CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  Chapter Fourteen

  Someone, who might well have been the French film director Jean-Luc Godard during a lucid interval, said that while he agreed that every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end they need not necessarily be in that order. Looking back down a long corridor of years at that serious, prematurely middle-aged figure in the wig and gown, or the bowler hat and pinstripes, I seem, for one hallucinated moment, to be looking at the future and not the past, seeing one complete version of what I was going to be when I grew up. I had become, perhaps too easily even for him, what my father had in mind, the ambitious barrister of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, the professional product of an English education. In our twenties we embrace middle age with enthusiasm, enjoy discussing mortgages and school fees and acquire a taste for mowing the lawn. The years which follow can bring the courage to return to the essentials of childhood, a state of carefree individuality which can only be completely recaptured at the moment of death.

  Not, of course, that the simplicities of professional life can be separated from a deep basis of private confusion. Billowing up to his client outside the Court, resplendent in the barrister’s set, aloof in the fancy costume, the professional has no difficulty at all in picking out the vital points in other people’s marriages and deciding that it was what happened in the summer of 1943 that caused the breakdown. At the same time he may have no idea why his own home is a daily battlefield, the scene of a war whose origins have long since been forgotten. Just as miraculous cures are brought about by doctors who are themselves suffering from fatal diseases, great issues of life and death are decided by Judges who, in their daily lives, can’t make up their minds when to play out their trumps and whose existence is entirely in the hands of resolute wives or implacable sisters. To the professional adviser nothing is easier to decide than other people’s problems, and I found no difficulty in telling men and women twice my age how to regulate their finances or to ‘exercise a self-denying ordinance’. I knew just what provision they ought to be making for their tax and what would be best for their children. I often had the satisfaction of leading them through the dark maze of the old divorce law into some sort of daylit sanity. I could only hope that they never saw me breaking into an undignified run as I left the Westminster Bank, or returning home with a nightly feeling of bewilderment to face again the perpetually insoluble complexities of married life.

  We had gone to stay in Ireland before we were married and Penelope had stood on the beach in Connemara looking at the sea, tempted, as she sometimes was in those days, by thoughts of death. Our temperaments differed in that while I looked at life, a good deal of the time, with the facile optimism of one who sees a steady increase in the number of his ‘undefendeds’, she got her strength, and I sometimes thought her pleasure also, from the undoubted awfulness of the human situation. She contemplated an increasingly desperate plight with a gloom which was frequently expressed with humour and a kind of glee. This attitude, so painful to her that it became, at times, heroic, provided the source from which she was able to produce her novels and short stories. She would lie stretched out in front of the fire filling notebooks with her neat handwriting, or sit in the sun with her typewriter clicking endlessly whilst the growing band of small girls galloped through the unmown grass astride short sticks which they made believe to be horses and fed, under the hedges, with small plates of cornflakes. Meanwhile I was writing out further and better particulars of intolerable conduct leading to the breakdown of the marriage, or, as time went on, preparing to fight the case of the Methodist minister whose wife ran away with the District Nurse.

  Life was not made easier, in those early days of marriage, by the extreme generosity of friends. A temporarily wealthy friend of Penelope’s presented us, in a moment of extraordinary kindness, with a farmhouse in Essex, and added the gift of a huge shooting brake to transport the children there. It was something of a struggle to afford the petrol but when we did, and had loaded the great van to the rafters with plastic pots and toys and gumboots and carry-cots and Ostermilk and shopping-bags full of spare knickers and balding Teddy bears, we were faced with a house which demanded more devotion than we had time for. I sat on the floor of a shed trying to start the electric light engine with a piece of string. I would pull and pull with no result and then the engine would start purring, the house would be lit up like a Christmas tree for about five minutes, but then the machinery would cough, splutter and fade away, the lights would dim and I would be left in the dark, hopelessly pulling the string and wondering how my ambitions to write got diverted into this extraordinarily frustrating activity. Once, in a magnificent gesture of despair, Penelope threw an entire bowl full of washing-up out of the kitchen window and into the uncultivated garden. The growing army of children looked on politely, and in mild disbelief.

  It was Jim Holland, once again, who came to our rescue. We managed to swap our house in Essex for his in Swiss Cottage. It was a tall, narrow and crumbling Victorian building which then attracted a rent of seven pounds a week. It was a huge, it seems now totally appropriate, family house with dark corners in the basement and unvisited rooms in the attic where children could hide, laugh and run to sulk or cry unnoticed. The rooms had moulded ceilings and the staircase stretched up into remote areas, which in twenty years we never finished painting. So distant were some of the floors that, years later, a notable Polish actor, who had made friends with one of my step-daughters, managed to live upstairs for a week without either of us or his anxious Embassy, who suspected defection, ever being aware of it.

  There was also, in the Swiss Cottage area at that time, a wonderful sadness which seemed, for some reason which I cannot entirely recall, well suited to our mood. There was a sort of late Viennese melancholy, promoted by the large number of middle-aged refugees who sat drinking Kaffee mit schlag in the Finchley Road tearooms and then returned to their bedsitters to listen to Mahler on the wireless and work out chess problems. They were the lost families who, during the war, felt particular terror when they were able to shout at an approaching aircraft, ‘It’s one of ours!’ In time the quiet streets round Swiss Cottage would be torn down to make room for offices and blocks of expensive flats. When we started to live there the rows of bells beside each front door were identified by engraved, Central European visiting cards. On summer evenings the crumbling terraces would come to life with the sound of exiled string quartets, rehearsing for concerts which might never be arranged.

  The Swiss Cottage house contained the lifetime of our marriage. It was the setting for the Christmases when the children were kept waiting outside the sitting-room door, breathless with expectation, and for the New Year’s Eve party where a literary County Court Judge tried to persuade a despairing young poet not to hang himself because it would be so embarrassing for His Honour to have to give evidence at the inquest. It was the place we were glad to see when we came home from holidays abroad and where, on many occasions, a strong feeling of doom was passed round the huge nursery lunches with the roast potatoes.

  It did us for almost twenty years, and put up with the vagaries of fashion, from the austere fifties to the more affluent sixties. At first we had single walls painted in distinct poster colours in the manner of the Great Exhibition on the South Bank, a small flourish of culture now almost forgotten, which left a memory not of the Crystal Palace but of the Guinness Clock. Then we had ivy-leaved wallpaper and rubber plants during the early Expresso Age and the Great Sanderson Revival. Finally we installed a kitchen designed by Terence Conran with a room divider, orange cupboards and concealed lighting. By that time the destruction of the area was almost complete, the new apartment blocks were forming up around us and the moulded ceilings had begun to tremble and crack and shower plaster down into the hall. The Terence Conran kitchen stood, cheerful and functional, in the centre of a disintegrating house and marriage. As the cracks spread we evacuated the house and, in the course of time, new lives were started. We didn’t expect the
house to survive our departure, but unexpectedly it has and stands almost alone among a forest of North London towers of cubby holes, places where there is no room to put the books or for the children to hide. It is still a beleaguered witness to a Victorian ideal of family living.

  In her stories Penelope kept her log of these years with wry precision, but in the early fifties she had not yet achieved her great success. Not even the rising tide of ‘undefendeds’ and the occasional contested divorce with ‘refreshers’ could keep the great, leaky edifice of the Swiss Cottage house financially afloat. I went on writing, finishing two or three novels quickly, anxious for the hundred pounds advance, conscious that, perhaps due to the premature onset of middle age, I had not found my voice, or that my head was still too full of the voices of admired talents. I was also invited to write stories for women’s magazines and, because of the close scrutiny of the cashiers at the Westminster Bank, I accepted the invitation.

  I was taken to lunch at The Ivy by serious, blue-haired ladies, to have the essence of ‘Women’s Magazine Fiction’ explained to me. Everything, they said, must happen by chance, the dark and handsome stranger (a doctor, perhaps, or a farmer, never, please God, a dentist or a divorce lawyer) should ideally pick the girl up in the street after a passing motorist has knocked her off her bicycle, although meetings in lifts or at concerts in the Festival Hall were not ruled out. The idea of life as a series of random accidents appealed to my view of the universe and the money promised seemed to me princely and likely to keep the Inland Revenue at bay for at least a month with something left over for Farex and bikkipegs. I wrote several stories at great speed which appeared, lavishly illustrated with pictures of sun-tanned characters with amazingly white teeth, and I made the mistake of reading one to my father during a weekend in the country.

  ‘Writing down?’ he said. ‘Stick to divorce, old boy. Far less humiliating.’

  There was surely, however, some source of wealth and recognition which could be tapped, apart from adultery and cruelty, to meet our more pressing needs. I thought of my knowledge of the technique of film writing, so painfully gained during my years in the Crown Film Unit. Was such expertise to be allowed to gather dust or had the time come for me to make a fortune in pictures?

  Whoever or whatever is in charge of our accidents provided a swift answer to this foolish request.

  I came back to chambers after a particularly testing ‘undefended’, one in which the marriage was less dissolved than slowly hacked to pieces before the Judge’s eyes, and my father’s clerk told me that a Mr Moxer had rung me. He had no idea who Mr Moxer might be, but he said that he didn’t sound much like a legal gentleman.

  When I dialled the number there was a sound of heavy, suspicious breathing.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Is Mr Felix Moxer there?’

  The breathing stopped, appeared to be painfully held and a suspicious voice finally said, ‘Is who there?’

  ‘He wanted me to ring …’

  ‘Here. Give it to me.’ I heard a female order and then an excited buzz as of amateur actors bickering behind a first-night curtain. Then there was silence as though a hand had been put over the mouthpiece. After a long wait the curtain rose on the female voice, aloof and efficient.

  ‘Films of Truth and Reality.’

  ‘Is Mr Felix Moxer there?’ I asked.

  ‘Mr Moxer is in conference. I don’t think he can speak with you.’

  ‘That you, Mortimer?’ Almost at once the voice I was to know as Felix Moxer’s broke in. He sounded, I thought, in almost mortal terror. ‘Doris is always talking about you. Says I ought to use you as a writer. Look, can you come round at once? You remember Doris, don’t you?’

  Could I ever forget Doris, with the cheroot dangling from her scarlet lips, wearing flannel trousers with a cheap fur coat slung over her shoulders, swearing at the hourly boys like a trooper? Doris was the Obergruppenführer of the Crown Film Unit and it seemed improbable that she should have had anything as human as a brother-in-law and incredible that she should have recommended me to him.

  ‘Come round? Where are you?’

  ‘In the City. Not far from where you are now.’

  I found ‘Films of Truth and Reality’ in a side street a short walk from my father’s chambers. I pushed open a purple front door and I was in a passage leading to a small, but well-equipped, studio. I saw the familiar sights, the lights producing continuous sunshine, the one-dimensional walls and swaying backcloths, the electricians playing Solo and a nervous assistant waiting by an urn for the director’s tea. It was a world I had hardly thought to see again, one which I then realized I missed very much.

  I was shown into an empty office, the door of which bore the inscription ‘Felix Moxer, A R P S. Private’. After about five minutes I felt I was being watched, but before I could enjoy the full discomfort of the situation Mr Moxer burst in at the door, giving an extremely poor imitation of a man who has just returned from a long journey.

  ‘Glad to see you, old man,’ he said. ‘Have a cigarette?’

  He produced a gold case, found only one cigarette in it, looked at it with dismay and then pressed it between his lips. He was a large man whose features, undistinguished in themselves, seemed to be on the point of drifting apart.

  ‘My God,’ he said. ‘My wife’s got a touch of the nervy. They get it in this business, you know. It’s the uncertainty. And a woman’s life can be very hard, old man, after a certain age.’

  I started to say that women no doubt had many difficulties at all ages, but he interrupted me severely.

  ‘You mustn’t keep me gossiping, old man. Now then. Feature-length film. Subject? Diamond smuggling. Budget? Open-ended. Your fee? Generous. First day of principal photography? Three months’ time. Can you leave for Africa next week?’

  ‘I suppose so …’ I thought of the bush, far from Swiss Cottage and the Temple. Above all I thought of the generous fee.

  ‘Just word out a short treatment, old man. Something to show the punters. Bring it in on Monday and I’ll have your contract ready.’

  That weekend I abandoned the Petitions and laid aside the Further and Better Particulars of Cruelty. I wrote a story about diamond smuggling which included an eccentric Dutchman, a beautiful Zulu girl and a cynical South African policeman who was given to quoting Swinburne. It was something, I felt sure, that Mr Moxer would enjoy and it should even keep the punters happy. It would pay the rent for a year and give me a month away from the Law Courts, with a film unit, in a tent, under the stars, where I could smell the dry, dusty veldt and watch the animals move out of the shadows around the waterhole at night.

  That year I saw no lumbering elephant or delicate antelope come to drink. I missed the jeep bumping across the dry landscape and the excitement of gumboot dances in the mine-workers’ compound. When I got back to ‘Films of Truth and Reality’ on Monday I thought at first I had mistaken the address. But the purple front door was unchanged, only the inside of the building had altered. There were no lamps, no electricians, no tea-boy and no make-up department. There were only boxes of bananas, apples and oranges. Felix Moxer’s name had been removed from his office door and the room was occupied by a man in a brown overall who wore a trilby hat. Like this insubstantial pageant, Mr Moxer had faded, leaving behind him nothing but a wholesale fruit business.

  The movies, of course, provide a perpetually frustrating occupation, not unlike the search for the Holy Grail, or the passionate pursuit of girls who never kept any appointment and finally turn out to have left for New Zealand with no forwarding address. In this way films have always seemed to me a world apart. When I wrote novels they appeared, however temporarily, in print. When I wrote plays none of them failed to be performed. As a lawyer, my cases came on for trial. Films are different. Films evaporate. After weeks of excited work they vanish into thin air. Now you see them, now you don’t and often, when you don’t, it comes as a merciful release.

  That, however, was the only occasion
on which an entire film studio eluded me. It was symbolic, perhaps, of my pursuit of the drama at that time. I stood with treatment in hand in front of a fruit shop, and ‘Films of Truth and Reality’ had melted into the world of fiction.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When he noted the death of King George VI in his garden diary my father had embarked on the last decade of his life. ‘Went up to chambers,’ he dictated to my mother, ‘and found it rather a strain. Everywhere the weeds are growing rank, but we are determined not to mind.’

  His interest in the law had faded a little and every moment seemed wasted spent away from the garden whose ceaseless activity he learnt of by hearsay from my mother. He would then repeat to her the news she had given him and she would note it down in her neat art-school handwriting, in a narrative in which she appears as a character. ‘Kathleen released a sparrow entangled in the grass of the West Field,’ she wrote, or ‘This evening Kathleen saw a hedgehog drinking the cat’s milk.’ This, however, is a rare instance of my father’s reporting that my mother alone had seen something. Usually events are recorded as though they had been visible to his sightless eyes also.

  ‘We saw two brimstone butterflies and a peacock,’ he reported and, in April 1952, ‘Anemone Blanda are improving, about 40 blooms. The first daffodils in flower are the Lenten lilies. Rhododendron Thomsonii is in flower, beautifully but sparingly.’ ‘On the 2nd of May,’ the chronicle continued, ‘we had our first dish of asparagus and the first cockchafer flew in. There is much apple blossom in the orchard. A thrush’s nest in the rhododendron border contains 3 or 4 newly born chicks. We have had to have a new outer cover on the spare wheel, the second tyre this year!’ That summer it became extraordinarily hot and my father recorded the fact that he had taken two cold baths a day, and ‘Smith has planted nemesias, asters and snapdragons in the border. Unknown to us (but guessed at by Kathleen) scything has been going on in the West Field. Three wasps nests were destroyed in the orchard. The Crinum Powelli has sent up four spikes which are now in flower. A homing pigeon has taken up residence with us since August 1st, completely tame. He comes into the house and sits on the table heater and the ice chest. On August 6th we had our first ripe peach. John and Penelope came down to stay with the children and we had a treasure-hunt.’