Going Ashore (13 page)

The Spanish Civil War broke out, calling many poets and novelists to one side and another, and, I believe, even another. I worked for a dairy firm, delivering buttermilk in the West End. My wife used to drive me. She
bought a small green car without a clutch, which she later exchanged for a yellow car without a hand brake. One of our regular customers was the gifted translator Egon Kelp. Kelp had already begun the arduous task of rendering the complete works of A. Hitler out of limpid German into rational English. One day, as Kelp was examining his monthly bill through a magnifying glass, I made the foolish remark that the vogue for Hitler was probably ephemeral and that one day all his books would be out of print. What made me say this? I have often asked myself. Was Kelp offended? I know only that he presently laid down the magnifying glass and said, courteously but decidedly, that he thought he might give up drinking buttermilk.

I believe that only the tact and unselfishness of my wife allowed me to write seventy-four novels before the age of thirty. Once, during those early years, I remember her reaching a brave and lucid conclusion: London was not enough. I would spend a Friday-to-Monday in Paris. An excursion ticket was obtained easily, and soon I was comfortably settled into a room in the guest wing of the British Embassy on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The Embassy had once been the home of Pauline Bonaparte.

Upon my return to London on Monday morning, my wife informed me that during my absence a great change in social and political attitudes had swept the ranks of literary England. Young writers were now getting and squandering immense sums of money by beating each other out on “scoops,” which they traded in Fleet Street. We agreed it was worth a try. My father-in-law was able to introduce me to the President of a country then situated in South America. During the course of our conversation, the President observed that he had never seen the Bey of Tunis lose his temper. We were able to place this with the book editor of
Bubble and Squeak
, whose generous check allowed us to spend the winter in Rome.

The atmosphere of Rome was unlike the atmosphere of London, or Guildford, or Bath, or York, or Aberdeen, where my wife had relatives. The Irish author D’Arcy Coin was the
tosse cavallina
of Roman society. He had a deep religious bent and spent some, but not all, of his time at prayer. Coin made no secret of his preference for making friends with persons of any sex whatsoever – a taste not many people could understand, let alone sympathize with. He took a liking to both of us, and told us he had seen Mussolini setting a tablecloth on fire during an otherwise unremarkable
dinner. I wondered if Mussolini was the person to do this. Later, I was shown a photograph of Pirandello. In Rome, I noticed some of the works of A. Hitler for sale, and I regretted more than ever my wounding remark to Kelp.

Nineteen-thirty-eight was the year of Munich. Royalties from the sale of my one hundred and eleven novels covered the children’s hobbies and the needs of the household staff, now increased to twenty. My wife and I decided we could risk the purchase of a house. After offering a fair price for Blenheim, we fell in love with a ruined Norman abbey in St. John’s Wood. Legend had King Harold riding forth from this abbey to defend England. It took us nine years and a million and a half pounds to restore, but we have never been sorry. I know that I would not want to live anywhere else. My wife papered the servants’ bedrooms, standing on a stepladder she had inherited not long before.

I now felt free to consider work I had been keeping at the back of my mind for some time – a biography of Julius Drought. Drought, now in his eighties, was waiting to be knighted, or to be offered the chairmanship of Slink’s Biscuits, or for some of his miracles to be recognized by the highest instances of the Church of England, with canonization to follow. I found his company enriching. It was Drought who pointed out how odd it was that the frontiers of Great Britain had seldom changed. He owned a large collection of ancient maps, on which the frontiers were clearly visible. One day, I heard Drought mention he was going to tea with Somerset Maugham. I never saw him again.

Of my wartime memories, none is more vivid than Romney Creeper’s return from the Yalta Conference. The Foreign Office had been warned that Stalin never went anywhere without a court of literary advisers. Wartime austerity meant that Churchill could have only one; he settled on Creeper. Creeper told me it was not strictly true that Stalin had given a poetry reading; he had simply quoted Rilke. (The rumor nonetheless continues to grow. It is unfounded. Perhaps my speaking of it here will help to curb it, or at least reduce it to sensible proportions.) Creeper explained that Stalin could not have held an audience for long by means of Rilke. The otherwise erudite Georgian thought
“Schatten”
to mean “several cats.” In a private talk with Creeper, Stalin confessed that life was nothing but
“several cats scampering over a sundial” – as Creeper was to put it, “neither good Stalin nor good Rilke.” Another of Creeper’s vignettes was of Churchill’s suddenly turning to him and saying, “What’s the Russian for ‘status quo’?” Creeper could no longer recall his reply, invented on the spur of the moment, but he feared the map of Europe would bear the trace of his ready wit. He showed me a quick sketch he had made of Stalin at the opera. I was struck by his resemblance to Yeats.

Bearing in mind my thoughtless slight to Egon Kelp, I refrained from telling Creeper that it was actually I who had been tapped for Yalta. However, Nanny Safflower had been called up for wartime duty, and I felt reluctant to leave my wife alone to face the music. That was how it came about that Churchill had second-best literary guidance at a time crucial for civilization, and that Stalin lost his only chance of meeting me. My wife agrees that had I been present at Yalta the map of Europe might, by now, be quite another kettle of fish.

DURING THE WEEKS
that preceded the engagement, Paola and Renata discovered new ways of combing their hair. Paola’s was short and brushed forward in a style Renata’s mother called “Charleston.” Over the Charleston locks she tugged a bathing cap made up of yellow daisies. Renata’s mother said that the sun and the lake water would turn Paola’s lovely head to rust if she didn’t take care now, while she was young. The older woman caressed Paola’s hair – the dry crown and the silk wet fringe that had touched water – and said she wished her own daughter had thick curls and blackberry eyes; but that was polite hypocrisy and accepted as such. Renata was the one who was almost engaged. Her father was a corporation lawyer in Milan, and her mother could have provided Renata’s dowry out of her own jewel box, if she had chosen to. Paola was the child of a widow. The father had died not quite two years ago, and there was a faint new difference between the girls, delicately felt, invisible still, like the turning of summer.

Renata could swim without wearing a cap – indeed, she was urged to do so, so that the sun and the water would bleach her hair to the washed-sand color for which her mother had another name: “Scandinavian.” Renata idly swam on her back with her hair spread and floating, but she was not mad, not drowning, not Ophelia. She was making herself very beautiful for her engagement. Coming out of the water she was to Paola’s sun-struck eyes a mythical girl. She raised her thin arms as if unconscious of them and pulled her Scandinavian hair back and held it taut with a curving tortoise-shell comb. Unknown bathers peered through the bamboo fence that hedged their private beach, but Renata was calm and scornful. The hair-style, like the disdainful look on her face, was copied from a magazine; but it was also true she did not yet know other people existed. She had still to learn the hard darting glance her mother and
Paola’s mother could send other women: the measuring regard that ascertained clothes, hands, and weight in carats. Renata was aware of herself. Floating on her back with her eyes shut to the sky, wishing herself alone on the lake in the circle of mountains, she saw the reflection of a girl, Renata, long, brown, her thin arms outspread, her hands and her feet like marine plants. She saw with her eyes shut her shadow on the bottom of the lake, a cloud transversed with small quick fish. Hers was the exquisite shadow of summer, the most memorable, the most precisely cast.

Paola and Renata and Paola’s little sister Anna and the two mothers lived that holiday, their last together, in Paola’s mother’s house. It was the last of anything; the house was sold to a Swiss couple from Zurich, and in the autumn the furniture would be sold at auction or stored in Milan. If Paola’s father had put the deed to the house in his wife’s name, it would have been a kind and practical gesture, and saved on income tax; but he died with the house his, and taxes owing, and only his mistress provided for. A block of flats in San Remo was in her name. Everything was going, now, and the family done for, and the father had struck at them within his lifetime, secretly, perhaps thinking he would never die; but he must have expected to die. Otherwise, would he have thought of his mistress, and provided for her? Of all this Paola said nothing as she brushed her Charleston hair forward or threaded ribbon through the lace of Renata’s peignoirs. She thought, but said nothing. Everything was going, done, except Paola’s mother’s dowry, which her father had always said was never quite enough. Paola heard her mother crying, but it was difficult to tell if she was grieving for her dead husband, or mourning his infidelity – exposed and dissected by lawsuits – or simply lamenting the disorder of his memory. It was almost as though he had wanted to be assured of survival, no matter how. “Dead and gone, and jealous of the living,” cried Paola’s mother, in a fit of hate for which she immediately begged forgiveness. Paola forgave. The father’s photograph, kept so that Anna would know what he looked like, gave way to the spectre of a stoutish man with a rather large head and a mistress on the Mediterranean coast.

It was the last of everything; this house was, it had been, the last Italian villa. Everything else was German, Austrian, and German-Swiss. The campsites and hotels bore signs saying “German Spoken,” and “German
Management,” the only Italians to be found were in the hotel kitchens, and one could walk miles without hearing a word in Italian: this the two mothers said with passion and spite. From their scrap of pebbly private beach, Paola and Renata watched with indifference shoals of floating inflated mattresses, each holding a Swiss, an Austrian, or a Bavarian, usually blistered red, but singing. The songs were melancholy and stirring, and although the words were in a foreign tongue the tunes were familiar. The girls could sing French and American songs, without understanding all the words. They were bored by the mothers’ passions. They were as bored with them as with patriotism or tales of war. These were the only matters that bored them. No summer had ever been as distracting as this last summer on the lake with Renata about to become engaged.

The obstacle to the engagement was Renata’s parents. The parents found nothing to criticize in Guilio’s fortunes or his person, but they began as if it were a game with the premise that he was unfit and must be proved desirable. He was twenty-eight, eleven years older than Renata, and still had not passed his examinations. He was studying law. At the rate he failed his examinations he would be studying law at the age of forty. Renata’s father – a lawyer – declared there were too many lawyers in Milan. Renata raged, Paola consoled. Up in Paola’s room, which the girls shared, Renata lay prone on the marble floor, limp with tantrums, and cried, “They want me to be an old maid.” “They don’t, of course,” said Paola sadly. Bereaved and mourning, undone by her father and the unknown San Remo whore, she wanted Renata to be engaged because that was the thing Renata wanted. Paola would always see a stout man with a large head signing papers, conspiring, casting his family on an ash-heap. Consoling her friend, she sat on the floor beside her and stroked her hair. Her hand was firm, and her voice warm and low and wise. “They don’t want you to be an old maid. You know that.” Renata knew that Paola was right.

Guilio had studied in Italy and Geneva and Heidelberg and now he wanted to go to the United States and study there for a time. Guilio’s parents said that if Renata married him, and took over the moral responsibility for Guilio’s life, they would send him to the United States or anywhere he liked; but Renata’s father wanted Guilio to go away alone
and come back for Renata when he had passed his examinations. The responsibility for Guilio was too great for a girl of seventeen. That was the story they told Renata. It might or might not be the truth.

That went on in July. In August Renata stopped raging and began to weep. She had to wear sunglasses at the dinner table to hide her bloated eyes. She scraped her increasingly Scandinavian-looking hair away from her innocent forehead, and sat as though rebuffed, contemplating an untouched dinner, while the others talked at once. Paola tried to feel, We shall be somewhere else this time next year, but only this summer counted as a faithful season. A father died without warning. Without warning Renata would say, “I am engaged.”

The two mothers were thin and hard. The new difference between them was physical. Paola’s mother had stopped tinting her hair, as a sign of sorrow or of desperation. It was half mahogany, half dull grey. Renata’s mother was blonded white, and her head sleek and neat as a boy’s. Paola admired her large glossy red earrings and her brown shoulders and her quick tongue. She admired her rings and her sweet hypocrisy and her temper and her car. None of those attributes had come with marriage. She was born with some and inherited the means to have the rest. Renata’s mother was kind to Paola – so obviously not a threat – and took no notice of her own grieving girl, except when the sunglasses and the accusation they concealed seemed a reproach too great to ignore. Then she lost her temper. Once she lost her temper seriously and knocked the bowl of water in which grapes were cooling, half silver coated, half submerged, on to Renata’s lap. Renata jumped up, screaming, with her dress ice cold and pasted against her thighs. Her mother tried to hit her across the face with her napkin, but missed.