Loving Monsters (3 page)

My host put down his cup. ‘Many years ago you worried about being thought cynical?’

‘I’m an admirer of Lily Tomlin. “No matter how cynical you get, it’s not cynical enough.”’

‘I think you and I will probably get on. We may even turn out to be surprisingly alike in some ways. Given that we all have to construct ourselves from scratch, you seem to have done it on paper while I chose to do it by inventive living. There isn’t much difference.’

This had been an entirely unforeseen meeting and I was becoming conscious of the deep-frozen seafood
frittura
mista
steadily defrosting in the Co-op carrier bag in my car. Past experience suggested I would already have to scrub the floor mat with bleach to neutralise the raw octopus juice which invariably seeped through the welds in the bag. Otherwise it would brew up in the Mediterranean heat into a reek of corruption that would yet again bring to mind a journey I had once made across Manila in a hearse with broken air-conditioning when we were trapped for six hours in a series of traffic jams.

‘You must excuse me, Jayjay,’ I said. ‘This has been a most intriguing meeting and there are a million things I want to ask you. Clearly we’re going to meet again.’

‘Of course we are. It has been very good of you to give me your time. A total stranger, just out of the blue like that.’

He led me courteously through the house. I found his well-filled bookshelves reassuring, especially the healthy mixture of older volumes and brighter modern paperbacks. These last ranged from (snatched glance) Aldo Busi and Primo Levi in Italian to James Ellroy in Southern Californian. Plus half a yard of Patrick O’Brian, which somehow sat comfortably with my preconceptions of my host. My eyes also fell on a strange object that lay like an ornament on a bookshelf. A battered piece of metal about the size of a child’s sock, it was nevertheless brightly polished and obviously silver. That anything so flattened and creased should be carefully preserved suggested it was a curio.

‘There’s a story behind that,’ he said, observing my curiosity. ‘Now, then, your writer’s imagination to the fore: guess what it is. Or was.’

‘As a matter of fact I recognised it at once. It’s one of the king-sized silver-foil toothpaste tubes specially made for John Jacob Astor. This one must have been recovered from the wreck of the
Titanic
,
having been crushed by the extreme pressure on the seabed. How did you get it, if you don’t mind my asking? Surely not from Bob Ballard? He would die rather than remove anything from that ship.’

‘Oh, bravo! Most inventive for the spur of the moment.’ He flashed me an amused glance in which there was – what, exactly? Thoughtfulness? Complicity, perhaps? ‘The truth is, however, even stranger than your fiction. In 1847, when Lady Amelia Dance set off on her courageous mission to inspect Janissary prisons, she took with her two silver dildos modelled from Disraeli’s cock. It was well known that her marriage offered her few satisfactions. Indeed, she famously wrote that “Poor Dance would be well engulph’d by a candle-snuffer”, which made things pretty clear
.
I have her
Diary
here, by the way. So she put herself in the hands of Arcangelo Viotti. Viotti was an immigrant silversmith from Cremona who had set up in Cheapside and quickly earned a reputation for such skill and discretion that he became patronised by society. You can imagine the sort of thing. Some feckless blood
would pop a priceless heirloom to settle his gambling debts at Oxford and urgently need a first-rate copy to fool his family until he could buy back the original. Viotti would do it and keep silent. So Lady Amelia went to him and explained her requirement and Viotti arranged to have an impression taken from Disraeli during a poker session in Grosvenor Square. Don’t ask me how: it’s one of those historical mysteries one likes to speculate on in the bath. He made two identical objects in sterling silver to her design. They were hollow and the bottom part – what she called “the orbs and follicles” – was threaded and formed a stopper. Several days after leaving London on her journey – I think she had got as far as Karlsruhe, I’d have to check – she confided to her diary the discovery that there were “ever more refinements of phantasie” to be had from filling one with iced hock and the other with hot soup “such as will long retain and most readily transmit its chearful glow”. In fact, she had just made the same discovery about soup that Gladstone did some years later, that it keeps hot appreciably longer than mere water. I’m sure you’ve heard that splendid old BBC Archive recording of Gladstone’s manservant remembering that the old statesman used to fill his hot-water bottle with soup for exactly that reason? Anyway, long story short, poor Lady Amelia was eventually captured by the Cadi of Smyrna, mistaken for a nobleman’s son, and had a most unfortunate end. Her baggage, of course, was ransacked and the dildos vanished. However, one of them came to light when it appeared at Christie’s so-called “black auction” in 1972, the famous occasion when Napoleon’s phallus also came under the hammer. It is now one of the reserved items in the Gilbert Collection and bona fide scholars can examine it if they make a special request. Its companion is here.’ Jayjay picked up the battered piece of metal and handed it to me.

‘Pardon my scepticism, but how do you know?’

‘The hallmark. It’s identical to the one in the Gilbert Collection. Both have Viotti’s monogram.’

‘And why does it look as though it had been sat on by an elephant?’

‘Ah, that we shall never know. I acquired it in Vienna. I like to think some outraged Customs official there had confiscated it from a collector as obscene and laid it on the rails as the Orient Express pulled out, but one shouldn’t embroider historical facts to suit one’s own fantasies.’

I kept a thoughtful silence until we reached the car.

‘You have me at a complete disadvantage, Jayjay. You do at least know who I am, whereas I haven’t the remotest idea who you are, what you’ve done, why there are signed portraits of Henry Kissinger in the house. Never mind flattened dildos.’ I managed not to add
to
say
nothing
of
notes
from
Margaret
Thatcher.
‘Not a clue. You shouldn’t be either surprised or insulted, though. People think of me as a recluse. They are always amazed by what I don’t know. So you might at least help me decide why I should want to become your biographer. I’ve got you down as a retired dip., incidentally, but I don’t suppose you are.’

He was watching me with a mischievous smile. ‘I assure you, you have nothing to apologise for, and I everything. It was most discourteous. I should have made it clear from the start. There is no earthly reason why you should have heard of me. I told you quite truthfully that I consider fame to be fascinating but it is also true that I myself have always shunned it. You might say I rely on quiet recognition at most. What I am, you see, is a professional impostor.’

*

For long afterwards I could not shake the idea that our meeting had not been fortuitous but carefully engineered. Surely Il Ghibli had been most artfully set-dressed, the hook so discreetly baited that even the least greedy and most discerning of fishes (for like everybody, I fancied myself as such) would have taken a cautious nibble? But then I would promptly reject this as pure vanity. Why should anyone go to such elaborate trouble to put a straightforward business proposition to a mere writer? The following week I would be de-convinced anew. I would argue that he must have arranged the whole thing, having long before ascertained my
habit of shopping in the Co-op on that day and at that time. Not only had he baited the hook but he had fully intended me to appreciate it. For some as yet unknown reason it was not just any old writer this professional impostor wanted, but me.

Inevitably, I ran into him again before I could make up my mind. This time it was in the Co-op car park. He had just replaced his trolley in the steel shelter where its fellows were nested and was clearly miles away, standing paused by his car door, though he might have been contemplating the word
fica
someone had spray-painted in black on the shelter years ago.

‘I’m still thinking,’ I told him.

‘Think on,’ said Jayjay sunnily. ‘There’s no real hurry. Only bear in mind I shan’t be giving you my
entire
life. Nothing so conventional. I shall only be telling you the interesting bits. I don’t know if you agree with me but in my opinion all the really important stuff happens quite early on. The first thirty years of one’s life are lived; the remainder is dreamed. I’m convinced we have an inbuilt sense of time that gives undue weight to our youthful years, the reason being that for nearly all mankind’s existence a life span probably averaged forty years, which is very much what you still see in the harshest societies today. After that the clock’s increasingly bamboozled and accelerates as though searching out its end, which is why the older one becomes the more time seems to speed up. You yourself have already noticed this, of course. Indeed, I remember at our very first meeting you said that the gift of time comes from an Indian giver. So you ought to bear in mind that I’m not one of those people who find old age a matter of increasing and rather wonderful serenity. You will find – or you
would
find if you decided we had a deal – that I shall be skewing my life very much in favour of its first half. The second half has really been little more than a series of increasingly flavourless recapitulations, although the great conspiracy requires that I claim to be having the time of my life. Which of course I am, as you can see, shopping at the Co-op in Castiglion Fiorentino and wondering why a graffiti artist would bother to
spray a word like that over there when people obviously don’t even care enough to scrub it off. It must be very disheartening to a rebel adolescent to have aroused so little reaction.’

‘It wasn’t an adolescent who did it,’ I said. ‘It was actually the manager himself, trying to turn his own clock back. One night years ago he drove up in his BMW at two a.m. and sprayed the word. Then, finding he just felt tired and silly instead of young, he let himself into the back of the Co-op and hanged himself in the staff lavatory.
Fica
is his epitaph, and we shall never know whether it was a mere expletive or an invocation. Now I’d better go and do my shopping. I gather they have a special offer on the Elixir of Life this week. I trust you’ve bought a bottle?’

‘Certainly I have,’ said Jayjay. ‘Only for some obscure marketing reason they’ve disguised it to look like Gordon’s gin.’ He nodded to a bottle visible in a basket on the back seat of his car. ‘Anyway, James, I do hope you make up your mind soon. It really might just cheat my own clock if I were to re-live little bits of the past.’

‘If ever I did agree, I ought to warn you that I would stop if you began to bore me.’

‘So I would expect. Just as I would sack you if I saw you weren’t up to it.’

*

All this certainly added a gram or two to the balance in favour of working with him; but what with one thing and another, including the work I already had in hand, I came to no conclusion. Thus did the weeks go by, leaving me in apparent indecision. But it turned out to be only apparent.

Raymond Jerningham Jebb was born at 58 Beechill Road, Eltham on July 3rd 1918. Since most of his next eighteen years were spent in or around the London postal district of SE9 he qualifies as a genuine child of the suburbs. What is more, far from presenting the remainder of his life as a flight from the restricting horrors of petit-bourgeois gentility, he often spoke of the place, as well as of the inter-war period, with a degree of nostalgia. A biographer labels this Exhibit A.

He was, he said, the only child of Harold Jerningham Jebb and Olive Sargent, about whose ancestry he was not very forthcoming. I don’t think he was particularly interested. Piecing it together, it appeared Harold’s own father was originally from Shropshire (there are some Jerningham graves in Ludlow) and had been brought when still a child to Herne Hill where his family had bought a poultry farm beside the Effra. Jayjay spoke of geese, a lucrative trade especially in the Christmas season. Harold was born there on the precise day in May 1885 that John Ruskin, a few hundred yards further up the hill, finished the dedicatory preface to
Praeterita.
Despite the spread of the railways that Ruskin so deplored this area of Kent was still remarkably countrified, for all that it would soon qualify as south London. Jayjay’s father remembered being driven in his own father’s donkey-cart through the lanes of Dulwich, Peckham and Lewisham and often beyond Bromley as far afield as Widmore, in those days a remote Kentish village. These were delivery rounds, and the boy Harold would scramble out at each of the high-street poulterers, lugging geese that weighed almost as much as he did, their beaks and feet tied with a loop of bass and their wings pinioned. Harold had also recalled the new streets even then being laid out across fields of buttercups. The heaps of London bricks waited on each plot, the blond skeletons of roofs stretched their bright pine trusses in perspectives a hundred yards long waiting for the tilers with pads of sacking on their knees to cover them up. This was the work of men like Cameron Corbett, who built estates over large parts of Eltham and Hither Green and became the first Lord Rowallan on the strength of it.

Somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century the goose farm beside the Effra was bought and it, too, quickly disappeared beneath brick and asphalt just as the river itself was destined to vanish. Harold’s father did well out of the sale of his land and thereafter the family moved briefly to Tulse Hill before fetching up near Well Hall station at the foot of Eltham’s modest hill. Well Hall itself was an eighteenth-century house built on the remains of a Tudor manor and here at the age of fifteen Harold became an all-purpose knives, boots and jobbing boy. If Jayjay were to be believed he also became the clandestine lover of Well Hall’s tenant, Edith Nesbit. E. Nesbit had moved to the Hall in 1899 and stayed until 1922, a good deal longer than Harold’s association with her household. He had certainly left her employ, and supposedly also her bed, well before 1906 when she published the book that made her famous,
The
Railway
Children.
By then Jayjay’s father had become apprenticed as a ship’s broker and settled into the career that was to sustain him and his family for the rest of his working life. Why that line of business, particularly? Maybe he was responding to a force of nature that in one way or another still influenced the life of every Londoner of the time. The buttercups, orchards and paddocks of Herne Hill and the rest of suburbia might be fast disappearing, but the River Thames was at the full flood of its vitality. From Eltham’s eminence there were views northwards (fog permitting) towards Woolwich and Greenwich. The Royal Dockyard was not three miles away. Just across the river lay Silvertown and the great commercial hub of the docklands. The port and its shipping were London’s heart as well as the Empire’s.

When his son was born in 1918 Harold was already thirty-three and had been married seven months. The Great War put normal life into abeyance where it had not stopped it altogether. Harold was lucky. His knowledge of ships, their cargoes and insurance had earned him a desk in a crowded Admiralty office instead of a posting to France. It was while he was there that he
met Olive, who was working in the Censorship. AWSCD
*
was the department whose job was similar to that of the civilian censorship: checking the letters of RN personnel for inadvertent breaches of security as well as for signs of a more intentional espionage.

– I will tell you about my mother (said Jayjay early on) in the hopes that I shan’t have to refer to her again. When they met it seems she was by no means a beauty though apparently very jolly. By the time I can remember her she was anything but jolly, having lost a favourite brother in the last week of the war and then falling
victim to a terminal attack of religion. This was a particularly crippling strain where any sense of irony was concerned: Methodist or Wesleyan or Congregationalist, I forget which. Really, I’ve blotted it out completely and it would take a hypnotist to recover the memory. Somewhere I must know the answer perfectly well. The house was full of tracts and she was always going to church meetings. You never met such dreary people as her friends. They had in common a worthy dowdiness, or possibly a dowdy worthiness. Not unkind to me as a child, certainly, but the sort who would practically faint with horror if ever someone offered them a glass of sherry.

– At the time when my father and Olive met in the Admiralty, though, she was still allegedly good fun and quite bouncy. She was also fearsomely bright. I later heard this from a couple of people who had known her in the Censorship and they said my mother had the best brain of anyone they had ever met, male or female. That must mean something. In those days women weren’t as a rule given the credit for having the intelligence to come in out of the rain, not unless a gallant gentleman with an umbrella assisted them. So what happened to her in those ten years or so after the war? I really don’t know. I’m afraid she went considerably batty. Marriage to my father, I suppose. Plus her health was not up to much. But she went on being bright in a strictly formal sense even as Jesus rotted away the rest of her intellect. I remember she carried all our household accounts in her head. I never once saw her use pencil and paper to add up bills. She also whizzed through the crossword in my father’s
Daily
Telegraph.
Anyway, let’s not dwell on my mother. She really had nothing to do with my life other than in a limited biological sense. –

At these words (Exhibit B) the biographer sits back and taps his teeth with the end of his pen, sensing that it will be useless to challenge head-on a statement that cannot possibly be true. The tone of voice in which it is delivered, one of throwaway finality, suggests clearly that any further probing will be met with truculence.
To catch this monkey one will need to go very softly indeed, behind Jayjay’s back if necessary. Since when was it assumed that anyone wanting their life written will necessarily tell the whole truth? Or even any of it?

– One can hardly have grown up this century without having absorbed some of that Freudian over-determination – he said on another occasion. – You know, when things people
don
’
t
want to talk about take on heavy significance. But why mightn’t it be that the most important things in a person’s life sometimes really are the ones that seem the most significant? Now in my father’s case there was a side of him that I think did have a lasting effect on me, whereas I could never say that about my mother. Except, of course, that I’m a devout atheist and stupid with figures. I’ll get to my father’s influence shortly.

– There’s no doubt that, seen through our neighbours’ eyes, my father would have appeared completely conventional, quite unexceptional. The Pooter par excellence, the nine-to-five man incarnate. Every morning, rain or shine, off to work in the City. Dark suit, bowler hat, overcoat, brolly and briefcase. A short walk to Well Hall: left into Balcaskie Road, down to Glenlea, left again and you’re practically at the station. Up to Charing Cross on the eight-seventeen. Strap-hang the District or Circle line to Monument, another short walk up Leadenhall Street. He worked in the new Lloyds building. New then, I mean; I think they built it on the site of the old East India House in the late twenties. Once there he must have been just one of a vast army of underwriters sitting at desks all day, probably in their shirtsleeves and wearing cuff protectors. Over the years he became quite senior, but essentially he remained an underwriter. Then in the evening the reverse journey back to Eltham. A picture of regularity. Much later, of course, that sort of working life became the butt of endless jokes about wage-slavery and unimaginative, drab existence. Still, I would bet that nowadays an awful lot of men would cheerfully put up with it if given the chance. People like routine, you know. They need it. At the end of a long life I am convinced that security is number three on the human list of basic essentials, right up there after food and shelter. That’s where politicians go so wrong talking about people needing to adjust to not having a job for life, to working with six-month or one-year contracts, to moving house all the time. It goes against human instinct. We need our continuities, we ache for places. So I think many people would rejoice if told that, all else being equal, they would still be doing the same work in ten, even twenty years, gradually moving up the ladder of seniority, bringing home a little more money and taking slightly longer holidays.

– So if I describe my father as an archetypal nine-to-five man I’m certainly not mocking him. The twenties and thirties were hardly a stable period, what with post-war prostration and the mass unemployment of those who came back. Then the Wall
Street crash, the Slump, the hunger marches. To be in a skilled and essential line of business like my father’s was a godsend for a man with family responsibilities. As long as there was trade there were merchant vessels; and as long as there were valuable cargoes shuttling about the world on the high seas my father would be in employment. Not true of goose farmers, after all. –