Love Among the Bookshelves Page 4

  Games were, of course, compulsory in most boarding schools. They were supposed to turn you into real men, even if your IQ remained at zero. This commitment to the values of the playing fields of Eton and Rugby meant that literature came very low on that list of the school’s priorities. We had a decent enough library, consisting mainly of books that had been gifted to the school; but as reading them wasn’t compulsory (as opposed to boxing and cricket), the library was an island seldom inhabited except by one shipwrecked and literary young man—yours truly.

  My housemaster, Mr Brown, realizing that I was a bookish boy, had the wisdom to put me in charge of the library. This meant that I had access to the keys, and that I could visit that storeroom of books whenever I liked.

  The great escape!

  And so, whenever I could dodge cricket nets or PT (physical training), or swimming lessons, or extra classes of any kind, I would ship away to my desert island and there, surrounded by books in lieu of coconut palms, read or write or dawdle or dream, secure in the knowledge that no one was going to disturb me, since no one else was interested in reading books.

  Today, teachers and parents and the world at large complain that the reading habit is dying out, that youngsters don’t read, that no one wants books. Well, all I can say is that they never did! If reading is a minority pastime today it was even more so sixty years ago. And there was no television then, no Internet, no Facebook, no tweeting and twittering, no video games, no DVD players, none of the distractions that we blame today for the decline in the reading habit.

  In truth, it hasn’t declined. I keep meeting young people who read, and many who want to write. This was not the case when I was a boy. If I was asked what I wanted to do after school, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a writer,’ everyone would laugh. Writers were eccentric creatures who lived on the moon or in some never-never land; they weren’t real. So I stopped saying I was going to be a writer and instead said I was going to be a detective. Somehow, that made better sense. After all, Dick Tracy was a comic-book hero. And there was a radio series featuring Bulldog Drummond, a precursor to James Bond.

  In the library, I soon had many good friends—Dickens and Chekhov and Maupassant and Barrie and Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole and P.G. Wodehouse and many others—yes, and even Bulldog Drummond, whose adventures were set forth by ‘Sapper’, whose real name was H.C. McNeile.

  Pseudonyms were popular once. ‘Saki’ was H.H. Munro. ‘O. Henry’ was William Porter. ‘Mark Twain’ was Samuel Clemens. ‘Ellery Queen’ was two people.

  My own favourite was ‘A Modern Sinbad’, who wrote some wonderful sea stories—Spin a Yarn Sailor (1934), a battered copy still treasured by me, full of great storms and colourful ships’ captains, and sailors singing shanties; but I have never been able to discover his real name, and his few books are hard to find. Perhaps one of my young computer-friendly readers can help!

  Apart from Tagore, there were very few Indian authors writing in English in the 1940s. R.K. Narayan’s first book was introduced to the world by Graham Greene, Mulk Raj Anand’s by E.M. Forster; they were followed in the fifties by Raja Rao, Attia Hosain, Khushwant Singh, Sudhin Ghose, G.V. Desani and Kamala Markandaya.

  A few years ago, while I was sitting at my desk in Ivy Cottage (where I am sitting right now), a dapper little gentleman appeared in my doorway and introduced himself. He was none other than Mulk Raj Anand, aged ninety (he lived to be ninety-nine). He spent over an hour with me, talking about books, and I told him I’d read his novel Coolie while I was still at school in Simla—Simla being the setting for the novel. When he left, he thrust a ten-rupee note into little Siddharth’s pocket. Siddharth, my great-grandson, was then only three or four and doesn’t remember the occasion; but it was a nice gesture on the part of that Grand Old Man of Letters.

  But I digress. I grow old and inclined to ramble. I should take T.S. Eliot’s advice and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled (and yes, they are beginning to look a little frayed and baggy). Is this what they call ‘existential writing’? Or ‘stream of consciousness’?

  Back to my old school library. Yes, my library, since no one else seemed to bother with it. And from reading, it was only a short step to writing.

  A couple of spare exercise books were soon filled with my observations on school life—friends, foes, teachers, the headmaster’s buxom wife, dormitory fights, the tuck shop and the mysterious disappearance of a senior prefect who was later found ‘living in sin’ with a fading film star (thirty years his senior) in a villa near Sanjauli. Well, that was his great escape from the tedium of boarding-school life.

  It was not long before my magnum opus fell into the hands of my class teacher who passed it on to the headmaster, who sent for me and gave me a flogging. The exercise books were shredded and thrown into his wasterpaper basket. End of my first literary venture.

  But the seed had been sown, and I was not too upset. If the world outside could accommodate other writers, it could accommodate me too. My time would come.

  In the meantime, there were books and authors to be discovered. A lifetime of reading lay ahead. Old books, new books, classics, thrillers, stories short and tall, travelogues, histories, biographies, comedies, comic strips, poems, memories, fantasies, fables . . . The adventure would end only when the lights went out for ever.

  ‘Lights out!’ called the master on duty, making his rounds of the dormitories.

  Out went the lights.

  And out came my little pocket torch, and whatever book I was immersed in, and with my head under the blanket I would read on for another twenty or thirty minutes, until sleep overcame me.

  And in that sleep what dreams would come . . . dreams crowded with a wonderful cast of characters, all jumbled up, but each one distinct and alive, coming up to me and shaking me by the hand: Mr Pickwick, Sam Weller, Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Mr Dick, Tom Sawyer, Long John Silver, Lemuel Gulliver, the Mad Hatter, Alice, Mr Toad of Toad Hall, Hercule Poirot, Jeeves, Lord Emsworth, Kim, the Lama, Mowgli, Dick Turpin, William Brown, Nero Wolfe, Ariel, Ali Baba, Snow White, Cinderella, Shakuntala, John Gilpin, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, Peter and Wendy, Captain Hook, Richard Hannay, Allan Quatermain, Sexton Blake, Desperate Dan, old Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  ‘I wanted money and I wanted fame,’ wrote Somerset Maugham in a preface to one of his plays, and he achieved both in the course of a long and brilliant literary career.

  He was born in 1874, attended King’s School, Canterbury, and the Heidelberg University, and studied medicine in London. But he gave up medicine for literature and wrote his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), when in his early twenties.

  An avowed disciple of Anton Chekhov and Maupassant, Maugham was a realistic writer with a style that was austere and unsentimental, without frills—but always compelling.

  Of Human Bondage, a masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, came out in 1915. His travels took him to China, which resulted in The Painted Veil; to the South Seas, which produced The Moon and Sixpence (based on the artist Paul Gauguin’s life in Tahiti); to India, which gave him The Razor’s Edge; to Paris, for Christmas Holiday; and to the Far East, which resulted in many of his greatest short stories.

  But it was Cakes and Ale (1930), set in England, that I remember best, probably because it was my first foray into adult fiction. It was not in our school library, but it was doing the rounds amongst some of the older boys, along with Zola’s Nana and Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber. It was a thinly veiled portrait of Thomas Hardy, the grand old man of English letters; but it was the character of Rosie, his young and effervescent wife, that appealed to the adolescent reader. I read the novel again last month, and found that it had lost none of its freshness and appeal. ‘Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say,’ says Rosie. ‘We shall all be dead in a hundred years and what will anything matter then?’

  Amongst Maugham’s o
ther works there are two books that are essential reading for any would-be writer. These are The Summing Up and A Writer’s Notebook. They are not on my shelf simply because, whenever I manage to get copies, some aspiring young writer comes along and makes off with them!

  From Cakes and Ale (1930) by W. Somerset Maugham

  Chapter 15

  Edward Driffield worked at night, and Rosie, having nothing to do, was glad to go out with one or other of her friends. She liked luxury and Quentin Forde was well-to-do. He would fetch her in a cab and take her to dine at Kettner’s or the Savoy, and she would put on her grandest clothes for him; and Harry Retford, though he never had a bob, behaved as if he had, and took her about in hansoms, too, and gave her dinner at Romano’s or in one or other of the little restaurants that were becoming modish in Soho. He was an actor and a clever one, but he was difficult to suit and so was often out of work. He was about thirty, a man with a pleasantly ugly face and a clipped way of speaking that made what he said sound funny. Rosie liked his devil-may-care attitude towards life, the swagger with which he wore clothes made by the best tailor in London and unpaid for, the recklessness with which he would put a fiver he hadn’t got on a horse, and the generosity with which he flung his money about when a lucky win put him in funds. He was gay, charming, vain, boastful and unscrupulous. Rosie told me that once he had pawned his watch to take her out to dinner and then borrowed a couple of pounds from the actor-manager who had given them seats for the play in order to take him out to supper with them afterwards.

  But she was just as well pleased to go with Lionel Hillier to his studio and eat a chop that he and she cooked between them and spend the evening talking, and it was only very rarely that she would dine with me at all. I used to fetch her after I had had my dinner in Vincent Square and she hers with Driffield, and we would get on a bus and go to a music hall. We went here and there, to the Pavilion or the Tivoli, sometimes to the Metropolitan if there was a particular turn we wanted to see; but our favourite was the Canterbury. It was cheap and the show was good. We ordered a couple of beers and I smoked my pipe. Rosie looked round with delight at the great dark smoky house, crowded to the ceiling with the inhabitants of south London.

  ‘I like the Canterbury,’ she said. ‘It’s so homey.’

  I discovered that she was a great reader. She liked history, but only history of a certain kind, the lives of queens and of mistresses of royal personages; and she would tell me with a childlike wonder of the strange things she read. She had a wide acquaintance with the six consorts of King Henry VIII and there was little she did not know about Mrs Fitzherbert and Lady Hamilton. Her appetite was prodigious and she ranged from Lucrezia Borgia to the wives of Philip of Spain; then there was the long list of the royal mistresses of France. She knew them all, and all about them, from Agnes Sorel down to Madame du Barry.

  ‘I like to read about real things,’ she said. ‘I don’t much care for novels.’

  She liked to gossip about Blackstable, and I thought it was on account of my connection with it that she liked to come out with me. She seemed to know all that was going on there.

  ‘I go down every other week or so to see my mother,’ she said. ‘Just for the night, you know.’

  ‘To Blackstable?’

  I was surprised.

  ‘No, not to Blackstable,’ Rosie smiled. ‘I don’t know that I’d care to go there just yet. To Haversham. Mother comes over to meet me. I stay at the hotel where I used to work.’

  She was never a great talker. Often when, the night being fine, we decided to walk back from the music hall at which we had been spending the evening, she never opened her mouth. But her silence was intimate and comfortable. It did not exclude you; it included you in a pervasive well-being.

  I was talking about her once to Lionel Hillier and I said to him that I could not understand how she had turned from the fresh, pleasant-looking young woman I had first known at Blackstable into the lovely creature whose beauty now practically everyone acknowledged. (There were people who made reservations. ‘Of course she has a very good figure,’ they said, ‘but it’s not the sort of face I very much admire personally.’ And other said: ‘Oh, yes, a very pretty woman; but it’s a pity she hasn’t a little more distinction.’)

  ‘I can explain that to you in half a jiffy,’ said Lionel Hillier. ‘She was only a fresh buxom wench when you first met her. I made her beauty.’

  I forget what my answer was, but I know it was ribald.

  ‘All right. That just shows you don’t know anything about beauty. No one ever thought very much of Rosie till I saw her like the sun shining silver. It wasn’t till I painted it that anyone knew that her hair was the most lovely thing in the world.’

  ‘Did you make her neck and her breasts and her carriage and her bones?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, damn you, that’s just what I did do.’

  When Hillier talked of Rosie in front of her she listened to him with a smiling gravity. A little flush came into her pale cheeks. I think that first when he spoke to her of her beauty she believed he was just making game of her; but when she found out that he wasn’t, when he painted her silvery gold, it had no particular effect on her. She was a trifle amused, pleased, of course, and a little surprised, but it did not turn her head. She thought him a little mad. I often wondered whether there was anything between them. I could not forget all I had heard of Rosie at Blackstable and what I had seen in the vicarage garden; I wondered about Quentin Forde, too, and Harry Retford. I used to watch them with her. She was not exactly familiar with them, comradely rather; she used to make her appointments with them quite openly in anybody’s hearing; and when she looked at them it was with that mischievous, childlike smile which I had now discovered held such a mysterious beauty. Sometimes when we were sitting side by side in a music hall I looked at her face; I do not think I was in love with her, I merely enjoyed the sensation of sitting quietly beside her and looking at the pale gold of her hair and the pale gold of her skin. Of course Lionel Hillier was right; the strange thing was that this gold did give one a strange moonlight feeling. She had the serenity of a summer evening when the light fades slowly from the unclouded sky. There was nothing dull in her immense placidity; it was as living as the sea when under the August sun it lay calm and shining along the Kentish coast. She reminded me of a sonatina by an old Italian composer with its wistfulness in which there is yet an urbane flippancy and its light rippling gaiety in which echoes still the trembling of a sigh. Sometimes, feeling my eyes on her, she would turn round and for a moment or two look me full in the face. She did not speak. I did not know of what she was thinking.

  Once, I remember, I fetched her at Limpus Road, and the maid, telling me she was not ready, asked me to wait in the parlour. She came in. She was in black velvet, with a picture hat covered with ostrich feathers (we were going to the Pavilion and she had dressed up for it), and she looked so lovely that it took my breath away. I was staggered. The clothes of that day gave a woman dignity, and there was something amazingly attractive in the way her virginal beauty (sometimes she looked like the exquisite statue of Psyche in the museum at Naples) contrasted with the stateliness of her gown. She had a trait that I think must be very rare: the skin under her eyes, faintly blue, was all dewy. Sometimes I could not persuade myself that it was natural, and once I asked her if she had rubbed Vaseline under her eyes. That was just the effect it gave. She smiled, took a handkerchief, and handed it to me.

  ‘Rub them and see,’ she said.

  Then one night when we had walked home from the Canterbury, and I was leaving her at her door, when I held out my hand she laughed a little, a low chuckle it was, and leaned forward.

  ‘You old silly,’ she said.

  She kissed me on the mouth. It was not a hurried peck, nor was it a kiss of passion. Her lips, those very full red lips of hers, rested on mine long enough for me to be conscious of their shape and their warmth
and their softness. Then she withdrew them, but without hurry, in silence pushed open the door, skipped inside and left me. I was so startled that I had not been able to say anything. I accepted her kiss stupidly. I remained inert. I turned away and walked back to my lodgings. I seemed to hear still in my ears Rosie’s laughter. It was not contemptuous or wounding, but frank and affectionate; it was as though she laughed because she was fond of me.

  Chapter 16

  I did not go out with Rosie again for more than a week. She was going down to Haversham to spend a night with her mother. I had various engagements in London. Then she asked me if I would go to the Haymarket Theatre with her. The play was a success and free seats were not to be had, so we made up our minds to go in the pit. We had a steak and a glass of beer at the Café Monico and then stood with the crowd. In those days there was no orderly queue and when the doors were opened there was a mad rush and scramble to get in. We were hot and breathless and somewhat battered when at last we pushed our way into our seats.

  We walked back through St James’s Park. The night was so lovely that we sat down on a bench. In the starlight Rosie’s face and her fair hair glowed softly. She was suffused, as it were (I express it awkwardly, but I do not know how to describe the emotion she gave me), with a friendliness at once candid and tender. She was like a silvery flower of the night that only gave its perfume to the moonbeams. I slipped my arm round her waist and she turned her face to mine. This time it was I who kissed. She did not move; her soft red lips submitted to the pressure of mine with a calm, intensive passivity as the water of a lake accepts the light of the moon. I don’t know how long we stayed there.