ON BEING BORN AND OTHER ADVENTURES
I have seen the house often. Cheerful aunts have bellowed its name at me as we skim by: “That’s the place, David!” (In real life my first name is David.) “They should turn it into a national museum!” But the house I prefer is a different one, built in my imagination. It’s red brick and clattery and due for demolition, with broken windows, a “For Sale” sign, and an old bath in the garden. It stands in a plot of weed and builders’ junk, with a bit of stained glass in the smashed front door—a place for kids to hide in, rather than be born. But born there I was, or so my imagination insists, and what’s more I was born in the attic, among a stack of brown boxes that my father always carted round with him when he was on the run. When I made my first clandestine inspection of those boxes, sometime around the outbreak of the Second World War, they contained only personal stuff: his Masonic regalia, the barrister’s wig and gown with which he proposed to astonish a waiting world as soon as he had got round to studying law, top-secret plans for selling fleets of airships to the Aga Khan. But once war broke out, the brown boxes offered more substantial fare: black-market Mars bars, Benzedrine inhalers for shooting stimulant up your nose, and, after D Day, nylon stockings and ballpoint pens.
My father always had a penchant for weird commodities provided they were rationed or not available, like plastic orange-peelers that broke after the first orange. Two decades later, when Germany was still divided and I was still a British diplomat living on the banks of the river Rhine in Bonn, he appeared unannounced in my gateway, perched inside a steel coracle with wheels attached. It was an amphibious motorcar, he explained. He had acquired the British patent from its manufacturers in Berlin, and it was about to make our fortunes. He had driven it down the interzonal corridor under the gaze of East German frontier guards, and now he proposed to launch it, with my help, into the Rhine, which happened to be swollen at the time, and very fast flowing. I dissuaded him despite my children’s enthusiasm and gave him lunch instead. Refreshed, he set off in great excitement for Ostend and England. How far he got I don’t know; for the car was not spoken of again. I assume that somewhere along the journey creditors caught up with him and removed it. But that didn’t stop him from returning to Berlin, which like other war-torn cities exercised an energetic attraction over him. A couple of years later he popped up there again, announcing himself this time as my “professional adviser,” in which capacity he graciously accepted a V.I.P. tour of West Berlin’s largest film studio, and a great deal of the studio’s hospitality, and no doubt a starlet or two, and listened to a lot of earnest talk about tax breaks and subsidies available to foreign filmmakers, all in the noble cause of finding the best place to make the movie of his son’s recent novel, “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.” It goes without saying that neither his son nor Paramount Pictures, who owned the film rights, had the least idea of what he was up to.
There’s no electricity in the house of my birth, and no heating, so the light comes from the gas lamps on Constitution Hill, which give the attic a creamy glow. My mother lies on a camp bed, pitifully doing her best, whatever her best may entail—I was not conversant with the niceties of childbirth when I first pictured this scene. My father, Ronnie Cornwell, is champing in the doorway in a snappy gent’s double-breasted and the brown-and-white brogues he played golf in, keeping an eye to the street while, in pounding cadences, he urges my mother to greater efforts: “God in Heaven, Wiggly, why can’t you get a move on for once? It’s a damned shame is what it is, and no two ways about it. There’s poor old Humphries catching his death out there and all you do is shilly-shally”
Though my mother’s first name was Olive, my father called her Wiggly, rain or shine. Later, when technically I grew up, I, too, gave women silly nicknames in order to make them less formidable. My father’s voice when I was young was still Dorset, with heavy “r”s and long “a”s. But the self-laundering was in progress and by the time I was an adolescent he was almost—but never quite—well spoken. Englishmen, as we know, are branded on the tongue, and in those days the brand really meant something. Being well spoken could gain you a military commission, bank credit, respectful treatment from policemen, and a job in the City of London. And it’s one of the ironies of Ronnie’s mercurial life that, by realizing his ambition of sending my brother and me to posh schools, he placed himself socially below us by the cruel standards of the time. Tony and I were whisked effortlessly through the class sound barrier, while Ronnie remained an upstart. Not that he ever exactly paid for our education—or not in full, so far as I can make out—but he fixed it, which in Ronnie’s eyes was what counted, particularly in the war years. One school, after a taste of his ways, bravely demanded its fees up front. It received them at Ronnie’s leisure in deferred black-market dried fruit—figs, bananas, prunes—and a case of unobtainable gin for the staff.
Yet he remained, which was his genius, to all outward appearances a most respectable man. Respect, not money, was what he cared for above everything. Every day he had to have his magic recognized. His judgment of other people depended entirely on how much they respected him. At the humble level of life, it’s true, there is a Ronnie prototype in every second street in London, in every county town. He’s the back-slapping, two-fisted tearaway naughty boy with a touch of the blarney; who throws champagne parties for people who aren’t used to being given champagne, opens his garden to the local Baptists for their fête though he never sets foot inside their church, is honorary president of the boys’ football team and the men’s cricket team and presents them with silver cups for their championships. Until one day it turns out he hasn’t paid the milkman for a year, or the local garage, or the newspaper shop, or the wine shop, or the shop that sold him the silver cups, and maybe he goes bankrupt or goes to jail, and his wife takes the children to live with her mother, and soon she divorces him because she discovers—and her mother knew it all along—that he’s been screwing every girl in the neighborhood and has kids he hasn’t mentioned. And when our naughty boy comes out or gets himself temporarily straight, he lives small for a while and does good works and takes pleasure in simple things, till the sap rises again and he’s back to his old games.
My father was that fellow, no question, all of the above. But that was only the beginning. The difference was in degree, in style, in scale. It was in his episcopal bearing, his ecumenical voice, his air of injured sanctity; and his infinite powers of self-delusion. While our standard naughty boy is blowing the last of the housekeeping on the three-thirty at Newmarket, Ronnie is relaxing serenely at the big table in Monte Carlo with a complimentary brandy-and-ginger in front of him, me, aged seventeen and pretending to be older, on one side of him, and King Farouk’s equerry, aged fifty-plus, on the other. The equerry is well known at this table. He is polished, gray-haired, innocuous, and very tired, and he has a white telephone at his elbow, compliments of the casino management. It links him directly to his Egyptian king, whom we imagine in one of his palaces, surrounded by astrologers. The white phone rings, the equerry wearily takes his hands from his chin, raises the receiver, listens with his long eyelids lowered, and in a trance transfers another chunk of the wealth of Egypt to red, or black, or whatever number is considered propitious by the zodiacal wizards of Alexandria or Cairo.
For some while now Ronnie has been observing this, smiling a sanctimonious little smile to himself that says, If that’s the way you want it, old son, that’s the way it’s got to be. And gradually he starts to raise his own bids around the table. Purposefully. A great strategist disposes of his troops. Tens become twenties. Twenties become fifties. And as he splashes out the last of his chips and to my alarm beckons imperiously for more, I realize he is not playing a hunch, or playing the house, or playing the numbers. He is playing King Farouk. If Farouk favors black, Ronnie goes for red. If Farouk backs odd, Ronnie raises him on even. We are talking hundreds by now (these days thousands). And what Ronnie is telling His Egyptian Majesty—as a term’s worth, then a year’s worth, of my school fees vanish into the croupier’s maw—is that Ronnie’s line to the Almighty is a great deal more efficacious than some tin-pot Arab potentate’s. Ronnie is blessed, whereas Farouk doesn’t rate a bean in God’s great plan—not even when Ronnie sinks gracefully to the seabed with his flag flying. In the soft blue twilight of Monte Carlo before dawn, we saunter side by side along the esplanade to a twenty-four-hour jeweller’s shop to pawn his platinum cigarette case—Bucherer? Boucheron? I’m warm. “Win it all back tomorrow with interest, right, old son?” Ronnie assures me in the foyer of the Hôtel de Paris, where he has mercifully prepaid our room bill. “Showed that chap Farouk a thing or two. Lost twice as much as I did. Three times.” And though it may never have happened, it equally well might be that a few days later, having exchanged visiting cards with the equerry, Ronnie would be on the phone to Cairo introducing himself as the chap who played a bit of arm’s-length roulette with His Majesty the other night, and by an odd coincidence Ronnie was visiting the Middle East next week, and was there any chance the King was free for a drink because, if so, Ronnie would make it his business to be free, too. . . . And if it didn’t work that time it would work some other time in some other country because Ronnie was a living advertisement for his own truism that, provided you’ve got a clean shirt and ask nicely, God will always give you a fair crack of the whip.
So I am born. Of my mother, Olive. Obediently, with the haste Ronnie has demanded of her. In a final push to forestall creditors and prevent Mr. Humphries from catching his death while he crouches, outside in his Lanchester. For Mr. Humphries is not just a cabdriver but a valued confederate, as well as a fully paid-up member of the Court, and a distinguished amateur conjurer who does tricks with bits of rope like hangman’s nooses. In high times he is replaced by Mr. Nutbeam and a Bentley, but in low times Mr. Humphries with his Lanchester is always ready to oblige. I am born, and packed up with my mother’s few possessions, for we have recently suffered another bailiff’s visitation and are travelling light. I am loaded into the boot of Mr. Humphries’ taxi like one of Ronnie’s contraband hams a few years hence. The brown boxes are thrown in after me and the lid of the boot is locked from the outside. I peer around in the darkness for a sign of my elder brother, Tony. He is not in evidence. Neither is Olive, alias Wiggly. Never mind. I have been born and, like a brand-new foal, am already on the run. I have been on the run ever since.
I HAVE MY FIRST TASTE OF PRISON
I have another confected childhood memory that, according to my father, who had every right to know, is equally inaccurate. It is four years later, and I am in the city of Exeter, walking across a patch of wasteland. I am holding the hand of my mother, Olive, alias Wiggly. As we are both wearing gloves, there is no fleshy contact between us. And indeed, so far as I recall, there never was any. It was Ronnie who did the hugging, never Olive. She was the mother who had no smell, whereas Ronnie smelled of fine cigars, and pear-droppy hair oil from Taylor of Bond Street, Court Hairdresser, and when you put your nose into the fleecy cloth of one of Mr. Berman’s tailored suits you seemed to smell his women there as well. Yet when, at the age of twenty-one, I advanced on Olive down No. 1 platform at Ipswich railway station for our great reunion after sixteen hugless years, I couldn’t work out for the life of me where to grab hold of her. She was as tall as I remembered her, but all elbow and no huggable contours. With her toppling walk and long, vulnerable face she could have been my brother Tony in a white wig.
I am in Exeter again, swinging on Olive’s gloved hand. At the far side of the wasteland is a road from which I see a high red brick wall with spikes and broken glass along its top, and behind the wall a grim flat-fronted building with barred windows and no light inside them. And in one of these barred windows, looking exactly like a Monopoly convict when you go directly to jail, without passing Go or collecting two hundred pounds, stands my father from the shoulders up. Like the Monopoly man, he is clutching the bars with both big hands. Women always told him what lovely hands he had and he was forever grooming them with clippers from his jacket pocket. His wide white forehead is pressed against the bars. He never had much hair, and what there was of it ran fore and aft over his crown in a tight black, sweet-smelling river, stopping short of the dome that did so much for his saintly image of himself. As he grew older, the river turned gray, then dried up altogether, but the wrinkles of age and dissolution that he had so richly earned never materialized. Goethe’s Eternal Feminine prevailed in him till the end. He was as proud of his head as he was of his hands, according to Olive, and soon after their marriage mortgaged it for fifty pounds to medical science, cash in advance and the goods to be delivered on his death. I don’t know when she told me this, but I know that from the day this knowledge was entrusted to me, I eyed Ronnie with something of the detachment of an executioner. His neck was very broad, hardly a kink where it joined his upper body. I wondered where I would aim the axe if I were doing the job. Killing him was an early preoccupation of mine, and it has endured off and on even after his death. Probably it is no more than my exasperation that I could absolutely never pin him down.
Still clutching Olive’s gloved hand, I wave at Ronnie high up in the wall and Ronnie waves the way he always waved: leaning back and with the upper body dead still while one prophetic arm commands the skies above his head. “Daddy; Daddy!” I yell. My voice is a giant frog’s. On Olive’s hand I march back to the car feeling thoroughly pleased with myself. Not every small boy, after all, has his mother to himself and keeps his father in a cage.
But, according to my father, none of this happened. The notion that I might have seen him in any of his prisons offended him very much—“Sheer invention from start to finish, son.” All right, he conceded, he did a bit of time in Exeter, but mostly he was in Winchester and the Scrubs. He’d done nothing criminal, nothing that couldn’t have been sorted out between reasonable people. He’d been in the position of the office boy who’d borrowed a few bob from the stamp box and been caught before he had a chance to put them back. But that wasn’t the point, he insisted. The point, as he confided to my half sister Charlotte, his daughter by another marriage, when he was complaining about my generally disrespectful behavior toward him—i.e., I wouldn’t give him a cut of my royalties or put up a few hundred thousand to develop a nice bit of greenbelt he’d gulled out of some misguided local council—the point was that anyone who knows the inside of Exeter jail knows perfectly well you can’t see the road from the cells.
And I believe him. Still. I’m wrong and he was right. He was never at that window and I never waved to him. But what’s the truth? What’s memory? We should find another name for the way we see past events that are still alive in us. I saw him in that window but I also see him there now, grasping the bars, his bull’s chest encased in the convict’s uniform, with arrows printed on it, as worn in all the best school comics. There is a part of me that never afterward saw him wearing anything else. And I know I was four years old when I saw him because a year later he was at large again, and a few weeks or months after that my mother slipped away in the night, disappearing for sixteen years before I rediscovered her in Suffolk, the mother of two other children. She took with her one fine white hide suitcase by Harrods, silk-lined, which I found in her cottage when she died. It was the only thing in the whole house that bore witness to her first marriage, and I have it still.
I saw him crouching in his cell, too, on the edge of his bunk with his mortgaged head in his hands, a proud young man who’d never in his life gone hungry or washed his own socks or made his own bed, thinking of his three pious, doting sisters and two adoring parents, his mother heartbroken and forever wringing her hands and asking God “Why, why?” in her Irish brogue, and his father a former mayor of Poole, an alderman and freemason. Both serving Ronnie’s time with him in their minds. Both turning prematurely white-haired while they waited for him. How could Ronnie bear knowing all that while he stared at the wall? With his pride and prodigious energy and drive, how did he cope with the confinement? I’m as restless as he was. I can’t sit still for an hour. I can’t read a book for an hour unless it’s in German, which somehow keeps me in my chair. Even at a good play; I long for the interval and a stretch. When I’m writing, I’m forever bouncing up from my desk and charging round the garden or up the street. I’ve only to lock myself in the loo for three seconds—the key has fallen out of its hole and I’m fumbling to get it back in—and I’m in a Force 12 sweat and screaming to be let out. Yet Ronnie at the prime of his life did serious time—three or four years. He was still serving one sentence when they slapped some more charges on him and gave him a second. The bits of prison time he did in later life—Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Zurich—were weeks or months at most.
Researching “The Honourable Schoolboy,” in Hong Kong, I came face to face with his ex-jailer at the Jardine Matheson tent at Happy Valley racecourse.
“Mr. Cornwell, sir, your father is one of the finest men I ever met. It was a privilege to look after him. I’m retiring soon and when I get back to London he’s going to fix me up in business.” Even in prison, Ronnie was fattening his jailer for the pot.
I am in Chicago, supporting a lacklustre campaign to sell British goods abroad. The British Consul General, with whom I am staying, hands me a telegram. It is from our Ambassador in Jakarta telling me that Ronnie is in prison and will I buy him out? I promise to pay whatever needs to be paid. To my alarm, it is only a few hundred. Ronnie must be down on his luck.
From the Bezirksgefängnis in Zurich, where he has been imprisoned for hotel fraud, he telephones me, reversing the charges. “Son? It’s your old man.” What can I do for you, Father? “You can get me out of this damned jail, son. It’s all a misunderstanding. These boys just won’t look at the facts.” How much? No answer. Just an actor’s gulp before a drowning voice delivers the punch line: “I can’t do any more prison, son.” Then the sobs that as usual go through me like slow knives.
I asked my two surviving aunts. They speak the way Ronnie spoke when he was young: in light, unconscious Dorset accents that I really like. How did Ronnie take it, that first stretch? How did it affect him? Who was he before prison? Who was he after it? But the aunts are not historians, they’re sisters. They love Ronnie, and prefer not to think beyond their love. The scene they remember best was Ronnie shaving on the morning of the day the verdict was to be announced at Winchester Assizes. He had defended himself from the dock the previous day and was certain he would be home free that evening. It was the first time the aunts were allowed to watch him shave. But the only answer I get from them is in their eyes and dropped words: “It was terrible. Just terrible.” They are talking about the shame as if it were yesterday rather than seventy years ago.
Forty-something years earlier I had asked my mother, Olive, the same question. Unlike the aunts, who prefer to keep their memories to themselves, Olive was a tap you couldn’t turn off. From the moment of our reunion at Ipswich railway station, she talked about Ronnie non-stop. She talked about his sexuality long before I had sorted out mine, and for ease of reference gave me a tattered hardback copy of Krafft-Ebing’s “Psychopathia Sexualis” as a map to guide me through her husband’s appetites before and after jail.
“Changed, dear? In prison? Not a bit of it! You were totally _un_changed. You’d lost weight, of course—well, you would. Prison food isn’t meant to be nice.” And then the image that will never leave me, not least because she seemed unaware of what she was saying: “And you did have this silly habit of stopping in front of doors and waiting at attention with your head down till I opened them for you. They were perfectly ordinary doors, not locked or anything, but you obviously weren’t expecting to be able to open them for yourself.”
Why did Olive refer to Ronnie as you? You meaning he, but subconsciously recruiting me to be his surrogate, which by the time of her death was what I had become?
There is an audiotape that Olive made for my brother Tony, all about her life with Ronnie. Twenty years after her death I still can’t bear to play it, so all I’ve ever heard is scraps. On the tape, she describes how Ronnie used to beat her up, which, according to Olive, was what prompted her to bolt. Ronnie’s violence was not news to me because he had made a habit of beating up his second wife as well: so often and so purposefully, and coming home at such odd hours of the night to do it, that, seized by a chivalrous impulse, I appointed myself her ridiculous protector, sleeping on a mattress in front of her bedroom door and clutching a golf iron so that Ronnie would have to reckon with me before he got at her. Would I really have struck him on his mortgaged head? Might I indeed have killed him, and followed in his footsteps to prison? Or just given him a hug and wished him good night? I’ll never know, but I have played the possibilities in my memory so often that all of them are true.
Certainly Ronnie beat me up, too, but only a few times and not with much conviction. It was the shaping up that was the scary part: the lowering and readying of the shoulders, the resetting of the jaw. And when I was grown up Ronnie tried to sue me, which I suppose is violence in disguise. He had watched a television documentary of my life and decided there was an implicit slander in my failure to mention that I owed everything to him.
OF RONNIE AND OLIVE’S COURTSHIP AND THE SPECTRAL UNCLE ALEC
How did Olive and Ronnie first get together? I asked her this question in my Krafft-Ebing period, not long after that first remembered hug at Ipswich station. “Through your Uncle Alec, dear,” she replied. She was referring to her estranged brother, her senior by twenty-five years. Their parents were both long dead, so Uncle Alec, a grandee of Poole, Member of Parliament, and fabled local preacher, was her effective father. Like Olive, he was thin and bony and very tall, but also vain, a natty dresser with a great sense of his social importance. Appointed to present a cup to a local football team, Uncle Alec took Olive along with him, in the manner of one schooling a future princess in the exercise of her public duties. Ronnie was the team’s center forward. Where else could he possibly play? As Uncle Alec moved along the line, shaking hands with each player, Olive trailed behind him, pinning a badge to each proud breast. But when she pinned one to Ronnie’s he fell dramatically to his knees, complaining she had pierced him to the heart, which he was clutching with both hands. Uncle Alec, who on all known evidence was a pompous arse, loftily condoned the horseplay, and Ronnie with impressive meekness inquired whether he might call at the great house on Sunday afternoons to pay his respects—not to Olive, naturally; who was socially far above him—but to an Irish housemaid with whom he had struck up an acquaintance. Uncle Alec graciously gave his consent and Ronnie, under cover of wooing the maid, seduced Olive.
“I was so lonely, darling. And you were such a ball of fire.” The fire, of course, was Ronnie, not me.
Uncle Alec was my first secret source and I blew him sky high. It was to Alec that I had secretly written on my twenty-first birthday—Alec Glassey, M.P., care of the House of Commons, Private—to inquire whether his sister, my mother, was alive and, if so, where she might be found. I had of course asked Ronnie the same question when I was younger, but he had only frowned and shaken his head, so after a few more shots I gave up. In a two-line scrawl Uncle Alec advised me that I would find her address on the attached piece of paper. A condition of this information was that I should never tell “the person concerned” where I had it from. Stimulated by the injunction, I blurted out the truth to Olive within moments of our meeting.
“Then we must be grateful to him, dear,” she said, and that was all.
Or it should have been all, except that forty years later in New Mexico, and several years after my mother’s death, my brother Tony informed me that on his twenty-first birthday, two years before mine, he, too, had written to Alec, had taken the train to Olive, hugged her on No. 1 platform and probably, thanks to his height, achieved a better grasp than I had. And he had debriefed her. So why had Tony not told me all this? Why hadn’t I told him? Why had Olive told neither of us about the other? Why had Alec tried to keep us all apart?
The answer is fear of Ronnie, which for all of us was like fear of life itself. His reach, psychological and physical, and his terrible charm were inescapable. He was a walking Rolodex of connections. When one of his women was discovered to be consoling herself with a lover, Ronnie went to work like a one-man war room. Within an hour he had a line to the wretched man’s employer, his bank manager, his landlord, and his wife’s father. Each was recruited as an agent of destruction. And what Ronnie had done to a helpless erring husband he could do to all of us tenfold. Ronnie wrecked as he created. Every time I am moved to admire him, I remember his victims. His own mother, freshly bereaved, the sobbing executrix of his father’s estate; his second wife’s mother, also widowed, also in dazed possession of her late husband’s fortune: Ronnie robbed them both, depriving them of their husbands’ savings and the proper heirs of their inheritance. Dozens, scores of others, all trusting, all by Ronnie’s noble standards deserving of his protection: conned, robbed, ripped off by their knight errant. How did he explain this to himself: if at all? The racehorses, parties, women, and Bentleys that furnished his other life while he was gulling money out of people so helpless with love for him that they couldn’t say no? Did Ronnie ever count the cost of being God’s chosen boy?
IN WHICH I HIRE DETECTIVES TO INVESTIGATE THE REAL ME
I keep no diary and never have done. I keep few letters, and most of Ronnie’s to me were so awful I destroyed them almost before I read them: begging letters from America, India, Singapore, and Indonesia; hortatory letters forgiving me my trespasses and urging me to love him, pray for him, make the best use of the advantages he had lavished on me, and send him money; bullying demands that I repay the cost of my education; and doom-laden prognostications of his imminent death. I don’t regret having thrown them away; sometimes I wish I could throw away the memory of them, too. Occasionally, despite my best efforts, a shred of his inextinguishable past turns up to tease me: a page of one of his typed letters on flimsy airmail paper, for instance, advising me of some crazy scheme he wants me to “bring to the Attention of your Advisors with a View to Early Investment.” Or an old business adversary of Ronnie writes to me, always tenderly, always grateful to have known him, even if the experience proved costly.
A couple of years back, dickering on the brink of an autobiography and frustrated by the poverty of collateral information, I hired a pair of detectives, one thin, one fat, both recommended by a rugged London solicitor, and both good eaters. Go out into the world, I said to them airily. Be my guests. Find the living witnesses and the written record and bring me a factual account of myself and my family and my father and I will reward you. I’m a liar, I explained. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists. So what I’ll do is this, I said. I’ll let my imaginative memory rip on the left-hand page, and I’ll put your factual record on the right-hand page, unchanged and unadorned. And in that way my readers will see for themselves to what extent an old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination. We all reinvent our pasts, I said, but writers are in a class of their own. Even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them. I directed them to Ronnie’s dates and names and places and suggested they dig out the court records. I imagined them hunting down vital sources while there were still a few around, former secretaries, prison officers and policemen. I told them to do the same with my school record, my Army record, and, since I had several times been the subject of official security checks, the assessments of my trustworthiness by the services we used to regard as secret. I urged them to stop at nothing in their search for me. I told them about my father’s scams, domestic and foreign, everything I could remember: how he attempted to con the Prime Ministers of Singapore and Malaysia in Britain’s two largest football pools and, within a whisker, brought it off. But it was the same whisker that always let him down. I told them about his little “extra families” and mistress-mothers, keepers of the flame, who, in his own words to me, were always there to cook him a sausage if he dropped by. I gave them the names of a couple of the women I knew about, and an address or two, and the names of the children—whose is anybody’s guess. I told them about Ronnie’s war service, which consisted of using every trick in the book not to do any, including standing in parliamentary by-elections under such rousing banners as “Independent Progressive,” which obliged the Army to release him to exercise his democratic rights. And how, even while he was being trained, he kept a couple of courtiers and a secretary or two on hand, billeted in local hotels, so that he could pursue his legitimate business of war profiteer and trader in shortages. In the immediate postwar years, it is my conviction, Ronnie improved upon his Army record by awarding himself the alias of Colonel Cornhill, by which name he was well known in the shadier corners of the West End. When my half sister Charlotte was playing in a film about a notorious gangland family in East London called the Kray brothers, she consulted the eldest brother, Charlie, in order to collect material for the part. Over a nice cup of tea, Charlie Kray dug out the family photo album, and there was Ronnie with an arm round the two younger brothers.
I told them about the night I checked into the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen and was at once invited to visit the manager. I assumed my fame had gone ahead of me. It hadn’t, but Ronnie’s had. He was wanted by the Danish police. And there they were, two of them, upright like schoolboys in correction chairs against the wall. Ronnie, they said, had entered Copenhagen illegally from the United States with the assistance of a couple of S.A.S. pilots whom he had fleeced at poker in a New York dive. Instead of cash, he had suggested they give him a free ride to Denmark, which they duly did, spiriting him through customs and immigration when they landed. Did I by any chance, the Danish policemen inquired, happen to know where they could find my father? I didn’t. And, thank God, I really didn’t. I’d last heard of Ronnie a year earlier, when he had tiptoed out of Britain in order to escape a creditor or arrest or both.
So there was another lead for my detectives, I told them: let’s find out what Ronnie was running away from in Britain, and why he had to get out of America the hard way, too. I told them about Ronnie’s racehorses, which he kept going even when he was an undischarged bankrupt: horses in Newmarket, in Ireland, and at Maisons-Lafitte, outside Paris. I gave them the names of trainers and jockeys and told them how Lester Piggott had ridden for him while Lester was still an apprentice; and how Gordon Richards had advised him on his buying. And how I had once come upon young Lester in the back of a horse trailer, lounging in the straw in Ronnie’s silks, reading a boys’ comic before the race. Ronnie’s racehorses were named after his beloved children: Dato, God help us, for David and Tony; Tummy Tunmers, which combined the name of his house with his affection for his own stomach; Prince Rupert—the only horse that showed any form—after my half brother Rupert; and Rose Sang, an arch reference to my half sister Charlotte’s red hair. And how in my late teens I used to go to race meetings in Ronnie’s stead after he had been warned off the course for not paying his gambling debts. And how when Prince Rupert to everyone’s amazement took a place in—was it the Cesarewitch?—I returned to London on the same train as the bookies Ronnie hadn’t paid, lugging a briefcase stuffed with banknotes from bets I’d placed for him around the course.
I told my detectives about Ronnie’s Court, as I had always secretly called it: the motley of genteel ex-prisoners who formed the nucleus of his corporate family—ex-schoolmasters, ex-lawyers, ex-everything. And how one of them, called Reg, took me aside after Ronnie’s death and tearfully gave me what he called the bottom line. Reg had done prison for Ronnie, he said. And he wasn’t alone in that distinction. So had George-Percival, another courtier. So had Eric and Arthur. All four had taken the rap for Ronnie at one time or another, rather than see the Court robbed of its guiding genius. But that wasn’t Reg’s point. His point, David—through his tears—was that they were a bunch of bloody idiots who had let Ronnie con them every time. And they still were. And if Ronnie rose from his grave today and asked Reg to do another stretch for him, Reg would do it, the same as George-Percival and Eric and Arthur would. Because where Ronnie was concerned—and Reg was happy to admit this—the whole lot of them were soft in the head.
“We was all bent, son,” Reg added in a last respectful epitaph to a friend. “But your dad was very, very bent indeed.”
I told the detectives how Ronnie had stood as a Liberal parliamentary candidate for Great Yarmouth in the general election of 1950, taking the Court with him, Liberals to a man. And how the Conservative candidate’s agent met Ronnie by appointment in a private place and, fearing that Ronnie was going to split the vote in Labour’s favor, warned him that the Tories would leak his prison record and one or two other tidbits about him if he didn’t stand down, which Ronnie, after consulting a plenary session of the Court, of which I was an ex-officio member, refused to do. Was Uncle Alec the Tories’ Deep Throat? Had he sent them one of his secret letters exhorting them not to reveal the source? I have always suspected so. In any event, the Tories did exactly as they had threatened. They leaked Ronnie’s prison record, and Ronnie as predicted split the vote and Labour won.
Perhaps by way of friendly warning to my detectives, or as a bit of a boast, I impressed upon them the extent of Ronnie’s network of connections, and the lines he had to the most unlikely people. In the late forties and early fifties, his golden years, Ronnie could throw parties at his house in Chalfont St. Peter which included directors of the Arsenal football club, Permanent Under-Secretaries, champion jockeys, film stars, radio stars, snooker kings, ex-lord mayors of London, the entire cast of the Crazy Gang then playing at the Victoria Palace, not to mention a handpicked selection of lovelies from wherever he got them, and the Australian or West Indian Test cricket teams if they were visiting. Don Bradman came, and so did most of the great and good players of the postwar years. To which should be added a choir of leading judges and barristers of the day and a troop of ranking Scotland Yard police officers in off-duty blazers with crests on the pocket. Ronnie with his early education in police methods could spot a flexible copper a mile off. He knew at a glance what they ate and drank and what made them happy, how far they would bend and where they would snap. It was one of his pleasures to extend police protection to his friends, so that if someone’s son, dead drunk, rolled his parents’ Riley into a ditch, it was Ronnie who received the first frantic phone call from the child’s mother, Ronnie again who waved his wand and caused the blood tests to be muddled in the police laboratory, to the profuse apologies of the prosecution for wasting Your Lordship’s valuable time: with the further happy outcome that Ronnie notched up yet another favor to his account in the great Promise Bank where he kept his only assets.
In briefing my detectives I was, of course, beating the air. No detective on earth could have found what I was looking for, and two were no better than one. Ten thousand pounds and several excellent meals later, all they had to offer was a bunch of press clippings about old bankruptcies and the Great Yarmouth election and a pile of useless company records. No trial records, no retired jailers, no golden-bullet witnesses or smoking gun. Not a single mention of Ronnie’s trial at Winchester Assizes, where by his own account he defended himself brilliantly against a young advocate named Norman Birkett, later Sir Norman, then Lord, who served as a British judge at the Nuremberg trials. From prison—this much Ronnie told me himself—he had written to Birkett, and, in the sporting spirit dear to both of them, congratulated the great barrister on his performance. And Birkett was flattered to receive such a letter from a poor prisoner who was paying his debt to society, and wrote back. And thus a correspondence developed in which Ronnie pledged his lifelong determination to study for the law. And as soon as he came out of prison he enrolled himself as a student at Gray’s Inn. It was on the strength of this heroic act that he bought himself the wig and gown that I still see trailing after him in their cardboard box as he crisscrosses the globe in his search for El Dorado.
IN WHICH MY MOTHER, OLIVE, UNDERTAKES A CLANDESTINE OPERATION AND I AM PHOTOGRAPHED FOR THE EDIFICATION OF A DEAD WOMAN
My mother, Olive, crept out of our lives when I was five and my brother Tony was seven and both of us were fast asleep. In the creaking jargon of the secret world I later entered, her departure was a well-planned exfiltration operation, executed in accordance with the best principles of need-to-know security. She selected a night when my father, Ronnie, was billed to come home from London late or not at all. This was not hard. Fresh from the deprivations of prison, Ronnie had set himself up in business in the West End, where he was diligently making up for lost time. What kind of business we could only guess, but its rise had been mercurial. Ronnie had barely drawn his first breath of free air before he had gathered to himself the scattered nucleus of his Court. At the same dizzy speed, we abandoned the humble brick house in St. Albans to which my grandfather with much frowning and finger-wagging had conducted us upon Ronnie’s release, and established ourselves in the riding-school-and-limousine suburb of Rickmansworth, less than an hour’s drive from London’s most expensive fleshpots. With the Court in attendance we had wintered in splendor at the Kulm Hotel, in Saint-Moritz. In Rickmansworth our bedroom cupboards were stuffed with new toys on an Arab scale. Weekends were one long adult revel while Tony and I persuaded riotous uncles to kick footballs with us, and gazed at the bookless walls of our nursery while we listened to the music from downstairs. Among the less probable visitors of those days was Learie Constantine, still arguably the greatest West Indian cricketer of all time. It is one of the many paradoxes of Ronnie’s nature that he liked to be seen in the company of people of brown or black skin, which in those days made him a rarity. Learie Constantine played “French cricket” with us and we loved him dearly. I have a memory of a jovial domestic ceremony in which, without benefit of priest, he was formally inducted as my godfather.
“But where did the money come from?” I asked my mother at one of the many debriefings that attended our reunion. She had no idea. Business was either beneath her or over her head. The rougher it got, the further she stayed away from it. Ronnie was crooked, she said, but wasn’t everyone in business crooked?
The house from which Olive made her covert exit was a mock-Tudor mansion called Hazel Cottage. In darkness, the long, descending garden and diamond-leaded windows gave it the appearance of a forest hunting lodge. I imagine a slim new moon, or none. All through the interminable day of her escape, I see her engaged in surreptitious preparations, filling her white hide Harrods suitcase with operational necessities—a warm pullover, East Anglia will be freezing; where in heaven’s name did I leave my driver’s license?—casting nervous glances at her Saint-Moritz gold watch while maintaining her composure toward her children, the cook, the cleaning woman, the gardener, and the German nanny Annaliese. She no longer trusts any of us. Her sons are Ronnie’s wholly owned subsidiaries. Annaliese, she suspects, has been sleeping with the enemy. Olive’s close friend Mabel lives only a few miles away with her parents in a flat overlooking Moor Park Golf Club, but Mabel is no more privy to the escape plan than is Annaliese. Mabel has had two abortions in three years after becoming pregnant by a man she refuses to identify; and Olive is beginning to smell a rat. In the mock-raftered drawing room as she tiptoes through it with her white suitcase stands one of the earliest prewar television sets, an upended mahogany coffin with a tiny screen that shows fast-moving spots and just occasionally the misted features of a man in a dinner jacket. It is switched off. Muzzled. She will never watch it again.
“Why didn’t you take us with you?” I asked her at one debriefing.
“Because you’d have come after us, darling,” Olive replied, meaning as usual not me but Ronnie. “You wouldn’t have rested till you got your precious boys back.”
Besides, she said, there was the all-important question of our education. Ronnie was so ambitious for his sons that somehow, more by crook than by hook but never mind, he would get us into classy schools. Olive would never have been able to manage that. Well, would she, darling? I can’t describe Olive well. As a child, I didn’t know her, and as an adult I didn’t understand her. Whenever I start to write a female character, Olive always seems to get in the way; and I blame her for this, which is quite unfair.
The white hide suitcase sits today in my house in London and has become an object of intense speculation to me. As with all major works of art, there is tension in its immobility. Will it suddenly leap off again, leaving no forwarding address? Outwardly, it is a well-to-do bride’s honeymoon suitcase with a good brand name. The two uniformed doormen who in my memory stand forever before the glass doors of the Kulm Hotel in Saint-Moritz, brushing the snow from guests’ boots with a dramatic flourish, would immediately identify its owner as a member of the tipping classes. But when I am tired and my memory is out foraging for itself, the interior of the suitcase breathes a heavy sexuality. Partly, the tattered pink silk lining is the reason: a skimpy petticoat waiting to be ripped off. But there is also somewhere in my head a hazily remembered image of carnal flurry—of a bedroom skirmish I have intruded upon when I am very young—and pink is its color. Was this the time I saw Ronnie and Annaliese making love? Or Ronnie and Olive? Or Olive and Annaliese? Or all three of them together? Or none of them, except in my dreams? And does this pseudo memory portray some kind of childish erotic paradise from which I was shut out once Olive had packed her bag and left?
As a historical artifact, the suitcase is beyond price. It is the only known object that bears Olive’s initials from her Ronnie period: O.M.C., for Olive Moore Cornwell, printed in black beneath the sweated leather handle. Whose sweat? Olive’s? Or the sweat of her fellow-conspirator and rescuer, a gingery, irascible land agent who was also the driver of her getaway car? I have an idea that, like Olive, her rescuer was married, and, like Olive, had children. If that’s so, were they, too, fast asleep? As the professional intimate of landed gentry, her rescuer also had class, whereas Ronnie in Olive’s judgment had none. Olive never forgave Ronnie for marrying above himself. All through her later life, she hammered this theme, until I began to understand that Ronnie’s social inferiority was the fig leaf of dignity which she clutched to herself while she continued to trail helplessly after him in the years of their supposed estrangement. She let him take her out to lunches in the West End, listening to his fantasized accounts of his prodigious wealth, though none of it ever reached her, and after the coffee and the brandy—or so I picture it—yielded to him in some safe house before he scurried off to run the world. By keeping open the wounds that Ronnie’s low breeding had inflicted on her, by deriding to herself his vulgarities of speech and lapses of social delicacy, she was able to blame him for everything and herself for nothing, except her stupid acquiescence.
Yet Olive was anything but stupid. She had a witty, barbed, and lucid tongue. She was better grounded than Ronnie, if only because he had discharged himself a year early from grammar school in his impatience to score his first failure. Her long, clear sentences were print-ready; her letters cogent, rhythmical, and amusing. In computer-dating terms, it has always seemed to me, Ronnie and Olive were remarkably well matched. But while Olive was willing to be defined by whoever claimed to love her, Ronnie was a five-star con man endowed with the unfortunate gift of awakening love in men and women equally without feeling the smallest obligation to return it. Olive’s resentment of my father’s social origins did not stop at the principal offender. Ronnie’s father—my own revered grandfather, Frank, ex-mayor of Poole, freemason, teetotaller, preacher, icon of our family probity, no less—was, according to Olive, as bent as Ronnie. It was Frank who had put Ronnie up to his first scam, had financed it, remote-controlled it, then kept his head down when Ronnie took the fall. She even found a bad word for Ronnie’s grandfather, whom I remember as a white-bearded D. H. Lawrence lookalike riding a tricycle at ninety. Where on earth I was supposed to stand in this wholesale condemnation of our male line remained unsaid. But then I’d had the education, hadn’t I, darling? I’d had the language and manners of respectable people beaten into me.
HOW THE ROTHSCHILDS CAME FACE TO FACE WITH CHURCHILL’S SECRET AGENT
One thing I’m pretty sure of is that there is no development to be traced in Ronnie’s character, no illuminating moment you can put your finger on and say, From here on Ronnie was bent. All the evidence I ever heard suggests he was bent from the day he shook his first rattle. And, like a lot of born con men, he was a sucker, as gullible as those he conned and, after the event, as shocked as were his own victims by the baseness of his deceivers.
There were times when I looked on with awed disbelief as Ronnie bounced into the baited trap. A Middle European lady of some age came to him in great secrecy claiming to be the widow of a Rothschild baron who had perished under the Nazis. All she asked was Ronnie’s assistance in moving a chest of priceless treasure across the Austrian border into Switzerland and selling it. The chest was in the hands of Roman Catholic priests, who had kept it hidden through the war. Among its treasures she included American gold dollars, a Gutenberg Bible, and a couple of rolled-up Old Master canvases, probably Rembrandts, I forget. If Ronnie could see his way to putting up a bit of seed money to bribe Swiss customs, paying off the Roman Catholic priests, and taking care of a few other trivial overheads, such as debts the poor woman had run up while she was locating the treasure and arranging to convey it to the border—in all a few thousands, nothing—he could have the use of the capital once the treasure had been turned to cash. The Baroness Rothschild wasn’t greedy. Money didn’t interest her. All she asked was a modest annuity; she would be guided by Ronnie as to how modest this should be. She wept.
Ronnie had summoned me from Oxford to London to listen to her story, which I duly did, and as soon as we were alone he asked me my opinion. I said the woman was a fraud and the story ludicrous. It is touching from this distance to reflect on the chivalry with which he rushed to the defense of a fellow-artist. I suggested he contact the Rothschild family in London or Paris and ask them to confirm that she was a genuine Rothschild widow. He would hear none of it. The poor woman was in hiding, living under a false name. The whole family was after that treasure, and they were after her blood as well. The important question was, how much was a Gutenberg Bible worth? And, when we had found that out, was I willing to put aside my studies and my cynicism for a few days and accompany the Baroness to Switzerland?
I was, I did. She was too good to miss. I escorted her first to Zurich, where she did a lot of shopping and charged everything to the hotel. Alone, I set off for the appointed border town, a godforsaken Alpine hamlet where it rained constantly. For two days I hung around the railway station waiting for the sight of Catholic priests laboring under the weight of a great chest. They would be accompanied by a mysterious intermediary called Amstler, who, according to the Baroness, was armed with a slice of Ronnie’s slush fund. With more weeping, the Baroness had excluded herself from this moment of consummation. It was too risky. She could be recognized. They would stop at nothing. They hated her. Nobody appeared, and when I returned to Zurich the Baroness, too, had vanished, leaving only a trail of bills behind her. Ronnie never spoke of her again. The most he could manage was a martyred frown and a pious lowering of the eyes, indicating that human decency forbade comment.
In the same desperate year preceding his big bankruptcy, Ronnie also fell for the egregious Mr. Flynn. He was dreadfully thin, wild-eyed, unshaven, and of indeterminate middle age. He smelled of fox and dressed like a prisoner just released, in music-hall gray flannels and a sports jacket with overlong sleeves. On Ronnie’s insistence he had come to live with us in Chalfont St. Peter—actually, for want of space, in my bedroom, in the spare bed alongside my own. Flynn here, Ronnie explained, at a family briefing attended by my reigning stepmother, myself, and a couple of courtiers, and of course Flynn himself, was a hero. We should tell nobody what we were about to hear. During the war Flynn had served in the most secret of all secret services: an unsung, tiny band of intrepid men and women who were under Winston Churchill’s personal command. None of us sitting in this room—except Flynn, of course—would ever know what contribution Flynn had made to the Allied victory. Yet without him we might not be sitting here at all, and wasn’t that right, Flynn? And Flynn, who had a rich Irish accent, was very pleased, and said yes, it was quite right. And Winston Churchill, who was then Prime Minister, wished to reward Flynn for his services, said Ronnie, but for obvious reasons couldn’t do so publicly, and a medal was out of the question. So in two weeks’ time, at a very private ceremony at Buckingham Palace, to which Ronnie and a few other trusted friends of Flynn’s were privileged to be invited, His Majesty in person was going to appoint Flynn to the very important and lucrative post of Consul General in Lisbon, after which Flynn would put Ronnie in the way of all manner of profitable business, thanks to the enormous influence of a British Consul General in the Portuguese capital. To which Flynn again gave his energetic assent, and we went to bed.
Or I did, but Flynn for that night and all the nights he remained with us wandered silently round my room in his borrowed pajamas as if pacing out his cell. Some mornings Ronnie took him up to London. There were Flynn’s debts to pay off; Flynn had been down on his luck, poor chap, until dear old Winston had remembered him. There was a morning suit to be bought, not hired, because it would be needed in Lisbon, and a trousseau of decent suits, shirts, and underclothes because Flynn, as a secret hero, was too proud to ask for an advance of salary, and these diplomat fellows have to cut a dash when they’re out there doing their stuff. Each night, with uncharacteristic regularity, Ronnie brought Flynn home again, and Flynn paced his cell and rubbed white powder on the back of his neck and whispered to himself in a rich, unintelligible Irish brogue.
After a week of this I took my courage in my hands and told Ronnie what I by now believed: that Flynn was barking mad. And Ronnie for the second time that year rebuked me for my cynicism and lack of faith. And the next week, when the due date finally arrived, Ronnie and Flynn drove up to London in their morning coats with their toppers on the back seat. What followed was relayed to me months later by way of Ronnie’s consort of the time, who surprisingly had received his confession. Arriving in London, Flynn had disappeared in a taxi, explaining that he had to do something important before he went to the Palace to be honored. “Meet you there,” he said. And that was the last Ronnie saw or heard of Flynn until the poor fellow was arrested a few weeks later on a string of charges that included, rather sadly, the theft of my Burberry raincoat from the house in Chalfont St. Peter.
While Flynn was off attending to his errand, Ronnie had sat for a couple of hours in his grand offices in Mount Street, running the world as usual. Then, clad in his morning suit, he had hailed a taxi and instructed it to go to Buckingham Palace. I am sure the moment pleased him hugely. Ronnie was always a great patriot and monarchist, and he loved to share his life with cabdrivers. On the journey, having sworn him to secrecy, he would have told the cabbie all about Flynn the hero and Winston Churchill and the private investiture that was about to take place. But as they entered the Mall the driver pointed out that there was no royal standard flying from the Palace roof. Even then, Ronnie refused to lose faith. If the investiture was private, he reasoned, then the King was wise to keep his presence quiet till it was over. The policeman at the Palace gates destroyed his last illusion. His Majesty was in Balmoral and was expected to remain there some time.
In retrospect, I am aware once again of some sense of failed kinship between him and his deceiver. It is Ronnie’s eerie tolerance, not his disappointment, that fascinates. Like the Baroness, Flynn was a player, one of the breed. His fragility and striving were Ronnie’s. In some muddled way, he was Ronnie’s responsibility. When the chips were down, it was Ronnie and Flynn versus the world. Like Flynn, Ronnie didn’t just con other people. He conned himself as well. So why should he see through another man’s disguise if he couldn’t see through his own? Here is an account by Colin Clark, son of Lord Clark, the great art expert and collector, of Ronnie in his golden years. It is taken from Colin’s published autobiography:
That’s the only time I ever heard of Ronnie’s using a woman as his witting accomplice. Otherwise, it’s the same old story that I’ve heard a hundred times in different versions. There’s the one about the elderly Countess in Vienna who is still waiting for her family portraits to be returned from Sotheby’s, where Ronnie has sweetly arranged to have them cleaned and valued for her, free of charge. Or the distinguished lawyer from Buffalo who writes to me in tones of rueful admiration to describe how his entire partnership was put to work assessing the merits of a vast and innovative land-development scheme in Canada, and how he and his colleagues flew up there and spent happy days and a fortune in clients’ money inspecting the site, talking to architects and surveyors and above all to Ronnie, sharing his great vision. Until, slowly and reluctantly, they realized that a vision was all it was. Ronnie owned nothing that he claimed, had no authority to sell, had none of the rights and permissions he professed to have obtained. The entire project was a pack of lies, a sting, a con from start to finish. The letter ends with the familiar refrain that the writer, like so many before and after him, would not have missed the experience for the world, and thank you.
A GREAT AMBASSADOR AND A GRAND HOTEL DEPRIVE RONNIE OF HIS GOLF CLUBS
Yet, at the close of each act in the tragicomedy that was Ronnie’s life, the same question remains stubbornly unanswered: Why? What was the profit, the advantage, the product? What realistic hope could Ronnie have had—given also that he was laden with debt, on the run from Britain, and liable at any time to have his cover blown—of seeing his fantasy project signed, sealed, and delivered, and himself the triumphant winner on a white horse, riding away with his loot? First answer, in a word, none. The fun was here and now and there was no tomorrow. Immortals don’t need one. Second answer, my preferred one, he was conning himself as well. He believed in Colin Clark’s derelict property. He believed he was performing a priceless service for the elderly countess by taking her pictures off her. He believed in his vision of a great Canadian town fit for tomorrow’s heroes. And if he’d thrown in the Eiffel Tower he’d have believed in that, too.
Or consider this. Tony and I, at around eighteen and sixteen, are eating our hearts out with boredom one summer holiday when Ronnie out of the blue suggests we give ourselves a week in Paris and have a bit of fun. This is a most unusual proposal coming from Ronnie, since it implies the provision of hard cash. However, he insists, and gives us real folding money for our fares, and tells us that we can pick up whatever more we need from the Panamanian Ambassador to France, a first-class fellow to whom Ronnie has been shipping bottles of unbranded Scotch whisky under diplomatic protection. The Ambassador, he explains, unpacks the bottles in his cellar, sticks on whatever brand labels he thinks appropriate, and ships them to Panama, again under diplomatic protection. The scheme has been running nicely for some while, so it follows that there is a pot of money waiting to be collected. In the same mood of generosity, Ronnie declares that we can spend the first fifty pounds of it. The Ambassador and his glamorous wife receive us with full diplomatic honors and give us dinner and a fine time, but no money. Why should he give us money, he argues charmingly, when Ronnie owes him a small fortune? What Ronnie has not mentioned to us, apparently, is that the Ambassador has paid Ronnie up front for the unbranded whisky, and is still waiting for the first consignment. We apologize and leave. Was the Ambassador telling the truth? Or was he conning back? In those days I wasn’t sufficiently trained to form a view. I’m still not.
Next day we attempt to perform Ronnie’s second little errand: Pop round to the George V hotel, you fellows, which is one of the best pubs you’ll ever see the inside of; have yourselves a drink in the bar, shoulder to shoulder with some of the most beautiful women in the world, give my love to dear old Louis—or Henri, or whatever the head concierge was called—slip him a tenner from the money you’ve collected from the Ambassador, and bring back the golf clubs they’re looking after for me until my next visit. Thanks to the Ambassador’s obduracy, we have no tenner for Louis or Henri, but I don’t think it would have made much difference if we had. We state our business to the concierge, he presses a bell, a manager appears from behind an invisible door. “No golf clubs until your father’s bill is paid.” He adds sourly that a hundred sets of golf clubs wouldn’t cover it. For a bad moment he even seems to wonder whether he can impound the two of us as well. But he doesn’t, or we bolt before he can, to spend three penniless days with the clochards on the banks of the Seine, eating baguettes and drinking foul red wine by the litre.
There were real victims, that’s the trouble. Real blood on the carpet. Real wrecked lives and broken hearts, and I’m not talking about love. Tony and I ran another little errand for Ronnie that year and remember it with shame. The mark this time was not, unfortunately, a dubious Panamanian Ambassador or a wealthy property lawyer or the presumed heir to a great art fortune but an elderly couple who lived across the road from us in Chalfont St. Peter. Sir Eric had recently retired from a distinguished career as a civil servant in India, and was therefore a stranger to the country he had represented for so long. Ronnie’s instructions to us, barked by telephone from London, were to get yourselves over to Sir Eric’s house now and tell him everything’s all right. How all right? we asked. All right, for God’s sake! Don’t shilly-shally! Tell him if he kicks up a stink he’ll spoil everything. It’s all going to be all right. The check’s on its way. And with profound reluctance we went, and drank their sherry; and did our feeble best to vouch for Ronnie’s integrity while Sir Eric and his Lady peered at us with terrified disbelief. “We’re living on our pension,” Sir Eric explained, as to children, “and a little bit of capital my wife inherited. We’ve given them to your father to invest.” Then the killer question: Could we assure them that Ronnie, from everything we knew of him, could be trusted with their savings? I don’t remember what I said. Perhaps I didn’t do the talking. Tony did. We made several trips across the road. Sometimes one of us would go, and sometimes both, until finally we told Ronnie we couldn’t go again.
“Forgiven your father yet?” the beady Head of Personnel at MI5 asks me on the day I take up employment in his service.
“Oh, long ago, sir,” I reply, with Ronnie’s angelic smile.
And that’s another thing I’ve inherited from him: the mask of sanity.
How Ronnie broke the news to us of Olive’s nocturnal flight from the mock-Tudor house in Rickmansworth is a mystery. I have no recollection of mourning her except on the odd occasion when Tony and I found ourselves in some particularly lonely situation and on a shared impulse commiserated with each other. My guess is that Ronnie didn’t so much announce her disappearance as leak it, then trivialize it, then treat it as water under the bridge. She was ill—that much Ronnie must have told us, because I paid her regular visits in a sunlit hospital, where she sat upright in a ward all to herself, wearing an angora cardigan. But Olive, under interrogation, denied she had been ill at all during this period. And she had never possessed an angora pullover: “I wouldn’t, darling, they tickle.” Next the rumor—from Ronnie or a planted subsource—that she had fallen into immoral ways. Never judge, son. That’s God’s job, not ours. Know what it says in the Bible? Forgive and love her. Forgive and, by implication, forget. And certainly there would have been a great deal of weeping. Ronnie could weep at the drop of a hat, or no hat at all. On his side of the family we all can, but Ronnie was in a class of his own.
Then gradually she must have died, perhaps of injuries sustained in her immoral ways. Not formally dead. Not life extinct. Like all good spin doctors, Ronnie didn’t trade in unretractable statements. First would have come the heavy tabernacle silence, while we metaphorically settle in our pews and remember we’re in God’s house, except that it belongs to some luckless bank. Then a shaking of the head and a sufferer’s forbearing sigh. “Those medical boys, son, they just won’t give it to a fellow straight,” he might have begun, but with enough martyrdom in the voice, and enough bravely concealed pain, for you to wonder whether he was worse hit than she was. Until, bit by bit, after a few more coded statements from the pulpit, it would have been understood that not just Ronnie but all three of us were victims of the same misfortune, into which Olive’s illness, immorality, and death-or-its-equivalent had projected us.
And here, I guess, he would have seized his chance, and delivered the sum of all the multiple equations that had been whirring inside his head since the scene had begun. As a consequence of which, he would continue—we are still weeping, you understand, still locked in a triple bear hug where every choked statement flows inexorably from the last—Tony and I must go immediately to boarding school with the aim of becoming great lawyers, exactly as Ronnie himself will be a great lawyer, just as soon as he can take time off from running the world, because one day we’ll be Cornwell, Cornwell & Cornwell, the greatest family team of lawyers and pals that ever graced God’s Chancery Lane. And gradually it turns out that Ronnie has already had a quiet word with the headmaster of St. Martin’s School, Northwood, who’s a first-class chap, and a great golfer, and keen as mustard for us to get this thing behind us and start on the long hard road of duty; never mind it’s the middle of the term, he’ll take you.
In the course of a posthumous search of Olive’s humble cottage, I came upon a second artifact as significant in its way as the white hide suitcase, and as poignant. It hangs beside me as I write, a wedding photographer’s portrait of Tony and me, aged seven and five, dressed in the uniform of St. Martin’s boarding school for boys. It was taken, I suspect, on or before our first day as new entrants to the boarding-school gulag. We are posed in a studio, on a piece of fake garden wall. In our false smiles you may read, as I do, some kind of bracing for the ordeal that lies ahead. Do we look bereaved? Not to me we don’t, but children are the greatest liars on earth when it comes to concealing their emotions. The historian’s interest in the photograph, however, will rest less with the subjects’ faces than with the inscription in the lower right corner, where each has penned a greeting to Olive in painstaking handwriting done with a relief nib in India ink. “Love from Tony” in his hand and “love from david,” with a small “d,” in mine. No date.
You will take the point at once. If we are on our way to the gulag and Olive is missing and believed dead, what in the name of heaven do we think we are up to, sending her our love?
Do I recall posing for the photograph? I do. I had never before ventured into a photographer’s lair or sat under studio lighting. How could I forget feeling like a film star for the first time? Do I recall signing the photograph? I do not. Then why not? When I fished it out of its dark drawer in Olive’s cottage, where it was in such good condition that I suspect it had spent its life there, did I not have an immediate sense of recognition? So if I remember the photograph why do I have no memory of signing a message of love on it to my missing mother, of all people, to my ill-immoral-dead Olive, from david with a small “d,” on the day when, thanks to her, he disappeared into the gulag, not to emerge for eleven years?
Unless of course I didn’t sign it. Unless Ronnie, reluctant to revive in our minds the awkward question of Olive’s whereabouts, spared us the bother and did our signing for us. There is collateral for this assumption. When Ronnie, some fifteen years later, staged his biggest public failure—it was the early nineteen-fifties, the sum in contention a million and a quarter pounds—several documents that bore my signature, in my capacity as an officer of one of his eighty-something worthless companies, came under legal scrutiny. But I didn’t remember signing the documents, or accepting a post in any of his companies. Whether I told the receiver this, or lied to protect Ronnie, I simply forget. Certainly I told him that I had agreed to accept a retainer of four hundred pounds a year from a company called, as it were, Legal & David Investments Limited, in exchange for my written promise not to sell my services to any other firm. Ronnie had explained to me that this was a perfectly normal method for a respectable law company such as Legal & David to finance the studies of an up-and-coming future partner.
But I was past twenty by then. Thanks to the blessings of Britain’s compulsory national service, I had spent two years as an officer of military intelligence, which, as the saying goes, has as much to do with intelligence as military music has to do with music. All the same, I had taken to heart Ronnie’s lessons in duplicity, and adapted them to my own ends. Ronnie still believed I intended to read law, but I knew I had enrolled myself for modern languages. And though I was not aware of the impulse until I gave way to it, I was on the verge of the most subversive act yet in my covert campaign to undermine Ronnie’s absolute power: writing to my dead mother, care of Uncle Alec.
IN WHICH I SERVE A LONG PRISON SENTENCE FOR MY FATHER AND EXPIATE CRIMES I HAVE NOT COMMITTED
If there’s one thing above others that English letters can do without, it’s another dreary account of the horrors of an expensive private British education, the indelible scars that a neo-fascist regime of corporal punishment and single-sex confinement inflicts upon its wards, and the warping effect of all this on the body psychic of the British ruling classes down the ages. I will refer you instead to Lindsay Anderson’s film “If . . . ,” which might as well have been shot at my public school as his, and to the wealth of distressing literature, from Cyril Connolly’s “Enemies of Promise” to Paul Watkins’s “Stand Before Your God.”
Anthony Trollope tells us that his boyhood was “as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be,” but I’ll bet he didn’t set up as a young gentleman at the age of five, and, besides, I wasn’t a gentleman. I didn’t know the language or the taboos; everyone looked to me like a grownup from another country. Of St. Martin’s I remember little but the harrowing daily routine of bed-making, clothes-changing, and bell-ringing, and the extraordinary kindness of my brother Tony, who appeared from nowhere to scoop me up, brush the grime off me, and set me back on my feet. At both my early schools, Tony took on the job of proxy father, and for that matter mother, also, for the schools offered little in the way of Olive substitutes. From time to time, Ronnie would announce himself for a leave-out day. Mostly he didn’t show up, I assume because he didn’t want to be pestered about our fees. When he did come, he would bring his latest candidate for Olive’s job and a member of his Court for protection. Lunch would be a three-hour affair with a lot of brandy, which at that age we didn’t drink. At some point before the treat ended, we knew he was going to take us aside and ask us what we thought of the candidate, and we were going to reply “not much.” For the times when he didn’t appear as advertised, Tony and I developed a contingency plan. We would wait as ordered at the end of the long school drive, where Ronnie reckoned he was less likely to be spotted by the school bursar than if he rolled up to the main building. Having given him an hour or so, we would take ourselves for a long walk. “Had a good day, Cornwell?” “Super, sir, thank you.” “Parents O.K.?” “Fine, sir, thank you.” And so to bed.
Then an awful day came when Tony went on to his public school thirty miles away and I was left behind at St. Martin’s. So at weekends we each bicycled the fifteen-odd miles to an agreed meeting point and pooled whatever bits of food we had saved up during the week. Then I, too, left for a public school, called Sherborne, where I spent the worst three years of the seventy I have so far lived. My escape took place of its own accord when I was sixteen. Unlike Olive, I made no clandestine preparation. A term ended, the school train puffed out of Sherborne station bound for Waterloo, and as I watched the town’s skyline disappear I realized quite undramatically that I would never again see the place as a schoolboy. It was time to move on, and it was definitely time to get away from Ronnie.
IN WHICH I AM TALENT-SPOTTED FOR THE MONASTIC LIFE AND CHASTISED BY AN AUSTRIAN NIGHT PORTER
How I got out from under Ronnie, if I ever did, is the story of my life. Falling out of love with your father is like falling out of love with anyone else. The body count just gets too high. There was Sir Eric, there were more Sir Erics. There was Ronnie’s own family, who, after his father’s death, he robbed rotten. There was Sherborne, and a lot of spotty adolescence and moral posturing—my own—and being told by my deeply religious housemaster that I had to choose between God and the Devil. (For Devil, read Ronnie.) To swing my vote he steered me toward a whispering Anglican Franciscan monk called Algy, whose mission was to win public-school souls for the monastic life. In my recollection, Algy is the Christian equivalent of the secret Communist recruiters who threw their net over the likes of Kim Philby in the thirties. Under his feline prompting, I signed up for a series of excruciating three-day retreats on a beautiful Dorset hillside, where I mouthed plainsong, breathed incense, and tried to feel holy by eating bread and water while the Father Guardian read aloud from Lord Halifax’s “Fullness of Days” in a penitential growl. The brightest bit was looking after Brother Kentigern’s white rabbits, till I discovered they were being bred for gloves. The Father Guardian, who had been briefed in advance about Ronnie, must have been a specialist in moral mayhem, because he told me he was in the habit of crossing the Atlantic to hear the confession of James Thurber. He said it took him the whole return trip to recover. He also told me to endure Ronnie as a sacrifice, which infuriated me. But what did I want him to tell me? Go home and brain him with a golf club? I’ve no idea, and probably I had none at the time.
Then there was Gordon, who in my imagining, if nowhere else, was the super-victim of all Ronnie’s misadventures. I will pretend his name is Jones. Under yet other names he has appeared repeatedly in my novels. He’s the shabby, grinning, very English one with the forelock and the scuffed suède shoes, mumbling platitudes and doing brave things for honor. But in the real world, as near as I can get to it, he was Gordon Jones, aged about forty, an apologetic, sandy-haired, upper-class remittance man down on his luck, who had attached himself to Ronnie like a lost dog. The reason soon became clear to me. Ronnie had cleaned him out, but Gordon was in denial. He loved Ronnie, and believed that if he hung around him, somehow things would right themselves. But they didn’t. He appointed himself a member of the Court, ran Ronnie’s errands, placed bets for him, lied for him, and was a welcome house guest for weekends on the trot. But still things didn’t come right. And one day Gordon did a truly awful thing. He got himself a lady of the night and took her to a grand hotel—Claridge’s, the Ritz, one of those—and signed them both in as Sir Gordon and Lady Jones. He ordered a great meal, great wines, the best of everything. And sometime in the early hours he sent the girl home and shot himself or took poison—I’m not sure which. Either way, he was dead, though it was a long time before I was allowed to know this, because whereas Gordon had been dear old Gordon, a first-class chap and the salt of the earth even if he’_s a bit too fond of the bottl_e, he had suddenly joined the unmentionables who had lost faith. Except that Gordon had lost more than faith.
And after Gordon there was my mission to Saint-Moritz. And come to think of it, yes: if there has to be one moment or one place where my love affair with Ronnie hit the rocks, Saint-Moritz gets the prize, even if it’s a little hard to weep warm tears for a Swiss hotelier. I was sixteen and, in order to escape the ludicrous disparity between life at Sherborne and life with Ronnie, I had enrolled as a student of German philology at Berne University in Switzerland. Sometimes Ronnie sent money, but not often, so I took odd jobs, lived small, and shared my landlady’s salami. One day, Ronnie phoned: Son, I’ve got a job for you. It was the Sir Eric mission all over again, but this time the victim was the scion of one of Switzerland’s most famous hotelier families, the Badrutts of Saint-Moritz.
Now, Saint-Moritz was holy ground for Tony and me. Before the war, we had wintered there with Olive for the only family holiday we ever shared with her, and we had the photographs to prove it. After the war, Ronnie had returned there in triumph, bringing with him a riotous group of jockeys and other sportsmen and sportswomen, several members of the Court, their friends, and their friends’ friends—bring them all, the more the merrier, just sign the bill, because Ronnie, who loved the Badrutts and the Swiss and the good people of Saint-Moritz particularly, had decided to help them out of their postwar economic doldrums. To hell with British currency restrictions—let everyone settle his hotel bill with Ronnie, who out of the goodness of his heart would accept their English checks and act as a clearing house for the hotel, even if it cost him time and inconvenience. And my job—thus Ronnie once more—was to explain to dear old Toni Badrutt (or was it Caspar, I forget), who was a first-class chap, that the obstacles to passing on the money to him were proving a little more resistant than had been originally anticipated, but that everything was now in hand or, given a fair wind, soon would be. And while you’re there, son, have yourself a steak on your old man.
So I went to Saint-Moritz, and saw Olive’s ghost everywhere, although it was summer. And I stammered out my lines to Mr. Badrutt, who was too courteous, and perhaps by now too wise, to do other than thank me for my good offices and tell me the time of the next train back to Berne, because he didn’t know I’d had to hitchhike.
It’s the late sixties and at Ronnie’s urgent request I have flown to Vienna, where I am giving him lunch in the Sacher. No, I tell him, I will not invest in this surefire property he’s got his eye on. I will not invest in any of his schemes, now or ever. All I am willing to do is pay his landlord and his food bills and give him something for his daily living expenses. It is what a father might say to an errant son, and perhaps it is what Ronnie’s father should have said to Ronnie. Either way, it is enough to cause him to collapse sobbing on the table in full view of the waiters and other diners, until I am able to haul him sweating and heaving along the corridor to the front entrance because all I want is a cab, son, just put me in a cab and go back to your wealth and family and all the advantages I gave you. So I help him into the cab and he lowers the window and we weep at each other while he asks me whether I can spare a fiver for the fare.
It is the early seventies, and I am in London and have just delivered the typescript of a new novel. Tradition provides that my wife, Jane, take me to lunch at the Savoy as a reward, for I have inherited Ronnie’s affection for grand hotels. We are drinking a glass of champagne by way of an apéritif when Ronnie walks up to us wearing a new dark suit by Mr. Berman’s successor, handmade shoes and shirt, looking like a cherubic off-duty cardinal.
“What the hell are you doing in the Restaurant, son? You should be in the Grill—it’s far better. Come and join us.”
I explain the occasion. All the same, we agree to join him for a drink. His guests are a middle-aged couple from Ronnie’s home town of Poole. The husband looks like the sidesman from all the Baptist tabernacles that I attended with my grandparents while Ronnie was doing time. The wife wears floury face powder and a warm smile, no lipstick. It seems they own a fine piece of land overlooking the sea, son, and are hoping for a spot of free advice about how best to develop it. Beside them sits a bottle of Dom Pérignon, in an ice bucket. It so happens that Jane and I have settled for the house brand, sold by the glass.
It’s a few years later, Ronnie is dead, and I am revisiting Vienna in order to breathe the city air while I write him into a semi-autobiographical novel. Not in the Sacher again; I have a dread that the waiters will remember us. My plane into Schwechat is delayed, and the reception desk of the small luxury hotel that I have chosen at random is in the charge of an elderly night porter. He looks on silently as I fill in the registration form. Then he speaks in soft, venerable Viennese German.
“Your father was a great man,” he says. “You treated him disgracefully.” ♦
