A Curious Career (17 page)

Anyway they had an affair half a century ago, then she moved to Paris, married, had children (she is now a grandmother) but, like any good ex-girlfriend, kept in touch. When she moved back to London a few years ago, she started seeing Winner again and became the reigning girlfriend. She was the one who got him dieting and doing Pilates and walking for one hour a day. All his friends agreed that she was very good for him. But of course he could never resist temptation and in the spring of 2005 he had a fling with ‘Princess’ (not really) Paola Lombard and Geraldine went off to Milan to teach at her sister’s dance school. The affair with Paola only lasted a few months and very shortly afterwards she was diagnosed with breast cancer. To the cynical eye it might look as if Winner left Paola Lombard because she had cancer but he insists, ‘Ohnonono. She didn’t have cancer when we fell out. Oh I would never leave anyone like that. We fell out and then two weeks later she discovered she had cancer. She still is unbelievably unwell and I support her completely. I haven’t seen her for over a year – because I think it’s a very delicate issue for Geraldine – but I speak to her on the phone.’

Paola having departed, he immediately invited Geraldine back but she said no, she had promised to stay in Milan for a year. But she returned in July 2006 and has been with him ever since. She has her own flat, but has been living with him since his illness and has been ‘a beacon and saviour’ throughout. ‘She was unbelievable during this illness. I said I’ve been in hospital for five months and she said, “So have I.” I mean she would get me food, help me get dressed, she did everything, she was incredible. You couldn’t have asked anyone to do more – or expected as much. She is a remarkable person.’ Would he do the same for her if she were ill? ‘Well, I would wish to look after her, and I think I would, yes I would. Because I love her and I would have to. I wouldn’t desert her. I wouldn’t say, “Well this is getting rather boring now, I’ll go somewhere else.” ’

‘I thought maybe you would?’

‘No! I don’t think I would. No, that would be really horrible.’

So Geraldine’s reward for her loyalty is to be made official fiancée. Are they busy making plans for their wedding? ‘No! Listen – I said to her it’s taken me seventy-two years to get engaged, so don’t hold your breath for the wedding! She took it very well. It’s enough we got engaged – I’m still in shock from that.’ Even so, I have a hunch he might amaze his friends by getting married eventually. He seems to have given some thought to it. For instance, I asked whether, if they did marry, he would want it to be in a synagogue? ‘No – you can’t be less Jewish than Geraldine Lynton-Edwards, darling. She is, as they say, the shiksa of all time. And she ain’t going to convert. That takes a long time and I wouldn’t wish her to. No, we’d find some moron who’s licensed to make people man and wife.’ I reckon a nice juicy offer from
Hello!
or
OK!
for the wedding exclusive could swing it.

Is he still up for sex? ‘Well, I’m up for sex to a somewhat lesser degree than I used to be, hahahaha! I’m certainly not looking for it. This is the first time in my life – since the return of Geraldine – the first time ever that I’m not looking to have an affair. I don’t wish to have an affair, I don’t wish to be unfaithful. And it’s taken seventy-two years to reach this point of god-like tranquillity. As far as I’m concerned, that’s it.’

*

He died on 21 January 2013. We knew he was dying because he had stopped writing his
Sunday Times
restaurant reviews a few weeks before, which meant he must be very near the end. But at least he did not die a bachelor – he had married Geraldine in September 2011, with his dear friends Michael and Shakira Caine as witnesses. It took him seventy-five years to pluck up the courage to commit but at least he did it.

CHAPTER TEN

Writers

I was a very bookish child. I remember whole school holidays in which I did nothing but read – mainly because there was nothing else to do. I hoovered up Enid Blyton, Georgette Heyer, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and all the great crime novelists. I liked writers who wrote a
lot
– Simenon was a great find – because it meant I could trot down to the public library every Saturday and be sure of finding another four Christies or another four Heyers. On Saturdays I also went to Boots the Chemist to collect romantic novels (Barbara Cartland and suchlike) for my grandmother, who lived with us, but I never attempted to read them. My mother had more elevated tastes – she read mainly historical novels, and put me on to Margaret Irwin, Mary Renault, and
Gone with the Wind
. My father meanwhile was reading every book ever published (this is before he went blind) on Roman history, and the First and Second World Wars. The net result was that if you came to 52 Clifden Road, Twickenham almost any evening you would find four people with their noses in a book. Eventually, when my grandmother was bedridden, Dad rented a television for her and would sometimes go up to her room to watch it, but Mum and I rarely if ever did.

Reading was no hardship for me so it was obvious that I should study Eng Lit when I went to Oxford. By then, I had read most of the nineteenth-century novelists so I assumed it would just be more of the same. Anglo-Saxon (and, even worse, Middle English) came as a nasty shock. But the main trouble was that at Oxford I discovered there were so many more enjoyable things to do. Why spend an afternoon with Spenser’s beastly
Faerie Queene
when I could spend it at a
fête champêtre
on the Cherwell? I read enough to get a second, but began to resent books as things that interfered with more exciting pleasures, and spent most of my twenties avoiding them. It was only when I had children that I rediscovered the luxury of reading – after chasing toddlers all day, an evening with a book became my idea of the highest self-indulgence. It was not until my thirties that I was able to catch up on all the books I’d missed at school and Oxford when I was locked into the English syllabus. This was when I discovered the Russian novelists, when I read Proust and
Madame Bovary
for the first time, and inched my way into the American canon by way of Henry James. At Oxford, we’d been given the impression that novel-writing stopped with Thomas Hardy, and never crossed the Atlantic, so it was a joy to find Scott Fitzgerald and all the great American novelists waiting for me.

The Great American Novel that probably made the most impact on my generation was
Catch-22
, so I was thrilled, in 1998, to be able to interview its author, Joseph Heller. He was by then very old, in poor health, and publishing a feeble autobiography called
Now and Then
which should have warned me of disappointment to come. But when I rang him from New York, I was still trembling with excitement. He told me to take the jitney to Long Island and get off at Amagensett, where he would meet me at the bus stop. When I arrived, the rain was bucketing down, but there was no sign of Joseph Heller. I think I saw him drive past and come back fifteen minutes later when I was soaked to the skin. That would have been his idea of a good joke. He and his wife took me to a restaurant and proceeded to shout at each other over lunch, while I cowered between them and counted the minutes till I could catch the jitney back. It was a truly horrible experience and means that now, when I see
Catch-22
on my bookshelf, I shudder.

In theory, writers should be easy to interview because at least they speak intelligible English and use words accurately. On the other hand they tend to be quite secretive for the very good reason that they regard their own lives as material that they might want to use themselves. Why should they squander it on journalists who are bound to muck it up? But they also resent any suggestion that the characters or scenes in their novels could be based on their own lives.

I remember interviewing Muriel Spark in 1990 and feeling it was like inching up a rock face. She was perfectly friendly but she gave almost nothing away. On the other hand, I felt it was one of the most worthwhile interviews I ever did in that what little bits and pieces I discovered were genuinely ‘new’ and of value to future biographers. She wouldn’t talk about her short-lived disastrous marriage to Ossie Spark, who went mad in Rhodesia – ‘He’s still alive, poor thing’ – but she talked about why she never remarried: ‘Sexually, probably, I could be faithful: that’s not the point. The point is I couldn’t concentrate on the job, I really couldn’t. I’m too interested in my writing: I couldn’t
work
at a marriage.’

Later, I got to know her a bit better when she asked me and my family to cat-sit her house in Tuscany. It was teeming with fleas so we all hated it, but we liked the area so much we rented a nearby (flea-free) house every summer and invited Muriel and her companion Penelope Jardine over for meals. Penelope, a sculptor, wore the sort of casual clothes we all wore in Tuscany, but Muriel always dressed more formally in one of her many silk dresses with a piece of ‘good’ jewellery. So I was alarmed one day when she suggested taking me to her favourite dress shop in Valdarno. Penelope, as always, drove; Muriel sat beside her and sang hymns most of the way – she had a sweet voice.

The dress shop was everything I feared, with over-attentive sales assistants forcing me to try ever more horrendous (and horrendously expensive) silk dresses with matching coats, the sort of ‘mother of the bride’ clothes I would not be seen dead in. But Muriel was nothing if not determined. She made me try practically everything in the shop and kept telling me I would get a good discount – I had to buy some trousers eventually just to escape. Perhaps she was trying to encourage me into the sort of self-transformation she accomplished in Rome in the late 1960s, after the success of
Jean Brodie
, when she went from being a dumpy, frumpy, middle-aged woman to a dazzlingly chic slim beauty who was coiffed to the nines and dressed in couture. It didn’t work with me.

Muriel Spark had not yet written her autobiography,
Curriculum Vitae
, when I interviewed her – it might have helped if she had. With my next interviewee, Hilary Mantel, I at least had the advantage of knowing about her childhood from her brilliant memoir,
Giving Up the Ghost
. But we have only a patchy knowledge of her adult life. We know about her illness, endometriosis, because she has talked about it often in interviews. And we know a bit about her stay in Saudi Arabia because she wrote a novel,
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
, set there. There is a big blank, though, about her life in Botswana and I wanted to find out about that. She of course wanted to talk about the Tudors.

Alas, I am probably the only person in the world who is not a fan of
Wolf Hall
and
Bring Up the Bodies
. I know they both won Man Booker Prizes, I know that zillions of readers (including men who normally never read novels) were gripped by them, but I much prefer her previous, non-historical fiction. This probably stems from my deep hatred of history – I decided at school that it was bunk and have never felt any need to change that view. You will tell me, of course – or you will if you are a public-school product of a certain age – that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, but I haven’t noticed myself burning any witches lately.

The former
Times
editor, Sir Peter Stothard, when awarding the Man Booker Prize to Hilary Mantel, said that she had ‘recast the most essential period of our modern history’. And, he added, ‘I don’t think there are many more important things a novelist can do.’ The most essential period of our modern history? The Tudors? Seriously? Didn’t we have a couple of world wars since then? And the idea that recasting history is the most important thing a novelist can do is equally bonkers – surely the greatest novelists try to write about the society they live in?

Anyway, I approached my interview with Hilary Mantel nervously, wondering how we could discuss
Wolf Hall
and
Bring Up the Bodies
without my revealing my complete ignorance of the Tudors. I think she sussed. I think she susses
everything
. I think she is an exceptionally observant woman. But luckily also a kind one.

From the
Sunday Times
, 13 May 2012

Hilary Mantel has the most deceptive appearance of anyone I’ve ever met. She looks rather like a gerbil, soft and plump and fluffy, but it is safer to think of her as, say, a ferret or possibly even a tiger – something fierce that might bite you. Even her plumpness is misleading. It does not betoken a love of cake or chocolate but years of medication for endometriosis – until her twenties she was spikily thin. And although her speech sounds a bit quavering, I realised when I came to transcribe our interview that she speaks in perfect sentences, in perfect paragraphs, and entirely, sharply, to the point.

We met at her club, the Royal and Overseas in St James’s, where she stays when she is in London. She apologised for not inviting me to her home in Devon but said she had a difficult week ahead, looking after a disabled cousin who had just sold her house and was about to move into a care home. ‘And she’s likely to be in poor shape – she’ll have had a long journey, and given up her home. So I need to be on my own with her.’ She admits, though, that it’s bad timing with her book launch coming up.