by Nigel Barley
“But why does he speak as though his mouth is full of tennis balls?”
Mixing economy with ingenuity, Walter devised a stream of allegedly local cocktails, based on brem and arak and Noel sank them without demur, though he always wished to know their name. “Ear, Nose and Throat”, “Southpour Punch”, “Puputan”, “Boy Meets Girth” and “Baliballs” were the least of it. Evenings would be spent, Noel at the piano, stemmed glass delicately balanced at the keyboard edge ready for tippling a “Jolly Todger” or whatever, in a sort of protracted cocktail lounge improvisation that recalled the competitive swapping of pantuns at Malay weddings.
“The Belgians and the Greeks do it,
Nice young men who sell antiques do it.
Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love!”
Then play would begin …
“Piles up your arse do it,
Members of the British upper class do it.
Let’s do it! Let’s fall in love.”
Or
“Greta Garbo all alone does it,
Marlene Dietrich with a mmmmoan does it.
Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love!”
Then Walter would bumshuffle onto the stool and join in:
“Queen Wilhelmina on her throne does it,
Barbara Hutton slowly with the phone does it.
Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love.”
And Noel would soar, with his high tenor voice, into the bridging section:
“Walter Spies, in a sarong does it, though he isn’t the first,
Rudi, though it’s wrong, does it. If he didn’t he’d BURST!”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t greatly care for …”
Interrupted by Walter, returning to the main melody:
“The very least Balinese does it,
Separately each of the McPhees – you don’t know them – does it.
Let’s do it! Let’s fall in love.”
Back to bridging:
“Young Rosa and Miguel do it at the drop of a hat.
Oleg on his knees does it. Well, he is rather fat.”
Back to Noel:
“Charlie Chaplin as a tramp does it,
Rudi in the outside heat and damp does it …”
“What are you implying? If you mean the lapangan kota …”
“… Let’s fall in love!”
By some extraordinary coincidence, Walter had a painting freshly finished, trailing around on the forest giant table, downstairs, ostensibly to dry. It was small painting, the sort that might obligingly fit into a traveller’s luggage.
Noel looked down at it. “Ripping,” he commented, “simply divine. My first lover was a painter, Philip, and I remained with him till he died – ‘faithful unto death’ – except perhaps for the two shillings and sixpence I earned from Sir Hugh Walpole during an otherwise tedious train journey from Philip’s house, at appropriately named Looe, back to the metropolis. Perhaps that is what we are all seeking – someone to be unfaithful to. But, as artists, you will understand that what one does for money does not count, since it does not engage the heart and I might well not have fallen if the buffet car had been open.” He licked his lips naughtily and dropped briefly into lower class. “I have always been a bit of a bugger for a sticky bun. Philip opened my eyes to the world of art and the other thing but then, I suppose, one’s taste in neither is of the best at the age of fourteen.”
“Fourteen?” I gasped.
He cast me a fatigued glance and sucked on his cigarette. “I retained my virginity so late through not going to public school. But I have retained a taste for it and am an enthusiastic practitioner though gruesomely ungifted.”
“Ungifted? Who says?”
“It comes, I think, from working in watercolours.”
“Oh, I see. I thought you meant …”
Walter frowning through all this, saying nothing, unable to understand the excessively fronted Mayfair vowels.
“Watercolours dilute one. Your colours, dear Walter, are so vibrant”. He spoke with excessive clarity and volume as though to an aged relative, hard of hearing. “To look at them, one would think red paint cost absolutely nothing. You have found your secret place. I have yet to find mine and I envy but do not begrudge. Here you can be as you are. Nobody bothers you. The external world does not impinge with its rules and its whips. In the greasepaint world of the theatre, it is one thing, we are all merely playing our parts, but before the great shockable public, quite another. If asked about romance, I just say, ‘I am informed there is still a good woman in Paddington Green who wishes to marry me and it would be cruel to shatter her dreams’, or I look fleetingly downcast and whisper, ‘I have only loved one person in my life and, since marriage was impossible, I have never wed’. Not exactly a lie, for I fear it may be given to us on this earth to truly love only once and that I may have already known and lost that love. Grab every scrap of happiness while you can.” Oddly, years later, I would be sitting in a London theatre and hear those last words spoken by a character in a revival of one of his plays, “Greb every screp of heppiness …” But whether he was using his lines on us, or his genuine words as lines, I have never known. I suppose, for an artist, there is no difference.
***
“I’m gonna put on my best frock, me old ducks, paint my face and drag my sagging arse back to Blighty.” So Noel, in what I took to be best cockney, the day before the Governor General’s coming, the day of the grand dress rehearsal. Walter, distracted, not understanding again.
“What?”
“Der will abhauen.”
“Ach so.”
The boys, unaccustomedly, forming a line and sembahing low and ceremoniously as we left that afternoon in the packed Whippet. He must have tipped them generously. Oleg’s cheek was glowing from a final pinch of farewell. As soon as our backs were turned, they would be off to spend their money and find their own forms of wickedness suitable to marking the public holiday. Every gateway was decorated, by decree of King Walter, with a beautiful, hanging penjor, the usual ornament like a great ornate chandelier of bamboo. The streets were all swept, temples painted, scrubbed and decked with cut flowers while potted hydrangeas and nipa palms screened off anything offensive to the eye that could not be simply whitewashed into picturesqueness. Everywhere flags, fresh from the mills of Java, waved a triple greeting with enough cloth to clothe the entire population. Young men, beautifully washed, oiled and combed, in traditional warrior dress, struck advantageous poses along the roadside with ancient spears. Every crossroads was loud with marching gamelans and long processions of ladies, all in their best clothes and with gold in their ears, trailed towards the temples bearing artful offerings swaying on their heads. When we reached the town and drove past the new museum, soldiers were exercising on the lapangan kota of ill repute and Walter looked at me and smiled but said nothing. At least half the funding for the museum had gone on the lavish gateway, dripping with fangs and foliage, and it was now decorated with hundreds of little oil lamps that spread out along the walls, calculated to create a flickering evening drama of shadows. More lamps were floating in coconut shells on ponds awaiting only the touch of a match while a dance troupe in green and gold was poised, ready to spring into torchlit action at the first sign of anything looking like a Governor General. In short, the whole island was devoted to the exhibition of its beauty, history and culture with no thought for the mundane and purely practical. It rang with music, dance and song, was become a Busby Berkeley musical, a living museum, one vast, theatrical performance and the air was heavy with incense and the smell of frangipani that masked – as Rosa would have put it – any trace of the sweat of human labour.
As he made his way into the shady porch of the Bali Hotel, Noel gave us his hand, world-wearily, one last time. “Thank you so much, dear boys” he said waving an arm around at all the pageantry. “You really shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble just for me.” And as we pulled up before the Museum, King Walter smiled in complete satisfac
tion and yanked on the “needbrake”. He had surveyed his realm and it was good.
“You know,” he concluded. “This is the very first time the Balinese have got their culture absolutely right.”
***
“Six lines,” said Walter peevishly. Another brown envelope, slit, eviscerated, discarded on the table of the Bali Hotel. “Not even from the Governor General himself, some secretary. ‘His Excellency the Governor General has instructed me to write to you and express …’ I am a ‘valuable contribution’ and my participation is ‘appreciated’. I thought they would make me at least a duke.”
“I don’t think we do that, Walter. The whole notion of aristocracy in Holland is very underdeveloped. Keep the letter. You never know when …”
“How can you have a royal house without a flourishing aristocracy? What if they are childless?”
“Then, Walterl, they send for you.” This last from Vicki Baum, short, skinny, dark, very funny, in her mid-forties. A confident and self-possessed woman with theatrical affiliations and a cutting edge, typical of the women Walter really got on with. “Anyway, darling, you should never read reviews.” She reached – I was about to say for her cigarettes but Vicki never smoked or drank, which was odd in those days, and would have fitted the whole ensemble of her mannerisms – for the letter. She read, holding it out at arm’s length. “It is the first assistant secretary, after all. Damn it. I’m getting old and I forgot to bring my reading glasses on this trip.”
“There is a man in the market who does glasses,” offered Walter, “Japanese but a qualified optimist.”
“You mean he only sells rose-tinted glasses?” We laughed. We must have been speaking English. Vicki was Austrian, though I am not sure that she did not already have an American passport at that stage but, having been raised in the Jewish quarter of Vienna, she was mistress over a form of German even more bizarre than normal Austrian, with an oriental vocabulary and what seemed like a single very dark vowel. From being a professional harpist, she had married the orchestral conductor, worked in Berlin as a magazine editor and, as readers will know, made her great success with the book, Grand Hotel that had gone on to grace the stage and screen on both sides of the Atlantic and provide her with an entrée into Hollywood screenwriting. “Darling, in the writing business, you can sometimes live down a flop but never a big success.” She had told how she had attended the Broadway premier, escorted by dear departed Noel, both dressed up to the nines, but forced to pick their way, giggling, through swamps of horseshit from the police horses and incontinent torrential rain. Sharp-sighted despite the words of unqualified optimists, she had seen which way the wind was blowing in Berlin and got her family snugly under cover well before that storm broke. The Nazis had comforted themselves by first banning her books and later burning them. There was no nonsense about art with Vicki. She was a focused, professional writer who wrote for money. “Darling,” she would say, “I am an absolutely first-rate, second-rate writer.” And Bali, to her, was bankable copy, maybe a film. Who could tell? With her was her half-brother, Fritz, very comely, long limbed and a dancer but oddly not of the faith. It was agreed that she would come and stay in Barbara’s new house and work with Walter and they would recall the days, before they met, but when Plumpe had known them both, in two separate but not overlapping circles, at the Berlin Ullstein studios. Fritz, alas, would not accompany her, being bound for the Berlin operatic stage where Walter’s own brother was now Director and his sister a prima ballerina. So small a world really.
***
“Rosa has been explaining it to me,” said Vicki, clacking away on her portable typewriter, turning to look at me but not slackening her pace. Her hand pounded out the words as though crushing them with hammers. At her elbow, stood a mug of coffee. She had the gestures of a boilermaker. In the writers’ building at MGM, you had to cover a certain number of pages a day, regardless of quality, so you just kept your fingers moving. “About the Balinese struggling against feudal incomers from Java. I see my book as the battle of a noble peasant, standing two-footed on his own soil, immovable against corrupt landlords. Where we don’t agree is in whether you Dutch are the heroes who free him or the villains who enslave him even more.” She was in Barbara’s elegant new house that still smelled of paint and the size used to fix gold leaf. Through the door of the bathroom, I could see the gleaming Western toilet. I wondered whether it worked, and, if so, just where it discharged its burden.
“My Dutchness,” I smiled, “must be regarded as purely nominal, since I do not regard myself as part of the official project. After all, I hold no official position.”
She stopped and looked at me with pity. “Rudi, you can’t ignore the outside world. Surely you realise that a time is coming when you can’t sit comfortably on the fence any more. You’re going to have to choose who you are with.”
“Sitting on a fence,” I quibbled, ”is far from a comfortable position for any male.”
“Look,” she finally took her hands off the keys and scraped the bamboo chair round to face me. “When I left Berlin, I was like you, like Voltaire. ‘We must cultivate our garden’. But it’s hard not to be political when someone in a uniform is very deliberately smashing your skull with a nightstick. At that time, all the young men I knew in the theatre, arts, films were either fervent communists or fascists and didn’t talk to each other. So I had an idea. I bought a lot of beer and asked them all round so they could get to know each others’ point of view. At first they just glared. Then, after a few beers, they started shouting. Then, after a few more, I realised I was on my own. They’d all paired off and crept into the dark corners and were coming to their own conclusions in a more earthy way. I thought it was a great victory for good sense, but, of course, the next day they went back to hating each other. Sex is not just a loving act that brings people together. It can be violent and contemptuous. There’s a quote somewhere about men spitting not just with their mouths. Wait …” She turned and pencilled a note. “That’s too good to waste. Do you suppose” – she, no more the conversationalist but the writer with the next sentence half-formed in her brain and blinding her to all else – “you Dutch committed many rapes when you invaded South Bali? Of course you did. Napoleon was wrong about armies marching on their stomachs. They march on their cocks.” She stood up and marched, herself on bare feet, to the door, turned to face Walter’s bedroom window and called up. “Walterl!” A dim shout in response.
“During the invasion, were there any rapes?”
“What?”
“Rapes! RAPES!” There was a pause, then a sound of pounding feet and Walter appeared red-faced and confused, swinging round the doorframe, clad only in a frayed towel and gripping a rather nice hardwood sculpture of the god Tintiya, though in the new elongated style, therefore ill-fitted really to serve as a weapon of offence. Any other man would have been sweaty. Walter did not sweat.
“Vicki? Bonnetchen?” he cried incredulously. “What’s happening? Thank God!” Gasping and giggling. “I thought I heard you shouting ‘rape’ and ran to help. I mean hinder.”
Vicki laughed. “Thank you Walterl, so gallant”.
“Of course, I didn’t realise it was just Bonnetchen here … If there had been anything going on, he would have been the one screaming rape.”
“The question was as to whether Rudi’s people committed many rapes during the conquest?”
“Look ,” I protested. “When you say ‘my people’ …”
He sucked in his lip and wagged his finger at me, then turned it into that hair-brushing out of eyes gesture and flopped down in a chair, legs spread, shamelessly showing all he’d got, this room become part of theatre backstage where naked bodies were just more used props without erotic charge.
“More interesting is the fact that most Balinese weddings are done as though they were rapes.” He gestured with Tintiya in a manner that fellow Viennese, Dr Freud, would have found unsurprising then, with wide-eyed innocence, slipped it and gripped it
between his legs and drummed on its head with his fingers as he spoke.
Vicki grabbed a pad and was already scribbling Islamic-looking professional shorthand all over it. “Tell me more. Spare me nothing, darling.”
Walter dictated, rapidly tired, looked longingly at his pool, a prince wanting to turn back into a frog. “Enough, Vicki. Time to wallow and bathtime for the cockatoos. We had better change into bathing hose. I do not want to shock the boys.”
The water was deliciously cool and the afternoon sun warm and golden on our skins . Small white flowers were floating on the surface, as if scattered in memory of one of Walter’s gubernatorial receptions.
“There is a wonderful economy in Nature,” declared Walter. “Flowers can attract by colour or smell and by day or by night but all night-scented flowers, like these, are white.”
Was that true? He scooped one up and put it, Balinese-style, behind one ear and a white, not night-scented, cockatoo fluttered down and settled on his swimming head. It was their party trick. Walter dived underwater and the cockatoo, instead of flying off, clutched harder and followed him under, emerging coughing and gargling, like a drowning old man, when he resurfaced. Vicki’s “bathing hose” were a tight black one-piece, at that time in the height of fashion and she swam with firm, efficient movements.
“I can never see swimming costumes without thinking of the tarts who worked across the street from the magazine in Berlin,” she laughed between strokes. “It was forbidden to them to walk the streets, so they used to spend all day cleaning the tall windows with old lacy knickers, wearing only swimming costumes, to attract the attention of men below. That way, it wasn’t strictly against the law and the Schupos left them alone. If anyone seemed particularly interested, the girl would accidentally drop the knickers onto the street and the kind gentleman would raise his hat, pick them up and bring them back. People always assumed they must be very clean girls because they had such wonderfully clean windows.”
