Stephen’s friends in London were furious. How could he have been so naive? Robert Kee was overheard talking about it with James MacGibbon, his partner in the publishing firm they co-directed. Jean, James’ wife, was on the other line. James said: ‘what on earth did he think he wanted to take it away for if he wasn’t going to—’ And Robert: ‘absolutely typical Stephen’. And Jean: ‘he’s never quite grown up’.
This, according to my father’s MI5 file – for of course the Missing Diplomats caused a major disruption among the security services. Anyone who knew them was now under surveillance. MI5 knew that one of the last telephone calls that Burgess had made was to 15 Loudoun Road. He’d been looking for Wystan, who was staying with us, but he was out for supper. My mother passed on the message but Wystan did nothing about it; and that was that.
Burgess had hoped that he might take Maclean to Prague, drop him off, and then lie low in Wystan’s house on Ischia for a few months – as if the Italian police wouldn’t have noticed. Auden was thus involved. In the same letter to Stephen in which he discussed World within World, he went into the Burgess case. ‘I still believe Guy to be a victim, but the horrible thing about our age is that one cannot be certain.’
The word ‘victim’ suggests he thought Burgess might have fallen foul of some intrigue at the Foreign Office. On the other hand, what if it was all true and they really were spies? A week later, Wystan wrote again to Stephen: ‘I feel exactly as you do about the B–M business. Whatever the real facts are, they are unintelligible; even the word betrayal becomes meaningless.’
Betrayal becomes meaningless? This could mean that, without knowing the facts, it’s impossible to know what Burgess had betrayed. But the ‘facts’ are also ‘unintelligible’. I think Auden means: in the Thirties Burgess shared with all of us a series of principles that belonged to the times. It was ‘meaningless’ to state that this idea had been ‘betrayed’. Burgess may have done things regarding which, if they knew the facts, his friends might disapprove, but this would not constitute ‘betrayal’.
Cyril Connolly also knew both men, shared their background and was obsessed by their defection. Just the day before they’d disappeared, he’d had lunch with Donald Maclean at his club near the Foreign Office. They’d emerged late in the afternoon, ‘into a little pin-striped shoal of hurrying officials’.
Cyril had been following the deterioration of both men in recent months. Had they left clues about their plans? Should he have guessed? Should he have done something about it? He went to great lengths to establish their movements in the days before they left. Was it prearranged, or had they taken fright? Had they been tipped off that they were in danger of arrest?
Connolly talked it over with John Lehmann on the telephone, and was duly eavesdropped by MI5. Lehmann thought the most plausible explanation was that someone, probably in the United States, had been about to reveal embarrassing details about this Thirties background of sympathy for communism that they all shared. Lehmann: ‘It is very difficult to understand it otherwise isn’t it?’ Connolly: ‘Yes, very.’ Perhaps the implication is that, if this particular betrayal had stayed an English problem, it would have just simmered away in the background without anyone making a fuss.
Dad went back to London in July for the opening of a play he’d written for the Festival of Britain. Mum went with him as she had three concerts to perform, one at the Wigmore Hall. As I seemed happy in Torri, they left me behind. They weren’t gone for more than a week, but because the hotel would have seemed lonely without them, I was entrusted to one of the big sailing boats which in those days still worked their way up and down the lake. The red-haired brother of one of the maids who occasionally took care of me was the skipper.
No cabin for me, just a throbbing hatch beneath the deck at the front of the boat smelling strongly of tar and diesel. Bed was a blanket spread over a coil of rope tied to the anchor. I felt the coils moving beneath me when I slept, and the delicious perfume of oil and tar warmed my dreams.
But I also remember feeling lonely in the square of a strange town at the upper end of the lake – perhaps Malcesine. This wasn’t my village. My village was Torri. This village felt stranger than London, stranger than any town I’d visited, because my parents hadn’t brought me there, while Francesca’s brother sold his coal or did whatever he had to do in one corner of the piazza within a circle of gesticulating men.
On 9 July, Stephen was in Oxford for the first night of his play.
Back at the White Lion Hotel, an intelligence officer was waiting to question him in relation to the missing diplomats. This was William Skardon, a senior interrogator from MI5. They missed each other. Instead of spending the night, Stephen took the train straight back to London without going to the hotel where Skardon was waiting for him. MI5 decided not to reschedule this meeting. ‘At one time it was thought that it might be worthwhile interviewing Stephen but after further consideration the idea was dropped as it was thought he could produce no further information.’
This is what Spender’s MI5 file says. I don’t believe it. My father told me that in fact he had been interrogated. He was asked if he was aware that Guy Burgess was a communist agent. And he’d said: Yes. ‘Whenever Guy got drunk, which was almost every night, he’d tell us he was a Russian spy.’ Why hadn’t he reported this information to the appropriate authorities? ‘I thought that if we all knew, you must know, too.’
There is something very cosy about this story. ‘We’ and ‘You’ were social groups that overlapped. Somewhere in the background lay a reservoir of shared experience. Although I could be wrong, I think my father’s MI5 file is full of jokes. What significance would it otherwise have, to say that he’d never grown up? This suggests that the higher levels of those who kept an eye on him knew him. Had made up their own minds about him. Liked him, even.
Faced with Stephen’s devastating frankness, especially after his gaffe involving the News Chronicle, it’s easy to imagine what Skardon might have said next. ‘I think on the whole, Mr Spender, we’d better forget that this meeting ever took place. And may I suggest that from now on you say as little as possible about Mr Burgess.’ Skardon saw that Stephen, whatever his other virtues, was incredibly indiscreet. It would not have helped to dampen the scandal if MI5 interrogated him and then found their ignorance of a fact known to all – that Burgess was a Russian spy – spread all over London in a series of amusing after-dinner stories.
My parents came back to Torri and our hotel life resumed.
‘I never knew where to find you,’ Martino told me recently, for it was his job to look for me at mealtimes. ‘You did not frequent the best youth of Torri,’ he said, grinning. There was a big drain by the side of the other tile factory, the one near the church, channelling the overflow from one level of the village to another. I could slide down it but Martino was too big. Anyway, sliding down drains would not have suited the son of Oreste Tomei.
Torri wanted to improve itself. Everyone felt there was much to learn from these distinguished foreigners. Memmo the greengrocer heard that the great Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia was coming for a holiday, so he practised and practised, and when Segovia gave him a lesson, the entire village stood in the street outside silently listening.
Torri was fascinated by the distinguished foreigners who appeared there for holidays. André Gide, for instance, who brought with him from Paris a particularly unruly boyfriend. The day after spending turbulent nights with the lads of Torri, Gide would listen to the complaints of the boys’ parents. On his desk lay a stack of fresh banknotes. According to the degree of scandal involved, Gide would take some from the top and hand them over without a word. This was told to me by an old man whom I saw when Dad and I visited Torri for the last time several decades after Gide’s visit. He now sold gas appliances, and nothing remained of his cherubic former self except his long curling eyelashes. It was a lesson for us all, he said. At the time, we just enjoyed exploiting him; and we despised him. At this stage in
my life, he said, I have only gratitude for the example of good manners given to us by il Maestro Gide.
Mr Spender often went away to Verona, Martino told me. Once, he missed the bus. Martino found him at the edge of the water looking down. And he was always forgetting his papers. He asked Martino to remind him when the bus left and to make sure he didn’t forget his briefcase.
This man, he said, pointing at one of the photographs on the table in front of us. It showed me as a confused six-year-old, Dad a cheerful forty, my mother in the background with her eyes tight shut – she hated to be photographed – and next to her a wiry young man whom I’d assumed to be Martino, except of course the son of the owner of the hotel would never have sat down with the guests. A striped awning screens us from the sun and above us the bougainvillea thrives. A tray of peaches in a cut-glass bowl suggests the meal is over. The wiry young man has a cautious expression as if he were calculating something.
Lunch on the terrace of the Albergo Gardesana, summer 1951.
This man used to work for the main tourist office in Verona, said Martino. It was thanks to him that your father decided to come to Torri. They knew each other, because he was engaged to an au pair girl who used to take care of you.
This man … and a long pause. Martino couldn’t speak further.
I explained that I was in an awkward position. My parents’ archive was about to become available to the public and there was a chance that a scandalous book could be made out of their life together. I wanted to write my own version first. I thought that their marriage had been solid and happy, but now and again my father lost his head over some young man; and this had made my mother miserable.
Martino smiled.
She used to stop playing the piano as soon as your father left, he said. She’d come downstairs and sit under the awning nearest to the lake, away from the other guests at the hotel. She’d just sit there reading a book. Now and again she’d look up and stare at the water. I remember it so clearly! As for your father – who am I to say what happened? He might not have taken the bus into Verona in order to meet someone. He was a very cultured man. He might have just wanted to look at a church.
10
DON’T YOU EVER TELL A LIE?
WHEN WE CAME back from Italy in the autumn of 1951, we brought two young women of Torri with us to help in the house: Francesca, the sister of my skipper, and Idelma, who lived in a house above the village. My mother immediately showed them the brand-new washing-machine in the basement. They looked at it phlegmatically and said, O Signora, we’d much prefer to have the Lake of Garda outside the back door.
This was the most luxurious phase of our house in St John’s Wood. World within World had been nominated for one of the book clubs and my father was feeling rich. The parquet floor of the front hall of Loudoun Road was scrubbed and polished every day by Francesca and Idelma, who lived in a room so small that less than two feet separated their twin beds. In the evening, pre-television, they sat side by side on one bed and read fotoromanzi, sentimental comic books, except instead of drawings there were photographs of actors miming the stories. The male actors were sultry and the female ones were often in tears, looking up at the top of the page for a solution to descend on them like the heavenly dove.
My father’s study faced the front of the house, and his work table stood in front of the window of crinkly Victorian glass. Against the wall on the left stood a tall glass bookcase with two handwritten signs on it: ‘Precious Book Cupboard’ and ‘Do Not Open (Dangerous Glass)’.
Up a steep staircase with wobbly banisters were three bedrooms: my sister’s, my parents’ and my own. The bathroom was decorated with yellow tiles dating from the Twenties. My parents’ bedroom held a large framed mirror with, on the left, special brushes for Dad’s hair sold to him by the sadistic barber who sent him home every month with a different-coloured rinse. Large framed reproductions of Blake’s illustrations to Dante hung on the walls. They were gradually replaced by watercolours by John Piper, whom Dad knew from ages back.
My nickname as a child was Smashy. I liked guns. There was a silver six-shooter in an embossed holster. The only time my father ever spanked me was when I hit a visiting professor over the head with my pistol. I thought that since he was American, he’d appreciate this cowboy greeting.
My bedroom measured eight feet by ten. Two built-in cupboards, one Heal’s cabinet containing a diorama of my war toys lit by tiny bulbs imitating bursting shells. My sister Lizzie’s room was larger and looked south over the beautiful gardens between Blenheim Road and Marlborough Place. Once, our nearest neighbour Colonel Macintosh came over to complain. He said solemnly to Dad, ‘I am old enough to be your father, and your father’s father.’ He said I’d chucked one of his pears at his cat. His pears fell into our garden and one could stick a bamboo into them and launch them and I didn’t really mean to hit his cat, especially with the Colonel in a deckchair near by, but these things happen. My father was polite and when the Colonel left, he sniggered. Colonel Macintosh belonged to an imperial past and he had a handlebar moustache, and of course Colonel Macintosh always wore a Macintosh.
That autumn, my mother concentrated on four sonatas by Beethoven, two early, one middle, one late. My mother was a Beethoven specialist, and throughout my childhood I eavesdropped on the sonatas she practised.
She often talked about Beethoven, always in hallowed tones. She told me that when he wrote ‘Must it be?’ above a theme in one of the late quartets, it referred to his growing deafness and his search for spiritual strength in the face of adversity. The counter-subject, ‘It must be!’, signified peace of mind acquired with an immense spiritual effort. Years later, I discovered a short theme by Beethoven which he wrote in the margin of a letter to one of his friends. ‘Money! Must it be? The old lady wants the rent again.’ Much less spiritual, this brisk little piece told me something about my mother. I saw that Mum had wished on to Beethoven some of her own interior needs. She was attracted to the idea of spiritual struggle. Instead, whenever I think of Beethoven – which is often – I think of Mum: cantankerous, moody, bossy and high-minded, and on some occasions down to earth. The real Mum, not the spiritual Mum. This is how she played him, and I liked it a lot.
As a child, if I kept quiet and promised not to disturb her, I was allowed to take my toys and play under the piano while she practised. All I could see of her from this angle were her legs. The music came down among intense clicks and burps as the keyboard shifted slightly, allowing the hammers to hit two strings instead of three when required. Loudness, and the lateral movement of the wood-and-felt mechanism, were controlled by Mum’s feet. The lattice heaven above my head squeaked, sighed and thrummed beyond the music. With all this noise, I couldn’t understand why, down on the carpet, with the occasional movement on my part of tin soldiers, Mum would tell me sharply in mid-bar, ‘Quiet!’ Or even ‘Quai … Ett!’ if the music so dictated. But I learned that silence was vital whenever I nested, as it were, in Beethoven’s belly.
My mother often tried to teach me how to play the piano. Small self sitting on her knee, her two arms on either side of me, her breasts against my shoulders. Her wrists parallel to the floor, fingers splayed, each finger as alert as every other finger, and the thumbs also trying to be alert and nimble though the angle suggested they rode side-saddle. Off we go! All I had to do was plonk my index finger on the note to the left of the two black ones which, at the height of my chest, would have transfixed me had they extended themselves into railway lines. When things went wrong and I missed my cue, my mother said ‘Count’ into my right ear, or joggled me with a throb of her upper thigh; and on we went. ‘Come on. Count! It’s not too difficult. You’re on the first beat of every bar.’ The bars weren’t the ones recently cemented into my sister’s bedroom window to prevent her falling out, though these were five, like the staves of music we were staring at, and horizontal, and vaguely musical, in that green leaves in the garden seen through the bars on rainy days made musical s
ounds.
Many times, my mother tried to explain to me how music worked. She drew on a piece of paper a thing called ‘the rose of fifths’. I could see that indeed it was a rose. Each petal, indicated by a swift round shape, contained its botanical name: F sharp or, coming round the other way, G flat. I could grasp the principle of two and a half, or tone tone semitone. Maths ruled the universe, and this was maths. Only, I couldn’t grasp what was wrong with the octave that it was so uneven. After a while you found yourself in someone else’s territory.
I never learned to play the piano. Recently, as second clarinet in our wind quartet, I decided we ought to take a lesson from a professional. She listened politely to a whole movement and at the end she said, ‘Matthew, why is it you have trouble in counting the beats in held notes? You’re always in such a hurry to move off.’ I explained about my mother, and the terror of hearing the word ‘COUNT’ slapped into the back of my neck. The teacher said, ‘Are you sure you really need me? Wouldn’t you be better off with a shrink?’
We spent the summer of 1952 at Torri, but this time I was left alone for longer. I stayed with Idelma’s family in her house on the hill, sharing a room with a boy my own age. He had one gift I envied. He could tell the time by the sun. If I asked the time he’d look at the sun and say, ‘Twenty-two minutes to three,’ and that would be it. I had the watch, he had nothing, but his knowledge was superior. He also managed the goats, keeping them together by throwing stones at them as accurate as punctuation. He was in charge of the natural world and when the sun set, his hair rose up and turned into flames.
Beside the wood where a big green lizard lived there was a small field that suddenly filled with flowers. Peasants appeared at either end to cut them and send them off to the market. As these two groups drew together, they began to quarrel. Who had the right to cut which flowers? It was at this point, I think, that for me Italy lost the distinction between fantasy and reality. What could be more extraordinary than a hillside of angry peasants surrounded by flowers, some cut and bound in sheaves, some about to be cut?
A House in St John's Wood Page 12
