Contact! (11 page)

Mixed sensations

It seems only the other day that communism ended in Romania, but here I am already at the dinner table with a jolly crew of acquaintances, eating pike-perch from the Danube and drinking a happy Moldavian Riesling, to the deafeningly amplified thump of a band in the chandeliered dining room of the Central House of the Army. I have poked my nose into several such unpromising bastions of old Establishment. At the Writers' Union, for instance, which has been for several decades a tribunal of communist orthodoxy, I wandered bemused and unhindered through the accumulated cigar smoke of a thousand ideological debates, amiably nodded at now and then by marvellously literary-looking confrères. And at the Military Hotel, strolling in, I was befriended without question by a most formidable captain of the Romanian navy, wearing over his gilded uniform a leather coat like a U-boat commander. It is a queer mixture of sensations. On the one hand nearly everybody is welcoming. On the other hand few seem altogether frank.

Sharing the pleasure

In Wyoming cowboys sometimes walked their horses up to me as I picnicked in the sage, sat sketching in my car or took my morning walk through the scented countryside; and
then, after we had exchanged pleasantries and told each other where we came from, and explained what we were doing, sometimes they would slide from their saddles and join me for a few minutes, looking over my shoulder at a sketch, accepting a slice of cheese, or simply sharing the pleasure of the place and the moment–not a talkative presence usually, but one so naturally kind and unembarrassed that a silence was never awkward, and the parting came organically, like the end of a good meal, just before satisfaction moved towards surfeit.

Siren call

Seen from Hong Kong's New Territories in those days, China seemed to me essentially
simple
, like a world stripped of its complexities and pretensions. I found myself looking towards that silent landscape as though it were calling me home. Home to where? Home to what? As I wandered down the track towards my car, one of the stall sellers spoke to me quietly, without urgency, across his wares. ‘Why don't you buy,' he inquired, as though he genuinely, if mildly, wanted to know the answer, ‘the thoughts of Chairman Mao?'–and he held up a small red book, bound in plastic.

‘Get thee behind me,' I said.

Valleys music

I prefer to catch a Welsh male voice choir at practice, when it has not been stiffened up with clean shirts and clasped
hands for a concert. Nobody ever tried harder than a choir of the valleys intent on getting an interpretation absolutely right. Just once more, cries the conductor–
Unwaith eto, bois!
–and the lady accompanist stiffens herself again at the piano, the stocky tenors, the well-paunched basses adjust their spectacles, smooth out the creases in their music sheets and wait in tense taut postures, like tennis players awaiting a service, for the drop of the baton. The rustlings and the coughings stop. Silence falls. The maestro crouches there before his men, half doubled on the dais, a demoniac figure, black of hair, swarthy of face, eyes gleaming. He is irresistible! He raises his baton. The choir takes a breath. The pianist lifts her fingers. Crash, the place reverberates, the whole town surely, perhaps the whole of Wales, with the passion of the opening chord.

R.I.P.

The foreign news editor, my immediate superior at
The Times
, was ageing, and week by week I noticed not merely a faltering in the old gentleman himself, but a progressive disregard of his views. People did not listen to him. Decisions were taken without his knowledge. He clearly sensed it too, and for what seems to have been hours at a time, talking in an infinitely slow grating voice that was, I admit, among the heavier of my burdens, he would disclose to me his anxieties or more often his resentments.

He grew increasingly talkative, bitter and confused, until finally, one winter evening, he gave me a letter. If anything should happen to him, he said, buttoning his thick black
overcoat, straightening his homburg and removing his walking stick from its stand behind the desk, I was to hand it to the higher authorities of
The Times
; and gently chewing–for he generally seemed to have in his mouth, when not a cigar, some kind of lubricant lozenge, perhaps to keep his voice going–he nodded at me in his usual way, said goodnight with his habitual icy trace of a smile, and went home to kill himself with sleeping pills.

Levantine life

I was happy working for the Arab News Agency in Cairo. My friends were mostly in the office, and we were none of us rich. We were boulevardiers, but of a modest rank, frequenting the shabbier of the downtown pavement cafes, murky places with marble-topped tables where the coffee was as thick as porridge and the water glasses were a perpetual dingy grey. There we would sit and talk in the early evening, when the long siesta was nearly over, until we heard the rattle of the heavy steel shutters being raised one by one from the shop fronts, and it was time for us to saunter to the office and start work on the evening bulletin.

The news that greeted us up there was always full of drama and piquant intelligence–wars and corruptions, desert crime, court conspiracies, religious polemics, family feuds–and we worked in a spirit of Bohemian release. Once we were inside our dim-lit, crowded and untidy rooms we would forget the truth about ourselves, forget the impending misery of the midnight tram, forget the shabby villa off the airport road, forget the swarming children and the skinny
black-veiled wife, forget our lost hopes for a career in the law or the Ministry of the Interior, forget that we were indigent Egyptian effendis or struggling Levantines, forget even our sexual ambiguities, and lose ourselves in that strange little world of ours upstairs.

America verbatim

From my notebooks:

‘I told him, I said, “Johnnie, if you want me you've just gotta come right down here and get me…”'

‘Crooked? Crooked as a green snake…'

‘She said that? She actually said that, right there? She said that to your face…?'

‘Listen, Ed, I'll blind you, honest I will, I'll cut your tongue you old son of a gun you…'

‘She says to me, “Leon,” she says, “I wantya to know, I'm fond of you, truly I am, but there's this problem of Juan's baby, see?” “To hell with Juan's baby,” I says. “What's Juan's baby to me?” And she says, “Leon, honey,” she says, “listen to me…”'

‘If Consolidated Edison could be boiled down into one man I wouldn't have him in my home…'

An indistinct saint

St Frideswide was an indistinct medieval divine who is the titular saint of Oxford Cathedral. Every 19 October the bigwigs of the city and the diocese process, begowned, befurred, cassocked, epauletted and even bewigged, to celebrate her
memory at her shrine in the building. When I was once at the service I noticed that one of the most venerable canons of the cathedral showed signs of irritable impatience. He scowled, muttered audibly to himself, hitched his hood, twitched his surplice, nudged his companions and occasionally gazed frowardly around the congregation. It was true that ‘Jerusalem, My Happy Home' did seem more than usually protracted that day, with so much civic weight to slow it down. I watched that clergyman closely, though, and after a time I reached the conclusion that he was not annoyed by the music, only by the occasion. He didn't dislike the hymn tune. He had doubts about the saint.

Mayor Murphy's inducements

It happened that while I was in town St John's, Newfoundland, was celebrating its centenary as a municipality. The festivities closed with a public party which suggested to me an enormous country wedding–everyone someone else's sister-in-law, everyone ready to talk, with no pretence and no pretension either. Jigs and folk songs sounded from the stage, and when people seemed slow to dance jolly Mayor Murphy took the floor alone, offering free booze coupons to any who would join him. ‘You have to get them half tight,' he remarked to me as he handed out these inducements, jigging the while himself.

Later I was walking along a city street when a man launched upon me, without warning, a challenging statement in such advanced Newfoundlandese that I can only reproduce it impressionistically, so to speak. It sounded
something like: ‘Sish yarkin trapse John Murphy.' He looked at me expectantly for a response, so I simultaneously shook my head and nodded, to be on the safe side.

Things to attend to

The millionaire, a man of taste as well as power, commanding everything that money can buy–even he seemed restless and impatient; not socially, for he was kindness itself, but temperamentally. The whole luxurious establishment seemed to me somehow disposable: the manservant, the housekeeper, the masterpieces on the walls, the carpets from the East, the gorgeous maps and the calf-bound library, the great silver tray of decanters and silver-topped siphons, the bronze picked up from an unknown but infinitely promising young sculptor in West Africa–none of it seemed destined to last. It was as though he might decide one day to rip it all up and start again. As he saw me off at the door two things happened. An alarm buzzer sounded, announcing that the eldest son of the house had got stuck in the elevator, and the millionaire's wife called through the drawing-room door to say that the White House was on the telephone. ‘Excuse me,' he said in his flat velvet voice, shaking hands on the doorstep. ‘I have one or two things to attend to. Thanks for coming.'

Give and take

One still hears the instant give and take in Dublin pubs and parlours. ‘Ah, me rheumatism's cured,' says the old lady
quick as a flash when the landlord pats her kindly on the knee, ‘you should advertise your healing powers.' ‘Sure it was only my left hand too,' says the landlord. ‘Well and it was only my left knee–try the other one there's a good man.'

The judge

The judge at the Court of Session, Scotland's High Court, wore his tight-curled wig as though it had sprouted spontaneously from his pate in childhood. Crouched over his papers at his high dais, he was big nosed, wrinkle eyed, high cheeked, hooded, with eyes that never seemed to blink, and a mouth that expressed, whatever interrogation he supervised, whatever sentence he was decreeing, no flicker of concern, distaste or even particular interest. I could seldom hear what he said, for he spoke in a cracked and high-pitched drone apparently outside my aural range, but I observed that, like an owl peering down from a telephone wire, he missed no nuance or allusion of the proceedings below him. When I left the court I turned at the door for one last fascinated look at him, and discovered that, although his slumped posture had apparently not budged an inch, those pale blue eyes of his were staring fixed and motionless into mine–rather as though, like the owl, he could rotate his head without reference to his body, preparatory to dismembering a mouse.

Across a chasm

All the windows in the huge slab of a building are brilliantly lit, and in each a little cameo, separate from all its neighbours, is joylessly displayed. Here four girls sit tense over their sewing machines, silent and unsmiling, motionless but for the quick twist and tug of their fingers. There a solitary shirtsleeved man is hunched over his files and calculators, beneath the dazzling light of his naked bulb, dead to all else and perhaps to himself. Along the way eight or nine families seem to be packed into one room, and one sees only flashes of infant limbs, waves of drapery, buckets, black loose hair, bedclothes and grinning mop faces, as though some perpetual and appalling farce is being played inside.

Every room there is ablaze, every room full; and across the gloom one hears radios, clicking machines, shouts and children's screams. In another city all that life over there might be a comfort, a reminder that if you happen to be alone that night, all around you is the warmth of community. In Hong Kong it is different. Nobody in that building seems to take the slightest notice of anyone else–let alone of you as, peering out of the night, your wan Western face gazes aghast across the chasm.

Dead guys

I stood on the edge of Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC–Fame's Eternal Camping Ground, as it says on its triumphal arch–and looked across the massed ranks of the departed, like a vast city of slabs. ‘Are all these,'
said a child beside me, surveying Fame's Eternal Camping Ground herself, ‘are all these
dead
guys?' ‘Dead,' said I, ‘as mutton'–but at that moment her grandmother arrived, and throwing me a distinctly accusatory look, as though I were undermining the loyalty of the young, she gave the child's nose a necessary wipe of the Kleenex and hurried her down the hill to catch the Tour-Mobile.

Duke of London

As it happened the only time I ever saw Winston Churchill was at the very moment of his ultimate triumph–the moment when, on the day of German surrender, he appeared on a balcony in Whitehall to accept the gratitude of London, his battered capital of victory. All around us were grand old monuments of English history, Parliament and Abbey, Nelson on his column up the road, Admiralty and Banqueting Hall and Horse Guards Parade, and it seemed to me then that he was already one of them–so perfectly did his portly smiling presence up there seem to satisfy the setting, the story and the meaning of the day. I always thought he should have been made Duke of London.

Magic in Paris

Wandering into Notre Dame on a Sunday night, I found a choir and orchestra celestially performing Bach's Christmas Oratorio. The cathedral was full, a reverent multitude of young people sitting on the floor if they could not get a seat in
the nave, or simply milling about like me. It was magical. All Paris seemed to be there, singing its heart out or half lost in the marvel of it all. When I discovered that the choir and orchestra came from Germany, and realized that half the listeners were as foreign as I was, it only seemed more magical still.