipped with nuclear weapons from the harbour. When the Pope came to Sydney they stood on a street corner cheering and he smiled from the Popemobile until he noticed that many nuns in that particular group were wearing beards. Fabian said his father was an Italian Catholic dentist. ‘He thinks the Madonna’s great but hasn’t much time for God. As for me,’ the Mother Inferior told us, ‘I converted to Anglicanism and, after a stint as a barman in King’s Cross, I got a job in the public archives.’ His mother once said that she would have liked him to be a priest. ‘Mother’ – Fabian comforted her with admirable Australian common sense – ‘millions of mothers have sons who’re priests. You’re one of the few mothers in the world whose son’s a nun.’

  So we swam at Bondi, ate fish and Brought Our Own wine to Doyles on the Beach and flew up the Hawkesbury River in a tiny sea-plane which dipped and swerved as an ancient and superannuated pilot twisted round in his seat to talk to us. He got his seat-belt hooked on a door handle which was coloured red and marked Emergency Exit. I sat, white-knuckled in the back, and he said, ‘Want to know something, John? It’s a good thing you decided to set up as a writer and not a fighter-pilot. The trouble with this country,’ he went on, as we flew further along the broad green river and high up above the shade under the gum trees, ‘is that we’ve never had much sadness.’ We went to Brisbane and I talked at a dinner of Labour lawyers. It was a highly dangerous evening when the ‘chuck’ was somehow delayed in the kitchen for two hours, by which time the Labour lawyers were in no fit state to deal with Chicken á la King or to listen to speeches, so the proceedings broke up in magnificent disarray. We travelled up to the deep north where the flowers get brighter and the foliage more lush and the politicians more like folksy southern American Democrats, or at least they were in those distant days of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. At last we got into a boat and went to Bedarra, a small island over the Great Barrier Reef, with a map which might have come out of Treasure Island and names like Lookout Post and Hidden Valley and Hernandia Beach.

  The rain forest, filled with hibiscus and gum trees, swamp mahogany, bottle-brush orchids and, appropriately enough, the impenetrable lawyer vine (calamus australis), grew down to the sand and coral beaches. Sea-hawks soared over the trees, turtles dived deep into the water and jungle turkeys built huge nests in which the rotting vegetation slowly hatched out their buried eggs. There were about a dozen other guests housed in bungalows round the main hotel building and all the men seemed to be called Arthur. We never saw the Barrier Reef; it rained every day and the only sunshine was on the television news. There was a heatwave in London and the pictures were of sunbaked tourists leaping into the Trafalgar Square fountains. The wind came from the south, straight from the Arctic Circle, and the waitress, with bare arms and a cotton dress to preserve the illusion that we were in the tropics, went blue and shivered. I began to think of a new story and worked each day. In the evenings you could empty the drinks cupboard for no extra charge. We went through the Jacob’s Creek claret, the Coonawarra Hermitage and the Hunters Valley red. We played Scrabble and one of the Arthurs usually sang the ‘Marseillaise’.

  Just after the First World War the island of Bedarra was sold for £20. In the thirties a modern castaway bought one end of it for £45 and set up with nothing but a natural spring and such things as might have been washed ashore from a shipwreck. He made a hut with driftwood, he caught fish, lived on a rare selection of tropical fruits and vegetables and built his own loo and shower. But he found his ambition to paint vanish in the demanding business of housekeeping on a desert island. One of the Arthurs, a horse-racing man from Sydney, invited us to his bungalow where he served us platefuls of lobster and Russian caviare and bottles of French champagne. ‘Always bring this stuff with me,’ said this Arthur, who had cruised round Honolulu, gone to Jermyn Street to have his shirts made and visited Moscow for the May Day parade, ‘in fact I never travel without it.’ He had also invited the castaway, now a lean, bearded man in his seventies, dressed in immaculate white. ‘You can’t get hold of a desert island now,’ said Noël the castaway. ‘I’ve had some girls there to share my life, but they were artists and writers and no good with the plumbing.’ ‘I never got married,’ Arthur said, passing round the caviare. ‘But I’ve had one or two photo-finishes.’

  Noël told us of the Aboriginals who used to live on the next island. They performed ritual killings of those guilty of breaking family taboos and then ate a little of the victim’s kidney fat to prove that the execution was legal. Exactly how eating kidney fat proved such a thing, he didn’t explain.

  The castaway didn’t seem to live an entirely hermit-like existence, having visited Paris and once spent three years in Hollywood. ‘When I got back,’ he said, ‘things were terrible. Morning Glory had smothered the kitchen and a huge poinsettia had grown up in the middle of the sitting-room. If the fridge hadn’t still been working, I don’t really think I’d’ve stayed.’

  One afternoon the rain stopped and the cook lent us a hammer and gave us careful instructions about gathering rock oysters. We stood in the sea, under a grey and misty sky, vast as only an Australian sky can be. Penny became extremely deft at knocking oysters off the rocks. I washed them in the waves and disposed of them with a gulp of Castlemaine XXXX from a tinnie. We were far from home, on the other side of the world from the Law Courts and the television studios and all forms of anxiety. We were in a make-believe place which pretended to be a desert island with a pretence hermit. But the sea was real, Penny tapping at the rocks was real and the oysters tasted of all kinds of things like love and childhood holidays on windy beaches, and secrets which have never been published to the world. The happiness was real also. I had found a new land, and wouldn’t find another until years later, when I went to South Africa in search of traces of my mother and father.

  Chapter 13

  I’m settling into the back of a London taxi when the driver calls over his shoulder, ‘You still doing those cases down the Old Bailey, are you?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Was he a potential customer? ‘I haven’t done one of them for about ten years’

  ‘I did wonder. I was on the jury in that case you were doing when the bomb went off’

  I remember it well. A young man had filled his car with petrol and driven off without paying. A policeman who tried to stop him got lodged on the bonnet. The officer was unhurt but the young man was charged with attempted murder. The judge was quite unusually pompous. Just as he finished summing-up I saw a note being passed to him by the usher. He unfolded it slowly and spoke with great deliberation, ‘Members of the jury, I have just received a note which tells me’ – and then the words came tumbling out in a panic – ‘there’s a bomb outside the court!’ Whereat, his Lordship shot out of the door like a greyhound from a trap. The bomb duly went off, breaking a good deal of glass. No one was injured except my client’s unhappy mother, whose leg was cut, and a very stout, eccentric barrister named James Crespi, who was taken to hospital saying, ‘I have a great deal of affection for the Old Bailey, so when the bomb was about to go off I interposed my body between it and the building.’

  Later we stood in the street and the judge consulted his books to see if you could ta
ke a jury’s verdict in Ludgate Circus. The books said no, so we eventually returned to court. The judge repeated his summing-up and the young petrol-stealer was acquitted.

  ‘You were a very kind-hearted jury,’ I tell the taxi driver, ‘you let my client off.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he assures me. ‘You see, you always said good morning to us when you came into court and the prosecuting gentleman, he never said good morning to us.’

  Strangely enough this incident doesn’t cause me to lose faith in the jury system or the virtues of politeness.

  Both my father and I were guilty of infidelity to the law; my mistress was writing, his was the garden. He would break off conferences to get an early train, change his clothes and do a tour of the plants he couldn’t see but could only smell before the light faded and my mother would no longer be able to describe the budding of the camellias or the blowsy attraction of the dahlias. The house and garden acted like a drug on him; the place was a Circe’s island from which he found it harder and harder to escape. In time I also found myself less and less willing to leave it, to cover my head with itchy horsehair and put on a stiff, winged collar, to bow to someone for whom I felt no particular respect and say ‘if your Lordship pleases’, and to fight, over and over again, the same battles to save some client from being treated according to his just deserts. But then, as Hamlet said, ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?’

  Not, of course, that every fight was the same. The reasons for getting into trouble are the subject of infinite variation, from mere bad luck to the existence of evil. The Old Bailey was a mixture of the theatre of comedy, of tragedy, of the absurd and the macabre, and most often a drama in which these styles were alarmingly intermingled; as they were in the case of the murderous butler, a killer who, I was told, hoped to make the Guinness Book of Records on account of the number of persons he had done to death. In my childhood I remember my parents engaged a manservant, a tall fellow with crinkly hair who wore a grubby white mess-jacket which revealed the ends of his braces, called Tredgold. He used to ask me to go out on the common and bowl cricket balls at him, an invitation which filled me with fear. The butler in my Old Bailey case was pale, courteous and dignified. He had read a little law and discovered that in Scotland they had something which appealed to him greatly, a verdict of not proven. So he would drive his victims to Scotland, bury them on some barren heath and, if they were discovered, he hoped to take advantage of this ambiguous Scottish finding. He had been the butler of a very elderly ex-Labour MP who was no longer perfectly in his right mind. Having killed his employer’s wife, the butler offered to drive the old man, who was quite unaware of the tragedy which had occurred, to the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square to see ‘a nice travel film’. His victim saw no film but instead was driven to Scotland and there, beside a Highland stream, he was murdered.