The facts were: well, Jack was getting on … Painting … The galleries … Perhaps he’d been seen around a bit too long … It didn’t get any easier to live hand to mouth, hang on to promise … Oh, it had been fun. Belsize Park: they’d managed to stay put a good deal longer already than they could afford … Something cheaper in the country …? losing contacts … there didn’t seem to be many cottages any more to be lent to one … And now there was this offer. A JOB.
Art master at a school. In New Zealand. (Or was it Australia? both were remote to me.) A decent salary. Very decent, Jack said. A three-year contract; extendable. Passage paid. A house of their own in the school compound.
Can you see us live in a school? What a laugh. Can you see Susan? I thought they already could see themselves – respectability at a certain point may look adventurous.
Their people were pleased, even though it was the other side of the world. And it wasn’t that Jack would have to give up being a painter – holidays were long. It would be warm, Susan said, sun the year round, like living in the South again, and I guessed that she was harking back to a Mediterranean beach of some past summer, perhaps the very beach on which she had encountered my mother. ‘And what will you do?’ they asked (as if reading my mind).
I thought of the moment in Italy, at Cortina when the telegram had come for Doris offering a screen test and I had said You must go, and had stayed on by myself at the hotel. (That hadn’t been so bad. Or had it?) Now my reaction was dread – What will happen to me? I had the (elementary) grace not to show this and threw myself into discussing their pros and cons. The pros had to have it. Their families were already seeing them with new eyes – to the length of proposing to pay off their debts. (No more pawning of my cigarette case.) Whatever rigours and stuffinesses they might meet with in antipodean scholastic life, they would be sure to draw some amusement from; they’d be much forgiven and liked. (This turned out to be so: reports trickled through that Susan if she had sometimes scandalised, had charmed.) At the worst, we summed up, they’d be back in three years – Jack wasn’t getting on all that much – solvent and, who knows, with a show’s worth of canvases ablaze with an exotic vegetation.
They were not to sail until the autumn and I was going to spend the best part of the summer months at Sanary, so I did not assist in the dismantling of Belsize Park, and the question of my future could be treated by all concerned with marked unurgency. In the end, with a minimum of misrepresentations, it all slid into a new, or not so new, arrangement.
When I say all concerned I do not only mean the Robbinses, Alessandro (a benevolent word in edgeways), my mother (who could by no means always be relied upon to act passively), I have to include the powers – seen as dark, and largely in the dark, but powers all the same – who technically controlled my destiny until I came of age. I was still a ward of that court in Germany. It had a hydra-headed identity because the communications we were so slow in opening and responding to emanated, above gothically convoluted signatures, from a team of Oberlandesgerichtsrats and Amtsreferendars. We forebore to speculate how far they were in ignorance or at least in doubt about facts that must have appeared both nebulous and irregular to those good men (I did not refer to them with such equanimity at the time), so irregular indeed that whenever they took a collegiate look at what in some far-away cabinet must have been my file, they may have felt it best to let it lie. Sleeping dogs in another country … They may have prayed as hard as I did to have done with me. Unfortunately there were still quite some years to go.
I don’t remember or never really knew how the new arrangement was put over, or who instigated it and why; what seems odder is that it was made at all. A line of least resistance … It suited me. What emerged by late September – towards the end of a pleasant stay en famille in France – was that I was to go on spending the rough equivalent of the school-year in England pursuing – pursuing what? – well, my pursuits, and that I was to live in London under the protection, as Victorian novels put it, of Mr and Mrs Nairn (not met, unlike Jack and Susan, by my mother) which in practice meant a bed-sitter in Upper Gloucester Place found for me by Rosie Falkenheim ten steps from her own door.
Independence was to go the length of my managing the monthly money. (So far it had been sent to the Robbinses who had given me a share: well below a dress allowance but good pocket money.) And there I ran into an embarrassment at the outset. The room Rosie had chosen was a first-floor front for something like 25/6d. or 27/6d. a week with breakfast. I had only just realised how little the total amount of my allowance was (and how little the generous Robbinses had been taking for my keep!). There was a smaller room free to let, the landlady revealed, a top-floor back at 21/6d. When I said I would have that one, Rosie did not understand my choice. I ought to have talked facts but lacked the savoir-faire. She and Toni did not think talking money nice and moreover were convinced somehow that I belonged to a well-off family. I said I preferred to be high up; she said, it was I who’d have to live in it, and I knew that she thought me stingy. There’d be more occasions such as this. At sixteen, independence and friendship with one’s elders have their strings attached.
* * *
So there I was for a good part of the next three years in my room in Upper Gloucester Place trotting about London, latchkey and all. A not inconsiderable slice of life. They say that if you spend thirty years in one place they go in a flash. If this is so, the speed must be terrifying. In my own life, I found that the fragments it got carved into went fast, much too fast – the year in Portugal, the year in Mexico, five in New York, seven in Rome, three years in Essex, the decades, more than one, in Mediterranean France … Time split by places, by events – rushing towards the war, blowing away the post-war years – everything that happened as one got hold of it was over.
Is there remission in childhood? Time can feel long – or slow: not the same. I remember such stretches, yet on the whole even then things seemed to – did – pass, change, as one was settling in. So now in adolescence I felt no impatience for anything to happen to me. (Curiosity about people and the world, readiness for adventure, escapades on a minor scale were side-lines, not committal.) I had an instinct that already things had gone too far for me, I should like to have moved backward if one could (backward to where? unanswerable question). Perhaps like my mother I just preferred to remain in the day.
Her tendency not to take care of the Future overmuch may have come from a sense of the Future being already flawed: she had lived as an adult through a war that had irretrievably damaged civilisation; on the private level she had entered one marriage she could not absolve herself from and another bound to give hostages to fortune. My case was different. If I saw the Future as indefinite and not yet here, I also saw it – world and peace permitting – rosy. One would be happy. I might attain the one thing I ought to be, a writer. This by now seemed to have been accepted, by my mother explicitly, ‘If you have the talent’. (The bugbears at the Oberlandesgericht had not heard of it.) A most exalted calling – A Writer. (I never referred to it as author in my mind; still don’t.) I knew that I could never be a musician or a painter, were I ever to make my catch it could only be in words.
In more frivolous moments I thought of being a barrister as immensely interesting and exciting – and it might have been good training for that ultimate vocation – but my sex at the time was against it, not to mention my educational deficiencies. (At that stage I was convinced that I could learn almost anything including a new language in six months flat.) Meanwhile I occasionally faced the question: How does one become a writer? By writing. But the writing – the little that got done – wasn’t going well: not the stuff that becomes transfigured into A Book. So I stuck to the only apprenticeship I thought there was (today I might have thought of journalism?): I went on reading. Please God, make me a writer, but not yet.
When I am trying to think of those years in NW1, and I haven’t thought of them for a very long time, they seem to have been all of a piece,
a uniform round. It can’t have been wholly like that. There must have been some process of growing up, at whatever rate; life does widen and not only by visits to the British Museum, the Tate and Winchester Cathedral. Yet the only thing that remains vivid is the physical feel of living in London, young and on very little though sufficient money. The buses – one was always running after, catching or just missing a last bus; the queueing for a play in Shaftesbury Avenue; the Lyons’ Corner House afterwards (poached egg on toast); Bovril at a coffee stall very late at night; the elegance of Mayfair streets at lunchtime; how splendid the men, how pretty the girls, how well dressed everyone was, how en fête; the smell of the cheaper Soho restaurants (upholstery, grease, spice, trapped air); my digs.
A strip of a room, a strip of none too appetising carpet, a sash window (rather awful curtain), the whole reasonably clean: a respectably kept bed and breakfast place. I had a gas ring (used to good purpose with a pot and a pan I got at Woolworth’s), a basin with hot and cold; breakfast was in bed, brought up on a tray, English breakfast, not very well cooked, plentiful, welcome. It was a far cry from the whitewashed space I associated with living in Italy and Provence, but it could do, and it did. One great boon was the bath – half-landing down – generally vacant, with an abundant supply of steaming hot water (our southern abodes depended on rainfall and cisterns, seldom satisfactorily filled, and capricious wood-burning contraptions to warm the trickle).
Part of the day and the late night walks were my own, a solitariness I needed and enjoyed, the rest I played satellite to the Nairns. And it is they rather than what happened to my younger self who occupy my memory of those years: their daily life, their lives, their story. It got to me piecemeal. I never knew it all, but I got to know a good deal. The Two Sisters. That would be the title had it been a play (Jamie’s role – though this was not evident to me for some time – was not a principal’s). Some of it puzzles me still; I never fathomed Toni. Although she remained a great friend; she died in the nineteen-seventies, the result of an accident brought about by her own obstinacy.
In the late Twenties when I shared so much of their London life, Toni and Jamie must have been married for some years. They had met in Berlin (where the Falkenheims came from). Their father had been a doctor who died early leaving his widow – a somewhat over-cosseted woman – comfortably off. They lived in a large, properly staffed, rented flat in the Kurfürstendamm district. There were no brothers. The male element was an uncle, a bachelor who lived well, doted on Toni (said to have looked enchanting in a fragile way when a young girl). He encouraged her singing, took her to the opera, to the great performances of the time, and to suppers at places like Horcher’s and Kempinsky’s where he gave her caviar (literally), delicate little ragouts and sips of Château Yquem (again literally). This uncle had less time for Rosie, older, more independent and, as I said before, just scraping home as a jolie laide.
The girls grew up in that cultivated, liberal society which flourished in Berlin in the decade before the Kaiser’s War: professional men, artists, actors, journalists and musicians, bankers and aristocrats with a large but by no means exclusive element of Jews. Under the Weimar Republic, that society, as we know, became even more liberal, talented and mixed. The Weimar Republic (and a concatenation of the economic ravages of the late war, the Versailles Treaty, Allied expectancy of Reparation Payments) also brought inflation of devastating speed and scale. The mark in their pockets became devalued by a hundred per cent, a thousand, a million, a thousand million … Paper money – wages were paid daily more than once – was carried about in laundry baskets; what bought a piano last week and a loaf that morning barely ran to the evening newspaper. People in work or who owned and contrived to hang on to real property were able to scrape along; the rentier class was wiped out. Their comfortable income melted to nothing at all, the Falkenheims were left with little besides the family silver. The uncle was dead, his estate vanished. Frau Falkenheim became more idle and difficult, finding refuge in sleeping pills, complaints and neurasthenia; the girls, young women by then, took jobs. They had not been brought up to work, they had been encouraged as was the wont of females in their milieu to put their feet up after luncheon. They were, however, well educated (and connected). They got good jobs: Rosie in an art gallery, Toni in a well-known auction house, a Berlin equivalent of Sotheby’s. Both women unexpectedly turned out competent. Toni’s lot was not made easier by a morbid conscientiousness combined with the double burden of an invincible shyness that covered up an arrogance she had no real wish to conceal. Rosie liked and got on well with her male colleagues.
They managed to keep on the flat – letting go the staff, taking a lodger or two – and to look after their mother and her increasing demands. And it was at that auction house that Jamie, having come over to bid, met Toni and found her charming.
So far so clear. What would follow followed: proposal, engagement, some day Toni marries, leaves for England; some day at some point the mother dies, Rosie in her turn gives up her job, packs up and goes to join her sister and brother-in-law. And so here they are, the three of them, in London. (Rosie, incidentally, without a visible occupation – she only ‘helped out’ at Jamie’s shop the odd afternoon.)
Now and then remarks came out inconsistent with this sequence: dates or events that would not fit, such as Rosie talking about a play she remembered seeing in the West End: so had I, with the Robbinses, surely many years ago? Gradually it emerged that it must have been Toni on her own who held the job in Berlin, and looked after the increasingly unmanageable mother until she died (an overdose?). When Jamie met Toni and Toni accepted him, Rosie had already gone to live – a year ago, several years ago? – in England.
I should now say something about their daily lives. That Toni was discontented with hers was obvious. She missed, she longed for, she glorified Berlin – the theatre, her friends, the life … She was fond of Jamie, very fond, that too was evident. (Their bouts of big-man small-woman exchanges made Rosie look very distant.) She was serious about his work, giving advice (sound), doing the bookkeeping, another unexpected skill; the shop was doing well. All the same they were hard up, though living rent free; Jamie, intent on paying back the capital he’d been lent, insisted on a meagre budget. Toni’s singing lessons, by a far from top-class teacher, were their one extravagance.
That capital, by the way, came from Toni’s ex-boss, P.G., the founder of the Berlin auction house. He had a high opinion of Jamie’s abilities and integrity; the money, I understood, had been lent free of interest as a wedding present for Toni. Hence Jamie’s determination to repay it as soon, or sooner than they could.
P.G. was an exacting and a complex man, self-made, courageous (fighting a bone disease), witty, generous, a martinet and, on occasions, a charmer. He had the misfortune (one of his least) to become my pupil. That was in the Thirties when he and his family arrived in England as refugees. (I advertised language lessons in The Times agony column, though that particular job came to me by way of the Nairns.) I say misfortune because I cannot spell, at least not well enough to teach. He trusted me. Years later the poor man nearly sacked his American secretary because she didn’t spell harassment my way. (Not enough r’s he believed.) I also coached his son – an exceedingly handsome boy – on God knows what pretences! – and actually helped him, with the assistance of Brian Howard of all people, to get into an Oxford college. I often wish I had achieved as much for myself.
Back to Toni. She took being hard up well enough, though Jamie’s Scottish little household sums lacked the panache of the German débâcle. What she minded dreadfully was the housework – even at the worst in Berlin they’d had a Putzfrau, a daily, doing for them – it bored and repelled her. The mews was decently kept down to the unloved kitchen: but oh, the gloves for scrubbing and the gloves for dusting, the sighs and the lack of interest in her husband’s food – man’s food, Englishman’s food. Well, she gave him his breakfast and his supper. He had his lunches near the shop – so
mewhere behind Bond Street or Oxford Street – how nice for him, I thought, with a colleague or a customer, the men he brought back the anecdotes from. The sisters had their main meal at Schmidt’s, the German restaurant in Charlotte Street, where they met every day at one o’clock. I had been expected to join them; got out of it, couldn’t afford it for one thing though it was fairly inexpensive then and a good place of its kind. A sandwich, an apple or, after I reached eighteen, a couple of sausages at a pub were my range, not Kalbsfleisch and chocolate cake.
Suppers at the mews were segregated, a bought pie, baked beans warmed up for Jamie, something cold for the women: dark bread and butter, one of the more refined products of charcuterie such as Teewurst or liver pâté, an assortment of cream cakes – everything from Schmidt’s – followed by chocolates and cigarettes. They never cooked, and I dare say rarely ate, a fresh vegetable. We all drank tea. Jamie smoked a pipe.
Goodness, it sounds dreary. It was not. There was much to make it not so: Jamie’s friendliness, the flow of talk – books and their authors, music and musicians, art and its collectors – all coming naturally, pell-mell, not argumentative though each had different bents. Jamie might quote Tennyson, Toni would tell me to read Buddenbrooks and (curious choice for her) Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Rosie picked up Decline and Fall the week it came out. Another first I owe to her: Evelyn Waugh. I posted a copy to my mother next day.
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