Murderers and Other Friends

by John Mortimer

  Then the Tories in opposition went into a think tank and, inspired by Sir Keith Joseph, came to the conclusion that paradise was not only postponed, it did not, and could never, exist. In fact, even to hope for it was some sort of sick fantasy which led to political ill-health, dangerous anarchy and final madness. The business of politics had nothing to do with justice and much to do with permitting the rich to become richer in the hope that some small part of their wealth might dribble down and comfort the poor. Mrs Thatcher, the child of a corner shop in Grantham, swimming happily along behind Sir Keith, found this an enchanting idea; so the new Conservatism was born.

  It was Mrs Thatcher’s great achievement to take her party away from the paternalistic and easygoing knights of the shires and give it to – well, give it to whom exactly? In Paradise Postponed I invented Leslie Titmuss, who rises from being the most objectionable small boy in the village and, like his father, a clerk in the local brewery, to Cabinet rank. Mrs Thatcher and Leslie Titmuss achieved power by understanding the innate conservatism of the British blue-and white-collar workers. Leslie Titmuss thought that the real Conservatives were not like the old English gent and landowner, the chairman of the local party, whose daughter he was delighted to marry for the sake of advancing his career. When he’s seeking adoption as a parliamentary candidate he says:

  I grew up to understand the value of money because it took my father five years to save up for our first second-hand Ford Prefect. Every night he finishes his tea and says to my mother, ‘Very tasty, dear. That was very tasty.’ He always says the same thing. He falls asleep in front of the fire at exactly half past nine and at ten-thirty he wakes up with a start and says, ‘I’ll lock up, dear. Time for Bedfordshire!’ Always the same. Every night ... You can forget the county families and the city gents and the riverside commuters. They’ll vote for you anyway. What you need to win is my people. The people who know the value of money because they’ve never had it. The people who say the same thing every night because it makes them feel safe. The people who’ve worked hard and don’t want to see scroungers rewarded or laziness paying off. Put it this way, ladies and gentlemen. You need the voters I can bring you!

  I thought I had given Leslie Titmuss a good case and I heard it was shown to some members of the Labour Shadow Cabinet at the time of an election, as a warning of the argument that had to be countered. The lesson wasn’t learnt and Mrs Thatcher, and Leslie, resumed power. In spite of his ruthless and evil ways I acquired a certain affection for Titmuss; he was his own man, you knew where you were with him, and, although no good ever came of him, he was never guilty of grovelling to the electors in the way of politicians today. I have to say that my admiration for Titmuss was due, in great part, to the fact that he worked in the book and was a success on the page. I also have an irrational tendency to like people. I remember having a conversation with Norman Tebbit and, as he cracked his gallows jokes in that slow and deeply contemptuous voice of his, I felt a terrible affection for him stealing over me. This was cured, I am glad to say, when I heard his public pronouncements.

  If I was going to be rude about the political right I had to be equally insulting to the left. The story centred on the will of the Reverend Simeon Simcox, a rector rather like that Canon Collins who was always seen with Michael Foot on CND marches to Aldermaston, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, or any other well-meaning and fairly well-off Christian Socialist. His wife was an elitist and rather grand lady with left-wing views of the sort you might have heard in Bloomsbury drawing-rooms in the days of Kingsley Martin (who edited the New Statesman) and Bertrand Russell. I wrote of her brand of mandarin Socialism that ‘she wanted the working classes to rule the world, but she didn’t want to have any of them to tea’. A similar sort of left-wing grandeur was displayed by Lord Mountbatten’s family when a Conservative canvasser called on them. ‘Why don’t you try the servants’ entrance?’ he was told. ‘Someone there might support your party. None of us is interested in that sort of thing!’

  In the fifties and the sixties, when I started writing for the theatre, everything of interest seemed to happen in the North of England. Only there was life gritty, realistic and filled with ironic humour; where there was room at the top, the long-distance runner pursued his loneliness and the revels of Saturday night were followed by the remorse of Sunday morning. Girls from Roedean flattened their vowels and desperately sought a classless manner of speech, and I kept as quiet as I could about having been to Harrow. Now, I thought, the South should have its turn and I wanted to plot England’s changes where I live, in a strangely isolated pocket of resistance to the implacable urbanization of our countryside. The hills and the valleys at the edge of the Chiltern escarpment, before the flat Oxfordshire plain, have not changed noticeably, although the few remaining beech woods are fighting a losing battle against the fir tree invasion. But the cottages that contained farmworkers, tree-fellers and chair-leg turners when I was a child have been converted, extended, equipped with carports and granny flats and are inhabited by weekending merchant bankers or couples in advertising. There are still secret woods, however, and strangely deserted valleys. I thought the country I knew best was the place to set my story.

  While I was struggling with Paradise Postponed, a far more important act of creation was taking place. Rosie’s birth seemed casual. The anaesthetist arrived late and left her ancient fur-coat and handbag on a chair in the corner. The gynaecologist was in shirt-sleeves, the waistcoat and trousers of a dark-blue suit, and gum boots. We were joined by another, hitherto unknown character, introduced as the doctor held her up high and said she was a beautiful little girl. I think we opened champagne in the room. Later I fetched Emily, who was thirteen, to see her mother and new sister. When we left the hospital and shared a Chinese dinner she wondered, a little nervously, how things would turn out when she was no longer the only child of a second marriage. I made a resolution to postpone dying indefinitely.

  When Rosie was five months old the bad times started, and she became ill. We went to a variety of doctors who offered a variety of explanations. In Italy a doctor recommended a course of germs. We had tests and waited, sick with terror, for the results. At one time I was in a nursing home after an operation and Penny was in a hospital down the road where Rosie was on a drip. Months went by and there was no improvement and then, for no apparent reason, she began to recover. Now, as I’m writing, a nine-year-old girl with large eyes, long fair hair, a hatred of wearing dresses and an indomitable will is grooming a pony, getting ready to go out hunting with her mother.

  The trouble I’d had during Rosie’s illness was negligible by comparison. Careless Thetis held her child Achilles by the heel when she dipped him into the Styx for the purpose of making every part of his body invulnerable; this accounts for the peculiar weakness of the Achilles tendon. Keen squash and tennis players often hear a report like a pistol shot when this cord snaps; mine gave out quietly, discreetly, and over a long period of time. The operation to repair it caused a deep vein thrombosis in my other leg, which swelled up as though it had to support an ancient piano. For this condition I was put on a course of rat poison, which thins the blood. It’s said to be advisable to avoid alcohol during this process, a warning which I have to say I disregarded entirely. I also spent a good deal of time in a wheelchair.

  What I then discovered were some of the humiliations of childhood, because the chair reduces you to a child’s height. At parties everyone talks over your head and forgets to include you in the conversation. The most ridiculous event occurred when I was asked to a charity dinner in the ballroom of a Piccadilly hotel. Because I was going to make a speech, I was ceremoniously piped in by a platoon of Gurkhas and propelled between their ranks by a hostess from British Caledonian Airlines, provided by the charity organizers of the evening. The air hostess pushed, the Gurkhas blew, the ballroom was alight with 1930s splendour – and then the wheel fell off my chair. I have been in many absurd situations during a long life, but none so ridicu
lous as when I found myself legless in a crowded ballroom, seated in a crashed wheelchair with a Gurkha band of honour resolutely blowing its bagpipes.

  We also gave Rosie the name of Lucy, who had been almost the same age as Emily, lived next to us and was like a sister to her. When Emily and Lucy were quite young and we were filming A Voyage Round My Father they climbed into Laurence Olivier’s caravan, experimented with his make-up and tried on his wig. Lucy was the daughter of Suzannah and the Pipers’ grandchild. When she was nine, she ran out of the gate to catch the school bus and a car killed her instantly. I don’t think any of us have recovered from this; in spite of his religious faith John Piper could never explain or get over it. It’s a small paragraph in the indictment against God.

  Chapter 17

  Taking over other people’s houses is like taking over their lives. For many years I rented the homes of strangers to take my family to for summer holidays. The first was in Positano and I used to carry Jeremy, a small child in a white hat, up a thousand steps from the beach, while his sister Sally insisted that we were in Scotland. Later we took houses in Ravello, Greece and the South of France. I remember a strange house in Orbitello, where the gardener kept dead birds and rabbits hanging in the well. On one such holiday our landlord refused to move out but lurked about the house at night, accompanied by a silent parrot. He left threatening notes about the state of the bathroom for us to find in the mornings. When we told him we needed all the bedrooms, he and the bird spent the night in his car at the end of the drive. His case was an exception; for the most part we never met the people in whose pools we swam, on whose ping-pong tables we played and in whose beds we slept. We had answered an advertisement and had few clues about our hosts, other than some faded photographs of the house and a route which usually sounded dauntingly complex: ‘Turn right by the large ilex tree shortly after the ten-kilometre stone on the left, past the Agip service station. Then double back down the dirt-track where a dog is chained by a shed with a pink door. Do not miss this turning or you will be returned immediately to the Roma-Bologna motorway.’

  After the endless journey down the autostrada, with children who have finished their comics at Calais lying in the back, feeling sick, asking you exactly how long it will take to get to a place you’ve never been to before and making false allegations of longing for the lavatory in the next Motta bar, we would arrive at our home for the next three weeks. The description of fields of melons and strawberries surrounding the property may have meant only a burnt-out patch of withered sunflowers, the olive grove may have consisted of two stunted trees, but the bougainvillaea was in flower, there were bright geraniums in pots on the terrace and the swimming-pool was not yet afflicted by the drought. The thunder of a distant Lambretta would undoubtedly bring the formidable maid to unlock the front door, giving us that smile of daunting welcome perfected by air hostesses and hospital matrons. She was there to guard the rights of the absentee landlords and her chief duty over the ensuing weeks would be to watch hawk-eyed for signs of broken glasses, straw hats borrowed from the hall stand and dropped in the pool, or knives taken out on picnics and lost for ever.

  As the children argued about the bedrooms, and after removing piles of comics, half-eaten sandwiches and half-empty packets of raspberry crush from the back of the car, I would start on my great holiday interest – detection. Playing the role of Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, I’d try to discover, from such clues as the empty house might offer, something about the characters we were dispossessing.

  There are certain things which those who let their houses for the summer have in common. They are extraordinarily knowledgeable about the electrical and plumbing systems of their dwellings, and capable of giving instructions for their use in minute detail. These orders, accompanied by dire warnings of the disastrous consequences of disobedience, cover several sheets of duplicated typescript and are sent out like battle commands with the route and the photographs: None of the following devices should, on any account, be switched on at the same time: the heater in the master bedroom, the swimming-pool filter or the dish-washing machine. If a hair-drier is in use, it’s wise to disconnect the refrigerator. More detailed instructions will be found taped to the appliances concerned. Above all, avoid flushing the lavatory next to the small sitting-room more than once in any half hour or serious consequences may follow. Given the tone of these words of command. (The chain requires one sharp downward pull! Do not, on any account, be tentative or give repeated tugs, which may be counter-productive), every loo becomes an object of dread and you can’t switch on the record-player without fearing the sudden demise of the oven.

  Some houses furnish clues in the shape of manuscript volumes bound in marble paper and bought in Florence or Siena. These may have been intended for tenants to write usually unrevealing comments: ‘Two weeks of bliss, the Thompsons will come again’ or ‘Tracy and Tim Maynard broke the Rioja-drinking record poolside on Sunday morning and finally got Maria-Teresa to smile. Hasta la vista!’ In one house we thought we had struck gold: the owners kept a bulky volume describing all the dinner parties they had ever given. First came the menus, then the list of guests which included such heavily dropped names as Tennessee Williams, Visconti, and even Maria Callas on one occasion. Then came the comments. Did these record the table talk of the great and famous? Did they throw a flood of light on the lives and loves of hosts and guests? They did not. The notes were strictly confined to such profound observations as ‘cannelloni a little too al dente’ or ‘saltimbocca on the tough side but soufflé a rare success’. This too was, I suppose, revealing in its way.

  On very rare occasions the owners hand out straight information. In one house in France they were clearly not getting on. The wife, obviously a methodical lady, made a list of the attributes on which she would have to rely were she to set out on a new, unmarried existence. The document, left face upwards beside the telephone, was headed MY ASSETS and began: 1. Extreme physical beauty 2. A certain ability to type. She had also made a list WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN MY LIFE in which the house itself came first, someone called Gaston second and the rest of the family also ran. What was surprising about these lists was not that they should have been made (we all have to sort out our priorities) but that they should have been left so obviously to add interest and excitement to our stay.

  It’s often necessary, as the holiday sinks into its accident-prone middle period, to call the landlord about some disaster. In the dry Tuscan hills the water will run out, whether as an act of God or as the result of some dubious human conspiracy it is difficult to say. We have had to buy water by the lorry load from Siena which, on one nightmare night when we were reduced to boiling the spaghetti in San Pellegrino, was delivered into the swimming-pool by mistake. Into the same swimming-pool, on another memorable occasion, a horse fell during the hours of darkness and, unable to emerge, was found at dawn, blinking in the shallow end. Once the slenderest member of the party was lowered down the well in search of an obstruction. In another rented house, a rat regularly visited the kitchen. ‘A rat?’ said the landlord when we telephoned him. ‘That’s most unusual. But you’d better ask the maid to buy some glue.’ Glue? He was no doubt sitting comfortably in his London office, a place where the water gushes out of taps and no one has to be lowered down the well; he was enjoying the luxury of not being on holiday. On that occasion we ignored his instructions. Far better to have a rat scuttling across the kitchen floor than one glued to it in squeaking immobility.

  Holidays can be brutal occasions. Husbands and wives, usually protected by jobs, office routines, secretaries and bosses, are forced into each other’s company for twenty-four hours a day. Teenage daughters are deprived of their friends, parties, nights at the Mud Club, the Café de Paris or assorted discos, and find little to do but change their clothes or collapse on their beds in terminal boredom. Aged grandparents sit in the backs of cars and try to keep up everyone’s spirits; their efforts are not always successful. And yet in unaccustomed sunshine
, paying unaccustomed visits to churches and cathedrals, pausing, however briefly, in front of great works of art, the visiting family may not only discover unusual and interesting things about their landlords but about each other. For these reasons I think it worth the considerable risk of renting a house and going on holiday.

  I wrote much of Summer s Lease in an Italian house about fifteen miles to the east of Siena and, as the directions would say, you turn right past the castle and go on down a rough, dusty road, across a hillside that smells of wild fennel and wild thyme, until the road stops at the house and you can go, and would wish to go, no further. It’s an old, converted casa colonnica, a farm manager’s house; its big, cool rooms can accommodate many friends and a large assortment of children. The wine comes from the castle at the end of the road, and can be drunk in large quantities with no ill effects whatsoever. This castle, and a larger one built on the strangely Gothic lines of Balmoral, belongs to the Ricasoli family. I think it was early in the last century that, at a ball in Rome, the then Baron Ricasoli’s wife danced twice with a handsome young officer. Her furious husband dragged her out into the winter’s night in her thin ball-gown, threw her into his carriage and drove her to his castle in Tuscany. There he kept her prisoner and passed the long, tedious years while he stood guard over her, discovering the proper mixture of red and white grapes which became the classic wine of Chianti.

  I suppose, if I didn’t consider myself stuck for life in my father’s house, that corner of Italy is where I would choose to live. There is nowhere else where you can travel so easily to see paintings, where you can sit in such beautiful squares in so many small towns, where trees are as green as they are in England and the sun is never too hot; where the food is fresh and, unlike food in France, or nowadays in England, tastes of exactly what it’s made of, and where, on a warm night among the towers of San Gimignano, you can watch Rigoletlo as the moon travels slowly across the sky. Is is also the place, again unlike England, where children are welcome.