Loving Monsters (34 page)

Why here? I ask. Why this house?

*

– As soon as they could Mirella and the children shook the dust of Egypt off their feet and came back here to Italy. Their home was actually just the other side of Castiglion Fiorentino, in the hills overlooking Rigutino. What, about five miles from here? Hardly more. I tried to keep in touch with them but it wasn’t easy. The war was over but everything was chaotic and in a state of flux. It was obvious to me that the British had at best a limited future in Egypt so I decided to go back to England. Really, though, it seemed to me that I had come to the end of a phase in my life and it was time for a change. In one sense I was right: those nine years since 1936 had indeed been a formative experience. But I was wrong if I thought that a change would necessarily mean something radically different. I couldn’t see it at the time but from then on my life was essentially going to be permutations of things
I had already experienced and thoughts I’d already had. I don’t know if that made me a case of arrested development. No more so than anybody else, probably. I was twenty-seven, twenty-eight: already past my prime had I been an Egyptian
fellah
or
bedou,
who were often old at forty and dead at forty-five. By sheer good fortune I had been spared disaster or an arbitrary death at a time when such things were commonplace. It was a miracle that I had escaped being blown to bits in Alexandria by only a couple of minutes. I remember getting back to Eltham all tanned and fit and excellently nourished and being obliged to wonder ‘Why me?’ London was a changed place. Eltham was a changed place. It was bleak and scrawny and full of bomb sites. People were pale and drawn and shivering: coal was well-nigh unobtainable. They certainly didn’t look like citizens of a victorious nation. Hardly a family hadn’t lost somebody. There were gaps in streets where the Luftwaffe had missed the Docks or else a V1 or V2 had landed. People were constantly finding incendiaries in their gardens. The poorer East End kids wore dresses run up from black-out material. And everywhere you went in central London there were little groups of young servicemen missing an arm or a leg or else blind, playing accordions or the spoons for pennies. They merely swelled the ranks of all the First World War veterans already shining shoes outside Charing Cross station or playing banjos or being commissionaires, taxi-hailers and door-openers for hotels. And I kept thinking, ‘Why me?’

– It was the first time in nine years that I had seen my father. He looked a lot older and smaller than I remembered. He embraced me and wept when I came through the front door and he couldn’t speak for about fifteen minutes. We just stood there in the hallway of Beechill Road, he rocking me as though we were late-night dancers down at the Palais. Over his balding head I stared at our front door’s sunbursts and fanlight that had once been such potent images when I was homesick in Suez. I could see where he had stuck up the black-out material with drawing pins and sticking plaster. And there was the hatstand with both his
bowler hats, his ration book on the seat next to it. Eventually he found his voice. He said he was full of remorse at having sent me away. He could only have meant to Hither Green but he sounded as if he felt responsible for my nine-year absence in Egypt. That made me very sad. He said it was wrong of him; he’d known it was wrong at the time but my mother, well, poor old girl, we’d none of us known how ill she was. We had, of course, but I happily connived at this harmless fiction. He said he still tried to see Olive at least once a month even though the journey across London out to Finchley had become increasingly difficult what with wartime disruptions to public transport, and sometimes it hardly seemed worth it as she either refused to see him at all or else appeared not even to recognise him. Thanks to being hit over the head every few hours with pharmacological blackjacks she was silent, biddable, inert, although she still liked to do the crossword every day in the company of Elijah, who knew all the answers.

– The worst thing of all for me was that although I could perceive the pathos of my homecoming I wasn’t really moved. Not really. I was touched by this small old man named Harold who was my father, but little more. Too much had happened to me in the interim. I was no longer the moody lovelorn schoolboy who had left this house with a ticket to Suez in his pocket, although there was still enough of him to make me associate the place with the great unhappiness and resentment that had surrounded my leaving. I slept in my old room with the remembered wallpaper that now looked dowdy and faintly hideous. I paid my respects to the neighbours who, while welcoming, could not disguise the fact that the boy next door’s returning was no substitute for their own son who now never would come home. The winter fogs closing in, while awakening all sorts of old memories and associations, seemed mainly miserable after years of hard sun. I was constantly cold. I kept warm by borrowing an enormous pram and fetching firewood from Well Hall Road where a stray bomb had badly damaged the tramlines. They were now digging up the road in order to re-lay the tracks. It was an example of an
ill wind blowing someone a bit of good because it turned out that the original lines had been laid between tarred oak blocks the size of cobblestones that burned beautifully. I made as many trips as I could, carting back the booty, and by the end people were coming from far and wide and practically tearing up the roadway with their fingernails just to get something to burn. My father was so pleased. I suppose it was the first time his son had ever brought back something into the house that the family needed. We stockpiled the blocks in the empty coal cellar. Meanwhile the new Labour Government was busily laying out plots for prefabs on the parkland along the edge of Glenesk Road to ease the acute housing shortage. It was the very place where as a boy I used to gather horse mushrooms near the elm trees they’d just felled.

– As I said, I did try to remain in touch with the Boschettis. Adelio wrote me strange emotional letters I couldn’t quite fathom. By now he was nineteen, rising twenty. The new post-war Italian state was carrying on with the old system of military service for boys of eighteen, but since his father was dead Adelio was now technically the head of the family, being the only son, so he was exempt. With hindsight it’s clear that he was already in the grip of a lifelong melancholia which eventually was his ruin. Nowadays with its customary inaccuracy the medical profession can no longer distinguish melancholia. It thinks it’s the same as depression but of course it isn’t. In my experience depression nearly always involves some degree of physical inertia. By his own account Adelio’s heaviness of spirit went with an increasing lightness of body and the energy to walk everywhere. He even described himself as ‘getting thinner’, so he must have become positively gaunt. He was weeping a lot, he said, without knowing why, and going on long excursions to these very slopes. He must surely have derived some pleasure from this since these were the half-remembered hills of childhood, his primal landscape. I believe he walked almost daily from above Rigutino across the Valle di Chio and up into the hills over Ristonchia, passing
Spinabbio and Campo Gelato, on up to the summit of Sant’ Egidio. I think you and I would hardly recognise these same hills he walked then. They had been seriously over-grazed since well before the war; but when the front passed in the summer of 1944 with the Allies pushing northwards and the Germans falling back only slowly, most of the people down here in the valley took to the hills to avoid the fighting. They crowded into the scattered farm-houses like your own up there and ate practically anything that moved, even leaves and crickets by the end. So when Adelio was doing his daily walk in the late forties this mountain would have been practically a desert. No more hares and rabbits, hardly a songbird, the foxes all gone. The provincial government then did something unusually sensible. Faced with tens of thousands of PoWs being repatriated from all over the world, most of whom urgently needed work, Tuscany gave them the job of replanting the forests that had been decimated for firewood or grazed to extinction. As I’m sure you know, most of the conifers on this mountain were planted after the war. The old chestnuts and oaks are original, of course. Because chestnuts yielded the staple
farina
dolce
people took care of them, and scrub oaks grow like weeds here in any case. But all the pines and most of the mixed deciduous trees were planted by returning prisoners of war, and because nobody has any livestock today these hills are entirely ungrazed except by wild boar and porcupines. I shouldn’t think they’ve been so thickly wooded since the time of the Etruscans.

– Anyway, Adelio volunteered to help with this replanting. Mirella tried to make him go to university but he wouldn’t. She was even driven to write to me occasionally, mainly because she was at her wits’ end about her son. He seemed to lack all drive, all ambition. He had given up the idea of a diplomatic career, he said. He was quite disillusioned about politics and world affairs. He just roamed the hills with a book in his pocket or dabbled at planting seedlings with returned prisoners. Personally I wouldn’t have said he had the physique for that sort of work but he claimed it was a solace. Time went by.

–I, meanwhile, was busy trying to capitalise on the contacts I’d made in Egypt. I decided that playing the impostor and inducing people to open some doors for me might compensate a little for the grimness of London. Compared with Cairo it seemed a place entirely devoid of fleshpots or pleasures. Everything was still rationed, restaurant food was abominable, there was a flourishing black market if you didn’t mind dealing with spivs. Thanks to having worked for the embassy in Cairo I had a few friends in the Foreign Office as well as among ex-military types who were mostly demobbed and back in civvy street by now and trying to pick up what remained of their careers or family business. Julian Amery was an example of the latter. He had had a distinguished war in SOE specialising in the Balkans. It was for people like him that we’d stockpiled weapons in our warehouse in Alexandria. He kept volunteering to be parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia. I hadn’t seen him since the summer of 1942 when he was posted home from Cairo. I hadn’t even known he had survived the war. When I bumped into him in Whitehall at the end of 1945 he was most amiable. He remembered me as an Arabist and gave me some good introductions to friends of his in merchant banking. It was generous of him, especially since he must have been pretty preoccupied at that moment because his brother John was about to be hanged as a traitor. Awful scandal, really. John had run guns for Franco in the thirties and then made pro-Nazi broadcasts from Berlin for Hitler. His defence counsel tried to get him off by claiming that he was a Spanish citizen, but there was scant patience for that kind of technicality at the time and they hanged him regardless, just as they did Joyce who was claiming to be an American. You know, Lord Haw-Haw. Strange that the Amery brothers should have wound up on opposite sides of the same war, one decorated for bravery and the other executed for high treason.

– Merchant banking? Well may you wonder. It was more to do with my languages and contacts than it was with any interest in banking as such. I had surprised myself by discovering that I
wasn’t bad at business, at least at street level. It takes a certain insouciance, I suppose, to live off the pornography trade in a foreign country, and I had gained a good deal of confidence in my ability to busk my way along and know whose palm to grease. Given that the world of money, like that of politics, functions mainly on bluff and bullshit plus a degree of raw instinct, it was natural that an impostor like myself should have drifted into the sort of circles that needed
consultants.
That, really, has been my living since the war. Not only am I by nature a lover, albeit a failed one; I am also by nature a consultant. I know lots of people and I like picking their brains. I also like putting people in touch with one another, and the more disparate they are the more I enjoy it. And that was what I was doing in the late forties with Julian Amery’s banking friends. Did Barclays DCO need to convince the new Egyptian minister of foreign trade and finance that it was in Egypt’s interest for the bank to keep its offices and branches there, despite the growing unpopularity of all signs of British presence? Send for old Jayjay, who not only speaks the lingo but who knew the minister personally when he was a leading light in the Wafd Party. Barclays were not aware that old Jayjay had once sold the minister a film of a British girl from Kenya, one of the fishing fleet who had become stranded in Cairo, being pleasured by an athletic Egyptian postman and a springer spaniel. Had they known they would no doubt have been horrified, suspecting blackmail, for back in those days the ethical code of the City of London was still deplorably rigid. But there was no blackmail involved. I flew out to see the minister and we reminisced about the war years in that expansive, tea-sipping Egyptian fashion. Neither of us alluded to the film; we both knew we remembered the episode perfectly. If anything it was a bond between us and nothing to do with vulgar threats. Over a leisurely lunch he agreed it was vital for Barclays to go on being represented in Egypt and I promised him that an account would be opened for him in London should he ever need, for whatever unforeseeable reason, to send surplus personal funds out of Egypt
at a time when small-minded Egyptian politicians might make such transactions illegal. A year or two later I was sent on a similar mission to Tripoli where in those days of King Idris practically everyone who counted in government or the professions spoke Italian and only a minority spoke Arabic. Send for Jayjay again.

– It was on the way back from Tripoli that I flew to Rome, caught a train and went to visit the Boschettis. I found Mirella and Anna at home in Pieve di Rigutino but it seemed that Adelio had moved out and had gone to live with an aunt a few miles away. Anna was now in her late teens and had become rather a beautiful girl. It was curious seeing them again, now on home territory at last. We spent the evening reminiscing; and such is the power of reminiscence that wartime Alexandria began to take on an aura of the good old days, whereas at the time the political undercurrents of Fascism and the warfare that was about to engulf us had been anything but good. Either Mirella was being highly selective or she had an extraordinary ability to forget. She had after all worked in Mussolini’s foreign service, yet to hear her talk one would think she had been just an ordinary housewife and mother who had never driven around town in the company of a Nazi spy but had simply been swept up in the war like anyone else. To some extent I suppose there was some truth in it: she had indeed been caught in Alexandria because she had a husband in the military. But there was much that was disingenuous about her version of the past. She invited some friends and neighbours over to the house and introduced me too fulsomely as the gallant Englishman who had saved her family’s lives.