Chapter Five.

BY THE TIME I left Enfield Grammar School the ice-age following the great American slump had set in. At best a grammar school education, however sound, offered few more exciting prospects at the end of the day than employment in a high street bank, and the world crisis and its dole queues had put even this beyond my reach. In common with most of my friends I had to turn my hand to whatever came my way. The experience of those years fostered resilience - possibly even, of necessity, a sense of adventure.

Some of my schoolfriends who had hoped to sit at office desks found themselves earning their bread in less conventional and often less sedentary ways. One, unable to continue his accountancy studies, was appointed a.s.sistant rat-catcher to the council, and later set up on his own and did well. A second who suffered from some s.e.xual obsession became a professional partner at the Tottenham Palais de Dance, enabled in this way to kill both the financial and s.e.xual birds with one stone. A third made journeys to Spain and returned laden with cheap Toledan crucifixes which he advertised in the Catholic press as blessed by the Bishop of Salamanca. For a while I did less well, continuing to bottle the elixir for which I earned about thirty shillings a week.

Questions of prestige were closely limited to those of economic necessity in the matter of finding employment. Enfield possessed some of the largest apple and cherry orchards in that part of England, and there was cash to be had when the season for their picking arrived. In the case of the apples it was easier to concentrate on the windfalls, but the prestige job - picking from the trees - entailed the manipulation of heavy ladders, and the very small risk of a fall, and although there was slightly less money in it, it was what everybody wanted to do.

The part-time employment to be found in the cherry orchards was not only in picking the fruit, but in scaring away the thousands of blackbirds and thrushes that would come winging in for the feast, particularly in the early morning hours. It conferred prestige to be engaged by the farm to shoot these with a twelve-bore - a bird's corpse had to be produced for every cartridge expended - but social annihilation to enrol oneself among the group that patrolled the orchards in the early hours beating on drums. The most demeaning employment of all, taken by one of my ex-school friends, involved him in washing up for a Soho restaurant, and placing himself, dressed as a clown, at the entrance to display the menu provided for the lunch-time and evening meals.

With the expiry of childhood, Enfield had become a dull place. Almost from one year to another Mr Bowles had become old and blind, and I no longer took refuge at Myddelton House. The alluring Miss Tupperton was carried away by a dashing Major Pinkies, who had dropped in to the Hall one day to visit his old commanding officer and had not hesitated to plunder him in this way. Her place was now taken by a pretty and muscular young nurse, called in to help with Sir Henry's gout. My parents had come to the realistic conclusion that whatever dormant psychic gifts I might have possessed, I had little to offer the Spiritualist movement, and there was no hope whatever of my following in my father's footsteps. Nevertheless, membership of their church continually increased.

I lived in a place, as it seemed to me, where nothing happened. Once Enfield had been a large and attractive village at the end of an escape route from London, travelling down which it took a coach and pair an hour and a half to reach unspoiled country in which a succession of monarchs had taken time off to go hunting. It had an interesting school built in the reign of Mary Tudor, a fine church, several outstanding pubs, and the grandest and oldest cedar tree in the land, planted in about 1670 by Dr Ridewood, headmaster of the Grammar School, who brought the seeds from the Lebanon. This spread its stupendous umbrella of the deepest green foliage over the heart of the town until it was finally demolished to make room for a departmental store.

The magnification of an ancient village such as Enfield into a modern town is always a calamity. No sooner had the venerable cedar gone than a Mr Sidney Bernstein built his super-cinema, called the Rialto, in the old market place. The Rialto was modelled, as we were told, on the Roxy in New York, with an organ having 2,800 pipes and thirty-five miles of wires, and only lesser in the facilities it offered than the original in providing no built-in medical operating theatre. Few people in Enfield were sure of the origin of the word Rialto and some confusion arose when the first film, The Power of the Borgias, was shown, over unfamiliar names. Mr Bernstein, we learned, overwhelmed by the splendour of a bridge in Venice, had been ready with the supreme accolade. 'Know something?' he said to his retinue. 'I'm going to put this on the map. I'm going to name my cinema after it.' But the muddle in Enfield continued. Even the local newspaper got itself into a mix-up, or perhaps suffered a Freudian slip, speaking in its eulogistic review of Sidney Borgia, the cinema owner, and ret.i.tling the film The Power of the Bernsteins.

The compet.i.tion in the opening week of The Power of the Borgias - advertised in Enfield by a parade camel having a p.r.o.nounced limp - was The Great San Francisco Fire (second time round) on offer at the town's original, sad flea pit, the Queen's, and a private showing of Mustapha's Donkey in a windowless cell at the back of the Oddfellows' Hall. This latter may have been the first p.o.r.nographic movie ever made. A higher percentage of Enfield males had seen it several times, and it was so grainy and so ravaged by age and use that it was hardly possible to distinguish the donkey in the star role from the human actors it featured.

I saw The Power of the Borgias with an old schoolmate, Alexander Hagen, who had been good at maths and had set his sights on becoming an airship designer, then jettisoning the idea owing to the state of the world, and philosophically accepting employment at the sewage farm in Ponders End. A ritual Sat.u.r.day night meal followed at Mrs England's Dining Rooms in the pa.s.sage at the back of the station, where the tables were screened in such a way that patrons did not risk loss of face by being seen there, scuffling their feet in the sawdust. We began to ask ourselves if in fact we really existed or whether what we took to be life could not be a complex illusion, an endless, low-quality dream. These threadbare surroundings in which we sat hunched over a scrubbed table, our backs to the light, came very close to being nothing. Perhaps we too were nothing, had come from nothing, were journeying through nothing, towards a distant goal of nothingness. Enfield was nothing, the Rialto cinema nothing to the accompaniment of organ music, the Queen's nothing with fleas. We had come here to confront a supper of nothing, boiled, fried or scrambled, with or without chips, to be followed by custard if desired at no extra charge. After this it was back home to nothing, or down the town to pick up a couple of girls at the bottom of Church Street, and engage them in a lively conversation about nothing plus s.e.x, or just nothing.

Christ stopped at Eboli, but he would have found people there who still had the spirit to sing and dance, and Mr Bowles mentioned once that on the Greek island where he went to dig up plants the impoverished peasantry got away with fifty days of what was supposed to be the working year and used them up on parties, pilgrimages and processions. What had happened to us? Why had the lives of Sir Henry's serfs, and the workers at the Lock, been reduced to survival without distractions? Why had communal activities in the surroundings in which I was born come down to a couple of hours over a pint of sour ale in The Goat?

No wonder we took refuge in make-belief, dealt in pretence and self-pretence, and half-believed the personal myths of our own creation. No wonder our pudgy-faced local beauties started life as Ethel, Gladys or Florence but ended as Esmee, Phoebe and Diane and inflicted upon themselves their soulless accents.

Hagen had been a.s.sumed from his name to be a Jew, whose people had been carried in the stream of emigrants out of the East End, through Bethnal Green, Hackney, Clapton, Tottenham and Upper and Lower Edmonton, along the road taken by John Gilpin on his ride, until the great urban mess finally expired in the grim streets of Enfield Wash, Enfield Lock and Freezy Water where, discouraged from further advances by the disconsolate greenery of the countryside, the emigration had come to a halt. After a stretch at the sewage farm, he had walked out and set up as a wedding photographer. In this he did well, made money quickly and, while not going so far as to change his name, showed a preference for being addressed as Alexander rather than Alex, and asked his friends to p.r.o.nounce the A in Hagen 'ah' not 'ay'. Up to this point none of us had known much about him, nor visited his house. Now he let drop the information that he was half-German, and that his father had been German amba.s.sador to Liberia where he had met Alex's English mother, who was engaged in missionary work. They had separated after his mother's return to this country.

Hagen was a great watcher and imitator. He watched the men he hoped to mould himself upon, but of necessity from afar, so that his imitation never quite convinced. The tie was right but the voice was wrong. When he spoke, an echo of Central Europe lingered on which he said was Bavarian, but it only went down with girls who had never heard an Englishman of the ruling cla.s.ses speak. Intelligent as he was, he would never raise himself to half the stature of Mr Bowles' spirited nephew who had been born under the wings of victory. Hagen, like the rest of us, was too cautious, too premeditated, too afraid at bottom of his own shadow. He made money easily, but for all the calculated swagger that went with it, and the arrogant tilt of the homburg hat, he gave the impression of listening to the noises of the pogrom in the next street.

For a while I was in partnership with him in the wedding photography, which called for little technical and less artistic skill. The wedding guests lined up like trained dogs, put on their boozy, foolish smiles, you clicked the shutter, and that was the end of it. They expected to look unnatural and they did. Seeing himself as the organizer, Alex abstained from involvement in physical labour of any kind, which he would have regarded as an inefficient use of his time, so I developed the films and made the prints, working under primitive conditions in the kitchen after my parents had gone to bed. My father never failed to inspect these pictures of the bride and bridegroom at the church door, and the family groups ranged with their inane grins in order of height, and occasionally he would draw attention to a small defect, usually caused by fogging, in the hope that this might be a blurred countenance from the spirit world, squeezed in forlornly among the all too solid flesh of Ponders End, or Palmer's Green.

Part Three.

The Corvajas.

Chapter Six.

WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY WAS SPORADIC and seasonal in its revenues, leaving time to be put to other commercial uses. Hagen bought lost property at trade auctions conducted by the railways at their various depots. Sometimes we carried out a combined operation, as we did in a lot comprising 360 umbrellas of various kinds, eventually trebling our money on their resale. My fortunes took a temporary upswing when I bought for 6 at one such auction a racing motor cycle which had been abandoned somewhere abroad, and brought back to England after its rider had been killed in an attack on a speed record. I rode this in the novice cla.s.s in several dirt track races at Harringay and the White City, coming last in every race but one, when two of the four contestants crashed. In spite of this poor record of achievement the organizers would always accept my entry and pay me the valuable sum of 5 in starting money, in the belief that it did no harm to the gate to feature a rider who could be relied upon to fall off in three races out of four. It was a great reverse when after a month or so the machine's engine exploded and I was forced back for a short time into dependence upon the elixir.

Slowly mercantile operations began to take over. It was to be seen that a living was to be had for such as us, debarred from creative endeavour, by keeping a close watch on auctions of the ordinary kind, in which an often bewildering miscellany of goods were put up for sale. At these, low prices were the general rule, and when from time to time an article of value came under the hammer it could usually be bought cheaply and rapidly resold at a profit in an auction of the better kind. This could be an exciting and even romantic business. Experts who spent a lifetime in manoeuvrings of this kind, having dedicated years to the science of market values, could expect once in a while to pick up spectacular treasures cleared from attics that found their way to the auction room. We knew our limitations and confined ourselves to goods requiring little or no expertise, gathered loosely under the heading 'scientific articles' which might include anything connected with photography, microscopes, barometers, s.e.xtants, surgical instruments, and when the occasional artificial limb turned up at a sale, or in one case a box of pickled anatomical specimens, we knew that Stevens of Covent Garden were the outlet for them, and they too were taken in our net.

This trade was a nomadic one, involving endless journeyings into the remote suburbs, north, south, east and west. It became necessary to set up our headquarters near the centre of London, so we rented the first floor of a house in Woodberry Down, near Finsbury Park. This was a Victorian mansion built in prison style, probably under the influence of the nearby Holloway Gaol, with an attractive view of a reservoir from its back windows.

Woodberry Down, we soon discovered, had been colonized by Russians escaping the severities of the Stalinist regime, particularly at the time of the liquidation of the kulaks, and this tree-lined, rather somnolent street harboured a number of the kulaks or their children who had managed to get away. They were tribal people, Ingushes, Chechens and Kazakhs, who made no concessions to their present environment, dressing and largely behaving, it was to be supposed, as they and their parents had done back in Kazan or Tashkent.

Several families had joined forces to take a long lease on a house a few yards down the road, had installed English stoves and converted them so as to be able to sleep on top of them in Russian style in winter, and had pitched their black tents in the enormous Victorian rooms. The men, we were told, always slept fully dressed ready for an attack, but the women stripped naked and rolled themselves in bear skins. They drank pivo, a home-brewed Russian beer laced with methylated spirits, smoked yellow cigarettes with Cyrillic lettering on them, spent their money on fireworks, and kept the street awake with their all-night parties at which they let off rockets, beat tambourines, danced and wept.

Hagen became fascinated by the Russians after an encounter we had with one of them called Aron. We were driving down the street within days of moving in when Aron, wearing a roughly-tied black turban, the tails of his long coat swinging, and amulets hanging from his wrists, stepped out into the roadway to stop our car, merely to ask the time. He invited himself into our flat, looked it over, and said, 'you must give this place personality.' He advised us as to how this was to be done, and he and his friends painted the floor red, covered the walls with tin foil and stuck blue stars and crescents over them. When the work was over we held a party, and the Russians brought their beer, their methylated spirits and their tambourines, ready to dance the night away. Two of them were princes, but Aron freely admitted that they were from Caucasus where every valley had its prince. What we failed to realize was that some of our friends were Muslims - although there were Christians and Jews as well - and the date suggested by them for our party happened to be the feast of Mouloud, celebrating the birth of the prophet - an occasion for rejoicing. Some time after midnight and a short halt for prayer, the fireworks were let off and, under the direction of one of the princes, the Russians made a raft from our furniture, poured petrol over it, carried it down to the water, and set it alight. It made an awe-inspiring spectacle in the demure setting of inner-suburban London, and the Russians cheered and wept at the beauty of it. The party ended with the pointless arrival of the fire brigade, who were followed by the police. Hagen and I were on a three months' tenancy, and when this expired it was no surprise to us that it was not renewed.

While looking round for fresh accommodation I returned to Forty Hill, where any changes that had taken place were for the worse.

My father, who suffered from boredom, was going through a bad patch, sometimes causing him to groan aloud, and my mother was tired after a visit to Carmarthen where she had gone in response to my grandfather's pleadings to do what she could to get Polly through a current crisis.

Forty Hill, and with it much of North Enfield, was moreover on the verge of a great calamity, for the great and beautiful orchards among which I had spent most of my childhood were about to be cut down and replaced by housing estates.

Against the long-term prospect of gloom, my mother had a single recent triumph to report. A woman called Mrs Edwardes from the superior residential area of Enfield known as The Ridgeway, who had been vacillating, undecided, on the fringe of my mother's movement for at least a year, had been finally persuaded to join together with several of her friends, following a macabre experience to which she had been subjected. The tragedy of this poor woman - whom I had once met - was that over some fifteen years she had given birth to no less than ten still-born children. After the loss a short time previously of the last of these, and some final hesitation and misgivings, she had agreed to be present at a seance to be arranged purely with the object of attempting to communicate with the spirits of her unfortunate offspring. Some problems arose over differences of opinion among the circle members as to whether the still-born had souls or not. Right-wing extremists contended that a child who had never drawn breath did not, while the liberals held the view that even a foetus in an early stage of development did - although no one could draw a line as to whether the promise of eternity was present within hours, days or weeks after conception.

The seance for Mrs Edwardes called for a major organizational effort, and was attended by invitation by persons known to possess exceptional psychic endowment from outside the area. I remembered that my mother had even tried to encourage me to attend to contribute to the formidable barrage of astral force that was being prepared. The occasion, she said, was a huge success. My father had been supported by a professional medium, and at least five of Mrs Edwardes' still-born babies had given evidence of their presence, ranging from the infant mewing of the last of her children who had so nearly come into the world to the strong and confident greeting of her (now) teenage son.

At this point I was ready with the questions that made my mother impatient with me. Until what age would the Edwardes family continue to grow on the other side? Until the ideal age - the best possible age - she thought, but she could not suggest what that age might be. And at that age they would remain throughout eternity? Yes, she thought, a little doubtfully, they would. Throughout eternity.

The success of the seance for Mrs Edwardes had been due, my mother believed, in part to the astral power provided by several members of a group of local 'seekers' calling themselves the Sons (or Daughters) of Osiris. Their movement - very closely allied to Spiritualism - had taken its inception following the publication of a book called The Voice of Osiris, the Book of the Truth. The people of Enfield, few of whom bothered much with books, were buying it by the hundred in the belief that it had been written through a medium by the Egyptian G.o.d Osiris, personification of the power of good and the sunlight, and that the revelations it contained held the key to the transformation of unsatisfactory lives. It was printed on paper with a faintly perfumed smell, and ill.u.s.trated with softly shaded pencil drawings of posturing dehumanized humans and a menagerie of sacred animals: cats, dogs, falcons, ibises, owls. Scattered through the pages were the symbols of ancient Egypt held in a web of cosmic rays, and great vacant eyes stared back at us from faces emptied of all expression by divine insight.

It was my mother's ambition eventually to absorb the children of Osiris into her church. A problem remained. Her following described themselves as Christian Spiritualists. Could the adorers of an ancient Egyptian deity be at the same time cla.s.sified as Christians? The fact was that Spiritualism fostered open-mindedness in the matter of dogma, and I had no doubt that a way would be found of reconciling even such hugely dissimilar faiths.

Another of my friends compelled by the times to pursue an unusual economic strategy was Arthur Baron, who, working at first from a small garage in Bookham, Surrey, trained himself to become a skilled mechanic and then an engineer. He specialized in buying up wrecked cars of the better kind - always cheap and, if there had been a fatality, very cheap. With patience, skill and devotion, and frequently a trivial outlay of money, these could sometimes be restored to near-pristine condition.

My first car was from this stable, although this was one that had not been crashed. It was a 'straight-eight' Bugatti, the property of a rich Indian, who had altered its appearance in many ways. In doing so he had made it too fanciful and, needing garage s.p.a.ce for new purchases, had cleaned it out for any price he could get, without argument, to the first buyer he could find.

This car immediately disproved a theory of mine that the thirst for pretence was the hallmark of the English lower middle cla.s.s, for this rich and probably powerful man, living in a palatial Wimbledon house, had ordered a special body built in Paris for his car - in the shape of a boat, or as nearly as this could be achieved. There had been little to be done about the front, but the rear end had been furnished with a polished wooden deck, enclosed by a low bra.s.s rail, and with fittings of the kind seen on yachts. There were also four small portholes. The Indian liked the poetic a.s.sociation of the word sunbeam, so he had removed Ettore Bugatti's tiny elliptical trademark from the top of the radiator and replaced it - this was the process applied to all his cars - with that of the Sunbeam Motor Company, and an adaptation had been made to the radiator cap to accommodate an image of the Hindu's elephant G.o.d, Ganesh. An ivory plaque covering most of the instruments on the dashboard showed a pair of lovers in lascivious oriental intertwinings.

It was a car to cause pained eyebrows to be raised anywhere in the neighbourhood of St James's, but was received with astonished admiration in the outer suburbs, and seen by such as Alexander it was a human version of gaudy attraction hung by the bower bird in its lair to entice the female of the species within range.

Alexander's involvement with the dangerous Russians of Woodberry Down had been prolonged by the fact that he had fallen in love with one of them and was therefore concerned at this time with the need to show himself off to the best advantage. She was a Jewess, pretty and amazingly fair, the daughter of the Grand Rabbi of Astrakhan. Making a shallow dive into the history of his own people, Alexander had learned of the existence of an originally non-Jewish people, the Khazars, who had been converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages - hence the Rabbi's daughter's Grecian rather than Semitic features. The Rabbi, her father, had remained behind in Astrakhan, but the rest of the family had been in England for some years and Zahra had been sent to school in Highgate. She showed neither surprise nor emotion of any kind when Hagen told her he loved her, merely saying that she would have to speak to her mother and her brother about it.

A family conference took place, after which Alexander was invited for an interview, not only by the mother and brother but also by a local rabbi whose advice they had taken and who questioned him searchingly on his family background, his prospects, but above all on his religious beliefs. In all three areas Alexander was on dangerous ground. He had never been inside a synagogue, and little remained about him that was Jewish but the faint and slowly disappearing accent. The rabbi watched him with troubled eyes as Alexander tried to explain and excuse the religious liberalism of the community to which he belonged.

Zahra's family asked for time to consider the matter. In the meanwhile further meetings with the girl were not ruled out, but the stipulation was made that one of her friends must be present.

The picnic party in the Bugatti was inevitable, and the car was useful in its way, too, as it turned out, because the minor shared hardship generated by such excursions helped wonderfully to break the ice, and spice the encounter with mild uncertainties and adventure.

It was Sunday, the first of May, a steely and near-arctic day, with a black tapestry of cloud over London under which the buildings of the city were as white as old bones. Zahra had been spending the weekend in Bloomsbury with a friend who was of Sicilian origin with whom she had been on a course in English life and culture designed by London University for the benefit of visiting foreigners. Having removed the erotic ivory plaque from the dashboard, we arrived at the meeting place, the old Euston arch, just as a few small snowflakes began to fall. This involved us, as soon as the girls arrived, with the predicament of erecting the hood which, when not in use, was stowed away in the boot. This the girls, working with us and their hands like ours blue with cold, entered into in the spirit of fun.

Both girls were exceedingly vivacious. Zahra was more beautiful than her friend, but Ernestina, who reminded me of Carmen Miranda and sported a good deal of jewellery unsuited to the climate, had more to say. Our intention had been to drive out for lunch to a little place on the river near Richmond, but a small difficulty arose over Zahra and kosher food, and she had come provided with sandwiches. The girls had heard exciting reports about Epping Forest, and were eager to see it, so we went there instead.

More sandwiches were bought at the Robin Hood pub near Chingford, after which we parked just off the road by the side of a small, slatternly mere. Both girls, neither of whom had left London during the time they had lived in England, were enchanted by their surroundings. Ducks copulated with noisy and incessant ardour in the shallow water among the half-submerged oil drums and the bicycle wheels. The wind had s.n.a.t.c.hed the snowflakes away, but now the landscape was fleeced with rain. Once in a while, as we munched our sandwiches and shook the water from our sleeves, a little derelict sunshine burst through a rent in the clouds to produce a sombre and fleeting illumination among the trees which Ernestina found 'Turneresque'. Although she knew nothing of England beyond what she had read in books, she had formed an attachment for the country and its people based largely on d.i.c.kens and fallacy, and was ready to excuse anything. We discussed the cla.s.s system which she saw as evidence of the dynamic democracy of our inst.i.tutions. In Spain, where she had been educated, there was no democracy, and only two cla.s.ses, the rich and the poor. Surely we were better off? The English could do no wrong. I dressed badly and knew it, but what I realized as a personal shortcoming, an incurable untidiness, she almost certainly saw as commendable humility.

The matter of love came up, although treated in a somewhat academic fashion. The fair Zahra, who had ceased to nibble her last sandwich, turned her soft, trusting eyes upon us and spoke of Jewish idealism and the five-year betrothal preceding marriage in Astrakhan, where such idealism was practised in its purest form. Ernestina shocked her by a.s.suring her that all married men in Sicily who could afford to do so, kept mistresses.

'What happens if they're found out?' someone asked. Ernestina lifted a hand, clasping an invisible pistol to her forehead, crooked her forefinger as if pressing a trigger, clicked her tongue and giggled (she had a most infectious laugh).

'They get shot,' she said.

'You don't mean that.'

'I do,' she said. 'If they are so foolish as to be caught, what good are they to anyone? Far better out of the way.'

'And do the wives go to prison?'

'Of course not. These are family affairs. They're hushed up.'

'Would you shoot your husband?' I asked.

'No,' she said, 'but I won't marry a Sicilian. Just to be on the safe side.'

Alexander was giving his set display of the worldly wisdom of the man about town, but I felt that it failed to impress, largely because it was not understood. Whenever the opportunity arose, Zahra fixed him with her soft eyes and plied him with a question. Soon I began to realize that Alexander was being subjected to a renewal of the rabbi's interrogation, a subtle affair of small, artless queries through which all the facets of his character were under test. He was encouraged to talk on, and he did and Zahra watched him, probing and sounding. Despite the swagger of the Russian group as a whole, I saw her as cautious and calculating. In all probability we all wore disguises for this occasion, but Alexander, so carefully dressed for the part, was least convincing. There was little indication of the hard centre almost certainly concealed beneath Zahra's confiding personality. I caught at her thoughts: Handsome, yes, but penniless. An adventurer who will receive no inheritances. My father has a sense of humour, but never where I am concerned. How would he take this? Is it possible to imagine this man awaiting me as I am led in procession to the chappah? If he has no money, how can he offer the mishrim of gold coins, and the sharab in silver drinking vessels? Could he, even for this one occasion, play a single note on the r'beg or the toba? Oi, what complications! Could he take the traditional kobeiba of mince meat and cracked rice from its salver, shape it skilfully, using forefinger and thumb alone, into perfectly round kefta to feed both me and himself before our a.s.sembled friends, without covering us all with shame? a.s.suredly not. Would he respect the mikvah and learn in reasonable time to chant the prayers for the saba'a? It is improbable. As an Ashken.a.z.i, spoiled with the fat living of the degenerate West, could he be persuaded to live on unleavened bread and dates during the fasts? No.

Chapter Seven.

UNLIKE ZAHRA ERNESTINA WAS clearly not a walker in the old ways. She was full of what probably sounded to her revolutionary utterances, one being that in no circ.u.mstances would she marry an Italian, and on second thoughts she would do her best not to marry at all, although this did not rule out the possibility of living with a suitable male - above all one who was not her parents' choice. She also said that she despised religion, and more than religion itself the educated Latins of her acquaintance who paid lip-service to a faith they regarded as intellectually inadmissible. Sicilians, she said, were the worst of the lot, the insincere tag-end of a society in decay. She contrasted them with the English of the books she had read and the lectures she had attended, by comparison so devoid of deviousness, so upright in all their dealings, so bound by their word.

One of her theories - and it was one held by so many continentals - was that the weather had made them what they were. Ernestina had lived in hot climates and studied their enervating effect upon those who had to support them. Here the cold and the rain protected you from the siesta and kept you on your toes. Now the picnic over, she turned down a suggestion from Alexander that we should give up and go home, and urged further exploration of the sodden landscapes of Ess.e.x.

Another meeting was arranged for the next Sat.u.r.day evening, but my instinct warned me that Zahra would not appear, and she did not. Instead Ernestina was there on time outside Euston Station, bearing a brief note from her to say that she had a cold. Reading through its spa.r.s.e lines Alexander was inclined to the belief that he had seen the last of her. Meanwhile it was clear that Ernestina expected to be taken out, and the awkward prospect of a threesome was settled by his withdrawal.

Ernestina and I then walked down Tottenham Court Road and settled for dinner at the Corner House. St Giles' Circus might have been Xanadu as far as either of us was concerned, and little did we know that the audience played to by Lionel Falkman and his Apaches was composed in the main of intelligent au pair girls, and that such Lyons establishments were beneath the notice of native Sat.u.r.day night pleasure-seekers from Finchley and Golders Green. Lionel in his embroidered Balkan blouse made the routine round with his fiddle and we were pleased and a little surprised when he halted to play a few bars at our table. Ernestina had nothing but enthusiasm for her surroundings, for the elegance and restraint of the decor, the immaculate table linen, the sheen of the cutlery, the decorum of the clientele, the democratic consideration with which customers summoned a waiter with an un.o.btrusive gesture instead of hissing or clapping their hands, the dignity with which he took the order, the wholesome simplicity of the food he brought and the n.o.ble indifference with which he collected a tip without so much as a glance at it. A suspicion grew that this was the first time she had been alone with a male escort, although there was grudging reference to an admirer who called at her house from time to time to hold her hand in a deferential fashion and recite Spanish lyrical poetry, which she thought was pretty poor stuff.

There was something she found distinctly Parisian about the atmosphere and style of the Corner House, although it lacked the familiar grubbiness of an equivalent establishment in Paris. She had seen something of the great cities of Europe, and described and compared them with vivacity. Here was cosmopolitanism indeed. After Santander in North Spain she had been sent to be educated at Beauvais, then back to the University of Madrid. She was fluent in five languages and prepared to quote and discuss Proust, Dante and Cervantes in the originals. All I could offer by way of linguistic accomplishment was a half-dozen sentences in Welsh, drilled into me in the infants' school of the Pentrepoeth, and in the sphere of literature a nodding and uncritical acquaintance with Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. In spite of these cultural shortcomings and the fact that my travels had carried me no further than the soggy villages of South Wales, we found a good deal to say to each other.

After several more outings Ernestina peremptorily decided that the time had come for me to meet her parents. I was given no advance warning of this and therefore no time to prepare for the experience, which proved overwhelmingly strange. I was shown into a large room in the family house at 4 Gordon Street, Bloomsbury, which was lit as powerfully as if for a stage presentation. A strong overhead light in a chandelier was supported by a complex of lamps behind frosted panels at each corner of the ceiling. Pieces of period furniture had been placed here and there on a small prairie of magenta carpet, and my attention was captured by a gilded door, its panels incised with an abstract geometrical design. This was the setting for the surrealistic happenings of a Buuel film to come. I became aware of my crumpled suit of inferior cloth, of trousers that were too short and sleeves too long, of untended fingernails and creaking shoes, of the untidy parcel of books I was carrying and the badly-folded evening paper stuck into my jacket pocket. 'My father is very informal,' Ernestina a.s.sured me. 'He is easy to get on with, and you will like him. He will not understand your English, and you will not understand his Italian, but that doesn't matter.'

A moment later the gilt door swung open and a short, corpulent man entered the room. He was dressed in a dark suit of conservative cut which he might have been wearing for the first time. His eyes were black and protruding, and his black hair was brushed close to his scalp and no expression showed in his face as he came towards us, taking short, shuffling steps. We shook hands, he gave me a quick, mechanical smile, and said something incomprehensible in a language which I presumed to be Italian in a cracked, grating voice that managed in some way to be pleasant. 'Daddy is welcoming you to our house,' Ernestina said. 'He asks you to make yourself at home.' I bowed and, stricken momentarily with my old speechlessness, produced a faint, inarticulate gargling, before seating myself, still gripping my frayed parcel, on the edge of a small golden throne. Thus begun my long acquaintance with Ernesto Giovanni Batista Corvaja, a singular man.

At this point my attention was distracted from his somewhat hypnotic stare by the entrance of his wife, Maria Corvaja, a short, smiling over-elaborately dressed woman who, to my enormous relief, turned out to speak excellent English. We sat facing each other and a maid brought wine in cut gla.s.ses that added their iota of scintillation to the sheen and the glitter of the surroundings. All the interiors of my life until this moment had possessed their nooks and their crannies, places where untidy parcels could be stuffed out of sight, the alcoves and the recesses of rustic architecture which promised concealment in emergency. Here we sat together transfixed by protocol in our cube of pitiless light, from which there was no escape.

Madame Corvaja poured out routine affabilities, criticized Stalin and praised the Marriage of Figaro being performed in London at that time. But it was clear that the real business of the moment was with Ernesto, from whom I was divided by a linguistic chaos. Sometimes, I judged by the rise in his tone of voice and his eyebrows that I was being questioned, and I was obliged to reply by mumbling almost anything that came into my head. I was irresistibly reminded of a waxwork grouping at Madame Tussaud's, to which a miraculous animation had been added.

Eventually the presentation was at an end. Following instructions I bent over Madame Corvaja's hand and brushed it with my lips, Ernesto gave me a limp hand, and renewed his perfunctory smile and the parents withdrew. I was told that in leaving the room Ernesto had said to his wife, 'Mache? e un cenciauolo?' ('Has she brought a rag-picker home?') for which, when his comment was repeated to his daughter, he received a severe reprimand.

A month or two later, to the huge surprise of those who knew us, we were married. It was to be a marriage with a difference, a bold experiment undertaken with open eyes, a step in a new direction. Society - in this case represented by Ernestina's father and mother - would demand a signed legal paper, and they should have it. Thereafter concessions would stop. We agreed that a working partnership between a man and a woman could be a valuable arrangement, but there were to be no ties or sanctions. Ernestina would keep her own name, and we declared ourselves free to come and go as we pleased, and to part - if it ever came to that - without claim on each other. Needless to say, we were both earnest students of the doctrines of Bertrand Russell, and much as we agreed with his views on the subject of free love, we proposed to go a step further. This, we agreed, was not a love match. Romantic love was dismissed at best as an invention of Victorian novelists, at worst as a psychotic interlude. It was an arrangement inconceivable in any period outside the Thirties when revaluation of social customs could take extreme forms, and it was destined not to work as well as we had hoped it would. Later, in retrospect, I was more and more inclined to see the union as a way designed by Ernestina of freeing herself from the claustrophobia of family relationships, and from a Latin tradition she was at that time set upon renouncing - perhaps at any cost.

Inevitably all the circ.u.mstances attendant upon the ceremony were perfunctory and austere. Vows were exchanged in a quick embarra.s.sed mumble in the prosaic setting of the Henrietta Street register office, the witnesses being Alexander and a current Hindu mistress, said to be heiress to a Bombay garment-making fortune, who suffered from a streaming cold. Following the ceremony the Woolworth's ring was thrown in the nearest dustbin, after which the ticklish problem presented itself of breaking the news to the Corvajas.

We found Ernesto and his wife under the blazing lights of the drawing room of Number 4, Gordon Street, neither of them having received the slightest warning of what was about to happen to them. Ernestina delivered a short take-it-or-leave-it speech, and as Ernesto listened, a grey patina seemed to spread across his cheeks. In silence he drew a hand across his face and the shadow was gone, and a defeated looseness of the jowls was drawn tight.

'Show me the paper,' he said in Italian, and Ernestina took the marriage certificate from her handbag and gave it to him. He read it very slowly, his eyes moving from side to side as he followed the lines of print, halted by so many unfamiliar words before plodding on. He examined the stamp and the signatures, nodding in the end his stunned conviction. At his back Madame Corvaja, a bloodless smile carved in her face, had been turned to a pillar of salt.

'Non e uno scherzo, Papa,' Ernestina a.s.sured him, eyes sparkling with a kind of triumph. I began to understand how firmly she was in command of the situation, and how in some way this was for her a moment of victory in her relationship with her father.

Suddenly Ernesto shook his head - as if to free himself from a web clinging to his face. He straightened and smiled at me, a little wolfishly, I thought. What I was witnessing was a cla.s.sic example of the stoic Sicilian reaction to irretrievable calamity, known in their enigmatic island as 'swallowing the claws of the toad'. As if he had remembered an essential part of a religious ceremony, he next stepped forward a little stiffly, and took me into his embrace, stretching to his full height to squeeze his cheeks against mine and kiss the lobe of each ear. For a moment he rummaged through his stock of English for the proper words. 'I will give you my blood,' he then said.

Madame Corvaja, released from her spell, had rushed from the room and was now back with a maid, carrying a tray with champagne.

I moved on a temporary basis into the Corvajas' house, being instantly and wholly accepted as a member of the family. The situation is a familiar Mediterranean one where, by the survival of an ancient custom, it is normal for a husband to live - often for some years - with his in-laws before setting up a separate household, although the reverse is less frequently encountered. The tensions inherent in such an arrangement in the Anglo-Saxon world are rarely present in such cases, and the English stereotype of the overbearing mother-in-law is absent. Almost overnight I was absorbed into the traditional Latin family. Being a Sicilian household this 'Latin-ness', whatever its advantages and disadvantages, was exaggerated, seeming to call upon the individual member to surrender a little of his separate ident.i.ty in exchange for the solidarity and protection of the tightly-knit family group. Despite this highly traditional background, the senior Corvajas faced each new situation as it arose in an alien land with an extraordinary openness of mind, and whatever astonishment they may have felt when Ernestina announced to them that we should be occupying separate rooms, nothing of this showed in the quasi-oriental composure of their faces.

Neither of the senior Corvajas ever permitted themselves a criticism of me, except on the single occasion when, as we were about to visit a restaurant together, Ernesto suggested that I should smarten up my appearance. To this, as if inspired by an afterthought, he added, ' - and always strive to develop character.'

Rootlessness and isolation were prime factors in our being married. I was isolated and Ernestina was even more so, isolation in her case being largely a product of the excessive cosmopolitanism of her upbringing. The Corvajas were a family of Spanish origin who had settled in Sicily in the seventeenth century while it still remained attached to the Spanish Kingdom, and it was perhaps to retain some link with the ancestral country that Ernestina had been sent to complete her education in Spain. It had been first Sicily, then the United States, followed by Spain, France and England. Thus she had never lived long enough in any country to soak up the prejudices and adopt the standpoints by which a personality is to some extent defined. She, like her parents, was devoid of cla.s.s-consciousness, religious belief, and patriotism. There was not even an anchorage for her in a true native tongue which, even for a polyglot, is the vehicle for thought, because she spoke English, Spanish, Italian and French with equal fluency, and I am sure that there were times when she was not sure which language she was speaking. She was in urgent need of a tradition, a sense of history, allegiances, att.i.tudes and a firm point of view, and I was the last person to be of any a.s.sistance to her in the attainment of any of these things.

Imprisoned within the intensely parochial life of the outer suburbs, the working day surrendered to sales patter for yeast tablets and the fraudulent elixir, the glum pick-ups in Church Street, Enfield and Hilly Fields Park, the teeth-baring bonhomie of the saloon bar of the George and Dragon, and the Sat.u.r.day night hop at the Oddfellows' Hall, I had lifted up my eyes to the expansive horizons of the cosmopolitan world. But the situation in which I found myself was not quite that. In their way - and with good reason, as I was to find - the Corvajas joined me in the search for escape, although we pursued always fugitive ends in markedly different ways.

There were four in the Corvaja family, including a teenage son, Eugene, who went to a London school, and was becoming rapidly and fairly painlessly Anglicized. How far this process had gone can be gauged from his reaction to a family ceremony which had taken place a few years before. A number of Ernesto's friends had called at the house, and Eugene had been instructed to remove his trousers and climb on a table to permit his p.e.n.i.s to be examined, to ritual cries of astonishment and delight. This would have been of no importance to a Sicilian boy steeped in the local tradition, but, infected as he was by this time with Anglo-Saxon prudery and reserve, it was an incident Eugene remembered with some embarra.s.sment.

My mother-in-law, Maria, conducted the usual household tasks aided by a pair of young Welsh girls imported from some wretched mining village in Wales, who suffered the normal degree of exploitation that was the lot of so many of the daughters of that martyred country. What time that was left over from her severe and exacting surveillance of their work she would devote to the making of unsuitable shepherdesses' dresses, or the reading of literary cla.s.sics in several languages. The possession of a near-photographic memory - this she had pa.s.sed on to her daughter - enabled her to read at great speed and to devour books at a rate of never less than one a day.

Ernesto might have been regarded by an outsider as the most interesting member of the family. His ancestor, Prince Corvaja, had bought his princedom (one of 147) from the Spanish crown for 2,000 scudi, and built the small but exquisite Corvaja Palace in Taormina, now a national monument. Some of the new princes and dukes who had had to sc.r.a.pe together the money to pay for their t.i.tles remained poor for the rest of their lives, others became some of the richest men in Europe. The Corvajas did well out of sulphur, scooped up by child slaves in the most fiendish of all mines, crawling through tunnels that were too narrow to admit an adult. These were the facts of history and his family's past which Ernesto declined to discuss. Withdrawn in manner as he was, and dressed always as if attending at an important funeral, he was obsessed by an appearance of gaiety, with brilliance and light. The decorated gilt panels on the doors of his drawing room were his own work, and their Arabian motifs and geometric abstraction were repeated throughout the house. Having finished with the doors he began work on the ceilings, painting them with cheerful and indulgent scenes of fat-limbed putti bouncing on haloed clouds, his personal inspiration reinforced by Michelangelo's oeuvre in the Sistine Chapel, of which he possessed an excellent set of hand-painted ill.u.s.trations.

Strong light shone everywhere in the Corvajas' house. They eschewed shadows and the dark. There was no unlit corner, no spookiness under the stairs, no heavily-draped curtains behind which an intruder could lurk. Every cupboard, when opened, was flooded with refulgence from high-powered lamps. Occasionally, when it seemed to Ernesto that a total of several thousand candlepower offered insufficient illumination, a spotlight of the kind used on a film set would be switched on as soon as a visitor appeared in the doorway. Sometimes Ernesto, described in his pa.s.sport as a diamond dealer, would take a fine lawn handkerchief from his pocket in which, in professional style, he sometimes carried his diamonds. Placing a square of black cloth on the table immediately beneath the chandelier he would pour the diamonds from the handkerchief which, as they fell, made a faintly watery sound, the hiss and crackle of a high, thin waterfall tumbling off a distant cliff. I had no evidence of his ever buying or selling a single diamond, but this was an operation from which he clearly derived much aesthetic satisfaction.

The central feature of life in the Corvaja household was the evening meal. By day the house was a quiet one. Ernesto was normally engaged in a struggle with problems of perspective in ceiling-painting in one of the upper rooms. Maria would be gulping down s.n.a.t.c.hes of Stendhal in brief interludes from the vigilance maintained over the work of her Welsh drudges. Eugene was at school and Ernestina had just taken employment with the firm of Lever Brothers where she worked on the translation of confidential doc.u.ments into a number of languages under security conditions resembling those of a military establishment.

In the evening the family came together for the dinner ritual, conducted in a scene of the greatest animation. In their contacts with outsiders the Corvajas were quiet and undemonstrative, and although I have no way of knowing that this was the case, it was my theory that they sought release from the restraints they imposed upon themselves each day in what may have been a traditional Sicilian way. Breakfast and lunch were regarded as unimportant, and consumed rapidly and in near silence, but the evening meal was elaborate and lengthy, eaten in the usual glare of lights, and to music - always excerpts from the operas of Verdi or Puccini, to which the elder Corvajas were pa.s.sionately devoted - played on a first-rate gramophone turned up to an almost unendurable pitch.

Ernesto imported his own wine from Sicily, a l.u.s.ty, full-bodied vintage with an alcoholic content causing it to be bracketed with sherry for the purpose of the payment of duty. The wine was imported in casks and siphoned with a rubber tube into innumerable bottles - a task which occupied many hours. By the time it was over, Ernesto's normally cadaverous complexion was suffused by the vinous flush caused by unavoidable swallowing over a long period of tiny amounts of wine. Under this unsuspected intoxication his normal reserve dropped on one occasion, and I was astonished to hear him talking of Palermo of the far past, shaking his head at the folly of which the young of his day had been capable. One day he had been driving with a friend in the Parco della Favorita, and the coachman, boasting of his skill with the whip, had pointed to a cat by the roadside and said to them, 'If I can kill it with a single blow, will you eat it?' The bet was taken, and the coachman killed the cat, and Ernesto and his friend descended from the carriage and set about preparing the meal. Branches for firewood were taken from convenient bushes, someone was sent for a pot, for olive oil and tomato sauce, and the stew was prepared and eaten on the spot. 'It was impossible to welsh on the bet,' Ernesto said. 'A man of honour cannot go back on his word.'

The park was a place where up-and-coming young males went to prove themselves, sometimes in a desperate fashion. Another acquaintance of Ernesto's, seeking to 'make his bones', as the Sicilians put it, provoked an encounter with a prestigious rival, and received a knife thrust delivered with such practised skill that he was virtually disembowelled, without however the actual severance of an intestine (Ernesto, who may have been joking, said that such thrusts were practised on pigs or sheep). It was a moment, as the victor wiped his knife on his immaculate handkerchief, bowed smilingly and withdrew, which called for cool-headed action, and this the wounded piciotto took. Gathering his entrails with no signs of dismay, let alone panic, into his hat, he stopped a pa.s.sing fiacre, got in, and had himself driven to hospital. In a couple of months he was out again and back in the park, settling to wait for weeks, months, if necessary years, for the opportunity to settle accounts. 'He showed great presence of mind,' Ernesto said.

After two or three gla.s.ses of Ernesto's powerful wine an extraordinary change came over the members of the family. As if by agreement they began to argue with each other, arguments leading to quarrels of a violence I had never experienced before, with members of the family screaming to make themselves heard over the powerful operatic bellowing of Caruso or t.i.to Gobbi. Whenever this happened the terror-stricken cats shot under the table, and the fairly tame kestrel, equally startled, took off from the reproduction Donatello's David on which it normally perched, to flap in a distraught fashion round the room before coming to rest again on David's head upon which it would invariably release a copious dropping.

These nightly disputes arose over the most trivial causes, differences of opinion as to the highest building in New York, or the number of children given birth to by Queen Victoria. They were accompanied by terrible oaths in various languages, Eugene having recently been able to increase the repertoire of family invective by listing all the swear-words in English he had picked up in school.

Suddenly, at a moment when I felt sure that real violence, even tragedy was not to be averted, the storm was past, and reason and urbanity reigned again. Ernesto would settle himself, benign and contemplative, with a small brandy, Maria might pat her temples with eau de Cologne, while Eugene would avail himself of the moment of reconciliation to take off 'Your Tiny Hand is Frozen', and replace it inconspicuously with the new Duke Ellington.

The two most vociferous disputants were always Ernestina and her father, and despite the almost purely ritual character of these daily rows I began to suspect beneath the familiar histrionics the reality of a latent antagonism. It was some months before Ernestina admitted that so far as she was concerned this was the case.