Murderers and Other Friends Read online

  On the aeroplane we had been looked after by cheerful Afrikaner stewards and stewardesses, and wondered how it was that the Dutch, who have produced such a liberal and tolerant society at home, became violent racists south of the equator. Every brand of human being in this strangely isolated part of the world seems characterized by personal generosity and hospitality. No doubt many Boers cared well for their own servants, and their servants’ children, and their servants’ children’s friends. An open house is easy to keep when you don’t have to do the cooking and white South Africans who’d been to London were amazed that you had to give a fortnight’s notice, and wait for a formal invitation, if you wanted to take your child to tea in the house of a schoolfriend. The situation, of course, changed when the servants became insolent and asked for things like votes. The Afrikaners are a South African tribe, like the Zulus and the Xhosas, and tribal warfare and private generosity seem compatible. The English, however long they stayed, never really became a tribe raised in the dark heart of Africa. The Boers called them ‘salt pricks’, men with one foot in Natal and the other still in England, with their genitals trailing in the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean.

  The Cape is undeniably beautiful. From my bedroom window it seemed I could almost reach out and touch the side of Table Mountain, which changes perpetually, appearing and disappearing, standing out with daunting clarity or withdrawing into the clouds. When we drove up to Signal Hill, we were lost in a grey mist, barely able to see the bright blue flowers on the side of the road and the wild guinea fowl that scuttled across it. We drove down to the beaches, brown strips between the mountains and the white-crested breakers, and to the fish market where oysters, mussels, crabs, lobster and huge kingklip were arranged in patterns on ice, like gigantic flowers.

  At dinner we met a couple who ran a small independent publishing house. They had been arrested, and their daughter put in detention, during a long political struggle. From across the street police, with strong binoculars, had looked into their windows, seen the titles and immediately got a banning order. Against enormous odds these publishers managed to keep going and made a living. With the death of apartheid, books about the fight for human rights have gone out of style; now that change is inevitable everyone longs for entertainment. The couple in publishing are suffering badly and, in the theatres, Athol Fugard may have to give way to Noël Coward.

  At Durban airport we were met by my second cousin Peggy, the beautiful Rene’s daughter, and her husband Dennis, who wore long khaki shorts, long woollen socks and said very little, being an ex-army man, while his wife spoke quickly, full of memories and family news. ‘We came to see you once in a house in Swiss Cottage,’ she accused me, ‘and you stood in the corner of your room and asked how many black people we’d had to dinner lately!’ I thought how intolerable I must have been, a smug North London pinko far removed from the land of Umbopa and Gagool. We were taken to lunch in a grand house on the Berea, a pillared mansion, once used as an officers’ mess, surrounded by jacaranda trees on the hills above the centre of the city. Peggy’s son Michael is immensely tall, a huge Ian Botham look-alike, with gentle good manners and a crushing handshake; his wife Cass and two daughters are blonde and pretty. Michael is preparing a journey to Europe in an exhausting attempt to market an all-plastic supermarket trolley. All young South African Englishmen seem giants, their women change often and own a multiplicity of outfits. That evening we drove down the short Durban street given over to shacks and shanties, between two pieces of waste ground on which the black families don’t dare to trespass. Their homes are made of plastic sheeting and cardboard boxes. One dark room, which might blow away on a stormy night, houses a family of ten. There’s no water or electricity, no loos, no place to wash. Tsotsis, sometimes children from this and similar streets, have nothing to do except steal cars and rob people. If they mug you, the whites complain, you can’t just give them the money and hope to be allowed home in peace. It’s probable that they will take the money and shoot you.

  There was an orange sunset behind the palm trees; we were on the hot, Riviera-like Durban seafront. We walked down a long slender pier out over the ocean. We had been drinking Margaritas and were a little unsteady on the planks. The gently undulating waves were covered with small black dots, which I took for sea birds. Closer examination proved them to be the heads of people, business men and hairdressers, Michael told us, relaxing after a heavy day, bobbing about and waiting for a wave to wash them into shore. For some people, life in South Africa is still idyllic in spite of a soaring divorce rate and a plummeting currency.

  Pietermaritzburg has been called the last outpost of the Empire; the Union Jack still dangles in the heat above the entrance to the Victoria Club, which has relics of the days before the Union, when Natal was governed by the British as though it were a large Home County. In the shadowy recesses of the club, with its own small house, a patch of lawn and a large quantity of salad, there lives an elderly tortoise called Doranda. A brass plate secured to his shell announces that he was presented to the club in September 1914 by a captain in the South Staffordshires. That regiment was quartered in the barracks on a Maritzburg hill and, when they paraded during a famous thunderstorm, lightning struck their fixed bayonets causing some deaths and a good deal of madness. Whether this captain was affected I don’t know, but he certainly gave the club a tortoise which has outlived two wars and most of the old outpost’s inhabitants. We were in the Victoria Club with a local schoolmaster who told us that Doranda was the Latin name for tortoise. It’s a weakness of the English public school system that many hours spent learning Latin leaves you with such a tenuous grasp on the subject, but Jeremy and I looked at each other in surprise, remembering the Roman military formation, with shields held over bent backs, which was called a ‘testudo’. Careful research revealed the late Latin form ‘tortuca’, a derivative of ‘tortus’, meaning ‘twisted’. The ancient reptile of the order Chelonia, with its trunk enclosed between a carapace and a plastron, chomped its salad and the schoolmaster, with a slight loss of nerve, suggested that Doranda might mean tortoise in Greek. The privileged and poshly educated citizens of Maritzburg go round with hazy memories of the Empire, and even hazier memories of the classics.

  Another relative, a pale Scot in pallid clothes, took us on a lengthy tour of the Maritzburg cemeteries, introducing us to the gravestones of numerous Mortimers. I discovered that my grandmother Selina, who had been brought from Bristol with her three children to this strange country, died when she was forty-eight; and my asthmatic cocoa-drinking grandfather lived to be sixty-five. They are all there: Will and Mabel, and Aunt Gertie, quiet at last, and the twelve-year-old daughter of Jack the embezzler, who died of hydrocephaly and could hardly move her gigantic head. The spirit of Maritzburg lingers on the tombstone of a certain Frederick George Mapstone (Sergt Natal Carabineers) who died fighting for his country at Ladysmith on the 4th of November 1899 aged 33 years: ‘He has fought the good fight’, the tombstone told us, ‘and his Captain has called him to a high promotion.’

  Bill Bizley, who lectures in English at the University of Natal in Maritzburg, had helped us to find relatives and plan our trip. There have been strikes and demonstrations at universities, particularly in Johannesburg, by students wishing to extend the principle of one man, one vote to one student, one degree. Some find it a racist outrage that any black student should ever fail. This is unfair treatment as the English universities never surrendered completely to apartheid, and they have to struggle with the hideous legacy of a system which provided no proper black education. Now Bill Bizley was lecturing his students on Kim. Kipling, the awkward, often bloody-minded imperialist genius, is being dragged towards the South Africa of President Mandela.

  Maritzburg seemed too hot and its hotels too noisy, so we chose a place in the Natal midlands called, dauntingly, Granny Mouse’s Country House. The drought had burnt the hills to the colour of coconut-matting and the streams and the waterfalls were dry. The feeling tha
t you were driving through a scorched version of the Home Counties was strengthened by the place names: Caversham, Richmond and South Downs.

  Our destination was a cluster of thatched cottages where a short lady, standing in the shadows beside the reception desk, introduced herself proudly as Granny Mouse. To call the hotel twee would be an understatement. Laura Ashley patterns, flounced pelmets, tartan scatter cushions and flower prints abounded. My room had a frenzied American feeling to it. There were any number of small cushions dressed up in the stars and stripes, the flounced curtains were red, white and blue, as was the patchwork quilt. There were a number of framed photographs of President Kennedy, and others of his assassination and his funeral. Seated on the lavatory in my bathroom there was a bewildered teddy bear. In the dining room the black waitresses were huddled together and giggling, perhaps at the decor or more probably at the Mrs Tiggywinkle costumes they had on: big mob-caps, ribbons and aprons. These Beatrix Potter illustrations laughingly brought us liver and bacon. There was trouble near by; Zulus had attacked an area lived in by Indians and there were further massacres in the Natal heartland. It was the only moment in my South African journey that I felt fear. Who would wish to be hacked to death among a lot of Laura Ashley patterns?

  Jeremy and I sat in Granny Mouse’s English country garden, by a tiny swimming-pool filled with black and brackish water, with hadedahs, the glossy ibis, calling out above us as raucous as Aunt Gertie. The rainbird uttered its single tedious note. We talked as we hadn’t found time to talk for years; not, perhaps, since Jeremy was at school and we made a list for our day out in London – lunch, a cinema, finally a theatre. Even further back he was a quiet boy among a crowd of older, bossier girls or, dressed as a Roman soldier, was standing beside my father’s garden stool being asked, as I was asked at that puzzled age, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?’ We went to a game reserve where black rhinos slowly crossed the road and giraffes and wildebeest stood patiently, waiting to be photographed as though they too were tourists who’d come from another country.

  Not too far away a dog was wandering in a township with a human arm in its mouth; an American girl, dropping her black student friends off at their homes near the airport, was butchered; white racists were stealing weapons in enormous quantities. Gagool was still scuttling about, full of malice, looking forward to the great dance when innocent men and women would be picked off at random for instant death: ‘“Good! Good! Good!” piped out that aged iniquity. “Are your senses awake? Can you smell blood? Can you purge the land of the wicked ones?”’ Can the story ever have a happy ending? My numerous relatives, the salt pricks, are doing well to remain nervously optimistic.

  Chapter 23

  For a long time the children have been preparing a play. We heard them whispering. They locked themselves away from the Italian sunshine. We found our clothes vanishing, hats and sunglasses went musing, make-up was depleted. After dinner, we go down to what is labelled on the bunch of keys II Salone. It’s the coolest and most comfortable room in the house. Through the high French windows, now shuttered, you walk down stone steps to the patch of grass, the roses and lavender, to the olive trees and the wood where there is a stream and snakes perhaps an occasional wild boar snuffling. At one end of the room there is a platform, a grand piano, music-stands and piles of sheet music, a place where the true owners of the house play string quartets. We, the grown-ups, the old and the not so completely young, sit in darkness. After we have told each other how excited we are, we fall silent. And then the stage is bathed in light, performing as sunlight. Some people are having lunch, no doubt on the terrace, and then we see that the people are the children and the children are us.

  Rosie is wearing her mother’s shirt, her mother’s earrings, her mother's skirt, and between her fingers rests one of her mother’s fags, and she is gazing dreamily at a glass of wine. When Tom introduces her, in the manner of a gossip columnist, she pushes away her glass and says wearily, ‘Piss off, Tom!’ Claire Boxer, aged twelve, is wearing my hat, my glasses, my shirt, with a cushion acting as my stomach. Other children play other parents. They are us, in a new, fresh, well-lit and entertaining version, while we sit tongue-tied in the shadows, trying to put the best possible face on it.

  ‘All women become their mothers,’ Oscar Wilde said. ‘That’s their tragedy.’ It may not be tragic, but it’s inevitable, just as men turn into their fathers. We may wear different clothes and dance to different music, but we take over the same parts, the same loves, the same loyalties and the same old quarrels and unforgivable wrongs. Your mum and dad don’t necessarily fuck you up, they just step into the darkness and invite you to take their place.

  Humanity doesn’t so much progress as constantly renew itself, carrying the same old baggage down the centuries, and in this luggage the grievances are greatly treasured. It’s impossible to understand the bloodshed in Bosnia without some understanding of the Roman Empire and the Ottoman invasion; just as Ireland is still suffering from Oliver Cromwell. The British Civil War is now long over but the divisions are still clearly marked between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers. It’s not just a split between left and right, for there are many Conservative Puritans and left-wing Cavaliers. It’s not only the opposing claims of guilt and pleasure, the voice of duty or the hymn to Dionysus, the urge to gather roses on earth or lay up treasure in heaven. The division is stronger and more subtle. We live among Civil War battlegrounds, on a hill between two valleys where two families conscripted their servants to fight against each other.

  Sometimes it wasn’t even war between families but brother against brother. In Hambleden church there is the seventeenth-century tombstone of a husband and wife; half their kneeling children are dressed as Cavaliers, the others are in the uniform of Parliament. This may have been an astute political move to make sure the family would be seen right, no matter who won. I suppose anyone wanting an easy life would mix their Cavalier and Roundhead qualities like a sort of cocktail. The trouble with that is one of these heady draughts is bound to taste stronger and drown out the other.

  Just past the rare orchids and the trees, on the other side of a sunken road from us, is a great and seldom visited valley with a house, once disintegrating, in which lived the descendants of Colonel Scrope, a regicide who signed Charles I’s death warrant. The last member of the family to live there had kept Oliver Cromwell’s boots in his downstairs lavatory. The Cavaliers were on the other side of the hill. Mass has been said at Stonor Park, it seems, since the Norman Conquest and the Camoys family withstood persecution and huge fines, hid Father Campion, the Elizabethan martyr, in a priest’s hole and maintained the observance to this day. It was only broken on one Sunday during the present Pope’s visit to Britain, when the priests went off to catch a glimpse of His Holiness. When I was young the inhabitants of Stonor village were loyal to the old religion and the village school was Catholic.

  Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh used to visit Stonor and the 1930s chapel has its romantic echo in Brideshead. They came, I’m sure, out of affection for Sherman Stonor, the late Lord Camoys, who knew a great deal about wild flowers and came to the mistaken belief that he had been a parachutist during the war. After some long, and no doubt happy evening, he fell off a table and broke his leg. When he appeared in the House of Lords on crutches and was asked how he’d come by this injury, he is alleged to have said, ‘When your parachute fails to open at twenty thousand feet, you are rather inclined to break a leg, aren’t you?’ He often set off for London, sometimes getting no further than the Angel pub by the bridge in Henley. If he achieved his goal he would spend his money unwisely on a large variety of objects, including unsaleable pictures, and visit his good friend Eartha Kitt. He was a man with a sweet nature and a fine turn of phrase. When asked why a relative had his term of training in a priests’ seminary cut short he said, ‘I believe he was jumping a little too low at the leapfrog.’

  Our friend was Jeanne Camoys, Sherman’s widow, the dowager, the avenger, the end
lessly quarrelsome, whose abundance of malice made her excellent company. She was a small, pale, dark-haired woman who had been a great beauty in the thirties, with the exotic habit of painting her fingernails green. At some time a dose of Spanish blood had been pumped into her, making her liable to take instant offence and she was singularly unforgiving. Her features were small, but her jaw was strong and could set like an iron trap. Although from some upper-crust family, she had been hard up when she met Sherman and working in a hat shop. When we met she was living with her youngest son Bobby, at whom she would hurl demands from various parts of the house in a voice which was alarmingly powerful in so small a woman. She had been able to equal her husband in the matter of serious and devoted drinking.

  I liked her because she carried the strange art of being herself to unbelievable lengths. When she first invited us to lunch and we suggested we should ask her back, she said, ‘No need to swap cutlets.’ She regularly visited the King of Nepal, whom her son had tutored, and on her return would immediately ask for and obtain an audience with Mrs Thatcher to discuss the affairs of that remote kingdom. When a rat appeared on her garden wall she rang up Michael Heseltine, then Minister for the Environment, and told him to do something about it at once. When he failed she vowed undying enmity to Heseltine and said she was voting Labour. Bobby prepared himself to fight the minister for his Henley constituency as a Gay SDP candidate. She was extremely well read and had worked in some capacity for Edith Sitwell. She hinted at a distant, passionate relationship with Graham Greene, but I noticed that he was nervous of visiting England when he heard she was in the country.

  Jeanne was the only character I put directly into a work of fiction. One day she came to lunch, loud-mouthed, fragile and beautifully dressed. As I was sitting on the sofa beside her, she asked me to admire her shoes. I did so obediently and told her that she had very pretty legs, if I might say so. ‘You already have said so, I think. In your book.’’ I apologized for the use of her, and she smiled tightly. ‘Better to be lampooned than ignored,’ she said, a motto for everyone who suffers from the attentions of Private Eye.