What a lot too was left out or was of doubtful truth in even those opening statements. My mother was certainly not British, and to this day I am uncertain whether she was French – perhaps she was a rare Monegasque. The man she had chosen for my father left Monte Carlo before my birth. Perhaps his name was Brown. There is a ring of truth in the name Brown – she wasn’t usually so modest in her choice. The last time I saw her, when she was dying in Port-au-Prince, she bore the name of the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers. She had left Monte Carlo (and incidentally her son) hurriedly, soon after the Armistice of 1918, with my bills at the college unsettled. But the Society of Jesus is used to unsettled bills; it works assiduously on the fringe of the aristocracy where returned cheques are almost as common as adulteries, and so the college continued to support me. I was a prize pupil, and it was half expected that I would prove in time to have a vocation. I even believed it myself; the sense of vocation hung around me like the grippe, a miasma of unreality, at a temperature below normal in the cool rational morning but a fever-heat at night. As other boys fought with the demon of masturbation, I fought with faith. I find it strange to think now of my Latin verses and compositions – all that knowledge has vanished as completely as my father. Only one line has obstinately stuck in my head – a memory of the old dreams and ambitions: ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius . . .’ I said it to myself nearly forty years later when I stood, on the day of my mother’s death, by the bathing-pool of the Hotel Trianon in Pétionville and looked up at the fantastic tracery of woodwork against the palms and the inky storm-clouds blowing over Kenscoff. I more than half-owned the place and knew that soon I would own it all. I was already in possession, a man of property. I remember thinking, ‘I am going to make this the most popular tourist hotel in the Caribbean,’ and perhaps I might have succeeded if a mad doctor had not come to power and filled our nights with the discords of violence instead of jazz.
The career of an hôtelier was not, as I have indicated, the one which the Jesuits had expected me to follow. That had been finally wrecked by a college performance of Romeo and Juliet in its very staid French translation. I was given the part of the aged Friar Lawrence, and some of the lines I had to learn have remained with me to this day, I don’t know why. They hardly have the ring of poetry. ‘Accorde-moi de discuter sur ton état.’ Frère Laurent had the power of making even the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers prosaic. ‘J’apprends que tu dois, et rien ne peut le reculer, Etre mariée à ce comte jeudi prochain.’
The part must have seemed to the good fathers a suitable one under the circumstances and not too exciting or exacting, but I think my vocational grippe was already very nearly over, and the interminable rehearsals, the continual presence of the lovers and the sensuality of their passion, however muted by the French translator, led me to my breakout. I looked a good deal older than my age, and the dramatic director, if he could not make me an actor, had at least taught me adequately enough the secrets of make-up. I ‘borrowed’ the passport of a young lay professor of English literature and bluffed my way one afternoon into the Casino. There, in the surprising space of forty-five minutes, due to an unlikely run of nineteens and zeros, I gained the equivalent of three hundred pounds, and only an hour later I was losing my virginity, inexpertly and unexpectedly, in a bedroom of the Hôtel de Paris.
My instructress was at least fifteen years older than myself, but in my mind she has remained always the same age, and it is I who have grown older. We met in the Casino where, seeing that I was pursued by good fortune – I had been making the bets over her shoulder – she began to lay her tokens alongside mine. If I gained that afternoon more than three hundred pounds, perhaps she gained nearly a hundred, and at that point she stopped me, counselling prudence. I am certain there was no thought of seduction in her mind. It is true that she invited me to have tea with her at the hotel, but she had seen through my disguise better than the officials of the Casino, and on the steps she turned to me like a fellow-conspirator and whispered, ‘How did you get in?’ I was no more to her, I am sure, at that moment than an adventurous child who had amused her.
I didn’t even pretend. I showed her my false passport, and in the bathroom of her suite she helped me to rub out the traces of make-up which on a winter’s afternoon, in the light of the lamps, had passed for genuine lines. I saw Frère Laurent disappear wrinkle by wrinkle in the mirror above the shelf where lay her lotions, her eyebrow-pencils, her pots of pomade. We might have been two actors sharing a dressing-room.
Tea at the college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream. I lost my shyness, I spoke of my mother, of my Latin compositions, of Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps without evil intention, I quoted Catullus to show off my learning.
I cannot remember now the gradation of events which led to the first long adult kiss upon the sofa. She was married, I remember she told me, to a director of the Banque de l’Indochine, and I had visions of a man ladling coins into a drawer with a brass scoop. He was at the moment on a visit to Saigon where she suspected him of supporting a Cochinese mistress. It was not a long conversation; I was soon back at the beginning of my studies, learning a first lesson in love on a big white bed with carved pineapple bed-posts, in a small white room. What a lot of details I can still remember of those hours after more than forty years. For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation – but I think it is equally true of us all.
An odd thing happened as we lay on the bed. She was finding me shy, frightened, difficult. Her fingers had no success, even her lips had failed their office, when into the room suddenly, from the port below the hill, flew a seagull. For a moment the room seemed spanned by the length of the white wings. She gave an exclamation of dismay and retreated: it was she who was scared now. I put out a hand to reassure her. The bird came to rest on a chest below a gold-framed looking-glass and stood there regarding us on its long stilt-like legs. It seemed as completely at home in the room as a cat and at any moment I expected it to begin to clean its plumage. My new friend trembled a little with her fear, and suddenly I found myself as firm as a man and I took her with such ease and confidence it was as though we had been lovers for a long time. Neither of us during those minutes saw the seagull go, although I shall always think that I felt the current of its wings on my back as the bird sailed out again towards the port and the bay.
That was all there was, the victory in the Casino, and in the white-and-gold room a few further triumphant minutes – the only love-affair I have ever had which ended without pain or regret. For she was not even the cause of my departure from the college; that was the result of my own indiscretion in dropping into the collection-bag at mass a roulette token for five francs which I had failed to cash. I thought I was showing generosity, for my usual contribution was twenty sous, but someone spotted me and reported me to the Dean of Studies. In the interview which followed the last vestige of my vocation was blown away. I parted from the fathers with politeness on both sides; if they felt disappointment I think they also felt a grudging respect – my exploit was not unworthy of the college. I had successfully concealed my small fortune under my mattress, and when they were assured that an uncle, on my father’s side, had sent me my fare to England with promises of future support and a position in his firm, they relinquished me without regret. I told them that I would repay my mother’s debt as soon as I had earned enough (a promise they accepted with a little embarrassment because they obviously doubted whether it would ever be fulfilled), and I assured them too that I would certainly get in touch with a certain Father Thomas Capriole S.J. at Farm Street, an old friend of the Rector’s (a promise which t
hey believed I might keep). As for the notional uncle’s letter, it had been a very easy one to compose. If I could deceive the Casino authorities I had no fear of failing with the Fathers of the Visitation, and not one of them thought of demanding to see the envelope. I set out to England by the international express which halted then at the little station below the Casino. It was my last sight of the baroque towers that had dominated my childhood – a vision of grown-up life, the palace of chance, where anything at all might happen as I had well enough proved.
II
I would lose the proper proportions of my subject if I were to recount every stage of my progress from the casino in Monte Carlo to another casino in Port-au-Prince, where I found myself again in possession of money and in love with a woman, a coincidence no more unlikely than the encounter on the Atlantic between three people called Smith, Brown and Jones.
In the long interval I had led a hand-to-mouth existence, except for a period of peace and respectability which came with the war, and not all my occupations were of the kind to find a place in my curriculum vitae. The first job I obtained, thanks to my good knowledge of French (my Latin was singularly unhelpful), was at a small restaurant in Soho where I served for six months as a waiter. I never mentioned that, nor my graduation to the Trocadero, thanks to a forged reference from Fouquet’s in Paris. After some years at the Trocadero I rose to being adviser to a small firm of educational publishers who were launching a series of French classics with notes of a scrupulously cleansing nature. That did find a place in my curriculum. Others that followed did not. Indeed I was a little spoilt by the security of my employment during the war, when I served in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, supervising the style of our propaganda to Vichy territory, and even had a lady novelist as my secretary. When the war was over I wanted something better than my old life of hand-to-mouth, though nevertheless for some years I returned to that way of life, until at last an idea came to me south of Piccadilly, outside one of those galleries where you are likely to see a less than pedigree work by an obscure seventeenth-century Dutch painter, or perhaps it was outside a gallery a degree lower in the trade where a taste for jovial cardinals enjoying their Friday salmon was mysteriously catered for. A middle-aged man wearing a double-breasted waistcoat and a watch-chain, a man remote, I would have said, from artistic interests, stood gazing at the pictures, and suddenly I thought I knew exactly what was passing in his mind. ‘At Sotheby’s last month a picture fetched a hundred thousand pounds. A picture can represent a fortune – if one knew enough or even took a chance,’ and he stared very hard at some cows in a meadow, as though he were watching a little ivory ball running round a groove. It was surely the cows in the meadow at which he gazed and not the cardinals. No one could possibly envisage the cardinals in a Sotheby sale.
A week after that vision south of Piccadilly I gambled most of what I had accumulated during more than thirty years and invested in a trailer-caravan and about twenty inexpensive prints – there was an Henri Rousseau at one end of the scale and a Jackson Pollock at the other. I hung these on one side of my van with a record of the sums which they had fetched at auction and the date of the sales. Then I procured a young art student able to turn me out rapidly a number of rough pastiches which he signed each time with a different name – I would often sit with him while he worked and try out signatures on a piece of paper. In spite of the example of Pollock and Moore, which proved that even an Anglo-Saxon name could have value, most of the names were foreign. I remember Msloz only because his work obstinately refused to sell, and in the end we had to paint out his signature and substitute Weill. I had come to realize that the purchaser wanted, as his minimum satisfaction, to be able to pronounce a name – ‘I got a new Weill the other day,’ and the nearest that even I could get to Msloz sounded like Sludge, a name which may have caused unconscious purchaser-resistance.
I would drive from one provincial city to another dragging my trailer, and come to rest in a well-to-do suburb of an industrial city. I soon realized that scientists and women were of little use to me: scientists know too much, and few housewives love to gamble without the sight of ready cash that Bingo provides. I needed gamblers, for the point of my exhibition was really this: ‘Here on one side of the gallery you can see the pictures which have fetched the highest prices in the last ten years. Would you have guessed that these “Cyclists” by Léger, this “Station-master” by Rousseau were worth a fortune? Here, on the other, you have a chance to spot their successors and win a fortune too. If you lose, at least you have something on your walls to talk about to your neighbours, you gain the reputation of being an advanced art-patron, and it won’t cost you more than –’ My price varied from twenty to fifty pounds according to the neighbourhood and the customer; I even once sold a two-headed woman a long way after Picasso for a hundred.
As my young man became more skilful at his job he would turn me out an assorted half-dozen paintings in a morning and I paid him two pounds ten for each. I was robbing nobody; with fifteen pounds for a morning’s work he was well satisfied; I was even helping young promise, and I am sure that many a dinner party in the provinces went better because of some outrageous challenge to good taste upon the walls. I once sold an imitation Pollock to a man who had Walt Disney dwarfs planted in his garden, around the sun-dial and on either side the crazy paving. Did I harm him? He could afford the money. He had an air of complete invulnerability, though God knows for what aberration in his sexual or business life Dopey and the other dwarfs may have compensated.
It was soon after my success with Dopey’s owner that I received my mother’s appeal – if you could call it an appeal. It came in the shape of a picture-postcard which showed the ruined citadel of the Emperor Christophe at Cap Haïtien. She wrote on the back of it her name, which was new to me, her address and two sentences, ‘Feel a bit of a ruin myself. Nice to see you if you come this way.’ In brackets after ‘Maman’ – not recognizing her hand I read it first not unsuitably as ‘Manon’ – she added ‘Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers.’ It had taken many months to find me.
I hadn’t seen my mother since one occasion in Paris in 1934, and I had not heard from her during the war. I daresay I would not have answered her invitation but for two things – it was the nearest she had ever approached to a maternal appeal, and it was really time for me to finish with the travelling art-gallery, for a Sunday paper was trying to find out the source of my paintings. I had more than a thousand pounds in the bank. I sold the caravan, the stock and the reproductions to a man who never read the People for five hundred pounds, and I flew out to Kingston, where I looked around unsuccessfully for business opportunities before taking another plane to Port-au-Prince.
III
Port-au-Prince was a very different place a few years ago. It was, I suppose, just as corrupt; it was even dirtier; it contained as many beggars, but at least the beggars had some hope, for the tourists were there. Now when a man says to you, ‘I am starving,’ you believe him. I wondered what my mother was doing at the Hotel Trianon, whether she was existing there on a pension from the count, if there had ever been a count, or whether perhaps she was working as a housekeeper. She had been employed when I saw her last in 1934 as a vendeuse in one of the minor couturiers. It was regarded in that pre-war period as a rather smart thing to employ an Englishwoman, so she had called herself Maggie Brown (perhaps her married name really was Brown).
For the sake of prudence I took my bags to the El Rancho, a luxurious Americanized hotel. I wanted to be comfortable so long as my money lasted, and nobody at the airport could tell me anything about the Trianon. As I drove up between the palm trees it looked bedraggled enough: the bougainvillaea needed cutting back and there was more grass than gravel on the drive. A few people were drinking on the balcony, among them Petit Pierre, though I was to learn soon enough that he paid for his drinks only with his pen. A young well-dressed negro met me on the steps and asked me whether I needed a room. I said I had
come to see ‘Madame la Comtesse’ – I couldn’t keep the double-barrelled name in mind and I had left the postcard in my hotel room.
‘I am afraid she is sick. Is she expecting you?’
A very young American couple in bath-robes came up from the pool. The man had his arm around the girl’s shoulder. ‘Hi, Marcel,’ he said, ‘a couple of your specials.’
‘Joseph,’ the negro called. ‘Two rum punches for Mr Nelson.’ He turned back to me with his inquiry.
‘Tell her,’ I said, ‘that Mr Brown is here.’
‘Mr Brown?’
‘Yes.’
‘I will see if she is awake.’ He hesitated. He said, ‘You have come from England?’
‘Yes.’
Joseph came out of the bar carrying the rum punches. He had no limp in those days.
‘Mr Brown from England?’ Marcel asked again.
‘Yes, Mr Brown from England.’ He went upstairs reluctantly. The strangers on the balcony were watching me with curiosity, except for the young couple – they exchanged cherries intensely with their lips. The sun was about to set behind the great hump of Kenscoff.
Petit Pierre asked, ‘You have come from England?’
‘Yes.’
‘From London?’
‘Yes.’
‘London was very cold?’
It was like an interrogation by the secret police, but in those days there were no secret police.
‘It was raining when I left.’
‘How do you like it here, Mr Brown?’
‘I have only been here two hours.’ The next day I had the explanation of his interest: there was a paragraph about me in the social column of the local paper.