*
Rows were eroding my feeling for Jean-Paul and no doubt his for me. But, being in no mood to placate him, I rang Dr P to ask if he had something for stomach cramps, saying that if he phoned a prescription to a chemist, I’d pick it up.
Instead, he took me to dinner and insisted that a glass or so of wine could hardly hurt me.
‘You haven’t got an ulcer,’ he reminded me. ‘It’s just stress. Why are you stressed?’
I hadn’t the nerve to say. And when he offered to walk me back to the rue de Buci, which was a worrying move, since we risked running into a visiting Jean-Paul, I found myself crying, which must have persuaded Dr P that I was a bit unbalanced. Stress?
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked gently. ‘Can’t you tell me?’
I should have said, ‘It’s because I find you attractive.’ It was on the tip of my tongue and would probably have gone down well. Most people, after all, like to be liked.
What stopped me was seeing Jean-Paul over his shoulder. Real? Imaginary? Was guilt making me hallucinate? Fearful of finding out, I thanked Dr P for dinner, rammed my key into the lock in the door of my porte cochère and went in, closing the door behind me.
I left for Dublin that week and did not meet Jean-Paul again until some decades later when he saw me on French television promoting the translation of my novel, No Country for Young Men, got in touch and invited Lauro and me to dinner. We accepted and spent a pleasantly sedate evening with him and his pretty wife in their house in Bourg-la-Reine, outside Paris. Jean-Paul, who didn’t in the least resemble his old self, was now a psychiatrist and clearly living comfortably. The occasion was, however, a trifle odd. The word Communist was not mentioned, and he seemed to have forgotten that he had ever loved Stalin. In his eyes the unique purpose of our meeting must have been to show me that Seán had been wrong to think him a poor match. The four of us agreed, while saying good night, that his wife and he would come and dine with us in London, but they later called off the visit.
*
In Dublin in 1956 I decided to burn my thesis, which Moreau had more or less approved, though I did not. Gaston Baty as a topic didn’t really appeal to me, but I had discovered this too late. My plans for a subsidiary thesis had collapsed, too, for I had given up on Artaud as being thrilling but daunting – as any assessment of an artist subject to spasms of frenzy must, I imagine, risk being. So before leaving Paris I asked Samuel Beckett if I might write instead about him. He discouraged me, as he did everyone until fifteen years later, when Deirdre Bair, who was obviously more persuasive than I, made the same request and this time he agreed.
I was disappointed, because I had been enjoying his work since 1953 when a mutual friend gave tickets to the poet David Gascoyne and myself for the first production of En Attendant Godot, then lent me Beckett’s novels. It was a time of experiment in the Paris theatre, where Beckett was bracketed in people’s minds with Adamov, Ionesco and Genet, whose opacity was equally intriguing. I loved both opaque and open-ended narratives. They left you wondering. I didn’t necessarily think of Godot, for instance, as God. The Italian verb, godo, fitted just as well, and when the play was in English gave it the title ‘While waiting I come’, which was pleasingly paradoxical and connected with the play-acting with shoes (godasses in French) by the two tramps.
Play melts barriers, as our family had learned on wet days in West Cork when, rather than chat, we played cards so as to let monolingual Gaelic-and English-speakers join in.
*
Back in Ireland, having freed myself from Baty, I emptied my mind by hiring a horse and learning to jump double fences from an ex-jockey. Unfortunately he taught me to ride with my bottom in the air and the shortest of stirrup-leathers. When I said I wanted to do a sitting gallop instead, he pooh-poohed the idea with a leer.
‘Listen to me, ma’am,’ he argued, ‘the ones that sit back are in the military and, sit back so as to be able to draw their sabres. Now you don’t have a sabre, am I right?’
*
At Christmas it snowed, and Patricia and Richard, who were now living by a lake in a close-by bog, invited Seán, Eileen and me to dinner and, as there were said to be deep snow-drifts into which Seán’s small Wolsely could slip and disappear, Patricia’s brother, Keesje, who was staying with them, fetched us in a jeep. He and his two small sons were in Ireland to try to calm the despair which had gripped the three of them when the boys’ mother unexpectedly died in South Africa from a freak malady. Patricia had conceived a mad hope that I might help console Keesje, but Eileen, who had sat next to him on the drive through the snowy, starlit bog, confided later that his clenched profile had made her fear that, at any moment, he might swerve off the road and kill us all. She had, she said, sensed a doom hovering over him, for she claimed to have a feel for such things and often slept with a scarf over her forehead to prevent her third eye from detecting forces which it was as well to leave undisturbed. She had learned about the third eye from an Indian who lived in Howth.
Men were trouble. She didn’t want me taking up with another one. What she would like, she told me wistfully, was for me to take a crash course in Gaelic and become proficient enough to get a job in my own country – ideally in the diplomatic corps, which would allow me to travel but always bring me home.
‘Like a dog on a long leash!’ I teased, and, though we laughed, I knew she meant it. My failure to learn Gaelic, which other people’s daughters did with ease, struck her as perverse.
‘A crash course,’ she wheedled. ‘The Sacred Heart schools are no good at Gaelic. We should never have sent you to them. There must be lots of good teachers around, so why not give it a try?’
*
Instead, like generations of emigrants before me, I went to London.
It seemed to be full of people obsessed with what they wore. A school where I taught for a term made the girls change several times daily, and the taste for uniforms persisted into adulthood. Men wore defining ties, and boys couldn’t wait to get into the rig of pinstripe and bowler to strut down the King’s Road. A man who was then a radical, but later became a Thatcherite peer, came with me to Trafalgar Square to hear Nye Bevan denounce British action in Suez, then took me to tea in the Ritz. He had been to a wedding earlier and wore a morning suit, which struck me as a sign of readiness to turn one’s coat. The suit bore the message ‘Don’t count on me; I’ll revert to type’.
Patricia, over on a visit, warned, ‘Don’t talk politics. People here don’t like it.’ I found this baffling. How, if not in such talk, did you test your views? Jean-Paul’s head had been brimming with emphatic ones, and, like Stendhal’s heroine, I had borne off what was in it. Much of this was compatible with my own heritage: radical sympathies spliced with disillusion, which was rampant that year. The discrediting of Stalin, the invasion of Budapest and the divisiveness of the Algerian War kept it on the bubble. Nobody, however, cared to discuss this, so I began numbing myself with work and took two jobs, a daytime one as a supply teacher working for the London County Council, and a late-night one as a short-order cook in a place called the Moo Cow Milk Bar opposite Victoria Station. One of the waitresses there claimed to be a refugee from the troubles in Kenya and talked darkly of native savagery. Taking an Irish view of this, I wondered if the truth might be more tangled, and, sure enough, learned long afterwards that, when opinion in the Moo Cow Milk bar and the British press was ascribing atrocities to the Kikuyu, that tribe was being tortured and massacred by Brits at twice the rate at which the French were killing native Algerians. The difference was that French atrocities were known about, thanks both to the outraged French Left and to General Massu who claimed the right to torture anyone who had information which could save his men’s lives. English misdeeds, by contrast, were kept lengthily under wraps. No wonder people here didn’t like to talk about politics.
*
Edward McGuire had asked me to look up a girl in London with whom he was
in love, but whom his father had forbidden him to see. Rita was the most beautiful woman I ever met, but had no instinct for self-preservation. She was said to have been chosen by the film director Michael Cacoyannis for a major part in a film, but to have missed her chance by failing to turn up to an appointment. There was a series of such stories, including one about a youth who had so adored her that he built a shrine in her honour.
‘Yes, but she’s been around too long,’ shrugged a cynical friend. ‘Nobody will marry her now.’
Rita kept begging me to assure her that Edward would marry her, but I thought it wise not to raise her hopes, if only because of the emphasis with which he cursed his father for being ‘a bloody businessman!’ ‘I’m a painter,’ he often complained with pride. ‘But to paint I need money.’ And it was clear that he wanted the best of both worlds and that his father wouldn’t let him have it, possibly because he himself, from what people told me, was a good amateur painter who may once have faced the same choice as Edward and chosen business over art.
Rita, meanwhile, lived from hand to mouth, doing odd jobs in boutiques and restaurants up and down the King’s Road.
On one of my evenings off from the Moo Cow Milk Bar, I filled in for her by waitressing in a place run, or perhaps owned, by a sprig of the Anglo-Irish gentry. It was Friday, and some Irish construction workers, who had clearly strayed from their familiar beat, came in for dinner asking for fish. The sprig thought at first that he had none, then located some ancient prawns.
‘Have they a pong?’ he asked me sotto voce.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure? They seem all right to me.’ He was as feckless as the squireens whom Maria Edgeworth so brilliantly described in Castle Rackrent. ‘I’ll slosh brandy over them,’ he decided. ‘That’ll hide it.’
Meanwhile, five or six Irish heads, all as pink as peony buds, were converging in consultation – possibly about walking out.
‘Quick,’ said the sprig, ‘pour them some Guinness. Tell them it’s on the house and that the prawns will be ready in no time.’
‘They’re really off, you know,’ I warned and mouthed the words ‘fish poisoning’.
But he had the bit between his teeth. ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘that’s just how prawns smell.’
Since Rita could have lost her job if I warned the Irishmen, I kept mum, though I was tempted not to. The restaurant, I consoled myself with thinking, was unlikely to survive long if its owner sloshed brandy and Guinness around so readily. It would have been cheaper to make his customers an omelette.
*
Patricia had given me an introduction to a man called Poldy von Loewenstein-Wertheim, who said he had a claim to the English throne through the Stuarts and the House of Bavaria. He mocked himself amusingly, translated tales from the German and paid me to check his English. As he and his wife, formerly Diana Gollancz, gave me lunch whenever I did this, it made me feel a touch guilty, since Poldy and she were clearly short of cash. Later I heard that his son by a previous wife had become a financial adviser to the Rolling Stones and, thanks to his financial savvy, prosperous. Clearly the source of the savvy wasn’t genetic, but I hoped some prosperity would go Poldy’s way. Patricia, however, who came from a rich family, had a pitiless little smile when I mentioned my scruples. ‘Diana’, she told me, ‘spent her youth darning her dressing gown and being bullied by her father. Anything is better than that, so don’t worry about either of them.’
*
About this time I got work as a translator at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. I went out there whenever the European Parliament was in session, and in between came back to work for the LCC, filling in for absent teachers all over London. I stayed for what felt like a long time in a Dickensian school in the East End, where they couldn’t get teachers at all, and only left when one of the mums, a large, muscular woman, barged into my class and threatened to beat me up. Upsettingly, her son, though disruptive, was also one of the brightest children in my class and, when I put him out of the classroom for using four-letter words to a little girl, he had been found and caned by the headmaster. It was a violent place, jammy with soot, and had been scheduled for dismantling years before.
In soothing contrast, friends of Seán’s took me to clubs in the West End and, in Rita’s company, I idled in its pubs. That I had lost my protective colouring as a fille bien became clear on an afternoon when I paused in Paris on my way through from Strasbourg. Patricia Murphy, the poet, happened to be there, too, and so did the literary editor of the New Statesman, John Raymond, who was over to interview some woman writer, I think Marguerite Yourcenar. The three of us had a drink at the Deux Magots and, when I went down to the lavatory, a man was waiting for me. It was Lucian Freud, who some weeks before had tried to detach me from my escort at the Gargoyle Club in London. He looked a bit like a gargoyle himself, and in the Magots lavatory the flush of plumbing reinforced an impression of spitting rage.
‘You should know,’ he said, ‘that since you polluted yourself with that disgusting creature, John Raymond, I no longer desire to sleep with you.’ With that, he turned and sped up the stairs.
An odd encounter, given that neither man meant a thing to me. I had thought neither of sleeping with Raymond – who was unlikely to have thought of it either, since he was a Catholic convert – nor about Freud, except to remember that he had been a mentor to Swift and McGuire. My mind was on my own past; so learning that I might figure in, and even ‘pollute’, other people’s fantasies, gave me the mildest of jolts. The self-absorbed are hard to ruffle. Slowly, though, irritation surfaced. After all, had I not spent my childhood trying to cope with the coercive fantasies of my Gaelicising parents and their dreaming generation? Being reproached for failing to play a role for which I had not volunteered was a replay, and, as replays do, it helped get the past in focus.
In the Magots’ lavatory, however, my first reaction was annoyance at the male habit of defining women in terms of the men with whom they’re seen.
But I wished that Dr P had been half as enterprising as Freud. Seán’s letters kept urging me to give up the Moo Cow Milk Bar and try writing. So I did both, to the indignation of the Moo Cow manager, who claimed that I was wasting my training, since I could have had a future in the business and that, after the way I had let him down, he would never hire another graduate. Unworried by this – the pay had been risible – I began to write a radio play about a private boarding school for girls where I had taught for a term. It was located in St Albans and staffed by geriatric lesbians.
‘They’re all varsity women!’ the headmistress had boasted, while glancing with disdain at my Irish-Roman-Parisian CV. She claimed she couldn’t afford to pay me the Burnham scale, a rate of pay on which her staff were all too old and tottery to insist. We haggled, and my determination stiffened when I learned that I was to replace a French teacher who had unexpectedly dropped dead. In the end I enjoyed a small triumph at being the only one in this Do-the-Girls Hall to be paid the legal salary. Nicole, the resident mademoiselle, was young, freshly arrived in England and disgracefully exploited. Half stupefied with boredom, she told me, she had volunteered to wash and lay out my dead predecessor, and had no doubt been underpaid for that, too, if she was paid at all, since it was not the sort of job whose rate of pay one tends to know.
‘It interested me to do it,’ she admitted. ‘It was a challenge.’
Staying in that school was itself a challenge. The food was appalling: far worse than anything I had tasted in Ireland, let alone in London state schools where lunches were good, and pupils unlikely to accept anything as foul as the bread and dripping served here as elevenses to both staff and pupils. Yet several of those girls’ brothers were at Eton, and the sisters revelled in reporting their doings. Nicole and I amused ourselves by imagining other economies which their families might impose on their daughters so as to help stump up Eton fees for their male offspring.
I can’t recall whether I used any of this in my radio play,
which was broadcast while I was in Strasbourg, and for which I eventually received a cheque from the BBC. Next I wrote a story about meeting Romana in the Roman convent, and the New Yorker took that. Both pieces were crude caricature and had no doubt been accepted only because they were taken to be reports from the youth front. I also sold something to American Vogue. Later I grew ambitious, tried to write better, and sold nothing for years. I had made a false start as a writer, and the real one would not come into being for nearly another decade. Meanwhile I worked as a translator, taught languages and considered trying to get work as an interpreter at the UN. This would have required me to add a third ‘official language’ to my French and English, since you needed three to apply, and Italian did not count. Hesitating between Spanish and Russian, I made a stab at both. Meanwhile I also fiddled at writing. Why, I sometimes wonder, was I so slow to take off? Perhaps because, in an attempt to train myself in simultaneous interpreting, I developed a habit of turning news items read or heard on the radio from or into French and Italian. My mind at times was a clutter of cliché in three languages.
*
Stints in Strasbourg combined work and conviviality. Money flowed, and even translators were booked on ‘champagne flights’ – you could drink all you liked! – and put up in comfortable hotels. Pay was lavish, or seemed so to me. One sensed a barrier, though, between the grand, who were MPs or ministers, and the less than grand who were sometimes typists – though a few of these, thanks to family connections, were grander than anyone. Translators came in between and, despite their linguistic skills, tended to cluster in Anglophone groups. Perhaps living in Strasbourg had made full-time ones homesick. One old stager who cast an occasional eye on my work found French manners an affront. When I translated an account of a ceremony in the European parliament in which two male politicians embraced, he argued that this could not have happened.
Trespassers Page 18
