— What’s he like? said Rob. How should we act?
By now we were passing through the village of Deya, saying ‘Señor Graves?’ and ‘El poeta?’ to passersby, who confidently waved us on. At this time Graves had just finished his five-year term as Oxford Professor of Poetry. One of his historical novels, I, Claudius, had recently been televised, and his scholarly books — The White Goddess, The Greek Myths — were still very much current. He would now be seventy-three.
— Oh don’t worry, I said. Just go on as if he’s a god.
Graves seemed baffled but on the whole rather pleased to see us. He was perhaps fractionally diminished from the striding colossus of a few years earlier, but still very straight and head-in-air, the ancient coin of his face quite undulled. I introduced my friends and said,
— I’m sorry about this, Robert, but you must get some very weird people coming to see you these days. Now you’re so famous.
— Oh I do, I do. Some extraordinary people come to see me now. Extraordinary people.
The five of us looked out on the rocky acres — spurs and tors, terraces, arthritic olive trees. Then Rob said to Robert,
— Make that mountain open up.
— What?
— Turn it into a volcano.
— What?
— Go on. You can do it. Make that cloud go away.
— Oh, you’re —
— Summon a tidal wave.
— You little —
— Make the moon come out.
— Ooh, you —
— Make the —
And Robert got hold of Rob and roughly tickled him.*
A couple of hours later the Mini Moke was edging its way down the drive. Graves kept running back to the house to bring us more fresh-baked bread, more labelled jars of pickles and homemade jam.
It was 1968, the time of devaluation and currency restrictions (and of much else): the upper limit on trips abroad was £50 per person. I had taken £50 out of the country. Rob had taken less than £50 out of the country because, the day before our departure, he had gone to a betting shop. After two or three years of near-daily patronage, I had stopped going to betting shops. I stopped when I suddenly noticed that betting shops were populated not by rich people getting richer but, rather, by poor people getting poorer. I shared this observation with Rob, who nonetheless persisted. Anyway, by the time he got to Majorca (where we stayed free at Si’s father’s house), he didn’t have enough money to get back.
This soon became academic. As we drove north from Barcelona something very fundamental started going wrong with the car. I spent my nineteenth birthday as I had spent my thirteenth: pushing a car up the Pyrenees. It wasn’t quite the same, because this car also had to be pushed down the Pyrenees. The thing wouldn’t even coast. In a piece of 1962 called ‘Something Does Not Work with My Car’ Kingsley wrote:
After ten miles we came to a slight upward slope. That was that. We were in a small town called Le Boulou, a name I shall never be able to see on a map (which is as close as I ever intend to get to the place again) without horror.
And that’s where we were. Le Boulou.* I had loved all this the first time around: late nights, virile inadvertencies. But now, as I watched Rob approach the nearest house (hoping to call a garage on its telephone) and knock on the knocker and say, with pitiful insouciance, ‘Bon après-midi!’ — well, even before the door was slammed in his face, I had a sense of the length of the road ahead.
Eventually the car was towed back to Perpignan. We responded to the crisis in the manner of middle-class adventurers the world over: we phoned home for more money. I reached my step-uncle Colin (Kingsley and Jane were on holiday themselves). ‘Uh, we need some money sent.’ ‘Why? Can’t you get a job?’ ‘Get a job? What job? A job doing what?’ I waited in the post office while Rob tried his mother.
— What did she say?
— She said, ‘Get a job.’
— Christ. What’s all this about getting a job?
We did not get a job. I went on at Colin until he relented. It would take time for my father’s accountant to arrange the transfer (a complicated and perhaps semi-legal procedure). Rob and I spent freely until our money ran out the next day, the last few francs going on Coca-Colas and a pinball machine, and then settled down to a week of patient trembling and starving and hanging around the post office. We slept in a state-run Y. During the day we would sometimes tremble and starve in the public gardens. Here we would mingle with enormous, and enormously evolved, hitch-hikers (Germans, Swedes), nordic titans of self-reliance who regularly girdled the earth on a dollar a year. They were grateful for our bulk-bought Spanish cigarettes.
— You come up from Barcelona? In Barcelona it is easy to find a job?
Rob and I looked at each other. One of us said,
— It depends.
— How about the docks? Can you get a job at the docks in Barcelona?
Rob and I looked at each other: our pallor, our want of inches, our soiled flower shirts. And, in voices that suddenly sounded mid-adolescent, we began:
— Well it’s reasonably easy.
— It can be done.
— I mean, but you can’t just walk into a job at the docks in Barcelona.
The money came through in the end, of course. After reclaiming the car we reckoned we had about fifteen francs for supplies. Rob went off and came back with some glacier mints, some coffee-cream biscuits and some orangeade — a combination which, even on paper, still makes me flinch. The neck of the orangeade bottle snapped off as I tried to open it (during a hysterical thunderstorm in Perpignan’s northern suburbs), dramatically gashing my hand. More blood was to be seen the next morning when I managed to cough some up in a layby: out of my mouth came a translucent jellyfish with a dot of plasma in the middle of it. My only spell at the wheel lasted about fifteen minutes: a cigarette end, flicked from the rear seat towards the driver’s window, went straight down the back of my hipster jeans, causing me to swerve into the path of an oncoming pantechnicon. That was my shot. Rob drove all night. We signed an IOU on the channel ferry and reached home on our last gill of gasoline.
I was very short of money when I was a baby. I slept in a drawer and had my baths in an outdoor sink. My nappies bore triangular singe marks where they had been dried on the fireguard. It was tough. My father’s dinner would often consist of the contents of the doggybag that my mother brought back from the cinema café (the Tivoli) where she worked. (Memoirs: ‘Swansea’.) Kingsley would sometimes write to Philip Larkin pleading for the loan of a fiver — or even a quid. It was really tough, but I don’t remember any of it.
One day in 1978, in another car, Rob said to me as I dropped him off,
— Sorry, Mart, but could you spare a tenner?
I could, and usually I did. But this time I wouldn’t.
— A fiver. Okay a quid.
— Okay. A quid.
That week in Perpignan was my only experience of privation, of hunger. It would happen differently for Rob, who was no mere trier-out of hard times, and proved to have a genius for adversity — not ordinary disasters either but extraordinary disasters. By his example well-born Rob schooled Osric in Fri-dee and Satur-dee, in sofa and lavatory, in [with]drawing-room, in miffy.* Still, there was nothing bourgeois about his trials and labours. You would not know, gentle reader,† with your attentive brow, your soft hands on the spine, his ordeals of park bench, of winter coalhole, or shelterlessness, and prison. As a child Rob attended the ancient prep school Christ’s Hospital. Then he went to the ancient secondary school Westminster. Then he went to Wormwood Scrubs.‡ He’s fine now, in 1999. Some people cannot play by the prevailing rules; other rules might have been okay, but not the prevailing. Thirty years ago his face was Nureyevian; then experience imbued it, for a while, with something medieval: self-inflicted wounds, unembitteredly borne. He’s fine now, but Rob — but going under — lives very close to what I write.
From ‘Agua, No’ to ‘Agua, Sí’
/> On a tube train in Earls Court I saw a young man reading The Rachel Papers, about a week after its publication. He was enjoying the book, and in the best possible way: a reluctant smile, an unreluctant smile, a reluctant smile, and so on. I still regret that I didn’t go up to him. But I told myself: listen, this will be happening all the time — get used to it. I need hardly add that it didn’t happen again for about fifteen years (someone in a headset, on an aeroplane, scowling at The Moronic Inferno). When my first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award I told myself the same sort of thing: get used to it. And that never happened again.*
The terms of the prize, much resented by Kingsley when he won it, as we have seen, required that the author spend some months abroad. My father had taken us all to Portugal. I went to my mum’s in Spain. Spain: we’re in Spain again. Spain is my other European country, not Italy, not France. Spain … At that time Mum (for that is what I call her and how I think of her: I have to concentrate for an instant to remember her name — Hilary) was hoping to turn a profit running a bar in Ronda, Málaga. She has always fancied herself as having entrepreneurial talent in the catering line. Years later, back in England, at six a.m. every morning she would get behind the wheel of one of those burger-and-furter vans you see lurking in the lay-bys. Her one major success, with which she was then still flushed, was a fish-and-chip shop she had co-run in Ann Arbor, Michigan — a place called Lucky Jim’s. She was prospering in 1974, with a new husband (her third) and a new baby (her fourth). Her house, Casa de Mondragón, was the little sister of the adjacent palacio of the same name.
It was in one of the palace bedrooms that I worked, filling, to the disgust of the next occupant, two litre bottles with cigarette butts while taking my second novel from manuscript to typescript. For lunch I would walk across the bridge and into town, and spend an additional half hour feeling the warm breath of raptly attendant niños on my fingers as I played the pinball machine. Hemingway* — in every bar in Andalucia there is a signed photograph of Hemingway getting or staying drunk with the owner — recommended Ronda, and in particular its casino/club/hotel in the main square, as the optimum setting for an elopement. There is nothing much going on at the casino any more: a billiard table with no pockets, a smattering of old men playing chess in the uncerebral Spanish style, smacking the pieces on to their squares with a snarl and a taunt. But Ronda remains prodigious — physically exciting to inhabit. It stands on a high plateau split by an abysmal gorge. Look over the drop and you see birds in flight a hundred feet below.
Spain is my mother’s other country too, and she and her husband are back there now as I write, living in the primitive casita whose land they attempted to subsistence-farm in the late 1970s. The extent to which my mother has made herself mistress of the language can best be conveyed anecdotally. On one occasion the victim of an irresolute sexual assault by a local youth, she screamed at him, ‘Venga! Venga!’* Even so — to glance at Robert Graves — this was her country, beloved by her best; and I think I know why. We were strolling down the main shopping street, one afternoon in 1974, and we encountered Rafael, a famous local figure. You were never in danger of forgetting in those days (Franco would rule for another year) that Spain had a large population of cripples, clumpers, crutch-wielders, and all the rest; but still Rafael stood out. Wholly benign despite his furiously contorted face, he was a spectacular spastic with an unbelievable gait. He looked like Marcel Marceau putting absolutely everything he had into an imitation of a stage drunk. How could a stride so uneconomical (you wondered) ever really get him anywhere? As Rafael, a flailing blur, inched along, and as passersby greeted him with cries of Eh, coño!† and an embrace and a mock left hook, my mother turned to me and said,
— I love living in Spain. I now regard him as completely normal.
It struck you, or it struck me, that Ronda was a place that had yet to experience dental selfconsciousness. Many a perfectly moulded visage would unreservedly open out to you — revealing a bag of mixed nuts or, more typically in Andalucia, a bag of mixed nuts and raisins. This suited me down to the ground, because I hadn’t smiled unreservedly for at least five years. My mother and father had been tooth-sufferers all their lives and it was already clear that I was booked in for more of the same. ‘Take him home,’ our Welsh dentist told my mother (wiping his hands after a heavy session), when I was ten. ‘He’s a wreck.’ And my teeth were now undergoing a deterioration that a later dentist would characterise as dramatic. In my late teens one of my top incisors had been elbowed in, right-angled, by my brother (during a rare bit of three-handed rough-housing with Kingsley), and a few years later one of my lower incisors had been snapped off at the gum when Rob flung a handful of poker chips in my face (after great provocation, and not at all forcefully). They just felt wrong. They didn’t fit, didn’t fit; when I clenched my teeth, they didn’t fit. The mouth is uniquely vulnerable to obsession. If there’s anything going on in there, then that’s where you live: in your mouth. One of the characters in the novel I had nearly finished was a dental monomaniac (incapable, throughout, of considering any other topic), and this was very nearly my case. So I understood and participated in my mother’s love of Spain. It was simple: the standards were lower, and less shame attached itself to the body.
My half-brother Jaime was two years old in 1974, and it is therefore almost certain that the following incident belongs to a later summer. I tell it now, though, because it seems to me a sharp satirical commentary on my romantic life as it was then developing … Like many children in Spain, Jaime was allowed to accompany his supper with a glass of red wine,* heavily qualified with water. On this particular night Jaime kept a strict eye on the dilution procedure. ‘Agua, no,’ he kept saying, with raised forefinger, every time my mother moved to the tap. ‘Agua, no.’ He probably got two or three glasses down him — and then, before anyone could prevent it, he seized and drained an unattended gin and tonic. What followed was a stark paradigm of drunkenness, astonishingly telescoped. Jaime laughed, danced, sang, bawled, brawled, and passed out, all within fifteen minutes. Then about half an hour later we heard a parched moan from his room. Jaime was already having his hangover. The voice was faintly saying, ‘Agua! … Agua! …’
— Agua, sí, said Kingsley when I told him about it.
— Exactly. All the way from agua, no to agua, sí. In an hour.
Such avidity, solipsism and indiscipline seemed to mark my own love life; and there was very often this feeling of time being speeded up — and gambled with. The love affair with Tina Brown† was a love affair (the answers to the questions ‘Is it now?’ and ‘Is it you?’ were both clear positives), but it was over too soon, as if something much longer had been confusingly compressed into six or seven months … When my father made his Maugham trip he was thirty-three and fronting a family of five. My mother was my mother when she was twenty-one, and was Philip’s when she was twenty. This was the pattern of their generation. The pattern of mine was to marry late, have children late.* I didn’t know it then, but there was an awful lot of bachelorhood to be swum through. And the beginnings of a pattern were also emerging in me. Ardour dwindled. Three months, six months, twelve months, with the affairs tending to elide. Tina, pointing to a lacuna in my emotional repertoire, would later say that I had never had my heart broken. And I can now recognise that I somewhere harboured an unconscious distrust of love (to this I will return). But at the time it just felt like a process, increasingly familiar and inexorable. Ardour, then diminishing ardour, and constantly starting again. All the way from venga to fuera. All the way from agua, sí to agua, no.
One of the briefest of these affairs — one of the most condensed in time — caused me to pay another visit to my mother, not long after her reluctant return to England in 1977. I said I had a story I wanted to tell her. And a photograph I wanted to show her.
— Yes, dear.
Nearly three years ago, I said, I had an affair with a young woman called Lamorna. She had been and still was married to a r
ather older man, Patrick, whom I had known, slightly, for some time (‘He went out with Gully, Mum,’ I said, referring to the dedicatee of my first novel, and my mother smiled, now feeling more at home in all this). Patrick and Lamorna, I continued, had not been getting on well, and their marriage at that time was chaste.
— Yes, dear.
I said that Lamorna and I were still friends and that I had recently had lunch with her … I did not go on to tell my mother that Lamorna had impressed me with her general bearing and burnish — her beauty, her sanity. Lamorna suffered from manic depression — a condition once frivolously but memorably described by a psychologist as the Arnold Schwarzenegger of mental illnesses. I had seen her, and would again see her, in a state of tranquillised agitation, disorganised in thought, and seemingly beset by small fears, small enemies. That day at lunch it was I who was agitated (a current matter of the heart); and I remember Lamorna suggesting that I order something nonmonolithic, like a stew or a fricassee, rather than face the edifice of a steak or a chop. She knew about agitation. She knew all about agitation … The restaurant was the old Bertorelli’s in Queensway, opposite the bookshop (both long gone, as unsorrowfully noted by the narrator of Money), and Lamorna looked handsome and polished among its dark wood and bright linen. I was, as usual, obsessively alert to the health and prettiness of her dentition; as she bit into her tarama on toast, pink plumelets appeared in the tiny vertices between her teeth. I thought she had never seemed stronger or happier. I thought she had found equilibrium. And I was wrong: diametrically wrong.