Blame It on the Bossa Nova (22 page)

“What a mess,” he intoned as he measured the Nescafe into the cups. We wandered back into the living area with our coffees and I approached the table. I could see that it agitated Chris, but he didn’t want to appear uncool. I glanced at a few addressed envelopes – ‘The Leader of H.M. Opposition’, ‘The Editor, The Daily Telegraph’, ‘The Editor, The Daily Sketch’, another was addressed to somebody I’d never heard of at the BBC, and one to another guy at ITV.

“Has the Archbishop of Canterbury’s already gone?”

He came and shuffled them into a stack and put them on one side.

“It’s not funny Alex. I’ve got to protect myself.”

“It’s going to be hard to reach Gaitskill isn’t it? He’s in hospital, pretty bad too, isn’t he?”

“Yes I know, it’s awkward.... Perhaps I could send one to George Brown, just to cover myself.”

“I should if I were you, Chris,” I said. He made a note on a scrap of paper, which he tucked into a corner of his blotter.

“D’you know, Alex, I think they may be tapping my ‘phone.” He looked me straight in the face but it wasn’t the Chris I knew. He wasn’t revelling in it. We sat down and he sipped nervously at his coffee. I was trying to work out what the hell was going on. First the train, then the flat, now this. What had been happening?

“They want to put me away, Alex.” He blurted it out and I looked at him and saw that tears were streaming down his face. “... They’re going to get me under the Official Secrets Act, I think.” I put my coffee down and walked over to him. I put my hand on his shoulder as a tentative gesture of support, but it was a false move and sent him into a convulsion of sobs. I continued patting his shoulder. After a while he regained control. Later he spoke.

“.............Sandie’s a silly cow, you know, Alex...... She started the whole business. And it was all so unnecessary..... She was staying here for a few days over Christmas - Hard up, flat trouble, something - She stayed on longer than I wanted her to, in fact....... I didn’t know it, but while I was out one of those blacks was coming round.”

“The one who got knifed in Earls Court?”

“Yes..... That’s the one. Tony, or Winston. I forget which...... I don’t know the truth of it - Sandie says she never told them where she was, that she met him in the King’s Road one day and he came back with her - I just don’t know, Alex - You know me, I wasn’t jealous. I just don’t like being taken advantage of ...... Anyway, she got fed up with it....... Do you know what she did? - She really is a silly cow you know. She phoned up Frank Hough and asked him to get rid of the guy for her... You know how much Frank likes blacks. He was bored stiff, Pascale was in France with you... He was round inside five minutes. By the time he arrived Sandie and Winston were having a screaming match outside in the mews. The neighbours couldn’t take it; it was eleven o’clock at night. They phoned up the police.... I never have got on with the neighbours, I never did bother to socialise or make conversation - get to know them. I’ve only ever spoken to them when they knocked to complain about the noise, or cars parked all over the mews.... I can’t blame them for not being understanding really....” He was becoming philosophical, musing on the ironies of life. This was no good to me.

“Then what happened?”

“Frank naturally did the most stupid thing possible. He grabbed hold of Winston, lifted him off his feet and threw him across the mews. Winston had a gun on him. He fired six shots, six shots.... in the mews, with the neighbours looking on and the police just turning the corner from Pont Street. He caught Frank in the arm with one bullet. Thank God no one else got hurt, the others all missed. Most of the bullets went in the front door.”

This was straining my credulity. I wandered away from him out into the hall and opened the door. There they were - three bullet holes, splintered wood. “..... Just as the police grabbed Winston he started screaming that Sandie was screwing Ronnie Forsythe and that he was going to get Forsythe too and Frank’s standing there with an arm dripping blood...... The press arrived so fast I think they must have been in the back of the police car - someone had tipped them off.... They’ve always known about Sandie and me, not that it interested them. Now they’ve got it into their heads I’m some kind of spymaster.”

“Get-away,” I snorted.

“The next day at the hearing they hushed up the stuff about Ronnie as best they could, but it had to come out about how high up Frank was. He was the guy who had been shot.... Since then the press has been going mad, absolutely crazy, Alex. They knew all about Pascale. They knew she was in France with you - Were they waiting for you today, by the way?”

“Yes, they were. What about Sandie?”

He winced. “...... Sandie, silly bitch, has disappeared. Fucked off..... God knows where. They’re going mad trying to find her... And you, and Pascale. Now they’ll know where you are of course. It may not have been such a clever move coming here, Alex.”

“What do they say about me Chris?”

“Nothing actionable Alex.... They just don’t make you sound like a very nice person, that’s all.”

After a week spent living in his flat I began to realize that Chris didn’t get around much any more. Callers were scarce and didn’t stay long - except the press, who never gave up. But now even they were only half-hearted, going through the motions. They were really after Sandie and Pascale, who had also gone temporarily to ground. The phone rarely rang - perhaps it really was tapped. Chris’s social scene had undergone dramatic changes since I had last seen him. I think in a way he was glad to have me in the flat, at least I was someone to talk to.

One day a guy knocked on the door, dressed, as they say, in the uniform of a plainclothes policeman. It was early evening; Chris asked me if I’d mind taking a walk round the block. I wandered down to the Antelope, a pub in the back streets of Sloane Square, and took my time over a pint. When I got back Chris was alone and quite shaken up. The copper had asked him lots of questions about his ‘relationships’ with Frank, Forsythe, Sandie, and even Jenny. Chris told me then that when the story had first broken he had volunteered to go down to the cop shop and tell them all he knew. It made him nervous to think they didn’t believe him, or else were interested in him personally.

“I’ve got no patients Alex. They’re all scared stiff to touch me.”

Of Frank we saw nothing. Like Toby, Sandie and Pascale he had disappeared into the woodwork. Another week passed in which I failed to secure a job, Vanessa Redgrave and Bertrand Russell independently resigned from the Committee of One Hundred, De Gaulle said that Britain was not yet ready for Europe, the Vassall Tribunal resumed its deliberations at the Board of Trade, and Hugh Gaitskill finally died.

Christopher and I had cups of coffee in various locations and he told me about himself and his life. His previous role-playing, high activity existence hadn’t admitted the level of sincerity necessary to make Christopher truly likeable, but I found that in this respect he improved in reduced circumstances. His tale lacked the sense of purposeless purposefulness that had characterised Pascale’s. However given the opportunity to observe Chris in detail over an extended period only served to fill me with doubts. I’ve never done much reading into the field of psychology, psychiatric ailments, paranoia and the like, and whenever I’ve used words in that connection I’ve always been hesitant, aware or suspecting that they have a precise technical definition of which I am ignorant. I could see that Chris was going through severe mental anguish, but what it was exactly, I didn’t know. All I could see was that the guy was suffering. He spoke increasingly of being bugged, started looking all over the place for microphones, refused to use the phone and, when someone rang us, was convinced that every click on the line came from monitoring equipment back at MI6 HQ.

Everyone came in for abuse - Sandie, Frank, Ronnie, members of the House of Lords whom I’d never met but, who Chris swore, had let him down.

“You get to know your true friends at times like this Alex.”

Pascale I didn’t try to contact. I felt that the exposition of her experiences had not been to push our relationship into a newer, higher level, but more to serve as an explanatory epilogue to it. I had decided to leave it up to her to contact me if she wanted to, and after two weeks I hadn’t heard from her. The weather stayed bad, got worse. The sea freezing over no longer made the front page.

One day, a day on which the weather had been particularly recalcitrant, as if to emphasise the illusory nature of the prospect of imminent thaws, which had been widely canvassed, I had gone across the river to Battersea to pick up my unemployment benefit. The weather had exacerbated the already bad unemployment problem and I was not now subjected to any silly talk about temporary jobs in the civil service. Because I had been getting a bit pissed off with Chris’s company, and he with mine I sensed, I had stayed out, visiting the hamburger bar on Lavender Hill and a pub or two on the way back. It was eight o’clock when I let myself in with the latchkey that Chris had lent me. I think I was more shocked on this occasion to find Frank and a woman in bed together than I had been on the Sunday of the Cuba crisis. Also, the situation wasn’t quite the same; it was Sandie lying next to him. Christopher was sitting holding the inevitable cup of Nescafe in an armchair. He was giggling away with them. I don’t know how much of the irony he allowed to get through to him, how much his pride filtered before his intelligence received the image, but he wanted it just the way it was – ‘The Old Times’. His friends may have abused and neglected him, two of the worst offenders were sitting in the bed facing him, and all of them had dropped him. But he didn’t want to know, he was playing it straight. As they say in cricket: If the batsman thinks the ball’s spinning - it’s spinning.

“Not giving away any State Secrets I hope Frank?” I said.

Chris didn’t like this at all and I was pleased to see that no one else looked too keen on it. Only Sandie was completely indifferent.

“Hi Sandie.... I thought you were on the run. It looks as if it suits you.”

“Don’t get fresh.”

“I can’t help it. I’m fresh in today,” I completed the catechism of chat-up.

“....... By the way Frank, are we going to supply nuclear warheads to the West Germans, or is that all out of the window since October?.... Perhaps we should give them Skybolt. That way they’d be happy, and we wouldn’t offend the Russians - This stuff has all been downgraded to ‘restricted’, hasn’t it?”

“You always did have a great sense of humour Alex,” said Frank in a humourless voice. Chris was jumping about like a kid about to wet himself.

“For Christ’s sake Alex, this is hardly the time or the place. Some friends drop in on me, we’re sitting here having a lovely chat……and you come in with all this rubbish.... It’s too bad.” He nervously lit a cigarette.

“Come on Chris. I was only joking. Frank said as much. He can take a joke. D’you honestly think I’d say anything as embarrassing as that if there was a grain of truth in any of those rumours?”

“I hear you got chucked out of your pad Alex, you bum,” said Frank. They were all pretending that nothing had happened - All of them. Sandie wasn’t a fugitive, the black had never shot Frank, Chris was still a successful Harley Street doctor. But the bandage on Frank’s arm was real enough, and the atmosphere cracked like a sheet of thin ice every time someone spoke. The conversation cornered at ninety miles an hour and burned off down the side track of the London flat hunting scene. But even the delights that this had to offer shortly palled and I was again aware of the damper I had put on the gathering.

Things started to drift apart slowly. Chris got up and I heard noises in the kitchen. Sandie and Frank got dressed, casually, not like school kids in the gym changing room - “Who’s got my sock?” - Singly. But I noticed, I noticed they were both wearing pants. The most interesting were Frank’s boxer trunks, covered in Formula One racing cars, with John Surtees’ Lola disappearing up his arsehole.

“Surtees is driving Lotus now, Frank,” I said. “... He was going nowhere with Lola”..... We re-assembled in the living room where Chris conducted a level of banter calculated to relax the atmosphere. Chris had discovered the Beatles, whose record ‘Please Please Me’ had just skyrocketed to number one. It was their first big hit. At that time they were new to all of us in London, they hadn’t yet become the Fab Four, the Mersey Mop-Tops, and all that was to come after that. For all we knew it was a one off and they were One Hit Wonders. Frank, tired of being unable to participate, collared the conversation and dragged it round so that he could monopolise it. He did so with all his usual crudity:

“You can say what you like, there’ll never be another Glen Miller.”

“He’s not dead Frank, his plane didn’t go down in the channel. He just kept on going, right over to the Russians. They hushed it up ‘cos they thought it would harm the war effort.”

Frank ignored me and embarked on an anthology of all Miller’s known works.

It was eleven o’clock before the little group broke up. Frank got his coat and we hovered on the doorstep.

The other side of the mews I saw a guy in a Humber - the make of car the Gestapo would have commandeered if ever they had got to work in England - trying to look as if he was engrossed in a newspaper; and then Frank moved off in the direction of Harrods. It felt quite domestic, turning back inside and closing the door. I almost went and made myself a cup of hot milk and a banana sandwich. Sandie had disappeared somewhere and I guessed she had slipped off earlier. I hadn’t noticed her go. Chris and I sat and chatted for a while. He was elated and excited. It was as if Louella Parsons had picked up the phone and said nice things to him. He was Persona Grata again - Or so he thought. You couldn’t win with Chris. When he was down you felt sorry for the guy, began to see his good points. As soon as things started to pick up he became unbearable again. If things went on like this he’d soon have enough spare time to offer me advice on how to set my life straight. Fearing he might start right then I arrested in mid-flow his analysis of Frank’s shortcomings and announced I was going to bed. He looked irritated at losing his audience.