Wish You Were Here

by Nick Webb

  Years later this handy definition appeared in The Meaning of Liff:

  Tukituki (n)

  A sexual liaison which is meant to be secret but which is in fact common knowledge.

  Douglas was not only emotionally needy but averse to commitment, attributes to which his odd childhood must have contributed. On top of that he was a creative artist of some genius who had no easy affinity with the art form that made him his fortune. These were the ingredients of an insecure mix. For all his charm and humour, Douglas could be relentlessly self-absorbed. Living with him was emotionally draining.

  After less than a year, Sally and Douglas broke up. Sally felt claustrophobic. She had to escape; she missed her husband. Years later, when he felt able to be flippant, Douglas remarked that, “She went off with this bloke on the to me rather spurious grounds that he was her husband.” For Sally it was a good move. She went back to her husband (who had not been pining at home all the time) and they rediscovered all the reasons why they had got together in the first place. As in all the best stories, they produced two talented kids and lived happily ever after.

  Douglas, on the other hand, was plunged into what his mother, Janet, called the Sally Crisis. His family had to rally round. Janet came up from Dorset. Little Jane, then a teenager, turned up occasionally to administer sympathy and cups of tea, and try to take the Black Dog out for the occasional walkie. Douglas drooped about the St. Alban’s Place flat moping tearfully, feeling wretched and wondering What It Was All About.

  Douglas and Sally had exchanged a fair amount of correspondence. Writing this book would be so much less toe-curlingly intrusive if they had been of Pepys’s era, say, safely sanctified by history; I could look at their love letters in the sterile conditions of the Public Records Office or the British Library to lift appropriate chunks for the modern reader. As it is, I felt rather like a moist journalist from the tabloids when I chanced upon their correspondence in the bottom of one of Douglas’s huge crates of disorganized papers. Wordsworth described a particular variety of nature poet as “one who would peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave.” Biographers must feel like that all the time.

  Three things struck me about these letters.

  Firstly, as you would expect from two literary talents in a state of heightened emotion and at the top of their form, the letters were beautifully written and suffused with feeling. Douglas was demanding though wildly romantic. At one point he wrote that he would come back for Sally after the bomb fell. In a hundred years’ time, like the correspondence between the Brownings, their letters should be published.

  Mind you, the utter shamelessness of writers would bring a smile to the face of a reader familiar with Douglas’s work. Some of the nifty turns of phrase in his letters were recycled in books—possibly as private references, but also because they were just too good to be lost. For instance, in one of them there’s an evocative account of a Victorian picture of anthropomorphized animals, seen with vague unease in childhood and only decontaminated years later by adult perception. It reappears almost unchanged in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.* 163 This in no way detracts from the emotion behind the original account. Artists use everything, but that doesn’t mean they live their lives in what your existentialist would call bad faith. It’s just that the well they draw from is themselves; nothing is sacred. The pride of creation is overwhelming; they cannot let the good bits go to waste after one private outing.

  Secondly, Douglas’s tone after the break-up is full of complaint. He found it difficult to comprehend Sally’s viewpoint. He was terribly anguished but self-referential. (How could you do this to me with all my creative burdens?) Eric Berne in his classic book on transactional analysis, Games People Play, identifies one of the games as “See What You’ve Made Me Do.”* 164 The letters show Douglas playing that one at tournament level. Undeniably the poor man was prostrate with unhappiness, but he showed little understanding that Sally had also been put through the wringer. His own emotional needs were so profound that he did not—or could not—always grasp that other people had them too.

  Finally, Douglas had neatly fixed copies of his own replies to Sally’s letters. For a biographer that’s handy, but you have to wonder why. It’s not as if, like some villain in a melodrama, he’d promised Sally to make her Empress of India and had to be careful not to contradict or repeat himself in later exchanges. Like all couples going through the pain of break-up, there was a certain amount of epistolary ping-pong of the “in Paris you said . . . no, you said it first” variety. Anybody who has been through such an experience knows there is no contradiction between trivial point scoring and being racked by huge emotions. However, Douglas attached copies of his own love letters in reply to Sally’s for the entire course of the affair, not just the terminal stages. Perhaps here too his writer’s pride took precedence over everything. He could not bear to see a good piece of work consigned to the post forever, like a message in a bottle hurled into the sea. Of course, it’s possible that he retrospectively organized the correspondence though the closeness with which the two of them responded to each other’s letters gives the impression that the admin was contemporaneous.

  Somehow keeping copies seems rather too efficient for a man in a state of turmoil—but God forbid that too much is read into a stapler. Make of it what you will.

  One thing that Douglas did ask of Sally when they had irretrievably separated was that she promise that—though the heavens fall—she would never, never ever, have an affair with John Lloyd.

  Following the break-up, Mary Allen was dismayed by the state Douglas had worked himself into by late 1981. She realized that what he needed was company. Douglas without society was a lost soul, and a twenty-eight-year-old man cannot expect his mum to be on hand all the time.

  Mary Allen and Jane Belson had become friends under unusual circumstances. Jane had been going out with a barrister called Martin whom she took to a party where he met Mary Allen and promptly started dating her too. Mary decided quite quickly that the relationship was not for her, particularly after she heard on the grapevine that she was not quite the only woman in Martin’s life. About a year later Martin (who had by then confessed all to Jane) thought it would be entertaining to introduce them to each other to see if they would scratch each other’s eyes out. In fact they liked each other immediately and have remained on the best of terms ever since.

  Jane recalls her first encounter with Douglas:

  Mary felt sorry for Douglas but her capacity for listening to him on the phone for two hours a day was running out. He was desperate in that big flat on his own. She thought a solution would be to provide him with a flat mate. They discussed two or three possibles. One of them was me, and the others were eliminated by Douglas on the grounds that he would only have an affair with them—and that was not what he wanted. I had retrained as a barrister and was doing pupillage at the bar, where you don’t have any income at all, so I was stony broke and back living with my parents. So when Mary suggested it, the idea appealed. I had met Douglas a few times by then, but didn’t know him at all well. I knew Sally and her husband rather better.

  I came to see him and the flat to see if it would work. My first reaction was to be surprised all over again by how much taller he was than me. Most men aren’t. He took me up to the roof garden where we sat on uncomfortable metal chairs. He was shy and awkward at first. I think he was comforted by the fact that I knew Sally and her husband so he didn’t have to start the story from the beginning. We discovered more mutual friends—Douglas was a wonderfully indiscreet gossip—and started to feel more at ease with each other. Douglas had a curious combination of confidence and shyness, with physical awkwardness thrown in. He didn’t know where to put his legs and waved his hands around a lot when he talked. He later told me that when he was little and his mother wanted him to stop talking, she would tell him to sit on his hands. For Douglas, talking without moving his hands around was like trying to eat a sugary doughnut without licking
your lips.

  We passed each other’s tests and I moved into the spare bedroom. It’s odd sharing a flat with a man you don’t really know all that well. Shortly after I moved in, the Falklands War (sorry, Conflict) broke out, and while it was horrible it was also exciting in a gruesome sort of way. We took it in turns to rush downstairs and get the newspaper every morning and we watched TV news all the time.

  Douglas was under great pressure to finish Life, The Universe and Everything, which had come to a grinding halt about halfway through when Sally left. He sat in his study with several typewriters switching from one to the other to give the day a bit of structure. There would be bursts of typing punctuated by long bits of guitar playing (acoustic—the electric guitar came later and annoyed the hell out of our neighbours). I’d come home from chambers to find Douglas waiting to read me what he had written, scrutinizing my reactions minutely and checking carefully to see that I was laughing in the right way at the right joke. It was my first encounter with a writer (well, anybody really) who needed that level of reassurance.

  When Jane was first spotted by Rick and Heidi, Douglas’s architect neighbours in St. Alban’s Place, they were intrigued. Sometimes she appeared as a tall figure in fuscous barrister gear like some kind of professional burka, but off duty Jane sported a minute red leather miniskirt revealing legs that went on and on. “We wondered what Douglas was up to,” Rick said. “It looked odd.”

  Jane has the sort of brain that takes no prisoners. Douglas would complain about it sometimes—rather unfairly—though he was proud of her.* 165 Of course it would be lovely for any chap if the woman in his life gave him unconditional support and admiration for every notion, no matter how daft, but in the long term she would not be doing him a favour at all. Jane kept Douglas anchored to the ground. In the psychobabble of today, this service is known as a reality check. It’s invaluable, and not to be confused with lack of support: it is in fact the very best available.

  Jane and Douglas became friends, then lovers, and eventually soulmates.

  They were one of the most fashionable couples in London. They knew the brightest and the best from showbiz, the media, technology and the law—and they gave amazing parties in the apartment off Upper Street. One infamous occasion climaxed with a famous woman writer being entertained (in the same way as the woman in the bar in New York entertained men) by two chaps simultaneously while everyone else at first drifted, and then scuttled, into the other arm of the L-shaped drawing room. Douglas’s mother attended that party and received a contrite letter afterwards from the woman concerned. “Oh, that party,” Janet recalls with the sang froid of a nurse who has seen almost everything, “that party was really rather naughty. But is it fair? That woman is about my age.”

  Jane and Douglas also liked to give dinner parties and enjoyed collecting clever people from diverse fields and putting them together. On one lavish occasion they fed over a hundred people and—fearing the conversational constipation of the Brits—managed to find an intriguing fact about every single person that they printed out and placed with the adjacent guest.* 166

  A well-known anecdote from this period concerns Sir Clive Sinclair, he of the eponymous computers, digital watches and calculators, who was having dinner with them (October 1984). He spotted an early proof copy of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

  “I must have it,” he said, with the unwavering singleness of purpose that distinguishes the entrepreneur from lesser folk.

  “Alas,” said Douglas, “I’m afraid it’s the only one, so I must hang on to it.”

  “I’ll buy it, of course,” said Sir Clive.

  “I am sorry,” replied Douglas, “but it’s my only early copy and not for sale.”

  “A thousand pounds,” said Sir Clive, taking out his chequebook, “to the charity of your choice . . .”

  Greenpeace made a grand that evening.

  Throughout this period the relationship between Douglas and Jane deepened:

  We sort of lived together, and we had a lot of fun. When he finished Life, The Universe and Everything, we went off for a while and enjoyed ourselves. It was Whitsun, and we toured round bits of France in his open-topped VW listening to very loud music—Paul Simon mostly—and staying at very nice places. He had told his mother he was taking me, so we got visited by his mother and his aunt for an inspection. We both had Aunt Vals as it happened, who lived very respectably with men to whom they were not married. Douglas’s Aunt Val was deeply glamorous and enormous fun. She led off the vetting, asking exactly the sort of questions you hope people won’t.

  Not surprisingly, Jane survived the vetting process.

  In August 1983, after their move to Los Angeles, they both became desperately homesick, even Douglas who had taken to California like a walrus slipping into the briney. Returning, they drove all the way east across America in a Saab, listening to music and being impressed by the sheer scale of it all. There’s a romance to the size of the States that eludes us in Britain where you cannot drive all day, listening to country and western artists singing sad ballads through their noses, without ending up in the sea. From New York they flew home, and were reinstalled in Upper Street, where Jane resumed her practice as a barrister. Douglas started writing So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, found he had enormous trouble with it and ended up being locked in that hotel with Sonny Mehta.

  The relationship between Douglas and Jane did not always float along serenely. As Denis Healey once said of the government, it only looks like a swan on the surface because it’s paddling like buggery underneath. Jane sometimes found it tough living with Douglas. He was adorable but egocentric, enthusiastic but indecisive, creative yet repetitive . . . (She bore the word-perfect retellings of anecdotes with great fortitude as any loyal partner must.) But he was never dull. “I had to do the work on the growing-up side of the ledger,” said Jane. “I think that’s because he thought he’d lose his creativity.”

  Douglas had a weakness for toys, Jane remembers, especially electronic and expensive ones.

  He bought them on impulse. He had a complete incapacity for throwing things away—not because he didn’t like throwing things away, but because he could not decide what to throw away. The process of decision-making was beyond him, so he kept everything. And I think he also felt guilty because he was the first of his contemporaries to make money. So he was stinking rich while they were all grubbing around trying to make a living. I think he did find that difficult. Now, of course, a lot of them are richer.

  It wasn’t just the jettisoning of toys that drove him into agonies of indecision. Douglas was fearful of commitment, and Jane is strong-willed. They mostly got on, but they had some astonishing arguments on a scale suitable for decommissioning by United Nations weapons inspectors. In 1985 they nearly got married, Jane recalls, but they both backed off.

  Jane remembers one fearsomely energetic row (topic now wholly forgotten) they had sitting across the table from each other:

  Douglas would argue with great passion, precise grammar and a lot of sub-clauses. He was in full flow, arms windmilling, when he suddenly stopped. I waited. And waited a bit more, and then the penny dropped. “Split the fucking infinitive,” I said.

  One morning of this interesting time—which happened to be St. Valentine’s Day—Jane opened her front door to find a large bunch of exquisite flowers. From Douglas. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang and there was another and larger bunch. Both bunches were put in water before Jane left for work. At court she was interrupted in listening to her client’s account of the appalling behaviour of his about-to-be-ex-wife by the delivery of another and, by then, ludicrously huge bunch of flowers by an impressed usher. “You keep that man,” she said. “He must be a good one.” Jane’s client was less romantically touched. A fourth bunch was waiting in the court office as she left. Having struggled back to Chambers carrying the files of an acrimonious divorce and two bunches of flowers, she was greeted by a fifth under her desk. Once home, bunches six
and seven arrived. She spent the evening scrounging vases.

  All through the eighties they tacked back and forth. Mostly they had fun. They fell out, and got together again for massive reconciliations. They were passionate and cheesed off with each other simultaneously. Both parties took what Jane termed “time off for bad behaviour” when they lived apart for a while. In the old Chinese proverb sense, it was an interesting time.

  But, having been put to the test, their relationship survived. On 25 November 1991, Pan threw a party for Douglas in the Groucho Club in London’s Soho. Ostensibly it was to celebrate the recent Pan publication of Last Chance to See and the presentation of Douglas’s third Golden Pan Award. Douglas faxed the ever-efficient Jacqui Graham, by then a director, an extensive guest list. She was not surprised, though she sighed a little at its length.

  In the event, all became clear. Douglas had hijacked the party. All his mates were there (including Sue and me) freeloading remorselessly on champagne and those delicious little edibles. Suddenly there was a pinging of glasses as our attention was requested. Douglas placed himself in the “Ladies and Gentlemen” position. He looked sublimely happy. Jane stood next to him in a fetching irony-red suit. Instead of the usual gracious author speech, he announced that we were all wrong in our speculation about when they would ever get married because “after a whirlwind ten-year romance” he and Jane had done the deed that very afternoon. Everybody roared with approval.