Love Among the Bookshelves Page 5

  ‘I’m awfully hungry,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘So am I,’ I laughed.

  ‘Couldn’t we go and have some fish and chips somewhere?’

  ‘Rather.’

  In those days I knew my way very well about Westminster, not yet a fashionable quarter for parliamentary and otherwise cultured persons, but slummy and down at heel; and after we had come out of the park, crossing Victoria Street, I led Rosie to a fried-fish shop in Horseferry Row. It was late and the only other person there was the driver of a four-wheeler waiting outside. We ordered our fish and chips and a bottle of beer. A poor woman came in and bought two penn’orth of mixed and took it away with her in a piece of paper. We ate with appetite.

  Our way back to Rosie’s led through Vincent Square and as we passed my house I asked her:

  ‘Won’t you come in for a minute? You’ve never seen my rooms.’

  ‘What about your landlady? I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

  ‘Oh, she sleeps like a rock.’

  ‘I’ll come in for a little.’

  I slipped my key into the lock and, because the passage was dark, took Rosie’s hand to lead her in. I lit the gas in my sitting room. She took off her hat and vigorously scratched her head. Then she looked for a glass, but I was very artistic and had taken down the mirror that was over the chimney piece and there was no means in the room for anyone to see what he looked like.

  ‘Come into my bedroom,’ I said. ‘There’s a glass there.’

  I opened the door and lit the candle. Rosie followed me in and I held it up so that she should be able to see herself. I looked at her in the glass as she arranged her hair. She took two or three pins out, which she put in her mouth, and taking one of my brushes, brushed her hair up from the nape of her neck. She twisted it, patted it, and put back the pins, and as she was intent on this her eyes caught mine in the glass and she smiled at me. When she had replaced the last pin she turned and faced me; she did not say anything; she looked at me tranquilly still with that little friendly smile in her blue eyes. I put down the candle. The room was very small and the dressing table was by the bed. She raised her hand and softly stroked my cheek.

  I wish now that I had not started to write this book in the first-person singular. It is all very well when you can show yourself in an amiable or touching light, and nothing can be more effective than the modest heroic or pathetic humorous which in this mode is much cultivated; it is charming to write about yourself when you see on the reader’s eyelash the glittering tear and on his lips the tender smile; but it is not so nice when you have to exhibit yourself as a plain damned fool.

  A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. I wish he had explained why, but he merely threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he made his celebrated observation about parallel straight lines. I was much concerned, and forthwith asked Alroy Kear (who reads everything, even the books he writes prefaces for) to recommend to me some works on the art of fiction. On his advice I read the Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E.M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E.M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all. In none of them could I discover anything to the point at issue. All the same I can find one reason why certain novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Emily Brontë and Proust, well known in their day but now doubtless forgotten, have used the method that Mr Evelyn Waugh reprehends. As we grow older we become more conscious of the complexity, incoherence and unreasonableness of human beings; this indeed is the only excuse that offers for the middle-aged or elderly writer, whose thoughts should more properly be turned to graver matters, occupying himself with the trivial concerns of imaginary people. For if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life. Sometimes the novelist feels himself like God and is prepared to tell you everything about his characters; sometimes, however, he does not; and then he tells you not everything that is to be known about them but the little he knows himself; and since as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God I should not be surprised to learn that with advancing years the novelist grows less and less inclined to describe more than his own experience has given him. The first-person singular is a very useful device for this limited purpose.

  Rosie raised her hand and softly stroked my face. I do not know why I should have behaved as I then did; it was not at all how I had seen myself behaving on such an occasion. A sob broke from my tight throat. I do not know whether it was because I was shy and lonely (not lonely in the body, for I spent all day at the hospital with all kinds of people, but lonely in the spirit) or because my desire was so great, but I began to cry. I felt terribly ashamed of myself; I tried to control myself, I couldn’t; the tears welled up in my eyes and poured down my cheeks. Rosie saw them and gave a little gasp.

  ‘Oh, honey, what is it? What’s the matter? Don’t. Don’t!’

  She put her arms round my neck and began to cry too, and she kissed my lips and my eyes and my wet cheeks. She undid her bodice and lowered my head till it rested on her bosom. She stroked my smooth face. She rocked me back and forth as though I were a child in her arms. I kissed her breasts and I kissed the white column of her neck; and she slipped out of her bodice and out of her skirt and her petticoats and I held her for a moment by her corseted waist; then she undid it, holding her breath for an instant to enable her to do so, and stood before me in her shift. When I put my hand on her sides I could feel the ribbing of the skin from the pressure of the corsets.

  ‘Blow out the candle,’ she whispered.

  It was she who awoke me when the dawn peering through the curtains revealed the shape of the bed and of the wardrobe against the darkness of the lingering night. She woke me by kissing me on the mouth and her hair falling over my face tickled me.

  ‘I must get up,’ she said. ‘I don’t want your landlady to see me.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time.’

  Her breasts when she leaned over me were heavy on my chest. In a little while she got out of bed. I lit the candle. She turned to the glass and tied up her hair and then she looked for a moment at her naked body. Her waist was naturally small; though so well developed she was very slender; her breasts were straight and firm and they stood out from the chest as though carved in marble. It was a body made for the act of love. In the light of the candle, struggling now with the increasing day, it was all silvery gold; and the only colour was the rosy pink of the hard nipples.

  We dressed in silence. She did not put on her corsets again, but rolled them up and I wrapped them in a piece of newspaper. We tiptoed along the passage and when I opened the door and we stepped out into the street the dawn ran to meet us like a cat leaping up the steps. The square was empty; already the sun was shining on the eastern windows. I felt as young as the day. We walked arm in arm till we came to the corner of Limpus Road.

  ‘Leave me here,’ said Rosie. ‘One never knows.’

  I kissed her and I watched her walk away. She walked rather slowly, with the firm tread of the country woman who likes to feel the good earth under her feet, and held herself erect. I could not go back to bed. I strolled on till I came to the Embankment. The river had the bright hues of the early morning. A brown barge came down stream and passed under Vauxhall Bridge. In a dinghy two men were rowing close to the side. I was hungry.

  4

  That Year in Jersey

  It’s a period of my life that I haven’t written about very often
, not because it was unimportant or uneventful, but because no one else seemed to be interested in what I did there. And yet, looking back, I realize that it was a very formative period of my life, and that the decisions that I made there were to affect me, as a person and as a reader, in the years to come.

  A year after finishing school, I had left India without too much regret, having every intention of settling in the UK and making some sort of future for myself there. I arrived in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, with empty pockets and a trunk full of clothes. I was to stay with my aunt (my mother’s eldest sister) who had left India just after Independence, along with her husband (a retired surgeon) and three sons, making a home in St Helier, the port and capital of the island. A number of British and Anglo-Indian exiles had settled there; the climate was tolerable, and there was no income tax.

  My aunt was very keen that my mother should send her a packet of haldi, a vital ingredient in an Indian curry. Haldi and other spices were then hard to come by in post-war Britain. This was before the wave of immigration from India in the 1960s—and my aunt, who liked her curry, was desperate for a supply of haldi.

  A large packet of the yellow-gold spice was placed lovingly in my clothes’ trunk. But during the voyage the packet had burst open, and the haldi had scattered throughout my few clothes, staining my shirts, vests, underwear, socks and old school blazer. Haldi stains are hard, almost impossible, to eradicate. I had to borrow money from my aunt in order to buy some clothes. Worse still, most of the haldi had been lost, and we had to go weeks without a properly cooked curry.

  I have always hated being dependent upon anyone for my food, lodging, clothes and books, and within a few days of my arrival I was walking the streets of St Helier, dropping in at offices and showrooms, asking for employment. This is the best way to get a job—present yourself before the boss or whoever is in charge, tell him you are prepared to do anything from making the tea to making decisions on behalf of the directors of the company—and sooner or later you will find someone who can put you to work.

  During my year in Jersey, I went through four jobs, and was given the sack only once. When I grew bored with one job I simply left and found another. I did overhear my uncle talking to my aunt and saying, ‘The boy has guts. He doesn’t sit around waiting for something to fall into his lap.’

  Well, I was seventeen and if my mentors, Charles Dickens and Jack London, could stand on their own feet while still in their teens, so could I!

  The first job was with Le Riches, a large grocery store in the middle of town, where I did quite a lot of running around, carrying the day’s takings from one branch to another. As this could be rather risky (the sums being quite large), they probably thought I was expendable, should someone decide to waylay me; but muggings were rare in those days, and Jersey was a very law-abiding island. Even during the German occupation (during World War II), the islanders had gone about their business (mostly fishing and growing tomatoes) without paying much heed to the occupying power. And when the war ended in Europe, the Germans simply melted away and the islanders carried on growing their tomatoes as though nothing had happened. So, don’t believe everything you see in the movies.

  The nice thing about running errands for Le Riches was that the last errand took me to a downmarket area called Georgetown, and there I discovered a little cinema which specialized in showing early British comedies. And so, when I’d made my last delivery, I’d stop at the cinema and see a film before trudging through the two or three miles to my aunt’s house for supper.

  Here, at this little cinema hall, I made the acquaintance of many famous comedians of the 1930s and 40s—performers whom I had previously known only in the pages of Film Fun, a comic of my schooldays. Max Miller (‘The Cheeky Chappie’), Sydney Howard, Tommy Trinder, Will Hay, George Formby (the ‘Ukulele Man’), Gracie Fields (‘The Lancashire Lass’), and Old Mother Riley and his partner Kitty McShane—I say his partner because Old Mother Riley was in fact a man, a very accomplished actor called Arthur Lucan, who dressed up as an old lady and made his name as a drag artist. These old films were indeed very funny; most of the performers had been on the music halls and knew how to get their laughs. They made life tolerable for me during that restless year when all I wanted to do was make enough money to get back to India!

  Le Riches was paying me a pittance (less than £3 a week), so when another job offer came my way, I accepted it with alacrity. The travel agents Thomas Cook & Sons had just sent a representative to Jersey, to open a small office to meet the demands of the increasing hordes of summer visitors from Britain. This representative, Mrs Manning (husband absent), needed someone to handle the telephone, make reservations and look after the office whenever she was out—which was often, as she was enjoying a love affair with a gentleman who sold second-hand fire extinguishers. I don’t think she enjoyed it for long, because I heard later that he’d been arrested on a fraud or cheating charge; the fire extinguishers did not extinguish anything resembling a fire. But before that happened, we’d both been fired: I, by Mrs Manning for mixing up reservations (i.e., booking coloured people into hotels reserved for whites); and Mrs Manning by Thomas Cook for absenteeism and general mismanagement.

  Unemployment has never been my problem. I was soon working for Jersey Electric, making out bills for the electricity-consuming public. It was a fairly large office, with some twenty clerks, but I was the only one who called the boss ‘sir’. He called me into his inner office one day and said, ‘Young man, I think you went to a public school.’

  ‘I did, sir, but it was in India.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said, and gave me a promotion.

  But I did not stay long with Jersey Electric. A public exam was being held, with a view to selecting young clerks and others for the Jersey Civil Service, and on my uncle’s prompting, I appeared for it, scoring heavily in English literature and general knowledge, and standing fourth out of a couple of hundred candidates on the island. This got me a job in the public health department. I had always professed to hate exams (having deliberately flunked a couple at school), yet here was I, being patted on the back by my uncle for a display of academic brilliance.

  To the public health department I went, helping a senior clerk make up pay packets for the men working in Jersey’s intricate sewer system. An inauspicious beginning for a career in the

  civil service. But my mind was really on other things.

  I had written a novel—an immature but passionate thing, based on the journal I had kept during my last year in India—and I had stayed up many nights, using my aunt’s tiny attic room to complete it. It had gone to a couple of London publishers and been rejected; but a third publisher gave me a reason for hope. This was Diana Athill, a junior partner with the firm of André Deutsch, a new publisher who was making his presence felt. In later years, Diana Athill was to become a highly successful writer and editor and something of a celebrity, but at the time she was very young (in her thirties, about fifteen years my senior) and as yet unknown. And I, of course, was completely unknown.

  And in Jersey I had no friends. This wasn’t Dehradun, India, where you could make friends with the boy next door, or with the boys playing cricket on a plot of wasteland, or someone in a shop or at the cinema or in a bus or railway compartment. At my place of work everyone was friendly, helpful. But when the office closed, everyone went his or her own way, and I would walk home alone, over the brow of the hill to my aunt’s house.

  A fifteen-minute walk. And it was a twenty-minute walk to the seafront. And about the same to the public library in the centre of the town.

  Once again, books proved to be my best friends. I found most of the plays and poems of Rabindranath Tagore, an enchanting book about growing up in the Santhal Parganas, And Gazelles Leaping by Sudhin Ghose, and Rumer Godden’s novel, The River, set in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). These and other books took me back to India and gave an impetus to my own w
riting, so that the friends of my youth took on a new dimension in the novel I was writing ( It was to be called The Room on the Roof.)

  And then came the film adaptation of The River, a cinematic poem made by the great French director, Jean Renoir, son of the great painter Claude Renoir. This lyrical adaptation of Rumer Godden’s novel renewed all my longings for India, and made me determined to return as soon as I could without becoming a liability for my friends and family. They would support a schoolboy but not a young man without any qualifications or prospects.

  So I walked along the seafront whenever I could, watching the tide come in and the waves crashing against the sea wall, dreaming of becoming a successful writer and a master of my own fate. The sea was impersonal, majestic, accentuating my solitary state, but at the same time giving me a feeling of unique individuality, as I stood there alone in the darkness.

  One Saturday afternoon after work I found the tide had gone out, far out, and in my bathing trunks I followed the receding waves across almost a mile of sand and rocky outcrops. I found a solitary rock, left exposed by the receding tide, and I lay down upon it in the autumn sunshine, and fell asleep. I woke to find the tide coming in again. Water was lapping around the base of the rock. It wasn’t very deep, but the tide was coming in again, relentlessly, and I made for the shore with some urgency. The incoming waves aided me in my flight. I could swim a little but I did not trust the pull of the rip tide. So I blundered ashore in a bit of a panic. And when I looked back, there was no sign of my rock. It had been submerged. Perhaps I was destined to be something other than being a clerk in the public health department; or was I getting egoistic enough to think so!

  London beckoned—as it had beckoned Master Copperfield, young Mr Nickleby, Dick Whittington, James Boswell, and other heroes of my bookish boyhood. Having grown up in India with the novels of Dickens, J.B. Priestley, Somerset Maugham and P.G. Wodehouse, my vision of London was very different from its post-war reality; but I was determined to give it a try.