Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  So I didn’t go to war. But, although I’d disliked the army, and my Christian principles told me it was naughty to shoot foreigners, I’d have welcomed returning to the Canal to fight. I enjoyed my job in advertising but I had an addiction to new experience. I longed for travel and adventure, I’d developed a taste for the uncertainties of life, its random encounters and brief intimacies. If I had to choose between the chances, I definitely wished to choose the odd.

  13

  Jordan

  ‘I gather your mother’s been released,’ Father remarked while filling his pipe.

  We were seated on the terrace of a ramshackle bar by the side of a dusty track. For this was the late ’fifties and Mallorca was a beautiful island as yet untouched by mass tourism. Cala d’Or consisted of a few whitewashed cottages, one modest hotel and the bar/restaurant where we sat, run by an alcoholic Italian not-so-ex-fascist and his long-suffering English wife. A handful of expats had beached here to drink out what remained of their nothing lives at the end of a sandy track that went no further. Such was the spot where Father had chosen to settle.

  Yes, Mother had left the asylum several months ago, I told him. Her stay there had been a long one and I’d visited her regularly, though not as often as I should have. It was saddening and awkward to do so, for she sat in bed, silent and withdrawn, making no response to the small talk it became increasingly hard to generate.

  ‘Was it the electric shocks that cured her?’ Father asked.

  ‘I think what did it was going there with her lawyer to try to get her power of attorney. Uncle Tony was getting a bit fed up with paying for everything. I needed to write cheques,’ I explained.

  Father chuckled grimly. ‘Yes, she wouldn’t want that,’ he said.

  Most emphatically Mother had not; the suggestion had produced a response not seen in weeks. I was convinced I’d effected her cure where doctors had failed, for she’d got better from that moment on. Within a fortnight she was back at Gilston Road and I realised her recovery was complete when she halved Nanny’s wages, which I’d raised to £5 a week in her absence.

  Mother was her old self again. And Father, whose whereabouts for so long had been a mystery, had finally come to roost – and invited me to stay. Previously, I’d have done everything in my power to avoid accepting, but curiosity had drawn me to his hideout. In a single year his novel Sea-wyf had transformed him into a best-selling author and earned him a fortune. He’d acquired a new partner, Adriana, a slim, voluble Italian in her thirties, inexplicably devoted to him. They had travelled around the world together searching for the perfect place to live, and for a while considered Australia until he found the natives’ friendliness insufferable. They were looking for seclusion, no people, beautiful surroundings and the discomfort they both enjoyed.

  Standing on a low cliff above a rocky sea inlet, the house he’d bought was constructed on several levels. A flight of steps led down to a private jetty and a boat house where he kept an Indian canoe. Furniture was basic, plank tables and upright chairs; the beds were peasant-style, made from cement and plaster. The house had no electricity or running water but a well instead, and a charcoal-burning stove. It and the waterside setting were enchantingly picturesque but the village was without amenities. The only telephone was in the one hotel.

  Father wrote in the morning while Adriana shopped for food and busied herself around the house. During the day I swam, lay in the sun and read, or took out the canoe among the rocky inlets. In the evening the three of us would meet for dinner and conversation, which had grown no easier with the passing years.

  After that early and brief discussion of Mother’s sanity, mostly we kept to neutral topics affecting neither of us, though I did remark on how well his book had been selling in the USA while I was in New York.

  ‘Yes, it’s gone splendidly, I’m told. It’s a relief not to have to think about money now,’ he said.

  ‘Must be marvellous,’ I agreed. ‘But do you have to pay tax and things?’

  ‘Oh tax,’ he repeated disparagingly. ‘No, the bank takes care of all that sort of stuff. That’s what they’re for.’ There seemed nothing more to be said.

  The tone of our uneasy relationship was not improved by an incident which took place a week after my arrival in Cala d’Or. One afternoon I’d taken the Indian canoe and Father’s fishing spear and paddled out to the headland in an attempt to harpoon our dinner. I’d watched the villagers doing so at night with lanterns, but in daylight I was unsuccessful. Getting bored with this, I paddled to the almost deserted beach below the hotel, where Father would meet me later after making a telephone call. Hauling the canoe clear of the water, I lay down in the sun and went to sleep.

  I woke to the sound of voices. A photographer with untidy, boyish hair and German accent, together with assistant, make-up, and four models, was at work on the rocks beside me. Three of the girls were wearing swimsuits, one was being fitted into a black rubber wetsuit which the assistant was smearing with a slick sheen of Vaseline. It was an unexpected and welcome sight, I sat up to watch. ‘Can we borrow your harpoon?’ the photographer called down to me in Spanish.

  ‘Of course,’ I told him and he introduced himself: Helmut Newton. The name meant nothing to me, but I was thrilled to meet him and his alluring group. I lent him the fish spear with alacrity. When, a few shots later, he requested the canoe I was glad to give it him. And shortly after, when he asked for my body, I was more than happy to oblige. ‘In background only,’ he explained, to my disappointment. And so it was at first but, as the models changed into further swimsuits and Helmut’s perverse imagination dreamed up yet more highly charged set-ups, I improved my part, becoming ever more entranced within it. At the moment when Father, having made his call, strode on to the beach so that we might paddle the canoe back to the house together, the boat lay overturned at the water’s edge and a half-naked model sprawled helpless across its capsized hull. Above her reared a glistening black rubber avenger of flawless Nordic beauty poised to plunge the harpoon into her helpless victim, while I crouched at the fury’s feet, clutching her shiny calves in anguish.

  Lost in the drama of my role, I did not see Father as he stalked across the sand towards us with a set and rigid face. The first I knew of his presence in the scene was when he snatched his fish spear from the black avenger’s hand. With one heave he righted the canoe, sending the hapless model sprawling. Standing among the rest, silent and open-mouthed in surprise, with them I watched his retreating back as, stiff with fury, he dragged the boat into the shallows, clambered in and paddled off.

  Dinner that night was more than usually strained. That it took place by candlelight on the house’s terrace overlooking the still waters of the cala and a view of starlit tranquillity made no difference. Adriana did her best, chattering away brightly in an Italian fashion, but Father remained silent. I said I thought I should go back to London tomorrow.

  ‘Oh yes, your job,’ Adriana exclaimed, grasping at the opening. ‘So interesting, it must be fascinating to make commercials. Such a good profession.’

  Father grunted. ‘Piffling way to spend your life. Frightful second-rate people,’ he observed morosely.

  I took a sip of wine. ‘Actually, I’ve given up making commercials,’ I said in a throwaway voice.

  He was wearing his hanging-judge face already; his expression didn’t change, but I detected a glint of satisfaction in his eye. ‘Fired, were you?’ he asked after a long silence.

  ‘No, actually, I left.’

  No response but a glance of ‘I told you so’ to Adriana.

  ‘I’ve got another job,’ I added. ‘Writing and producing documentary films. About Britain.’

  It took a little while for him to digest this – a pause which was filled with Adriana’s Italian enthusiasm. Then he asked, ‘Who on earth would want to waste money making films no one wants to look at?’

  ‘The British Government,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a job with something called the Central O
ffice of Information.’

  He stared at me disgustedly. ‘Good God,’ he uttered at last, ‘You mean you’ve become a civil servant! Rolled umbrella, bowler hat … you’ll be getting a mortgage next!’

  The COI was a modern concrete and glass building in Lambeth. The walls of its entrance plaza, open to the street, displayed a vast mosaic mural depicting the labours of Hercules. Every night at closing time the local residents stumbled from the pubs, fumbling their chalks, to fall upon it with drunken enthusiasm.

  Morning would reveal these lurid tableaux. Heroic figures balling with gigantic organs, epically defecating and discharging torrents of highly coloured sperm would greet the stream of civil servants emerging from the tube station to run the rude gauntlet with downcast eyes and reach their desks unsettled. These graffiti formed the subject of lengthy internal memos, but the immutable regulations of government bureaucracy made it impossible for the cleaning staff to start work earlier than other employees in their regular morning task of returning the mosaic to its original design.

  Several hundred men and women worked in the building, though only about forty in the Film and TV Department, a half-dozen of these producers. For every person engaged in making film, three or more were employed to prevent him or her from doing so – or at least to render it as difficult as possible. Nevertheless, the department’s output was prodigious. Each month it despatched a total of four or five hours of cut film to the USA, Canada and the Commonwealth for transmission in a graveyard known as Public Service Time.

  My office was large and bare, furnished with a regulation metal desk and filing cabinet. Personal decorative touches were discouraged, though a framed photograph of an unexceptional wife and 2.2 children was permitted. Every Monday an elderly messenger issued each employee with a small tablet of soap and a clean hand-towel. Everyone went home at 5.30 sharp. But the man who ran the department was not what I’d expected. Charles de Vere Beauclerc was a spindly toff with a languid manner and Bertie Wooster voice, who later became the Duke of St Albans and my neighbour in the south of France.

  Here there were no perks or client lunches, and the government was a tighter-fisted employer than TVA had been. But I’d become bored by my peripheral role in putting together ads for cornflakes and washing powder. I wanted to make movies – a phase in youth as inevitable as acne; moreover, I had the misguided ambition to write and direct them myself, to become an auteur. Now I had the chance to do so, though the topics were not those I’d have chosen myself. I’d been at the COI for a couple of months, making two-minute shorts on subjects like morris dancing and Salisbury Cathedral when the department was commissioned to produce a series of four half-hour films on youth in Britain. The reason these were given to me to put together was not because I was considerably younger than the other producers, but because the work involved going on location for several weeks. The others were married, the ‘living-away’ allowance was hopelessly inadequate, and they all hated filming outside London.

  ‘Oh yah, just one more thing,’ Charles Beauclerc said, after telling me I had the job, ‘The Minister wants a word with you before you start.’

  I reported to the Commonwealth Relations Office next day. There was never any question of going anywhere by taxi while working for the COI; they wouldn’t pay for it. I caught a bus across the river then walked up Whitehall to the imposing entrance in Downing Street. My name was checked and I took a seat to wait by a bulletin board with a few notices thumbtacked to its green felt. One, which was handwritten, read, Gentlemen are requested not to play fives on the first floor landing when the Secretary of State is in his office. Told to go up, I climbed the stately marble staircase. The building was immensely grand. While making my way along a wide corridor from which tall mahogany double doors led into various offices, I overtook an antique cart loaded with brass coal scuttles which was being pushed down it very slowly by a wizened gnome in shapeless gulag uniform.

  There was a period in the eighteenth century when it was thought beneficial for people to be reminded constantly of death. The marble effigies of the deceased on their tombstones represent them not in the fullness of life but as corpses well advanced in decomposition. Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s shrunken body and sunken features conveyed that same impression. Deliquescence – accompanied by a delightful easy manner and enormous charm. He possessed an instinctive courtesy rare in the British aristocracy; it was impossible not to like him.

  His room – large, with tall windows, worn carpet, oil paintings and antique furniture – bore no resemblance to an office. He was dressed for the country in a tweed suit rather too big for him. It was a look I’d considered for myself as this was a Friday, but on the whole I’d thought grey flannel would be more appropriate, with the sixteen-inch rather than the fourteen-inch trouser bottoms.

  He gave me a cup of Earl Grey tea. ‘Now, about these films …’ he began, and I composed myself alertly to listen. Yes, of course they should feature young people, of course they should make their audience want to visit Britain, but this was not their principal objective. In their essence, they should convey the essential and abiding genius of the mother country and the innate virtue of Britishness … and of remaining part of the Commonwealth … the family. I made notes while he talked: Magna Carta … Houses of Parliament … unbroken tradition of democracy … political stability … constancy … decency … As he continued, the door opened – there was no knock – and the shrivelled gnome I’d passed earlier shuffled in with a fresh scuttle of coal for the open fire. ‘That’s what I mean,’ Home said. ‘This building’s been here 150 years and ever since that old chap’s been faithfully fulfilling his duty without anyone having to tell him or order him around.’

  Essential value of gnomes, I noted on the pad in front of me, enquiring whether these devoted old retainers ever posed a security risk. Not at all, he assured me genially, their ears were cauterised with a red-hot poker and their tongues cut out on starting here as lads.

  My briefing completed, he walked me to the door. ‘Don’t try to be clever, will you, Scott,’ he added as he showed me out. ‘These films have to be understood by our brown brothers, remember.’

  For three weeks I travelled the country, staying in third-rate hotels with a two-man 16mm camera crew provided by ITN, filming youth stuff and shooting interviews. I needed a thrusting figure to speak for youthful business enterprise. I asked my school friend Nigel Broackes if he’d come to the studio to be interviewed by Bernard Braden, who was presenting the series.

  On the day planned, Nigel arrived at the COI driving a 4.5-litre Bentley, which he parked in the forecourt. It was a while since I’d seen him, he’d put on a little weight and a certain gravitas and he exuded a visible air of prosperity and success. With Braden, we ran through the substance of the interview as Nigel explained his current activities. He’d founded and now controlled a plastics factory with sixty full-time employees and 150 outworkers in Bagshot; he’d started a hire-purchase company, Southern Counties Discount, which he ran from an office above Dr Scholl’s shoe shop in the Brompton Road; he’d become a director of a major real-estate agency; he’d entered the West End property market – with two partners he’d bought Green Park House overlooking the Park, which he was converting into ten luxury apartments and two shops.

  For someone who, like myself, was only twenty-four, it represented a considerable achievement. Towards the end of the interview Braden asked him what had made it possible.

  ‘A worn-out establishment, antiquated systems, obsolete old men hankering for ‘before the war’. We’re not crippled in the way they are,’ he answered.

  On camera, his manner and delivery came over not as boastful but calm and utterly self-confident. It was an impressive performance, but when I ran a rough cut of the interview to Charles Beauclerc he was scathing. ‘Pah, bet he comes a cropper!’ he remarked scornfully. I saw from his face that he was quite worked up about it and realised he was envious.

  I’d completed only the first o
f the youth films when I arrived at Hercules House to work one morning and was called to Beauclerc’s office where he sat with a cup of tea and a plate of ginger biscuits on the desk in front of him. He said, ‘You probably heard the news on the radio; there’s been a revolution in Iraq. They’ve assassinated Prince Feisal, their ruler.’ He nibbled fastidiously on a biscuit. ‘In fact, it seems they’ve eaten him. We think Jordan may go the same way. Last night we sent in a paratroop brigade to secure the country and support the king. Under international law, it’s a bit iffy, there’s going to be a whole hullabaloo in the UN, the Arab countries, Russia … We’re saying we’ve been invited to go in, but we need favourable news footage showing how popular and welcome the British troops are. Can you go there this afternoon?’

  ‘Of course,’ I told him.

  I went back to my flat to pack a bag. Before catching a train to Stansted Airport I stopped by Gilston Road to pick up my Colt .45. ‘Now you just be careful with that thing, Jeremy. Don’t you go shooting anyone,’ Nanny told me, unearthing it from her trunk.

  I flew to Jordan on a military Dakota loaded with war materiel and supplies. I was the only passenger. I had no camera crew; I’d been told to borrow one from ITN, with whom the COI had a contract. Amman airport had been closed to commercial traffic, but there were several taxis outside. I got into one, telling the driver to take me to a hotel.

  ‘Philadelphia?’ he asked.

  The name was familiar from a guide book to Jordan I’d consulted before leaving. It was the only decent hotel in Amman, but on my living-away allowance of £3 15s. I couldn’t afford the place. ‘Not the Philadelphia,’ I told him.