by Nick Webb
Years later Douglas was interviewed about the house by one of the glossy mortgage-company magazines.* 170 (He always found it difficult to say no to any interview. He was a complete media tart. Interviews were good for his morale; he could pretend they were work.) He said:
There had been a rag-trade sweatshop on the ground floor, a picture framer’s in the basement and an optician’s on the first floor. It had to be completely gutted. At one stage you could walk in and see the sky. The structural work alone took eighteen months.
Rick is an engaging man with a vivid sense of humour. A typical architect, he likes to think with a pen in his hand so he can doodle plans and create graphical networks of ideas. He and Douglas hit it off immediately, and they became great friends, rather on the pattern of Douglas’s other intense male friendships. Quite possibly, says Jane, this was the closest of the lot. They saw something in each other’s talents that was not dissimilar. As creative activities, writing and architecture both entail a painstaking attention to detail and the elaborate loading of structure onto proper foundations. Douglas was intrigued by creativity and he believed there was a lot in common between the insight of a scientist and the inventiveness of a writer. Douglas admired Rick’s talent, and was pleased to think that he was commissioning a building—surely the ultimate in patronage.
They were very much in sympathy intellectually. After all “architecture is frozen music.”* 171 When architects and writers are on song, they may both experience a eureka moment when something unexpected emerges. Rick remembers a typically foody Douglas analogy that went along these lines:
It’s like cooking roast duck. You check the recipe book, consult the Larousse Gastronomique, do lots of research, select the right spices and prepare the duck with exquisite care. Then you put it in the oven for exactly the right time for the very best duck results. When it’s ready—there you are. Perfect chocolate soufflé.
They had some visionary plans for the house. Douglas wanted a swimming pool and a gym in the basement, and Rick worked out how he could achieve it by digging out the garden and replacing it on top of the new construction. It would have been preposterously indulgent but quite magical. Unfortunately there was no access to the site for heavy plant except by going over the back wall of the garden. This was also the back wall of the Royal Bank of Scotland complex, a huge bunker of a building with a frontage overlooking the less fashionable (a relative term) end of Upper Street near the Angel tube station. As this happens to be where the bank stores its bullion, security is correspondingly humourless. Douglas and Rick petitioned the bank very charmingly for access, and even went up to Scotland to toady to the managing director in person. But the most they could negotiate was two hours per week, and Rick had to advise Douglas not to go ahead. Instead the basement became an elegant flat for Little Jane, Douglas’s young half-sister, who used it while she was training to be a nurse.
Douglas was a wonderful client for a young architect. Architects adore clients with imagination; it is just so much more fun building a house where you are encouraged to show some flair. It’s also a useful credential for further work. Douglas, Rick recalls, would always go for the wild idea even if it were more expensive. Jane, however, was better at reading plans and working out what they would mean in practice. But delay can lead to a certain testiness even in the nicest client. All through 1986 and into 1987 the work dragged on and on.
The expense was unimaginable. When the taxi meter is whizzing around in the head of an architect, it makes even a lawyer look affordable. You certainly don’t pass the time of day exchanging pleasantries about how clement conditions are for the season.
It was unfortunately just at this time that Douglas suffered a major financial blow. Ever since he started making serious money he had followed his tripartite scheme: a third for fun, a third for retirement, and a third to the accountant for the tax man. (Douglas would have been in the 40% tax bracket, but then what are accountants for? Besides, authors were then allowed to spread their income on the grounds that a book may represent several years’ labour, amid lots of genuine and allowable expenses.) This arrangement worked satisfactorily until 1986, though Douglas could never sustain interest long enough to grasp the detail. This definition from The Deeper Meaning of Liff gives a clue:
Swanibost (adj.)
Completely shagged out after a hard day having income tax explained to you.
Then things went seriously wrong. Douglas’s accountant had used Douglas’s money to pay his own debts, having unwisely guaranteed the liabilities of another client. Unfortunately, he was unable to replace Douglas’s funds that had been set aside for the Revenue. The loss was at least £150,000. Douglas’s own estimate came to £345,000, though as this was in a letter apologising for a manuscript delay, it may have been amplified by pathos. His lawyer, Leon Morgan of Davenport Lyons, and his new accountant, Alan Clark of Nyman Libson Paul & Co., took action against the accountancy firm on three counts: recovery of monies, retrieval of documents, and professional negligence. Meanwhile the Inland Revenue wanted its tax. The Revenue was sympathetic, but as Douglas said in a letter to his friend and collaborator, Mark Carwardine, their sympathy did not extend as far as letting him off. He would be given time, but he would still have to pay the tax and interest on the late payment. In the meantime he was spending awesome quantities of money as the building costs on Duncan Terrace took off like an F-16 from a flight deck. Douglas was bitter about this, pointing out in the same letter to Mark that he only committed himself to the project on the basis of advice from his accountant—who must have known full well that Douglas didn’t have the money, having nicked it himself.
Ed Victor and his colleague, Maggie Phillips, say that Douglas was in turmoil about whether to take criminal proceedings against the delinquent accountant (who had children to be considered) or to leave the matter as a civil action. In the end he decided not to involve the police. But he was righteously furious. On the other hand, the practical reality was that he could only hope to recover some of the money from someone earning, rather than doing time at her Majesty’s pleasure. Calling in the police, he explained to Mark, “is a bit like holding a gun on somebody. Once you’ve actually pulled the trigger, that’s it.”
Events took a darker turn when the accountant committed suicide. God knows how complex this affair would prove if his story could also be told. Douglas was very upset at his death, especially for the widow and children. He sobbed, Ed says, and was consumed with guilt. But the truth is that it was just ill chance that there was plenty of handy money in a client account, one that happened to belong to Douglas. The whole experience was very unsettling. Douglas had never been prudent, but he had made enough money not to have to worry about it. When he was married he was relieved that Jane could take over running his financial affairs.
All this Sturm und Drang only increased the urgent need to stop pouring money into Duncan Terrace. They say that everybody falls out with their architect sooner or later, and the only reason most of us don’t is because we cannot afford one in the first place. Rick and Heidi’s costs were based on a percentage of the building budget, so their fees rose as the project encountered ever more difficulties. Mind you, as Jane says, Rick was actually good value in terms of the aeons of time he put in. It says a lot for the affection between Douglas and Rick that they remained friends even though Douglas’s fascination faded a little. Eventually, when Duncan Terrace was completed, Douglas saw less of Rick and they drifted apart.
Another property into which Douglas tipped money was in New York where he acquired an elegant apartment on the fourteenth floor of a handsome building on Central Park South. He was by then making more money in the US than in any other market, and was back and forth across the Atlantic like a fiddler’s elbow. Driven by his perennial wanderlust and his love of America, Douglas convinced himself that it made sense not to spend money on hotels when he had so much business in New York and enjoyed being there so much.
Douglas loved to trav
el. He was relentlessly inquisitive, but travel was also, in all senses, flight. However, he did not believe that hardship is good for the character. Rather than being ennobling, discomfort is—if anything—likely to induce a corrupting resentment. On the contrary, he liked to fly first class, partly because that way he met more movers and shakers, but mainly due to the fact that he was genuinely too big for those seats in Economy (or “World Traveller”—euphemisms vary by airline) that seem to be made for small children. Even the airlines’ employees privately call it “scum class.” Fortunately Douglas had a good relationship with British Airways with whom he spent a small fortune every year. The airline would often try to organise an upgrade to First when he bought his Business Class tickets, if seats were available. Upgrading, a process driven by Kafkaesque subtleties beyond the ken of ordinary men, was later to be a pivotal component in the game of Starship Titanic.
Even in New York’s volatile property market, it is almost impossible not to make a profit if you just hold on for long enough, but Douglas managed it. He and Jane never used their Central Park South apartment as much as they had anticipated. They freely lent it out to their mates, but for a lot of the time it sat there empty, satirically burning up dollars in service charges. Douglas had bought it at the top of the market. When he sold after a few years, he lost money for he had paid for it when the dollar was weak and sold it when the dollar was strong.
Nearer to home, the third and final property (this was 1989) that Douglas fell for was a villa called La Masure near Gordes in Provence. It was paradise. This part of the south of France has long occupied a special place in the hearts of the English. It is unfairly favoured by nature, being warm and hilly with entrancing vistas. The local vernacular runs to thick-walled whitewashed villas with pinky-brown pantile roofs and shady courtyards full of roses. Bars and, more importantly, restaurants abound. What’s more it’s accessible within hours from London’s airports with direct flights to Marseilles. A Brit can enjoy a transformation as magical as entering a railway tunnel in a grimy industrial suburb and emerging into the garden of Eden. You can even drive there from the Channel ports in a day if you are prepared to be one of the Continent’s très vite Porsche-owning, white-knuckle crazies.* 172
Douglas and Jane had many a jolly holiday down there, and had no trouble enticing lots of smart friends to join them sitting on their terrace boozing and talking into the balmy evenings. Phil Pope, the actor, Stephen Fry, and John Lloyd and his wife, Sarah, were frequent visitors. Once, to the terror of all, his friend from Cambridge, Michael Bywater, a qualified pilot, flew a party down in a small two-engined aeroplane. La Masure was bliss, though they must have felt like escapees from one of those quintessentially English novels in which women in straw hats exchange inexplicit understandings in foreign villas. Douglas loved to invite friends there to witness him writing—but then he wouldn’t actually write. Conversation and local restaurants were much more amusing.
The house had been owned by a well-known publisher, Tom Maschler, the editorial boss of the famous imprint, Jonathan Cape. Ed Victor had helped to broker the deal. Douglas rang me when he was buying the property. The conversation went something like this:
“Tell me about Tom Maschler,” he said.
“Douglas, I’m intrigued. Why do you want to know?”
“Well,” he said, “I’m paying him a lot of dosh for his lovely place in France. He’s removed the light bulbs, the light fittings and the fire backs. Then he came back and took some of the logs away from the wood store. Is he a loony?”
I chortled. “No Douglas. Just a publisher, just a publisher . . .”
Douglas’s love of this part of France had been ignited by his stay in Juan les Pins, on the Mediterranean coast, where he had rented a villa while writing Last Chance to See. La Masure would have been the perfect place in which to write, except that the search for somewhere conducive to the fickle muse is just literary foreplay on an epic scale. Writers play this game in different ways depending on their resources. Some have to go swimming every morning—to oxygenate the brain, don’t you know?—because otherwise their lives are dangerously sedentary. Others invest time and money in getting the office absolutely right: the dictionaries within reach, the chair gripping the bottom like a libidinous old friend, the anglepoise with the full spectrum bulb positioned exactly . . .
Michael Bywater, who was then a writer on Punch magazine, tells a story of staying with Douglas in France. They dined out almost every night and in one local restaurant, Le Provençal, they were taken “for a couple of poofs.” He and Douglas used to argue passionately about ideas, and these were regarded as lovers’ tiffs by the incorrigibly superior French waiters. On another occasion, Michael and Douglas were rowing furiously about Roman Catholicism in Le Comptoir de Victuailler, a wonderfully decadent restaurant in Gordes where the food is so sensuous that Douglas said the owner was more like a panderer than a restaurateur. (“He looks at you with approval,” Michael remembers Douglas saying, “as if you were a degenerate who had just ordered a well-greased choirboy . . .”) Michael’s position on Catholicism was that if you could only accept the first premise (a pretty big “if”), the rest of the religion was well worked out by generations of subtle Jesuits. Internally it is logically consistent. Douglas was furious about the idea, the loathing of organized religion in all its forms rising in him from his childhood and his overwhelming father. Having just ordered fish, he picked it up and slapped Michael across the face with it. It was a turbot, Michael reports. They ate it afterwards. Delicious apparently. Michael, now a regular columnist in the Independent on Sunday newspaper, is the kind of writer who would torture a sentence half to death in order to avoid a cliché like, “Well, it’s better than a slap across the face with a wet fish . . .” Now, at least, he can claim to understand it more deeply than most.
Buying a place in France has all kinds of virtues, but doing so in order to write is not one of them. Douglas soon discovered that, unlike retailing, location is not the secret of writing.
••••••
The deal with Heinemann to publish Douglas’s books in hardcover had another virtue. It introduced Douglas to his new editor, Sue Freestone, who was at first drafted in to work with him on a freelance basis, but soon joined the company permanently. Sue was to become an important person in Douglas’s creative life. She’s a short, blonde, husky-voiced Canadian woman who confesses to being an ex-hippie. Her innate sensitivity, her somewhat rackety life before she settled down with her husband, the television journalist Vivian White, and a certain maternal kindness have given her a particular strength as an editor over and above any technical expertise in organizing text—an ability to empathize with the author. Along with heroically sustained patience, this was a quality she had to demonstrate in spades with Douglas right from the start. When Douglas was particularly constipated with his writing, her role was the emotionally draining business of providing instant approval and encouragement.
Together they went through peaks and troughs of elation and despair, and inevitably Sue came to care deeply for Douglas, great affection vying with equally great exasperation. “He was a misfit,” she said, “a large, left-handed man with an odd perspective who lived in a world that was designed for an altogether more straightforward, right-handed sort of person.” Her connection with him also did no harm to her own career, and his wicked parties provided access to a remarkable network of the élite. It was through Douglas that she met (and later published) Stephen Fry, for instance, a frequent guest at Douglas’s table. “Who is that woman,” Stephen recalls asking Douglas, “who hangs about the house while we’re laughing, to whom you give the occasional piece of paper?”* 173
The writing itself was not getting any easier. It was around this time that Douglas uttered his remark, cherished in literary circles, that writing was just a matter of sitting in front of a blank piece of paper “until your forehead bleeds.” He had spent a lot of 1986 editing The Utterly, Utterly Merry Comic Relie
f Christmas Book, to which he had given his time for free, but which proved more demanding than he had expected. It required him to coordinate myriad people and details—not a skill that Douglas had manifested to an acute degree as a producer.
He had also been working on Bureaucracy, another computer game for Infocom, the company which had sold a gratifying number, mainly in the States, of the first Hitchhiker’s game. It was inspired by his own move to Upper Street. To his chagrin he had found his credit cards had been invalidated by Barclay’s, for they had sent his new cards to his old address despite the fact that he had filled out a change of address card personally and handed it to them, right there in his own branch. Getting the “system”—an abused word for what is often an inchoate and foolish procedure sanctified only by time—to recognize his new location was a torment that lasted for two years. Douglas was provoked into some excited correspondence. A brief extract from his letter to Miss Wilcox at Barclay’s will give a flavour.
[A history of his attempts to inform the bank of his new address plus excruciatingly explicit contact details . . .]
[My Address] is at the top of this letter. It is also at the top of my previous letter to you. I am not trying to hide anything from you. If you write to me at this address I will reply. If you write to me care of my accountant, he will reply, which would be better still. If you write to me at Highbury New Park, the chances are that I won’t reply because your letter will probably not reach me, because I don’t live there any more. I haven’t lived there for two years. I moved. Two years ago. I wrote to you about it, remember?
Dear Miss Wilcox, I am sure you are a very lovely person, and that if I were to meet you I would feel ashamed at having lost my temper with you in this way. I’m sure it’s not your fault personally and that if I had to do your job I would hate it. Let me take you away from all this. Come to London. Let me show you where I live, so that you can see it is indeed in Upper Street. I will even take you to Highbury New Park and introduce you to the man who has been living there for the past two years so that you can see for yourself that it isn’t me. I could take you out to dinner and slip you little change of address cards across the table. We could even get married and go and live in a villa in Spain, though how would we get anyone in your department to understand that we had moved?
