Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  Behind the glass door we listened to an investigative journalist telling us about his inquiries into the ways of the army. ‘When the police searched my place,’ he said, ‘I knew how women feel when they are raped.’ ‘When we get a Labour government,’ a Socialist member of the House of Lords muttered indignantly, ‘we’ll have that chap behind bars in no time at all.’

  Our meetings continued and grew in interest, at least to us. We discussed the programme regularly with Harold and Antonia and the four of us met one night over a pub in the Portobello Road. We had reached agreement on the next subject for discussion when Penny said, in all innocence, that she’d seen Scandal, a film about the Profumo affair. Harold, forever as unexpected as his plays, took the greatest exception to this and felt it was a terrible thing to make a film about Mr Profumo and discreditable to watch one.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Penny was brave enough to say. ‘I thought in art no subject was taboo.’

  ‘Art!’ At this there was a Pinter explosion. ‘Oh, “art”, is it? Of course that makes it perfectly all right, doesn’t it? I’m so glad it’s “art”! It doesn’t matter what sort of harm it does so long as it’s “art”! How wonderful!’

  We were already in the Theatre of Menace but Penny went on to say, ‘Well, I was a child at the time of Profumo. I mean, to me he’s a figure in history. Like Henry VIII.’

  ‘Henry VIII!’ If Harold had been at the end of his tether it now snapped. ‘Did you say Henry VIII? That does it! Henry VIII absolutely puts the tin lid on it. I just can’t sit here and be told that Profumo’s just the same as Henry VIII!’

  At which point, coming, somewhat late, to Penny’s assistance, I was moved to say something controversial, such as, ‘Piss off, Harold!’ The Pinters left us and we sat thinking about life without the 20th of June Group and decided that we could probably endure it; but then, after a very short while, they were back, smiling in the most friendly fashion. I expressed my sincere admiration for Harold’s writing and the awkward moment was soon forgotten, particularly as the Pinters explained that they felt sensitive about Scandal because they feared a film might be made about them one day. We have filled many empty moments since then in trying to cast such a movie.

  In time Harold left the 20th of June Group, but we continued to meet without him. The occasions were less dramatic and no longer grabbed the headlines. Whether we helped the Opposition I don’t know. At least we made it clear that a number of writers hadn’t fallen for the mercenary charms of the new Conservatism. We owed the dissemination of this message largely to the newspapers which came to mock us.

  Mrs Thatcher was toppled by the machinations of her own party, and Labour was deprived of its greatest electoral asset. In her book she has dismissed Neil Kinnock as a leader always to be relied on to play into her hands, and after the election they both departed into the political shadows. He left abruptly and with him went, so it seemed to me, a link with the heady old days of the Labour Party. He was the holder of the torch which had been passed on from Nye Bevan and then by the somewhat tremulous hand of Michael Foot to Neil, his protégé.

  When I first met Neil he had only recently become leader of the opposition. If Mrs Thatcher had a poor opinion of him, he had little time for her. ‘She retreats into stylized arguments,’ he said. ‘I don’t rate her highly at all.’ His wife Glenys had given him a Gothic ornamented board from a chapel into which hymn numbers could be slotted; he said he would use it to keep the score in his Question Time bouts with the Prime Minister. He had to fight against heavy odds: a huge Conservative majority which often shouted him down, a press which gave him more bad notices in a week than most writers get in a lifetime, and an apparently irresistible temptation to pack too many words into every bulging sentence. But fighting is something he understands. He has said he has a certain contempt for those who cower in the gents during pub fights (as I certainly should) and don’t join in. As the election drew nearer, journalists followed Neil around in the hope of tempting him to blows, just as they followed his son Stephen round Cambridge hoping he’d drift into some newsworthy love affair. In neither of these doubtful activities were they successful.

  This red-haired, pugnacious character is best seen at home with Glenys and their two glamorous children. On his own ground Neil’s charm and enthusiasm seem irresistible and the wonder grows at the fact that the great British public found it so easy to resist them. It’s hardly enough to say that the voting millions had never found their way to Acton and so never realized that England might have become a brighter and more enjoyable place if Neil had moved into Downing Street. It’s not enough to know that the Kinnocks are the sort most people would like to have living next door, which could hardly be said for the members of the Cabinet they finally voted into power. Something, in those heady months that led up to April 1992, got lost. Perhaps it was the great British bottle.

  Neil had considerable achievements. In a dramatic and eloquent speech he managed to defeat Derek Hatton and the militant left. Over the years he forced the Labour party, an organization much inclined to shy away nervously from power, to unite as a body capable of winning an election. ‘Of course, I’ve no doubt we’ll win.’ At home in jeans and a sweater, a couple of years before the election, he blew an unexpectedly perfect smoke ring from his metallic-stemmed pipe, a scientifically improved version of Harold Wilson’s showpiece. ‘I should think by about twenty seats.’ Glenys, similarly dressed, had, as I remember, as untroubled a faith. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’ve no doubt Neil’s going to be prime minister. Just as, when I first met him, I had no doubt he was going to be an MP. He was one by the time he was twenty-seven.’

  Glenys’s grandfather was a deacon who sat in a big chair in the local chapel and sang hymns very loudly. Her father was a railway signalman and she said she had her first political experience at the age of one when she was pushed around with her pram full of leaflets during the 1945 election. Neil is the only son of a disabled miner and a nurse, a mother who was always ambitious for her son. Not only was he the first working-class boy to become a Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald, he was the first member of his family to go to university. It was there, at Cardiff, that he met Glenys in the canteen when he was handing out Socialist leaflets. ‘I must confess’ – Neil Kinnock was honest – ‘that what first drew me to her wasn’t her political intelligence, although I found out about that later.’

  There was a by-election at Monmouth, a very English constituency over the Welsh border. The Labour candidate was called Hugh Edwards and he appeared very nervous. Neil made a speech. Hugh Edwards made a speech, even I made a speech, and then, looking fragile and lost but always beautiful, Barbara Castle, who had been stuck on some draughty station platform, came wandering into the hall. Her eyes are blue, shining and almost blind, her hair still reddish, swept back appealingly. ‘Keep your sex,’ she once advised Emily. ‘Use it for power but don’t give it away.’ Such, apparently, was her technique at the Ministry of Transport. When Penny expressed a moment’s doubt about Neil winning the election, Barbara had called her a flibbertigibbet and said ‘careless talk costs lives’. Now she was standing on the platform, holding a few notes she was unable to read, and when she spoke she was vibrating with energy. She scorned the government and stirred the audience in a way which reminded us, after so many years, why we should want to vote Labour. When the meeting was over we went back to the plastic hotel in a sprawling urban development and Neil sang, in a light baritone, a number of songs to the candidate, such as ‘Hugh are My Sunshine’, ‘If Hugh were the Only Boy in the World’ and ‘Comes the Moment Divine When All the Things Hugh are are Mine’. It’s scarcely necessary to add that Labour won the seat with a majority of ten thousand and lost it again at the general election.

  It was Neil and Glenys’s silver wedding party in the Inner Temple Hall, my manor. The singing and playing of Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, the guitar of John Williams, woke the sleeping courtyards. I went to the gents in the spec
ial facilities reserved for Benchers of the Inn and I saw that my gown, hanging there unused, had stolen up a number of pegs as various judges and QCs had dropped off the twig. When I came back to the party, the Welsh relatives were singing and Neil and Glenys were dancing with the bewildering expertise they must have learnt in their student days. Even hardened journalists, who had followed his campaign for papers committed to the Tories, muttered that Neil would make the best prime minister but admitted that they couldn’t possibly write that.

  I don’t know exactly when it was that Neil became sure that he was going to lose the election. There were certain warning signs, the Labour lead in the polls was perilously narrow. There was a somewhat overstated rally in Sheffield in which Neil and Glenys dropped from the sky as though he were a successful American presidential candidate with his lovely wife; this was unfortunate but I doubt whether it would have deterred anyone who seriously intended to vote Labour. So much had changed in the past decade. The unions had become the victims of a policy of overkill and pubs had died. Men and women no longer met in public bars, drank beer and small ports and argued about politics, life, love and the state of the nation. Pubs have become places for deafening music, space invaders, white wine and lasagne verde. Many people stay at home watching videos and have lost the habit of worrying about the state of the nation. The last decade has almost washed politics clean of ideals and pity. The voters went to the polls and decided to stick with the ghosts of the government they had once admired. They forgot what they had said to the pollsters, and forgot that, whatever your political beliefs, our constitution fails to work unless rulers change and there is an Opposition with some experience of government.

  In David Hare’s play The Absence of War, the defeated Labour leader, faced with apparently endless Conservative rule, says, ‘Let’s join the Tory party. And then let’s all fuck it up.’ Neil was still smiling, also full of jokes, only he looked smaller and thinner. It was understood that he would have a job as a European Commissioner, and Glenys was to stand as a Euro MP. He told us that when he had been walking up to the steps of the throne at the opening of the new Parliament he said to Mr Major, ‘Well, here we are, in the same position as we were before.’ Major said, ‘I know just how you feel. It could have gone either way, and I’d be feeling just like you if I’d lost. Anyway, you did a great job for the Labour party.’ ‘As a matter of fact,’ Neil conceded, ‘he was being rather nice.’

  Some months later I met Mr Major, in the unusual surroundings, for me, of a cricket match. Being stumped for words I told him what Neil had said about going up to the steps of the throne. ‘That’s very nice of you to tell me that,’ Mr Major said, ‘and how nice of Neil to pass that on to you. And how nice of you to remember it. That is very nice.’ I felt I had to move away before my principles sank in a sea of niceness. Even this quality didn’t allow Mr Major to give Neil his expected job at that time, and, in his early fifties, a tough and extremely competent politician was left to enjoy the sudden popularity the newspapers would allow him, and to perform on radio and television. For a while he was as unemployed as our political hopes and aspirations.

  Chapter 22

  I am sitting in the boardroom of a television company where we award bursaries to playwrights. We interview writers who come with someone from the theatre which is prepared to sponsor them. The plays are mainly concerned with old people’s homes, or Northern Ireland, and so make for gloomy reading; but surprisingly often we discover a new talent operating on a different subject and then giving away the money becomes a positive joy. What sort of questions can you ask a writer? When did you start? Whom do you admire? Have you thought of writing about your job as a pornographic phone call answerer? Did you find you learnt a lot during the rehearsal period? If we give you this money, will you promise not to write for television? The young man answering the questions has small, gold glasses and designer stubble. His face goes blank when someone mentions Look Back in Anger. Beside him sits a plump, balding, middle-aged man in a black T-shirt and an earring. He smiles anxiously at every answer his protégé gives. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, they both vanish. I look at the committee members on the other side of the table. They are reassuringly visible. The sun, shining unusually brightly across the Euston Road, comes through the wide windows and picks them out in sharp focus. They show no surprise at the sudden nightfall on the candidate. I take off my glasses, breathe on them heavily and clean them with a red-and-white spotted handkerchief No amount of breathing and polishing will alter the fact that half the room is in deep shadow and Peter the playwright is no more than a voice in the night saying, ‘In my new work I thought of having a go at the environment.’

  The retinas departed from the backs of both my father’s eyes and he went to Switzerland in search of the best eye surgeon. In his day the operation was horrible. The eye was removed while you were conscious and operated on. For weeks afterwards you had to lie motionless, your head fixed, in some cases, between sandbags. If anything has improved since his time of blindness it’s surgery. By the next morning I am dressed in a short nightgown and a sort of plastic mob-cap, looking like the unwilling participant in some surrealist ballet, and ready to be pushed up to the theatre in Moorfields to replace the retina which had slid off the back of my left eye. As with my father, the operation is less than successful. I can see a little with my left eye but nothing that I am looking at. This hasn’t, so far, made a great difference to my life but, in spite of my love for my father, I never wanted to follow him in the matter of retinas. He was the man who told me to ‘avoid the temptation to do anything heroic’ and yet he went through his many operations with great stoicism. I don’t know how I would behave if both my eyes went and I was left to feel my way across the room, my arms stretched out, my knees bumping into the furniture, calling helplessly into the darkness for a wife who might not answer.

  None of this has occurred. I was well able to find my way to South Africa, to discover the extended family I had never met.

  ‘Your Uncle Will married into the Jackson family and the Mortimers didn’t approve of the Jacksons because they danced and committed suicide.’

  The Mortimers were West Country Methodists. My grandfather John had been a Bristol brewer. In the early 1890s he came to the conclusion that drink was wicked, signed the Pledge and departed for South Africa with his wife and three children, Will, Gertie and Clifford, my father, who was then four years old. He set up as an estate agent, an occupation which he thought, strangely enough, more innocent than brewing. His youngest daughter, Irene, was born in Pietermaritzburg. The firm, known as Bale & Mortimer, did very well; the family grew and apparently prospered until, long after my grandfather’s death, my cousin Jack Mortimer was forced, much against his will, to go into the family business. He took his revenge by embezzling a great part of the funds and spent seven years in gaol. The firm never recovered and the Victorian building in Church Street, Maritzburg, which housed it has now become a bottle store.

  My father always told me that, after he became a teetotaller, my grandfather drank nothing but a temperance beverage of his own preparing which produced all the outward and visible signs of drunkenness. I don’t know if this was just one of my father’s stories; like Niven’s they improved with age and were honed and polished in the retelling. Before the great emigration my grandfather had visited Natal; he’d gone there because of the asthma he suffered from in the damp air of Clifton, and then his favourite tipple was undoubtedly cocoa. I have his records from the 1870s, written horizontally across a Letts diary and then cross-written vertically, presumably to save the expense of another diary. The resulting confusion can’t be intended to mask any intimate and scandalous confessions; apart from work and chapel, he chronicles the most innocent treks by horse and wagon to the Orange Free State where he slept under the stars and ate horrendous meals washed down with cocoa.

  ‘Sent on the Kaffir to bring back my horse and also to take up some beef, bread, vinegar, rice and cocoa to th
e wagon’, he writes. Soon after they started, a yoke broke and then an axle. In this last accident the wagon overturned, depositing a bag of sugar on the hillside. ‘We made the best of it and had a healthy laugh over our misfortune, which didn’t interfere with our appetite and we set about getting some scoff cooked and prepared some cocoa. We made an attack on the potted salmon and then had a rusk with some sugar and cocoa (the rusks we soaked in a saucepan) ... A delightful view by a little creek where I washed 2 handkerchiefs and myself. Mutton and cocoa for breakfast.’ Later the party crossed a river, some of them on the backs of ‘Kaffirs’ and shot a wildebeest and so had ‘venison’ with cocoa. The evenings were spent playing the concertina and, on Sundays, reading sermons. Late one night, after they had fried some bits of a buck (which a Dutchman had sold them off the back of his horse for half a crown), a Mr J started to talk about native education and suggested that the ‘Kaffirs’ should be treated as equal citizens. This was a conversation which seems to have been about a hundred and twenty years ahead of its time. It was to this strange land of cocoa and ‘Kaffirs’, chapels and concertinas that my grandfather decided to transport his family.

  It was my father and not his elder brother Will who seemed, for some reason, to get the expensive education. Clifford was sent to Michaelhouse, Maritzburg’s imitation of an English public school, and he was there during the Boer War. The school magazine records that various old boys and masters took part in ‘the Historic Struggle’, including a W.S. Bigsby of the Natal Carabineers who, says the magazine, returned from the Siege of Ladysmith ‘a perfect wreck’. My father contributed a number of short stories to this publication; one was called the ‘Autobiography of a Post Office Mauritius Stamp’. Another, ‘The Green Diamond’, began with a group of men discussing the relative merits of Lord Kitchener and Lord Roberts on the verandah of the Sea View Hotel, Durban. They are startled by a deep voice from behind them saying, ‘If you would care to hear it, gentlemen, I should very much like to tell you the tale of the Curse of ’Mpala the witchdoctor, the son of Hesheth of the Bapadi, and of the effect it had on the lives of the men on whom it fell.’ A formative influence on my father was Sir Henry Rider Haggard.