The Whispering Swarm

  I wanted her. I was determined to have her. Against all habit I crossed a room full of half-dancing, half-talking people, went straight up to her and had Ildiko introduce us. She seemed startled when I stayed but then relaxed. We made a few jokes. Later, when she was about to leave with the group giving her a lift home I simply said, ‘You’re not going. You’re staying.’ And she stayed.

  That was the beginning of my courtship. And it was a courtship. She slept with me but she wouldn’t commit to me. I had never fought for a woman before. I was famous for it. But now I fought for Helena. For a short while she went out with both me and an Aussie friend of mine called Gordon Gaines. I think I’d introduced them. I’m not naturally possessive but I would have done almost anything to win her. I actually considered killing Gordon while I simpered and displayed my pretty feathers and fine accomplishments to the object of my desire. I wrote her songs and poems and begging letters full of sticky self-endorsement. Despite this she eventually agreed to marry me and that was that.

  11

  ENGAGEMENT

  I remember the evening Helena accepted me, the smell of the November air. We were on a Number 25, muffled upstairs, smoking at the back, a little drunk from good food and wine in Soho. I took her to meet my old friends. Masked against the fog I felt sudden pleasure as I pushed open the pub door for her to enter and the warm air carried her perfume briefly to me until we were inside and I was introducing her.

  Bitter beer and Gauloises were the predominant smells at the New Hanged Man, the last of Brookgate’s Victorian People’s Palaces, only a short step from the Globe. This was the pub used by a bunch of young Brookgaters and others who were involved in the arts, mostly film. There was jazz and folk upstairs. St Martins and the Slade were not far away. In a few years some of them would form bands and become Akhanon and Sadness and so turn into producers, A&R men, media personalities. The New Hanged Man still hosts bands and became one of the best punk venues in the early, wilder days. It’s been turned into a much bigger place. Glen Matlock performs there. In those days, though, I was the most successful of my peers. But that was before Akhanon got so big and Max Stone, who’d joined them, was voted ‘Best Guitarist in the World’ by Creem readers. I was proud of my friends and enjoyed introducing them to Helena. They all congratulated me on my catch. She said later she felt like giant cod.

  Of course I’d told Helena about the Alsacia. I tried to take her to Carmelite Inn Chambers where I’d seen the gates, where that pair of thief takers had tried to arrest me. She didn’t believe in the supernatural, she said. She believed only in the rational. She was only recently out of Cambridge. She was a sceptic. My lust increased. She argued that if it did exist then it had to be supernatural in origin and since we both agreed there was no such thing as the supernatural it actually couldn’t exist. She laughed happily. ‘You’ll believe in God next!’ Her point was a good one. For us a belief in God and the supernatural went arm in arm with reactionary politics and was antiprogressive at best. My own fascination with metaphysics was, I insisted, purely sociological. My own imagination was so wild I had to control it with the tightest, most rationalist of reins. Yet I responded negatively to Helena’s certainty. She argued that if you accepted the existence of, say, zombies, then ipso facto you accepted the existence of God. I took her point.

  Helena and I would have those arguments all the way through our marriage and well beyond. I think they bound me to her more strongly.

  12

  SCENES FROM URBAN LIFE

  Of course I still dreamed of the Alsacia and everything I’d experienced there, I dreamed of my frustrations at being unable to find the gateway. In some dreams Father Grammaticus and Brother Isidore tried to help me. In others they resisted me. Molly often rode beside me, her red hair wild and flowing in the wind, a devil-may-care grin on her lips. But I no longer felt that same fascinated yearning for her. I associated her with other dreams I had had when emerging into puberty. I told Helena all about them, of course, and she congratulated me on my imagination. She was fascinated by that, if not by the Alsacia. Helena’s scepticism was well honed. Her mother had argued rationally for years with her grim Methodist parents and Helena had learned to be a rationalist at her mother’s knee. They relished Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and others calling at their house. They could rout them. They knew Greek and could quote whole chunks of the Greek New Testament. Chapter and verse.

  What Mrs Denham wasn’t sure about was freelance writers. Those days were perhaps the last when a young man had to prove himself worthy to his girlfriend’s parents. Helena thought if I had a regular job then it would make things a lot easier. I could give it up later. Alistair Graham again came to my rescue. He was back from his travels and was working in the Liberal Party publications department. This was the time of the first so-called ‘Liberal revival’ when it seemed the reforming party of Lloyd George was making a comeback. Slightly euphoric, they were hiring speechwriters and people to work on their policy documents. So I got a job which mostly involved trying to make sense of work done by young men fresh from university whose parents had connections. The party leader was an amiable man who clearly thought there was something corrupting about power and did everything he could to keep from getting it. Jo Grimond was mild mannered, good humoured and not the brightest star in the political firmament. Almost as soon as I got there I saw how much money they were wasting, and when one of their favourite young chaps made a complete hash of the type and design for a whole set of policy pamphlets, Alistair and I had to sort out the mess. The pamphlets were delivered late and were not much use in the elections.

  My main job, as a writer, was to go to the Tory and Labour central offices, pick up their policy statements and rewrite the best of what we liked. Voila! Liberal policy! Our opponents were fond of saying that we had no policy. That wasn’t strictly true. We had a policy. It just happened to be theirs. The experience did help me write some political SF, however, and since the Liberals weren’t paying much I could pick up reasonable money by selling to Carnell and continuing to write for Look and Learn and the other AP publications. But I had a regular job. Helena’s ma would approve. Helena could safely announce our marriage.

  Before we both knew it we had parents and other relatives involved. We managed to tell my mother and Helena’s that we weren’t living near them, got both mothers’ blessings, kept them apart as much as possible (Mrs Denham was a strict rationalist and my mother was anything but) and, on 29 October 1962, we married at Caxton Hall, in those days the most fashionable registry office in England, across the road from the Houses of Parliament. Just up the road from Liberal headquarters. Next door to Methodist headquarters. That was a sop to Helena’s ILP Methodist grandparents and a compromise with her fiercely atheistic mother and her mother’s communist boyfriend.

  Our wedding reception was held at Mrs Denham’s house in Dulwich. Because she couldn’t afford to do much for the reception we made it a bring-a-bottle affair. There were three hundred guests, hippest of the hip and most bourgeois of bougies all cheerfully mingling. At first everyone got along very well, the way they’re supposed to in Richard Curtis movies. Through the course of the evening, however, the reception became more of a Richard Lester affair.

  Because Helena’s mother was a widow and not very well-off I paid for everything including the first tailor-made suit I’d ever possessed. Neither of us look that spiffy in the photos. We were doing and dressing as convention demanded. This was just before the swinging-London revolution when dandyism became the norm in some circles. I also paid for the photographer but unfortunately he got into a fistfight with my brother-in-law and used his camera as the weapon of last resort. Therefore we had very few photographs of the wedding. Which was just as well. Everyone was pretty drunk. My cousins taught Helena’s posher Cambridge chums to do the knees-up and my uncle Alf, who had been on the bill at the London Palladium, showed the local MP how to play spoons. My forty-seven-year-old mum met my dad for the first time s
ince the war and Ted Tubb, the lanky charming science fiction writer who edited Authentic before it folded and who never missed a party or a chance to chat up a woman (‘pick the ugly one—they’re always grateful.…’), offered to lead my still-good-looking and much-flattered mother to the bottom of the garden to look for the fairies. My dad even revealed a glimmer of jealousy. He left early, since he was on a cheap ticket from Paris.

  We heard later that my best man, David Harvey, who would become an influential economic geographer, had driven my cousin, David Roberts, home in Cousin Dave’s car and then dumped him sleeping in the alley outside his own house while Harvey went joy riding. He could have caught pneumonia, my posh Aunt Dorothea later complained to my unconcerned mother.

  Helena and I were the last to go home. We helped stack dishes and then Dave Harvey drove us back to our tiny, newly rented top floor flat in Lancaster Gate, directly across from the bell in the church’s tower. We both decided later that we would rather have plighted our troth in some other way and maybe found a nicer flat first. It was a depressing dump. All our furniture was handed down to us. Very little light came through the high windows. And, when you flushed the toilet, black ooze bubbled up into the bath. Even I couldn’t pretend it was an attractive love nest.

  In the bed I’d been born in I held her in my arms as she cried. ‘I wish I’d never got married,’ she said.

  I knew how she felt. But in those days social pressure was strong. We did not have a constituency as powerful as our parents’. That balance of power would change soon and rapidly but we were just on the brink of all that. My romantic twenty-two-year-old self became a bit depressed until I was reassured by her evident decision to stay. Passive-aggressive? I was used to simple aggression. My family never bottled up anything. Although a bit manipulative, my mother was volatile and she said whatever was on her mind. Rows came quickly, took furious form and then were over, thoroughly forgotten. When Helena first witnessed my mother and me arguing she thought surely WW III had broken out and that neither side could possibly ever speak again. She was astonished when a few days later everything was sunny and my mother and I had completely forgotten the point of the row and indeed the row itself. I wasn’t used to middle-class repression. Helena’s family brooded on a supposed wrong for months. They generally aired their terrible accusations over Christmas dinner when everyone was drunk.

  Before our first Christmas the Liberals had begun to complain about the hours I kept. I had edited Jo Grimond’s book and begged them to tell him not to publish. Even I could see how naïve his logic was. My conscientious point wasn’t welcome. As for the job: I had to admit that the work wasn’t very arduous but the pay reflected that. To earn what I needed I continued writing for AP and others, which meant I had to see editors. When my immediate boss, Cowie, asked why I was so frequently out for hours at lunchtime I explained to him reasonably that I couldn’t live on what the Liberals paid me. I had to get other work. A week before we celebrated the big holiday, and just three months after our wedding, I was fired. I was shocked. If I had needed the money, I said, that sacking was callous. My respect for the amateurs who worked there went down a little more. But the job had served its purpose even if Helena was disappointed at the end of my brief career in politics.

  13

  MARRIAGE

  Our tiny Lancaster Gate flat was at the top of exactly one hundred stairs in what had been a chambre de bonne. I’ll always remember that wedding night, and the next morning, a Sunday, when the church bells started chiming. The entire tiny apartment shook and I thought the windows and then my bones would shatter. My ears rang and the persistent murmuring which had been with me since I left the Alsacia was drowned out for a while. ‘That’s what I call a welcome,’ I said. We laughed ourselves silly. We were unprepared.

  On Christmas morning, we woke up to find the whole square covered in thick snow. The sun burned in a cold, clear sky. I got up and went out to Hyde Park. I paused at the gate. The entire park lay beneath the deep fall of pristine snow. I marvelled at it. The only prints were those of what seemed a large bird. A few minutes later I heard the call of a crow as he flew across the sky between the black branches of chestnut trees. That was the winter of ’62-’63 when the Thames froze at her fringes and the cold was bitter, meaning the snow didn’t melt but turned to ice. A month later the weight of the snow had me muffled in all the warm clothes I could find, staggering about on the collapsing roof high above the late Georgian square, trying to shovel snow from the gutters running between the high buildings on a level with the church spire, into the unpopulated backyard, before the stuff melted into our bedroom. More black filth bubbled up into the bath. The old concierge stole the bucket and shovel I had bought. We kept our spirits up as best we could. Helena still had her job at the Foreign Office and it was easy enough for me to make up my earnings to what they had been when I worked at the Liberal Party. We were not there very much, but we started looking for a new apartment.

  That January, while the snow still covered Hyde Park, Helena discovered she was pregnant. She had already had one abortion and didn’t want another. She tried a few old wives’ remedies to stop the pregnancy, but nothing worked. We were now, not four months into our marriage, anticipating our first child. Helena kept going in to work, but she was very depressed. I reassured her. I could earn enough for two—or three. The first thing to do was to find a larger flat. That was when Joyce Carter, Ildiko’s friend, took pity on us and offered us temporary use of her place in Kensington Park Gardens, off Queensway. We got out of our snow-burdened flat in Lancaster Gate and moved in. Another month or two and Joyce must have liked us as tenants. She was marrying her boyfriend and going to live with him in Malta. She couldn’t sublet her Queensway flat but she could sublet her other flat in Colville Terrace, Notting Hill, the core of slum landlord Peter Rachman’s empire of exploitation. I actually liked Rachman as a person. When work was slow I had done a bit of painting and decorating for him a couple of years earlier. He had paid decently and on the nail. I had lived briefly in the area and liked it, for all its association with race riots, crime and prostitution. We had a larger flat up fewer stairs, close to the shops of Portobello Road. It seemed like paradise in comparison. I was sure this would cheer Helena up.

  No matter what our situation, I soon learned that, without apparent reason, Helena could resist cheering up better than Queen Victoria at a Prince Albert retrospective. Periodically she fell into the blackest moods, refusing to eat or talk. I think these days we’d call it clinical depression. I did have the sense to wonder what caused her descents and try to ease them by changing my own behaviour. My ego often got into the equation back then. I always thought it was my fault, my failure. I would go out for long walks, to leave her alone. I wasn’t used to people not speaking their minds. Helena would never discuss anything, so I never knew whether she blamed me or whether her moods had any link to my actions at all. I needed some pointers. I remember a time when she’d spent all day trying to buy a hat to wear to a Royal Society of Literature function. It cost a fortune but she looked stunning. She spent about half an hour at the party and then wanted to leave. As we walked home she took off the hat and threw it over a hedge. I didn’t know why she did it. All I knew, conventional as it sounds, was that I wanted to support her, help her get through whatever it was. The more she withdrew, however, the more tired I became. After a while I despaired.

  Typically, I was prone to guilt. I even shared survivor’s guilt as further news of Nazi atrocities was detailed through the ’60s. Certainly some of the blame for Helena’s moods was probably mine. Her mother said my wife had been prone to those moods since her father had died suddenly of a heart attack at a concert. His favourite child, and just fourteen, she had hardly spoken for two years after she heard the news. The first month we were married, Helena told me she knew I was going to leave her. Being sans fathers, hers permanently, we shared our anger at the common experience. I swore I would not leave her.

&n
bsp; But generally she couldn’t see me as an ally. Men always divorced their wives, she predicted, to take up with someone younger. I was no better than the rest. My mum being who she was, I wasn’t used to indirect, despairing, or masochistic women. My mother had stood up to everyone, especially in my defence. I’m sure I caused Helena pain. I’m sure I delivered many of those small insults and diminishing remarks, the kind men still unconsciously delivered to women in the early ’60s. But whatever else, she always enjoyed my lovemaking. Maybe that’s what kept us together. She had been attracted to me by my generosity, she said. Good-natured and generous by inclination, like so many writers, I was probably monstrously insensitive, utterly self-involved, but genuinely out to give her a good time. I seemed able to sympathise with her but not understand her. I retreated under stress. I sought the few dark spaces of the apartment for my demonstrations of misery, just as she did. At any time you might find one or both of us in some cupboard or under some table or other. Slumped in any available furniture and bemoaning the futility of life. Those bleak ’60s playwrights were very influential.

  Two such personalities as ours were doomed, I suppose. Maybe Helena never had a chance to tell me anything because I was too caught up in my own ambition, imposing my own vision on reality. Yet I know I learned from her. I was already conscious of two different kinds of author in me. One was practical, able to make money commercially. The other was predominantly analytical, experimental, and not at all commercial! My imagination was forever imposing vision on reality. I constantly saw things which weren’t actually there. If I was overtired, an entire scene might present itself to me. I could take pleasure in it, even though I knew only I could see it. I wasn’t psychotic, but a cycle of intense work followed by terrible exhaustion could somehow enslave me. With others depending on me, anxiety was also now part of my creative habit. I must have been horrible to live with. Yet I craved equality. I was used to it. Maybe Helena wasn’t. As a better and faster typist I edited and typed her stories for her. But there had to be something more.