Trespassers (20 page)

‘Yes, but she’s been around too long,’ shrugged a cynical friend. ‘Nobody will marry her now.’

Rita kept begging me to assure her that Edward
would
marry her, but I thought it wise not to raise her hopes, if only because of the emphasis with which he cursed his father for being ‘a bloody businessman!’
‘I’m
a painter,’ he often complained with pride. ‘But to paint I need money.’ And it was clear that he wanted the
best of both worlds and that his father wouldn’t let him have it, possibly because he himself, from what people told me, was a good amateur painter who may once have faced the same choice as Edward and chosen business over art.

Rita, meanwhile, lived from hand to mouth, doing odd jobs in boutiques and restaurants up and down the King’s Road.

On one of my evenings off from the Moo Cow Milk Bar, I filled in for her by waitressing in a place run, or perhaps owned, by a sprig of the Anglo-Irish gentry. It was Friday, and some Irish construction workers, who had clearly strayed from their familiar beat, came in for dinner asking for fish. The sprig thought at first that he had none, then located some ancient prawns.

‘Have they a pong?’ he asked me sotto voce.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure? They seem all right to me.’ He was as feckless as the squireens whom Maria Edgeworth so brilliantly described in
Castle Rackrent.
‘I’ll slosh brandy over them,’ he decided. ‘That’ll hide it.’

Meanwhile, five or six Irish heads, all as pink as peony buds, were converging in consultation – possibly about walking out.

‘Quick,’ said the sprig, ‘pour them some Guinness. Tell them it’s on the house and that the prawns will be ready in no time.’

‘They’re really off, you know,’ I warned and mouthed the words ‘fish poisoning’.

But he had the bit between his teeth. ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘that’s just how prawns smell.’

Since Rita could have lost her job if I warned the Irishmen, I kept mum, though I was tempted not to. The restaurant, I consoled myself with thinking, was unlikely to survive long if its owner sloshed brandy and Guinness around so readily. It would have been cheaper to make his customers an omelette.

Patricia had given me an introduction to a man called Poldy von Loewenstein-Wertheim, who said he had a claim to the English throne through the Stuarts and the House of Bavaria. He mocked himself amusingly, translated tales from the German and paid me to check his English. As he and his wife, formerly Diana Gollancz, gave me lunch whenever I did this, it made me feel a touch guilty, since Poldy and she were clearly short of cash. Later I heard that his son by a previous wife had become a financial adviser to the Rolling Stones and, thanks to his financial savvy, prosperous. Clearly the source of the savvy wasn’t genetic, but I hoped some prosperity would go Poldy’s way. Patricia, however, who came from a rich family, had a pitiless little smile when I mentioned my scruples. ‘Diana’, she told me, ‘spent her youth darning her dressing gown and being bullied by her father. Anything is better than that, so don’t worry about either of them.’

About this time I got work as a translator at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. I went out there whenever the European Parliament was in session, and in between came back to work for the LCC, filling in for absent teachers all over London. I stayed for what felt like a long time in a Dickensian school in the East End, where they couldn’t get teachers at all, and only left when one of the mums, a large, muscular woman, barged into my class and threatened to beat me up. Upsettingly, her son, though disruptive, was also one of the brightest children in my class and, when I put him out of the classroom for using four-letter words to a little girl, he had been found and caned by the headmaster. It was a violent place, jammy with soot, and had been scheduled for dismantling years before.

In soothing contrast, friends of Seán’s took me to clubs in the West End and, in Rita’s company, I idled in its pubs. That I
had lost my protective colouring as a
fille bien
became clear on an afternoon when I paused in Paris on my way through from Strasbourg. Patricia Murphy, the poet, happened to be there, too, and so did the literary editor of the
New Statesman,
John Raymond, who was over to interview some woman writer, I think Marguerite Yourcenar. The three of us had a drink at the Deux Magots and, when I went down to the lavatory, a man was waiting for me. It was Lucian Freud, who some weeks before had tried to detach me from my escort at the Gargoyle Club in London. He looked a bit like a gargoyle himself, and in the Magots lavatory the flush of plumbing reinforced an impression of spitting rage.

‘You should know,’ he said, ‘that since you polluted yourself with that disgusting creature, John Raymond, I no longer desire to sleep with you.’ With that, he turned and sped up the stairs.

An odd encounter, given that neither man meant a thing to me. I had thought neither of sleeping with Raymond – who was unlikely to have thought of it either, since he was a Catholic convert – nor about Freud, except to remember that he had been a mentor to Swift and McGuire. My mind was on my own past; so learning that I might figure in, and even ‘pollute’, other people’s fantasies, gave me the mildest of jolts. The
self-absorbed
are hard to ruffle. Slowly, though, irritation surfaced. After all, had I not spent my childhood trying to cope with the coercive fantasies of my Gaelicising parents and their dreaming generation? Being reproached for failing to play a role for which I had not volunteered was a replay, and, as replays do, it helped get the past in focus.

In the Magots’ lavatory, however, my first reaction was annoyance at the male habit of defining women in terms of the men with whom they’re seen.

But I wished that Dr P had been half as enterprising as Freud.
Seán’s letters kept urging me to give up the Moo Cow Milk Bar and try writing. So I did both, to the indignation of the Moo Cow manager, who claimed that I was wasting my training, since I could have had a future in the business and that, after the way I had let him down, he would never hire another graduate. Unworried by this – the pay had been risible – I began to write a radio play about a private boarding school for girls where I had taught for a term. It was located in St Albans and staffed by geriatric lesbians.

‘They’re
all varsity women!’ the headmistress had boasted, while glancing with disdain at my Irish-Roman-Parisian CV. She claimed she couldn’t afford to pay me the Burnham scale, a rate of pay on which her staff were all too old and tottery to insist. We haggled, and my determination stiffened when I learned that I was to replace a French teacher who had unexpectedly dropped dead. In the end I enjoyed a small triumph at being the only one in this Do-the-Girls Hall to be paid the legal salary. Nicole, the resident mademoiselle, was young, freshly arrived in England and disgracefully exploited. Half stupefied with boredom, she told me, she had volunteered to wash and lay out my dead predecessor, and had no doubt been underpaid for that, too, if she was paid at all, since it was not the sort of job whose rate of pay one tends to know.

‘It interested me to do it,’ she admitted. ‘It was a challenge.’

Staying in that school was itself a challenge. The food was appalling: far worse than anything I had tasted in Ireland, let alone in London state schools where lunches were good, and pupils unlikely to accept anything as foul as the bread and dripping served here as elevenses to both staff and pupils. Yet several of those girls’ brothers were at Eton, and the sisters revelled in reporting their doings. Nicole and I amused ourselves by imagining other economies which their families might impose on their daughters so as to help stump up Eton fees for their male offspring.

I can’t recall whether I used any of this in my radio play, which was broadcast while I was in Strasbourg, and for which I eventually received a cheque from the BBC. Next I wrote a story about meeting Romana in the Roman convent, and the
New Yorker
took that. Both pieces were crude caricature and had no doubt been accepted only because they were taken to be reports from the youth front. I also sold something to American
Vogue.
Later I grew ambitious, tried to write better, and sold nothing for years. I had made a false start as a writer, and the real one would not come into being for nearly another decade. Meanwhile I worked as a translator, taught languages and considered trying to get work as an interpreter at the UN. This would have required me to add a third ‘official language’ to my French and English, since you needed three to apply, and Italian did not count. Hesitating between Spanish and Russian, I made a stab at both. Meanwhile I also fiddled at writing. Why, I sometimes wonder, was I so slow to take off? Perhaps because, in an attempt to train myself in simultaneous interpreting, I developed a habit of turning news items read or heard on the radio from or into French and Italian. My mind at times was a clutter of cliché in three languages.

Stints in Strasbourg combined work and conviviality. Money flowed, and even translators were booked on ‘champagne flights’ – you could drink all you liked! – and put up in comfortable hotels. Pay was lavish, or seemed so to me. One sensed a barrier, though, between the grand, who were MPs or ministers, and the less than grand who were sometimes typists – though a few of these, thanks to family connections, were grander than anyone. Translators came in between and, despite their linguistic skills, tended to cluster in Anglophone groups. Perhaps living in Strasbourg had made full-time ones homesick. One old stager
who cast an occasional eye on my work found French manners an affront. When I translated an account of a ceremony in the European parliament in which two male politicians embraced, he argued that this could not have happened.

‘But,’ I told him, ‘I saw it from the public gallery.’

‘
L’accolade?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they
embraced
?’

‘They kissed.’

‘My God!’ He shook his head. ‘The French!’

As similar thoughts sometimes struck me about the Irish, I knew how he felt.

David Kelly, who was in Strasbourg to learn about journalism, could touch these off. He had attended the Benedictine boarding school from which my brother Stevie had had to be rescued, and I wondered, with some embarrassment, if he knew more than I did about why. To my relief, though, David never brought the thing up. He and I sometimes took walks, during which he warned that, if he were to unexpectedly climb a lamp post, I should know that this was one of his Benedictine mentors’ cures for the troubles of the flesh. At first I took this for a joke, then saw that it wasn’t. Recalling how, when our family was worrying about Stevie’s mishap, there had been hints that ‘sex came into it’, I wondered if he too should have learned to shin up lamp posts.

In May 1957 I finished my work in Strasbourg, so my parents suggested we meet in Florence, hire a car and explore the countryside. They loved wandering around rural monasteries and rousing sextons from their siestas. Tuscany, at that time, was a sleepy place.

On their last day we drove to San Gimignano, a hilltop town
spiked with tall, slim, mediaeval towers. Smaller and surely cheaper than Florence, it would be a good place to settle in for a while, and try to write. Why didn’t I do that? Eileen coaxed hopefully. So while Seán lay drowsing on a bench with his hat over his face, she and I agreed that, if I stayed in Italy, they would come back in the autumn.

Then I drove them to the station where no sooner had their train pulled out than I began to miss them. Now that we had no reason to quarrel, we enjoyed each other’s company, though I was already having doubts about staying in San Gimignano. How could I forget the woman in Forster’s
Where Angels Fear to Tread
who is so charmed by a small Italian town that, unable to imagine its winter dullness, loneliness and underlying misogyny, she marries a local dentist? As one enticement quickens another, she walks straight into the trap laid by the narrative. Best, mindful of that warning, to stay somewhere at least as big as Florence.

What I needed, if I was to do that for any length of time, was to find someone who could point me in the direction of cheap
pensioni, tavole calde
and the like. So I headed for the National Library where I asked an American girl for advice. With some pique, she asked how I had known she was an American and, when told she looked like one, pointed out that everything she was wearing had been bought here. I tried to soothe her, learned some useful addresses and left to follow them up.

Clearly we were not going to be friends.

Americans in those years did stand out, but it is hard to say how. The words ‘open-faced’ and ‘bland’ come to mind. Globalisation was unheard of and national characteristics pronounced. French faces were often intensely focused, and American mens’ shorts gaudy, while English ones tended to be army surplus and bell out like lamp shades; Italian men wore tight suits … I regretted annoying the American girl.

Next day was my twenty-fifth birthday when, according to
an old French saying, girls
coiffent Sainte Catherine,
i.e. become spinsters. Thinking about this, I realised that, though I no longer missed Jean-Paul, I did miss Paris and Rome. Both are enlivening and protean, and my learning their languages was no accident. France in the old songs was Ireland’s friend, and I had been ready to love it. I think, too, that I am drawn to cities which developed a complexity which our bit of the Roman Catholic empire failed signally to achieve. It is satisfying, when you have only known fragments, to encounter the realised model, though liking a Catholic metropolis can have less to do with belief than with codes and jokes which belong to an
anti
-Catholic backlash. When I visited Latin America in 1980, it was the satirical talk which made me feel at home.

Yet the man whom I was now about to meet would take me to a place with which I feel little affinity. Notoriously the US West Coast has its own beauty, but for my taste it is too spread out, lacks shadow, and is insufficiently urban; its oral skills are poor and I would never have gone there but for Lauro.