Bruce Chatwin (27 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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Elizabeth arrived in time for the Sotheby’s season at the end of September. She was told she was replacing a girl who’d put her foot through a painting. “It’s the most appallingly inefficient place under the sun, but that has lots of advantages, and besides everyone is so nice.” From now on she wrote to Gertrude every week.
Wilson was particularly solicitous. He gave Elizabeth tickets to the theatre. He sent her out to buy Bittermints, ruining her teeth. One weekend he invited her home to Kent. “The house is heated and was absolutely boiling and it’s full of odds and ends he has collected including a narwhal’s horn which I covet.” He proved a good boss, undemanding and jokey. He was always bringing objects into the office, a grey stone yoke, an Aztec carving. “I’d say: What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? I asked questions all day long.” Her duties were not onerous, although, she told Gertrude, “he is apt to call up at the weirdest times and rang at 11.30 last night to tell me to forge his signature to some documents he had forgotten to sign.”
Once, when recovering from jaundice and knowing her fondness for animals, he asked Elizabeth to look after his parrot. “Birdbrain” was the size of a pigeon and could sing “Three Blind Mice” and miaow. Having lived on the edge of the Cromwell Road, the bird could also make traffic noises. It followed Elizabeth everywhere. “I like having him except that I have to keep the electricity heater on all day which is going to be pretty expensive, but maybe I can charge it to PCW with any luck.”
In January 1962, she moved into 38 Tedworth Square, a second-floor flat in Chelsea. Sharing the weekly rent of fifteen guineas were her floor-mates from Radcliffe. Gillian Walker had come to study at the Courtauld; Pattie Sullivan to work at Morgan Guaranty.
The three of them took off at weekends in Elizabeth’s grey left-hand drive Volkswagen Beetle. “I would lean out of the right-hand window and tell her if it was safe to pass,” says Pattie. “She had strange economies. She refused to buy new glasses, and either borrowed mine or held her hand over the missing lens, which was discouraging when she was driving.”
She found London expensive. Three dollars bought her a pound. Her correspondence to Gertrude includes a steady stream of requests, for peanut butter, nylon toothbrushes – “The English ones are simply hopeless and go all squashy immediately” – and Bonnie Doon knee socks. “I wish I could come home just for a few days: all the clothes in
Vogue
are so nice, much nicer than any here.”
For all Wilson’s pleasantness, her job at Sotheby’s lacked excitement. He was often away in New York, “so I spend most of the day reading and doing the crossword . . . However, it does tend to get boring after a while and I sometimes think there isn’t much point in coming to work at all.”
A few weeks later, she wrote again: “Boy, are we bored.” On 28 November 1962, after a year in London, she decided to come home for good. Part of her decision had to do with a series of telephone calls from Bufton Brady, her boyfriend in America. “No one except Gill knows this yet, so don’t say anything. Buff and I are thinking of getting married in June if everything works out.”
After months of feeling lonely and wretched, Buff had written to her from Boston. “Dearest Liz, I’ve hemmed and hawed my last; something definite must be done now before we both go mad. So. I now make my final stand with the following conditions . . . namely I must either be married to you or ‘washed up’ . . . There you have it in a nutshell, Elizabeth Chanler, all you have to do is say the word and we’re off . . . You can take me or leave me now quite easily. I await you and your answer by the first of the coming year. It will be too late otherwise. Love always, Buff.”
Elizabeth, treating her engagement rather in the manner of an awful secret not to be revealed under any circumstances, promised Gertrude to come home once she had sorted out her car. Since she was not a British resident, the American-registered Volkswagen needed to be out of the country by the following year or else she faced a fine.
On 9 September, 1963, Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. The car had safely left by boat for Baltimore. “Now about me, the thing is that I will not be coming for a little while.”
In the middle of April, as Buff had prepared to receive her in America, Elizabeth had driven Bruce to the West Country. They climbed Maiden Castle above Dorchester and walked along a deserted pebble beach.
Bruce soon took to ringing Tedworth Square. “He would talk for hours,” says Elizabeth. “I could never find out what he wanted. He wasn’t saying, ‘Do you want to go to the movies?’ I think he was fascinated by my voice. But he was obviously lonely. When we got married, he would say: ‘It’s so marvellous. When I come home, I’m not alone. There’s someone here’.”
Bruce was still involved with Gloria. His bubble car had blown up after a collision with a lorry, and he did not hesitate to press Elizabeth into the role of chauffeur. Elizabeth drove them to Wales. They stayed with Wilson’s ex-wife, Helen Ballard, near Ledbury, and in the morning they went pony-trekking on the hills above Llantony.
Their affair began in a bed and breakfast in Gloucestershire on another excursion to Llantony. Bruce sang most of the way. Cole Porter’s “You’re the tops”, Jack Buchanan, from
Me and My Girl
, “The sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out today,” and yards of Noel Coward dialogue.
“He was more fun to be with than almost anyone I knew,” says Elizabeth. “When he started writing he became slightly less fun. But at Sotheby’s, he was happy-go-lucky and he was singing because he was free of Sotheby’s. It was like being let out of a strait-jacket.”
Their destination was Llantony Abbey Hotel on the eastern slope of the Ewyas valley, the most beautiful of the Welsh border valleys. The hotel was built out of part of a ruined Augustine priory. The grit-stone arches dated from the twelfth century, framing mountains that had cast their spell on visitors since the time of the Norman Marcher Lords. Hemmed in on three sides, the valley measured “no more than three arrow shots in width”. Today, its beauty is unchanged, savage, remote.
The little hotel had no telephone. Bruce was required to send a reply-paid telegram. He was excited to find that his grandparents had written their names in the hotel guest book. Isobel and Leslie Chatwin had bicycled here over the Gospel Pass from Birmingham. Bruce and Elizabeth rode little Welsh ponies up onto Hay Bluff and the heathery ridge he would call “the Black Hill”. “This is where my heart lifts,” he told her. He had been conceived in Wales. He knew the valley below from his schooldays at Marlborough, when he had bicycled to Capel-y-ffin. Neither Welsh, nor English, the strange, uninhabited moorland resembled the Derbyshire moors of his early childhood. Elizabeth says, “It was a part of the world he liked best.” Together they walked Hay Bluff, like Amos and Mary in
On the Black Hill.
“He walked ahead, brushing aside the gorse and the bracken, and she planted her footsteps in his.”
Llantony became Elizabeth’s favourite destination with Bruce, but the grey Volkswagen taxied him to other places. Their motoring expeditions resembled those of Lotte and the twins in Bruce’s novel: “They visited megalithic tombs, crumbling abbeys, and a church with a Holy Thorn. They walked along a stretch of Offa’s Dyke and climbed Caer Cradoc where Caractacus made his stand against the Romans . . . Their interest in antiquities revived.”
Bruce showed Elizabeth things she would never have done without him. She says, “He was the best person to travel with. He’d done his research. There was always a point to it. What really turns me on is people’s brains, I’m afraid. He just did have a marvellous mind. I knew then I would be more homesick for England than I would ever be for America.”
Meanwhile, Gertrude fretted in Geneseo. Since November she had been anxious to announce her daughter’s engagement in the newspapers. What was happening? Elizabeth stalled. “I like getting mail at Sotheby’s, but could you put PRIVATE in large letters on the outside of the envelope as sometimes they don’t look and open them.” Gertrude at last entrusted her cousin Ernest with the mission of finding out. Over a lunch at the Connaught, Ernest Iselin, once a diplomat, told Elizabeth a decision had to be made concerning Buff. “Are you really going to marry this man?”
She wrote to Buff, regretting she had led him on. She says, “He was a much weaker character than me and I’d have beaten him to pieces. It’s no good marrying a character whom you’re going to destroy. I’d have bullied him. I couldn’t bully Bruce. That was the great attraction.”
Sotheby’s romances were common. Six office marriages occurred in Bruce’s time. But nobody suspected a relationship between the chairman’s secretary and the chairman’s blue-eyed boy. Digby-Jones once spotted the pair having lunch at the St James’s Club and told Wilson. “How extraooorrrdinary,” said Wilson, and forgot about it. Nobody knew, not even Elizabeth’s flat-mates.
Bruce and Elizabeth did not talk about their affair between themselves. “I was terrified he’d feel trapped and disappear,” says Elizabeth. “He’d have run a mile if I was being possessive.”
She had known about Gloria and about other girlfriends. “I remember him discussing one French girl, small and blonde, the daughter of a dealer. At one point he said he was going to marry her. I thought she was very inappropriate.” Elizabeth was aware also of homosexual relationships. “I’d known he’d had boyfriends. It didn’t matter. I knew this was how Bruce was.”
In July 1964, after another visit to Llantony, Elizabeth wrote to her Radcliffe friend Eleanor Macmillan: “Is it love or not? I don’t think so, but for me it will be the most marvellous bright thing to remember . . . This guy looks like everyone’s idea of a golden-haired child. As a matter of fact I’d simply
love
to have a little boy by him. He’d be indescribably beautiful & fantastically clever. I don’t suppose I could get away with it without being married.”
One morning, when Bruce was out of the office, Bruce’s secretary composed “a husband horoscope”. This is how Sue Goodhew defined the attributes of the ideal Sotheby’s spouse: “He will live in the country, in a medium-sized Georgian or Queen Anne House, probably in Hampshire, Wiltshire or Berkshire. He will either farm vaguely, or commute each day. He will be about 30, with a red face, but very nice and kind and amusing.” The couple would have a spaniel, a labrador, and four children. “She will occasionally be asked to open the village fete and will attend all the hunt balls faithfully . . . Altogether she will lead a normal happy country life. She will occasionally come up to London to do some shopping (Harrods) and have her hair done (André Bernard’s). She will drive a Morris Traveller car and husband will have a Jaguar (perhaps). Son will go to Eton and daughters to a Horsey Establishment. Staff will consist of one gardener and his son, and one daily lady to help in the house when necessary.”
Elizabeth did not wish this picture of married life, but she conceived a personal fantasy. She would buy a smallholding with chickens. Bruce would spend the weekends. “I never figured he would want to get married. I figured: ‘We can go on like this’.”
In this manner, Bruce and Elizabeth kept their relationship secret for two years.
XIII
 
Afghanistan
I come from a very middle-class family of lawyers and architects. Travel was an immense relief
–
it got rid of the pressure from above and from below. If you’re out on the road, people have to take you at face value.
—BC, to Michael Ignatieff
IN THE SUMMER OF 1962, THE 17-YEAR-OLD HUGH CHATWIN
, on the last leg after a 10,000-mile hitch-hike from Cape Town via Cairo, bumped into his older brother in Rome.
“Bruce!”
“Hugh!”
Like Stanley and Livingstone, they shook hands in the middle of the Via Veneto. Bruce was on his way home from Greece; Hugh from a five-month odyssey through Africa.
Bruce had urged Hugh to see Africa before he started his training as a surveyor. Where Bruce at Marlborough had been inspired by Robert Byron, Hugh had read
Cape Cold to Cape Hot
by Richard Pape, an out-of-work bomber pilot who had driven an Austin A55 from Nord Cap in Norway to South Africa. Bruce, aged 22, had furnished Hugh with a list of addresses and his portrait camera.
Not for another year did Bruce attempt a comparable journey. In the summer of 1963, he made the first of three visits to Afghanistan with his friend Robert Erskine. Their object was to buy antiquities and to follow Byron’s footsteps in
The Road to Oxiana.
Bruce rented the Grosvenor Crescent Mews flat to the American dealer Hélène Sieferheld. He said, giving her a copy of
The Road to Oxiana
: “This is what I’d like to be.” In September 1960, he had retraced Byron’s journey through the Greek islands to Crete. That holiday had made him eager to go further, to cross the Persian border into the Hindu Kush and to fulfil an adolescent fantasy. His journal would show a conscious imitation of Byron: the appreciation of recondite stonework; the nicknames for rulers (Bruce’s pseudonym for Nasser, “the Smiler”, is like Byron’s “Marjorie Banks” for the Shah of Iran); the same romanticising of the masses. “He’s always talking about young gazelles,” says Erskine, who performed the role of travelling companion occupied in that book by Christopher Sykes.
The journey lasted only three weeks, plotted in the vaguest of terms and with scant understanding of the culture. Yet it planted the seed of Bruce’s yen for Central Asia – “with its pale green rivers and Buddhist monasteries where eagles wheel over the deodar forests and tribesmen carry copper battle-axes and wreathe vine leaves round their heads as they did in the time of Alexander.”

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