Contact! (5 page)

Reassurance

I was in the Isle of Man for the first time in my life, to write an essay about it. I had bought a book about Manx folklore and, finding an open-air cafe beside the sea, settled down to read it with a plate of prawns and a Guinness. The sun was lovely, the prawns were excellent, the Guinness went down like a treat, and I congratulated myself upon my choice of profession. Presently a lady came over to my table and handed me a pamphlet. ‘Oh, thank you,' I said, ‘how kind of you. What's it about?' ‘Oh my dear,' she emolliently replied, ‘it is only to reassure you that God is always with the lonely.'

No reply

Nowhere on earth is so inexorably improving as Washington, DC. When we came down from the top of the Washington Monument even the elevator operator dismissed us with a parting injunction. ‘Let's all work', he said,
‘to clean up our country for the two-hundredth anniversary just coming up.'

‘Yes sir,' we dutifully replied, ‘you're darned right–you hear that, kids?'

He had not, however, finished yet. ‘And I'm talking,' he darkly added, ‘about the mental aspects as well as the physical.'

We had no answer to that.

Possibilities of misfortune

The Kashmiris are a hospitable people, but not inspiriting. They seem to be considering always the possibilities of misfortune. In the autumn the fall of the leaf seems a personal affliction to them, and the passing of the year depresses them like the fading of their own powers. Then in the chill evenings the women disappear into their private quarters, and the men light their little baskets of charcoal, tuck them under their fustian cloaks and squat morosely in the twilight, their unshaven faces displaying a faint but telling disquiet. There was a touching pathos, I thought, to their style. ‘How do you like your life?' I asked one new acquaintance there, when we had progressed into intimacy. ‘Excellent,' he replied with a look of inexpressible regret. ‘I love every minute of it'–and he withdrew a cold hand from the recesses of his cloak, and waved it listlessly in the air to illustrate his enjoyment.

My dinner companion

Marvellously lithe and light-footed are the people of Helsinki, big but agile, jovial at smorgasbords or loping across their snowfields like Tibetan holy men. Their children, slithering about with hockey sticks, give the heartening impression that they came into the world on skis. Their wives are neat as pins, and gossip sharply in expensive coffee shops. They are a people that nobody in the world could possibly be sorry for. They are sharp as nails, and twice as spiky. But here's an odd and provoking fact. When I wanted something to read with my dinner some unexpected instinct guided my choice, a kind of reluctant nostalgia, a niggling trace of respect and affection, and when I sat down to my pig's trotters I found myself dining with Turgenev: and all that brave and courteous citizenry, I felt, could not offer me quite such company.

Diplomats and a pianist

I once went to the British embassy in Washington, DC, to see the pianist Vladimir Horowitz presented with the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society, brought to him on a cushion by a marvellously suave young secretary and handed over with a graceful ambassadorial speech about violent times and the meaning of art. Mr Horowitz seemed pleased, but instead of replying in kind sat down at the piano and played in a highly vibrant and indeed imperial manner ‘God Save the Queen', making full use of the sustaining pedal.

There was a pause at the end of it, and instantly, as the last notes faded, I clicked the scene in my memory: and so I have held it there like a flash from a dream, the ambassador benignly at attention, the young diplomats rigid all about, the American guests clutching their champagne glasses, the great room aglow with carpets and portraits, the pianist's hand raised in a last grandiloquence–an ornate little vignette of Washington, where life so often shimmers through a gauze curtain, insubstantially.

Impact!

King Sobhuza of Swaziland, one of the world's last absolute monarchs, offered me a kindly greeting. His subjects fell on their knees, or even on their faces, when he passed, but I looked him Jeffersonianly in the eye, and shall never forget the moment. He had the most remarkable, most twinkling, most mischievous, altogether most entertaining face in the world. He seemed to radiate an amused but resolute complicity, as though he knew what a charade life was but was determined to make the most of it. He was dressed that day in European clothes; when he wore his tribal costume, a stunning assembly of feathers, bright textiles and talismanic brooches, the effect must have been terrific.

Style

I joined an eminent, kind and cultivated actress in taking a cab to an address on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Said the
cab driver: ‘Whereabouts is that on Second Avenue, lady?' Without a flicker in her elegant equanimity she replied: ‘Don't ask me, bud. You're the fucking cab driver.'

On an Oxford evening

Loitering around Magdalen College on a classic May evening I saw a company of players making their way through the trees for a performance of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. They were moving swiftly in their cowls, ruffs and velvets, all among the elms, and a few shy deer watched them pass between the tree trunks. Their footfalls were silent on the turf, their voices reached me faintly on the warm air, and they disappeared into the shadows merrily, with Puck occasionally practising his jumps, and Titania lifting her crimson skirts, and a few lumpish fairies skirmishing in the flanks. I never caught the spell of the theatre more hauntingly, as I watched them across the fence, and felt like Hamlet when the players came to Elsinore–‘You are welcome, masters, welcome all.'

The moment of victory

An old woman, horribly crippled, struggles down the last few steps of the Chapel of St Helena, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. It is a faintly illuminated crypt. Her progress is agonizingly slow, but she is determined to reach the altar by herself. Painfully with her two sticks she shuffles down the stone steps, each one a torment. Prayers are min
gled with her breathing. When at least she reaches the bottom, though, and I peer into the darkness to watch her, she abruptly leans down and places her sticks beside her on the ground. Then, straightening herself as far as her old crooked frame will allow her, she raises her arms above her in triumph and exuberance, more like some whipcord young athlete at the moment of victory than a poor old woman, distorted and arthritic, who would soon have to face the steps again.

At Schwab's

Hardly a Hollywood memoir is complete without a reference to Schwab's, ‘The World's Most Famous Drugstore', and it is still heavy with the old mystique. Elderly widows of émigré directors reminisce about Prague over their breakfasts. Young men in jerkins and expensive shoes ostentatiously read
Variety
, or greet each other with stagey endearments. Ever and again one hears exchanges of critiques across the hubbub–‘I love her, she's a fine, fine actress, but it just wasn't
her
…'–‘Well, but what can one expect with Philip directing, she needs
definite
direction'–‘True, but shit, it just made me
puke
, the way she did that last scene…' I took to sharing a table with the divorced wife of a Mexican set designer who shared my enthusiasm for Abyssinian cats.

A royal court

I had an introduction to a Mogul princess, of the dynasty which made Delhi its capital in the seventeenth century and
built the very walled city in whose labyrinthine recesses she lives. I found her ensconced in her front sitting room between portraits of her imperial forebears: a short, decisive old lady with a brief mischievous smile and an air of totally liberated self-possession. Her antique mansion is a beguiling shambles in the old Islamic style: a couple of rooms in the Western manner for the convenience of visitors, the rest more or less medieval–wide decrepit courtyard, dusty trellised vine, thickly populated chambers all around. There are granddaughters and sons-in-law and undefined connections; there are skivvies and laundrymen and assorted sweepers; there are children and dogs and unexplained loiterers in doorways. Forty or fifty souls constitute the tumbled court of the Begum Timur Jehan, and through it she moves commandingly in green trousers, issuing instructions, reminiscing about emperors, traitors or ladies of the harem, and frequently consulting her highly organized notebook, all asterisks and cross-references, for addresses or reminders.

Politicians

I love to watch the politicians ushering their constituents around the Capitol in Washington, DC, benign and avuncular, and to observe the endearing combination of the condescending and the wheedling with which they shake hands with their respectful electors at the end of the tour–‘We sure are obliged to you, Congressman'–‘We certainly are, sir'–‘I shall never forget this day, Congressman'–‘
Fine, fine, great to have you along
…' Meeting a likely looking gent in a Capitol corridor, I
tried a gambit myself, as a speculation. ‘Morning, Senator,' I said. ‘Hullo there, young lady,' he instantly replied. ‘Having fun?'–and off he strode to his office, chomping, alas for my purposes, not an actual, but at least a metaphorical cigar.

Perfect understanding

Long after the end of the British Empire, some of its manners balefully survived. In Patna I had occasion to go to the Secretariat to ask permission to take photographs of the city, and found myself before a functionary of such classic insolence, such an unassailable mixture of resentment, patronage, self-satisfaction and effrontery that for a moment I felt like picking up his inkwell and throwing it at him. But I bit my lip and restrained myself, and as I glared back at him there the scales dropped from my eyes: his image blurred and reassembled before me, his colour paled somewhat, and I saw before me his true archetype and inspiration, the lesser English civil servant–now, as in imperial times, the insufferable master of his art. I thanked the man profusely and assured him that I understood
perfectly
why I would have to make an application in triplicate to the Divisional Officer, who would unfortunately not be on duty until the following Wednesday afternoon.

Snow in Holland

I was once in Amsterdam when the first snow of the winter fell. The men in the central junk market, among their stuffed
birds and rusty curios from Surinam, broke up the most hopelessly lopsided of their kitchen chairs and made bon-fires of them. A cold wind whistled in from the North Sea, huddling the more mature housewives in their mutation minks and driving the portly burghers to the felt-covered newspaper tables of the cafes, where they meditated ponderously over their coffees like so many East India merchants considering the price of apes.

Joburgers

I found the poor black inhabitants of the Johannesburg locations, in the cruel days of apartheid, hard to understand. Sometimes they were grave and courteous, and I was reminded of Ethiopian chieftains; sometimes they treated me with such bubbling flippancy that I thought they might be teasing me; sometimes a flash of malice entered their eyes, or something gave them such inexplicable amusement that they burst into a tumult of infectious laughter, or danced little jazzy jigs upon the pavement. When they spoke, they did so with explosive animation, but when they listened the whole of their being supplemented their hearing, they became one great ear, and their white eyes, their tense bodies, their eager fingers and their yellow striped socks all waited upon my words. And once in my hotel I heard tinny twangs of music from the street outside; and there beneath the arcades of President Street a solitary black man was lounging by, in a crumpled brown hat and blue dungarees, plucking away at a guitar as he walked, humming a high-toned melody, and expressing in his every
gesture, in the very swing of his shoulders, the spirit of blithe indolence.

‘The same again'

Kabul in the 1960s is a tense, nervous, shifty capital, and edgiest of all at night, when the streetlights are dimmed, the brilliant Asian stars come up above the hills and only a few shrouded watchmen are left brooding on the doorsteps. Then the whole place feels sleepless and dry-eyed, like some insomniac conspirator. Sometimes a shot rings dead on the night, and sometimes a distant shout, and when a donkey pads softly by you can hear the two men upon its back, nebulous in white robes, murmuring to each other in low sporadic undertones. I once asked an old man of Kabul what would happen if another enemy attacked this capital as the British had catastrophically attacked it in 1845. Would they be exterminated too? He gave an angry tug at his beard and threw me a look of piercing and bloodshot intensity. ‘The same,' he hissed through the last of his teeth. ‘The same again!'

Home are the hunters!

I first went to Kuwait in the company of a sheikhly hawking party, returning home from a desert sporting expedition. Splendid were the caparisons of those haughty Arabian sportsmen, and their eyes were cold and heavy-lidded. They wore magnificent flowered gowns, and crossed bandoliers,
and daggers, and spotless headdresses, and golden swords; and big black lackeys carried their peregrine falcons, hooded upon their pedestals; and a brass band puffed away on the airfield at Kuwait when this gorgeous crew, looking slightly airsick, staggered on to the ancestral soil.

The quarry clerk

I was only just in time to meet Bob Owen of Croesor, in northern Wales, before he died in 1962, and I am glad I didn't miss him. He had worked as a clerk for a local quarry company for more than thirty years, a small man with a high wrinkled brow, a white moustache and bushy eyebrows, respectably dressed when I met him in jacket, waistcoat and unassertive tie. He was a tremendous talker, a chain smoker and a chapel goer of strong views, and when his quarry work ended he had become a writer and lecturer well known throughout Wales. He took me to the small square house where he and his wife lived and, merciful heavens, the moment he opened the front door for me I found myself hemmed in, towered over, squashed in, squeezed down by an almighty multitude of books. They filled every room of the house–he had amassed more than 40,000 books and pamphlets, many of them rare and valuable. He was born, he told me, in a very small nearby cottage, nicknamed Twll Wenci, and people used to call him Bob Twll Wenci–Bob Weasel's Hole.