Chapter Nine.
THERE WAS SOMETHING IN the atmosphere that forbade all reference to our recent experience on the drive back to London, although the conversation was lively enough upon other topics. I suspected with Ernestina that this was an occasion as with a young child when calamity is dismissed without comment. A little to my surprise she seemed anxious to get home. The journey to Wales was to have been part of a larger sight-seeing excursion. She had seen nothing of the country, and I suggested we might make a good start with Bath. But the projected side-trip seemed to have been forgotten. England was failing to live up to her expectations and, if not the English, almost certainly the Welsh too.
This small misadventure had happened at a time when Ernestina gave the impression of wishing to move further and further out of her father"s...o...b..t, and as a first step we had left London and rented a cottage in a wood at Iver in Buckinghamshire. It was the property of a n.o.blewoman we never met who had filled it with majestic, decrepit beds, with imperial eagles embroidered on their silk counterpanes, and with drinking vessels of all shapes and colours, more than fifty varieties of them, designed to contain every known alcoholic liquor. Here we had lived in the deep shade of the pines for some weeks before Ernestina decided that the countryside no longer held any attraction for her and we found ourselves back in Gordon Street once more.
The day after our return from Wales Ernestina went through what I was now beginning to recognize as a recurrent phase. She was a girl who needed to laugh, and there were times when she would commit herself to an orgy of laughter, provoked in any way she could find. She had found that the easiest way out was to visit one or more of the so-called news cinemas that had recently opened in London to provide a short programme of news-reels interspersed with cartoons and knockabout comedy items. The first day back in London was spent in entertainments of this kind to which I did not accompany her. Apart from that she settled to reread old favourites from a collection of humorous writings she possessed, including much of Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, and a prized h.o.a.rd of excellent comic papers sent to her from America. After two days of this treatment she had quite recovered from whatever it was she had suffered, her giggles subsided and she could cope with the normal solemnity of the world.
Now suddenly she announced that she had given up the idea of living anywhere in England, and made the suggestion that we should emigrate to Spain, where she had spent the happiest times of her life. It was an idea that seemed attractive enough to me if only a way could be found of making a living there. In the early summer of 1936 we made a trip by car to Spain to investigate the possibility of such a move.
We drove to Seville and stayed there with the Estradas, friends of Ernestina, a young couple who lived in a tiny Moorish palace with an unimposing entrance next to a shoeshop in the celebrated Calle Sierpes - thus named from the serpentine fashion in which it twists through the heart of the old town. We found the city in a state of turmoil, and were told and could read for ourselves in the newspapers that the rest of the country was no better off. What we had no way of knowing was that the outbreak of the Civil War lay only a few weeks ahead.
Like most of Spain"s upper and middle cla.s.ses of their day the Estradas were staunch fascists. It would have been hard to imagine a man milder in appearance and manner than young Juan Estrada, but he was a landowner in an area where the peasantry lived in the harshest conditions in Europe, employed as seasonal labourers on vast estates for extremely low wages. The newspapers reported almost daily cases of peasants dying of starvation in nearby villages, and some three years before the police had carried out a ma.s.sacre in the village of Casas Viejas where the peasantry had attempted to occupy uncultivated land.
On the first evening of our stay with them the Estradas took us for dinner to a fashionable restaurant some three miles out of town, an ancient coaching inn of great charm in a setting of featureless prairies of ripening wheat. On each of the tables placed in the shade of the vines a small pile of copper coins had been placed. Peasants - largely women and children - emaciated and in rags, lurked by a hedge surrounding the restaurant, and from time to time one of them would make a cautious advance to a table and, at a signal from a diner, pick up one of the coins - a half-peseta piece known as a perro chico. At intervals one of the restaurant staff would run out screaming abuse to slash at the beggars with a whip and drive them off. Within minutes they were back again and the mute submissive collection of these coins of minuscule value went on, virtually unnoticed by the diners, as before.
Juan Estrada very quietly and calmly explained to us that the time had come to put these people in their place. He and a number of friends, all of them landowners and all excellent riders, had formed a band - well, almost a private army, he said - and in a matter possibly of days they would make the rounds of the villages and deal with the Reds in their own fashion. One of our fellow guests was a rejoneador who had been spearing bulls in the ring in Seville only the Sunday before, and laughingly he referred to this as valuable practice.
It was an environment in which Ernestina and I found ourselves out of our depths. Next day we started off on our way back, making for France. We took the direct route through Cceres and Salamanca, to avoid Madrid, but just short of Plasencia we were stopped by a police roadblock and directed, with no reason given, to a diversion through the small town of Ciudad Rodrigo. The Sierra de Gata had to be crossed. It was the Europe of the Dark Ages, ghostly and skin-and-bone poor, with weasels sunning themselves in the dirt road, macabre trees, and once in a while a grey, wall-eyed shack with no gla.s.s in the windows and the slates sliding off the roof. For hours on end there were no signs of human presence.
Ciudad Rodrigo, grimed, sullen and silent, was closed up from end to end, doors bolted and windows shuttered. There was no one to ask the way, and when we stopped to study a road sign we heard the sound of shots terribly close and resonant in the narrow canyons of the streets. At the far end of the town we found the main hard-surfaced road to Salamanca, but a few miles further on two carts barred the road, and men carrying firearms of all descriptions came out from behind them. They had the underdog"s face of the Spanish countryside, fleshless, displaying all the details of the skull, and they would have been interchangeable with the wretched peasants begging for ha"pence at the smart restaurant outside Seville, but for the dignity conferred by hunting rifles and fowling pieces.
They were quite happy to explain, almost in a childish way, what was going on, and to provide acceptable reasons for their interference with traffic. They pointed proudly to their red armbands, explaining that they were milicianos del pueblo, and that their village had been under attack by a fascist band which they had beaten off, leaving one dead. An unshaven, wild-eyed man, looking like a bandit but describing himself as the schoolmaster, had pushed to the front, and began a short pedantic lecture on the political situation, before being cut short by a heavy burst of firing from the far end of the village. At this we all lay down in the road behind the carts for perhaps ten minutes, after which, following the example of the milicianos, we began to crawl on hands and knees for the shelter of the nearest houses. We found ourselves in a small, dark, earthen-floored room with a mother and her two small children under the table and, resisting an impulse to join them, remained standing with our backs to the wall as far as possible from the small window, for about an hour, while sporadic firing went on - some from the roof above.
After that the schoolmaster was back, happy and excited by some new triumph. A mopping-up operation - he savoured the expression affectionately - and we would be obliged to go back to Ciudad Rodrigo to spend the night. The inn was for people who brought their sheep with them, he said, but at the other end of the scale, the Parador Nacional was highly to be recommended, and as this was closed for the emergency he proposed to go there with us and open it up.
A stop was made on the way to pick up a cook. The schoolmaster hammered on the great feudal door, and the caretaker let us in. He was happy to welcome us, he said. There was a hint of a suggestion by the cook, in her recommendation to us not to worry if we found there was too much to eat, as she had a large family at home who would help out.
In the morning the schoolmaster joined us for breakfast, so changed in his appearance as to be almost unrecognizable. He had had a close shave and was wearing a clean shirt, b.u.t.toned at the neck, and polished shoes, and the wild eyes of the night before were calm and confident. The gun slung over his shoulder seemed out of place in the sumptuous and orderly environment. He caressed it like a child before propping it against the leg of the enormous table and sitting down.
"Were you disturbed during the night?" he asked.
"I thought I heard shooting."
"You did," he said. "The last of it. Now we are at peace again." He gestured in a regal manner at the dark, grandiose furniture, the paintings, the tapestry. "All this belongs to the people," he said. "Stay as long as you like, and tell them to send the bill to me."
The cook, beaming and nodding, came in bearing a lordly dish on which tiny eggs with bright red yolks that might have been laid by a thrush floated in greenish olive oil. A separate platter held rashers of black mountain ham. It was clear that she had served English guests before, and understood their breakfast requirements. She was followed by the caretaker who opened shutters and windows, and we listened rea.s.sured to the slow exchange of neighbourly pleasantries, and the chiming of a bell.
"In Italy and Germany the fascists overthrew the people," the schoolmaster said. "What they did not understand was it could never happen here. When they struck we were ready for them. It was all over in a few hours. From now on you can go where you like, and no one will bother you."
Four days later we were back in England, and a week later the Civil War broke out. The whole province of Salamanca was instantly occupied by Nationalist rebel troops, and there were few towns such as Ciudad Rodrigo where ma.s.sacres did not take place; it is virtually certain that the schoolmaster would have been killed in one of these.
Chapter Ten.
EARLY IN JUNE IT was the Corvajas" custom to pack up and move to Ostend where they stayed for the three months" gambling season at the Casino, so that by the time we were back in England they had already left. Ernesto gambled every day, but gave us no account of his operations, nor did he welcome the presence of any member of his family when he was at the tables.
This year we were invited to stay a week with them. In conformity with Ernesto"s dislike of flamboyancy in any form we found that they had installed themselves in a second-cla.s.s hotel in a side street, where they had arranged for us to be put up. We took our meals in restaurants of the family kind, with the proprietress keeping severe watch in something like a telephone booth and with elderly waiters suffering from scurf, with copious grease-stains on their jackets. Ernesto, in fear of being despised by such as these, always overtipped, but then studied their faces anxiously to a.s.sure himself that they were satisfied.
The routine after dinner was that the couple would go off to the Casino together and Ernesto would stand by and watch Maria lose her small daily limit on rouge et noir, after which she would take a taxi back to the hotel. Thereafter, for her husband the business of the evening began in earnest. One evening there was an urgent telephone call from someone speaking broken English with a French accent, whose voice I recognized as that of a regular visitor at Gordon Street. Neither Ernesto nor Maria could be found, so the man left a message to say that his car had broken down, and he would not be at work at the usual time. Maria came in first and let the cat out of the bag. "Oh, that must be Georges," she said. "The head croupier." It is only to be supposed that Ernesto and Georges were involved in what is now known as a sting.
Ernesto never admitted to having won at the tables. At most he would say, "I made my expenses." Back in London when the season was at an end I would watch for signs of an increase in affluence, but there was none. There was no way of knowing with the Corvajas, remembering their traditional avoidance of conspicuous consumption. Maria went on wearing the same absurd dresses it seemed to me she had always worn, and the same old valuable but dowdy jewellery, and there was no scope in Ernesto"s simple existence to indicate a change in fortune. In reality life offered them all they asked for without whatever extras Ernesto"s forays at the Casino might have provided. Only one thing was denied to them - freedom of movement - for outside these annual trips to Ostend they had lived for so many years in what amounted to close confinement in London.
Life with the Corvajas had the effect in time of stifling natural curiosity. In a way the family members seemed to be reaching out with tentacles to anchor themselves to each other, and were ant-like and corporate in their activities. Yet with this it was clear that personal privacy was closely guarded, and no one was allowed to look into the Corvaja mind. Like the Arabs, the Sicilians seemed absorbed in current affairs. Just as in Arabic, there is no future tense in the Sicilian dialect, and in discussion I found that there was little taste or talent for reminiscence. These att.i.tudes, I suspected, resulted from the training of a sad history. Sicilians are avid for the physical company of others, probably inspired by that ancient and universal saying that there is safety in numbers. Yet when they are together - in the case of the Corvajas apart from the ritual of the evening quarrel - they easily fall into silence. I have never forgotten the experience some years later of standing after nightfall in the main street of the small Mafia-ridden town of Cccamo, and watching the groups of males trudging endlessly up and down, each group carefully maintaining its distance within a dozen or so yards of the next, while no one spoke.
Suddenly, just after the return from Ostend, Ernesto asked me to do him a favour, and what was proposed - much to his discomfiture - could not be accomplished without a revealing discussion of the problems involved. He was obliged to begin at the beginning, cautiously and grudgingly, and sketch in the details of his early life. Up to this moment I had heard of little more than the ambush in New York, and a few garish anecdotes of his days as a young blood in Palermo. He now told me that while in his twenties in Catania he had been charged with a major crime, had escaped from prison and - through the influence of an uncle, the Prior of one of the religious orders - had been smuggled away to America. Later I was to discover the existence of a family legend that he had been carried aboard the ship bearing him to the New World in a coffin in which the necessary air-holes had been drilled. A further admission was that in New York he had become a member of the Unione Siciliana, an organization by his description formed to look after poor Sicilian immigrants who suffered intense exploitation in the States. To use his own words, "My people were under attack and I felt it my duty to do what I could to protect them." For the first time I learned that he had studied law at the University of Berne, the suggestion being that he had served what is seen by outsiders as a somewhat sinister a.s.sociation in a largely advisory capacity. In New York he seemed to have lived in some style in an apartment stuffed with antique furniture, and not having by that time developed their appreciation of music, he and Maria spent their leisure hours together filling sc.r.a.p-books with "artistic pictures" cut from American magazines.
What must have been a pleasant and possibly exciting existence came to an abrupt end when Ernesto fell into the ambush as he was stepping down from a cab outside his apartment. The survival rate of those exposed to such an experience is negligible. Two machine-gun bullets carried his hat away, but he lived, and two days later he and his wife, leaving all their possessions, including their treasured sc.r.a.p-books, took the boat for Europe. They chose England because, after the expiry of the original arrest warrant, Ernesto was placed under an order of permanent banishment from Italy.
Now, after the years of exile and the patient but possibly reluctant devotion to craftsmanship in the home, relieved only by the all too brief annual escape to Ostend, a way had been opened for the return to Italy. It all depended on the backing, if this could be secured, of a powerful fascist hierarch, Count Aldo Giordano, who lived in Milan. An approach had been made and negotiations that showed promise entered upon by one of Ernesto"s Sicilian contacts. Then suddenly, when the affair seemed to be in the balance, all communication with this man had ceased, and all Ernesto could suppose was that he had fallen foul of the law. At this time I was interested in the possibility of importing used Italian sports cars into England, and had mentioned that I might make a quick trip over there to see what was to be had. Ernesto hoped that it would be possible for me to do this without delay and at the same time carry a message for him to Giordano in Milan.
I agreed and, before I left for Italy, Ernesto treated me to what I came to recognize as the set lecture kept in readiness by any Sicilian to try to explain away the sorrows of his country. For a thousand years Sicily had been under the heel of a succession of a dozen or so foreign governments, from that of the Arabs to United Italy with its capital in Rome. Each of these, in the ends of the efficient extraction of booty, had made its own laws to be added to the legalistic muddle left by its predecessors. In the end there were tens of thousands of enactments, most of them quite ununderstandable to the layman, and many of which contradicted each other. Since the law as it stood failed to protect the citizen, it had to be every man for himself and, under the polite and civilized exterior that was all the foreign visitor saw of Sicily, the reality was one of survival through sheer personal strength, political connections, through skill in forming defensive alliances, and the power of the bribe. Ernes...o...b..lieved that the best any man could hope for was to be able to look after his family and his friends. In the depths of this harangue I suspected a lurking plea of extenuating circ.u.mstances. I never came to know what was the crime for which he had been obliged to flee the country.
Count Aldo Giordano was glutted with fascist honours and awards. He was one of the youngest of the motley crew who had tagged after Mussolini in "the march on Rome", was officially designated a squadrista, having been inscribed in the early fascist squads, and had been decorated with the government"s highest award, the Sciarpa Littorio. He was probably the only Italian who regularly wore a bowler hat, and when he came to pick me up at my hotel in Milan and take me to lunch, he had one of these with its inevitable a.s.sociate, a furled umbrella, resting on the seat beside him of the open black Alfa Romeo he was driving.
We lunched in a roof-top restaurant under the laced profile of the Cathedral of Milan. There were soldiers everywhere, many in splendid uniforms and wearing plumed Alpine caps. These were for Italy the intoxicating days following the conquest of Abyssinia, and a revolt in the Tripolitanian colony had just fizzled out after its leaders had been captured and thrown from aeroplanes. It was hard to think of the Count as a partic.i.p.ant in the aggressive policies of the fascist state. He was small-boned and fragile-looking and a little monkish in his dark, heavyweight English suit. He spoke good English learned from a Scottish nanny, with a thin, bleating voice, and mentioned that his family were descended from the Longobards, ninth-century invaders of Italy who wore long beards, but were said to have exceptionally small p.e.n.i.ses - a disadvantage, he added with a dry smile, that had rectified itself with the pa.s.sage of centuries.
The count said that he was interested in money and, having read in my presence Ernesto"s letter, he asked me if he were rich, to which my reply was, probably, but there was no way of knowing. He mentioned that he was in the import-export business, trading in such diverse goods and commodities as goat skins, ostrich feathers, bilingual talking dolls, Hornby train sets, and camel flesh which, minced up with appropriate herbs and served with pasta of various kinds, formed an important part of the rations of the colonial troops. His many possessions included a balloon, a mountain of china clay, and a finger-bone - one of many small relics gnawed under the pretext of a reverent kiss - from the embalmed body of St Francis Xavier, on display at the Church of the Bom Jesus in Goa. His wife, said this small, rather bird-like man, was an ex-Miss Italy. He sipped his Pellegrini contemplatively and added that his s.e.xual needs were well attended to, as he kept a brace of mistresses as well.
When I mentioned an interest in Italian cars the Count was instantly interested and sympathetic. Italians in general like to make themselves useful where they can. As a matter of course - of national tradition - the Count would have helped me when he could, establishing a small balance of favour here and there, some which he would cash in, and others he would not. If calculation came into this at all, it may have been that it would have been useful to get off on the right foot with Ernesto in whatever dealings he might have with him. Whatever the motive, he immediately found me an Alfa Romeo that had won a 24-hour race at Le Mans, which I bought at an absurdly low price and drove back to England a few days later. When I eventually resold it, it was out of necessity and with great reluctance, at a large profit.
Two weeks after the encounter in Milan, Giordano arrived in England, bringing the beauty queen wife with him, who - while a little jaded perhaps after the fifteen years that had pa.s.sed since the crown had been placed on her head - was certainly one of the most charming women I had ever met.
An Italian-style banquet, in the tremendous refulgence of Ernesto"s dining room, took place, during which the Count told Ernesto all about the ramifications of his business empire, the Longobards with their small p.e.n.i.ses, the two Doges of Venice in his later family history, his recent dinner with Marshal Badoglio and his audience with the diminutive but intelligent King Vittorio Emmanuele, who had probably listened to his outpourings, as did Ernesto at this moment, with an occasional sickly grin and a nod of the head. It was hard to believe that these two men, one so pa.s.sionately absorbed in the vanity of prestige and the vanity of material possessions, the other so devoid of such considerations, could be the product of the same nation.
Giordano stayed three days in London, spending part of each evening with his wife watching all-in wrestling at Blackfriars. The sport, recently introduced, was enjoying something of a vogue, although it was banned in Italy as a degenerate spectacle that clearly awoke some of the spirit that the Count must have shown in his old days as a squadrista for, on the occasion I accompanied them, he leaped to his feet galvanized with excitement, shouting curses and threats at one of the wrestlers, and finally took off one of his shoes and threw it at him. This was not returned, but what did it matter? he said. He had brought a dozen pairs with him; and possessed sixty in all.
The wife, Celestina, had a suggestion to put to Ernestina which seemed startling in England in those days. When Italians of their cla.s.s and age-group went on holiday, she said, they were always on the look-out for a possible exchange of mates, not necessarily because they were libidinosi but because a holiday was not a holiday without all the new vistas and experiences that were to be had. Whether or not you were inclined to promiscuity, said Celestina, you embraced an unknown body, just as you took the waters (which might even taste dreadful) or went for long health-giving walks. What did Ernestina think of the idea? Reporting back to me, Ernestina said that as a person of avant-garde ideas she had felt a loss of inner face in having to turn the offer down. "But just imagine Aldo Giordano. ..."
Whatever the object of the Count"s visit had been, it was, at least in large part, successful, for within a few days of the Giordanos" departure we saw Ernesto and Maria off on the train to Rome. They returned from what sounded like an almost triumphant visit to all the old haunts of Ernesto"s youth to a state of near chaos at home.
Maria"s brother, Franco, a man Ernesto could never abide, with his indiscreet wife Florence had moved into the house while the Corvajas had been away, and as ever disaster had followed on their heels. With Maria"s outstanding exception, the Darbellays sounded an ill-starred race. The males of the family were depressives who turned easily to the bottle, and one of Franco"s younger brothers had recently committed suicide with some difficulty, by drowning himself in a three-foot-deep fountain in the centre of Berne in broad daylight.
Franco, too, was a depressive, weak, ineffective and defeated, who suffered the additional disadvantage of having a sickly, complaining wife, suffering among other ailments from an irreparable prolapse of the womb, causing her frequently to drop whatever she was doing and wander off, taking a hand-mirror, to the lavatory to check whether her cervix was visible.
At normal times, with Ernesto"s cold and disapproving eye upon him, Franco vegetated calmly enough, a background presence hardly noticed in the house by the other members of the family, but left to himself - since Florence spent much of her time in bed - he was liable to be seized and transfigured by mischievous and destructive energy.
The Corvajas returned to a double row of milk bottles on the front doorstep, finger-painted graffiti in black boot polish on the gild doors, Florence"s uterine ring in disinfectant in an antique Chinese bowl on a sideboard, a faint smell of vinous vomit that penetrated to every corner of the house, and Franco asleep in a firmament of broken gla.s.s on a once superb Aubusson carpet now irretrievably stained with the dark wine of Sicily.
Next day it was explained to Franco that he would have to go into hospital for treatment. This he accepted without demur, dressing himself with extreme care when the time came, with a new shirt, a dark well-knotted tie, and a smear of brilliantine on the tightly curled fair hair that was only beginning to turn grey. There followed a firm parting handshake for everyone, and Maria took him to the French Hospital in Charing Cross Road, where she waited until he was in bed, embraced him and then went off. Walking out into Shaftesbury Avenue she saw a small, excited crowd that had gathered on the pavement nearby. People were running. Looking up, she saw one of the hospital windows was open, with faces at it, and that part of the balcony had broken away. Even before she had pushed through to the front of the crowd, she knew that it would be Franco. He was dead.
A few days later I was called by my mother to Enfield to reason with my father. He had ceased to dispense his elixir, sold his pharmacy, and now, reasonably, feeling the life drain from him, appealed, like Simeon, to G.o.d to be allowed to depart in peace. My mother, a woman of hard and resolute fibre, but on unsure ground where my father was concerned, must have suspected that G.o.d might hear him, and my mission was to appeal to my father to change his mind.
It was too late, he said. He had devoted fifteen years as a Spiritualist medium to proclaiming and providing proof of the survival of the human personality beyond the grave, with little desire to investigate its quality and attraction. Yet even this infinitely shadowy territory, to which the Spiritualists had done no more than add a dimension of triviality, seemed preferable to him than continued existence on earth as an old man confined with his memories among the vanishing cherry orchards of Forty Hill.
It was too late, he explained, and with a kind of quiet triumph he took my hand and placed it over a swelling in his stomach. This, he said, was cancer. The only thing that gave him any pleasure now was the sight of flowers in bloom. Winter was upon us. He might survive, he thought, until next spring, but then he would surely die. He felt no pain of any kind.
Although he refused at first to see a doctor, one was fetched. Next day he was taken to hospital. The day after he was operated upon, and that same night he died in a most tranquil fashion.
My father"s death was followed in quick succession by the deaths of two of my aunts, Annie fading rapidly from some unknown cause, and Polly, inevitably, of multiple burns after falling in the fire in the nursing home where she had been placed by the Reverend Emrys Davies, who had decided that it was no longer safe to leave her without proper supervision in the house. Surprises were to follow, as I learned through my cousin Dai Owen, who lived within a hundred yards of the house in Wellfield Road and, attuned to all the currents of gossip in this town where a part of religion was to know one"s neighbour"s business, was well placed to keep track of what went on.
Everyone in Carmarthen had a.s.sumed that the Baptist minister would inherit the two aunts" worldly possessions, but to the general astonishment this proved not to be the case, for all Annie"s and Polly"s property pa.s.sed to Li. The Reverend had obtained power of attorney in the two senior aunts" case, but mysteriously enough, Li had held out. The emergency had suddenly uncovered in this confused and vulnerable little old neurotic a core of lucidity and determination. Like a Threspotian goat-herd called by oracle to be priestess, Li was transformed. The minister was shown the door. Li straightened herself, dressed in new clothes to appear in the streets of Carmarthen and paid a visit to her solicitor where, according to confidential information supplied by the clerk, she showed a clear grasp of the situation in which she found herself. Her next call was on a firm of builders and decorators whom she employed to smarten up the house before it went on the market. Li cleared the dismal thickets in the garden, packed off the furniture to the King"s Street salerooms, and ordered a holocaust of the books, including a collection of every issue of the Christian Herald since its first publication, and - alas - the painstaking eye-witness record of all the public hangings at Llangunnor which as a child I had so longed to possess. In some way Dai Owen had learned that Li - whom I found it hard to believe had ever put pen to paper - had kept in touch with her sister living in exile in Canada, sent there after the birth of an illegitimate child to marry a settler who advertised for a bride. The sister was long since dead, but her son now invited Li to come to Canada to live with his family, and to Canada in a matter of weeks Li departed, to be seen and heard of no more.
In Forty Hill the Spiritualists, deprived of my father, managed to carry on much as before, employing visiting mediums in his stead. My mother"s fame as a healer continued to spread, and a custom had sprung up, based on a tradition established at Lourdes, of leaving behind, after a successful visit to her, the appliances and vessels of orthodox medicine for which the patient no longer had any need. These trophies festooned the equivalent of the vestry in my mother"s church, the Beacon of Light. My mother"s cures were not of a spectacular kind, so there were no discarded crutches, but there were a pair of reinforced boots employed for weak ankles which had strengthened under the healing touch, a brace of trusses, several iodine lockets, and even a Wonder Worker, and many empty bottles that had held once indispensable medicaments - Dr Collis Browne"s Chlorodine, Parr"s Sovereign Expectorant, Ashton and Parsons" Phosforine, and the like - that were no longer required.
Chapter Eleven.
MUCH OF 1938 WAS spent in travelling, journeys financed by occasional windfalls from my incursions into the world of trade, added to a little money Ernestina had of her own. A peregrination took us through Central Europe into the Balkans, through Rumania and Bulgaria to the Black Sea, and back through Yugoslavia and Hungary. It was done on the cheap in an elderly Ford V8 costing 31, bought expressly for the journey and thrown away at the end. Discarding comfort, we chose the seediest of accommodation, and when no inn existed in a village when we decided to stay the night, there was never a problem about finding a room in a peasant"s home. In this way our outlay was hardly greater than if we had stayed at home.
That spring I had met Ladislas Farago, a Hungarian Jew, and the author of a successful book, Abyssinia on the Eve. Many years later Farago was to create the Bormann legend, publishing a book that purported to describe his meeting in South America with Martin Bormann, Hitler"s vanished deputy. This was said to have netted him a million pounds. It was a minor spoof and of slight importance. What was of disastrous consequence for the American people was that Farago should have become one of President Nixon"s evil geniuses and an inspirer of his policy in Vietnam. Ladislas, who was considerably older than myself, was the possessor of irresistible charm, fatally allied with the power to carry conviction in all his utterances. I found him in those days also a kind man and it was hard to believe that he could have perpetrated the cruel deceptions (for he knew and cared nothing for the Far East) by which the sufferings of the war were prolonged.
I listened to Ladislas" p.r.o.nouncements as to an oracle, accepting without question all he told me. His new project was a journey to the North Yemen, about which he would write a book for which his publishers had already paid an enormous advance. He suggested that I should go with him to take the photographs, and I instantly agreed, being at all times, both before and since, the ready prey of any Pied Piper.
In those days the North Yemen remained a terra incognita to Europeans, previously visited by two or possibly three Englishmen, and Ladislas painted pictures of the marvels it contained. It was ruled over by an all-powerful despot, the Imam Yahya, who daily administered the ferocious Koranic justice seated under a tree at the gates of his palace, and entrance to the country could only be granted by him in person after application through his envoy in Aden. The application had to be sent by sea - carried in a dhow - to the port of Hodeida, thereafter by despatch rider to Sana"a, the Imam"s mountain capital. It took up to two months to receive a reply.
In the event we spent seven weeks in Aden and the enormous area of the Protectorate - much of it, with its medieval desert cities and their mud skysc.r.a.pers, of great fascination - before word arrived through Imam"s emissary that we might travel to Yemen, but only as far as Hodeida, where we should receive further instructions.
We bought a chestful of Maria Theresa silver thalers, the only currency acceptable in the Yemen, provisions for a week and boarded the first dhow bound for the Red Sea. Every aspect of the voyage was attended by uncertainty, and at the back of the mind there was always the nagging statistic that ten per cent per annum of such ships depart on voyages from which they never return. The captain, establishing his viewpoint with the remark that only G.o.d could be sure of anything, said that according to the winds, it could take anything between three days and three weeks to reach Hodeida, and warned us that he would not sail on Fridays and holy days. He insisted that we should accompany him if at any time he decided to interrupt the voyage to take part in some local pilgrimage. Having carried all our gear aboard and settled where we could find s.p.a.ce to await the hoisting of the single lateen sail, we found ourselves suddenly, with all the rest of the pa.s.sengers, ordered ash.o.r.e again. A canoe coming alongside had brought an invitation to the captain, and all who voyaged on the ship, to attend a wedding in the family of an old friend from the Hadramaut to the east of Southern Arabia, now settled in Aden. "You must go with us, too," the captain said to us. "Now you are my brothers. We shall eat together, and then we shall dance until dawn. Tomorrow it is my intention to set sail, and if not tomorrow, the day after that."
There was nothing for it. We disembarked and were conducted to a great tent that had been put up on the town"s outskirts, there at an all-male party - the bride and her friends being elsewhere - to feast and dance the night away. The food was varied and exquisite, but above all strange: great saffron-flavoured lucky dips of rice and meat to be searched with the fingers, camel"s-hump fat, lamb"s t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, delectable innards in batter, lurid fish from the coral reefs, locusts en brochette, great bustards as big as turkeys baked in clay, skewered ortolans. All-pervasive was the suggestive aroma of ras el hanut, compounded of dried rose-buds, pepper and Spanish fly, supposedly aphrodisiac, and certain if consumed to excess to provoke severe irritation of the urinary tract. After the inflammatory food, plenty of good healthy exercise, leaping and cavorting to fife and drum, while a flying fugleman brandishing a stick rushed up and down the lines of the dancers to whack out at the evil spirits attracted to such festivities, with an occasional shout of triumph whenever he managed to flatten one that had settled with predatory interest upon some part of a guest"s anatomy. Prudently such parties ended, as this one did, with communal chewing of large quant.i.ties of qat leaves containing a mild narcotic which instantly quenched the fires lit by the ras el hanut, exorcized improper visions, and turned the mind to spiritual themes.
At daybreak we went down to the dhow, and with this demonstration of the righteousness of patience the voyage began, and in this spirit of tolerance and resignation it continued. There were thirty-two pa.s.sengers on this small ship, Arabs of every condition plus a trio of Yemeni Jews, and for the purpose of this journey we were all to become members of a united family. In a moment of emergency when the main sail was torn to shreds in a brief squall, able-bodied males gave a hand to the crew. When we were becalmed for days on end and food began to run short, there was a voluntary distribution of private provisions, shared out in the most scrupulous fashion, although sometimes with difficulty, for how in compliance with this desert protocol did we set about the division of a fruit into thirty-two pieces?
Nothing could have been more gracious, more diverting or more generous than the company with whom we travelled on the dhow; and the considerable drawbacks to the voyage, unsuspected when we set out from Aden, would have been brushed aside by any seasoned traveller. The dhow carried, like some receptacle filled to the brim, an ancient odour investing its timbers with the cargoes of decades, many of them of hides and of dried fish. Harder to endure were the a.s.saults by innumerable mosquitoes, forcing us at night - despite the great heat - to cover ourselves completely by blankets. When the breeze fell away we lay motionless in the dark in a sea glittering with a great h.o.a.r-frost of phosph.o.r.escence, and for days on end the sun showed us a slow heave of oiled water clogged with the opened umbrellas of millions of jellyfish. The presence of familiar landmarks on the Yemen coastline, a rocky outcrop, a tower, reminded us that our position on the map had remained unchanged. Every day the ship"s baker baked unleavened bread. This we washed down with kishr, a greenish, pungent-flavoured concoction boiled up from coffee husks, preferred in Southern Arabia to coffee itself. It was a combination which produced unappeasable indigestion.
A single incident stands out from the doldrums of this experience. The majority of our fellow pa.s.sengers were from the interior of Arabia, and few had seen the sea until they reached Makalla or Aden to board the dhow. Fortunately however for us, when reduced to a diet of unleavened bread, we were carrying two sailors for Bahrain, originally pearl-fishers who now worked the coast, transferring from dhow to dhow and receiving in lieu of regular wages a very small percentage of the sale of the cargoes they handled. Despite a lack of proper tackle, these men set themselves to fish and caught a large and ferocious-looking barracuda destined to be cooked and divided up in the usual way. The big fish was left to leap and twist on the deck, and Ladislas, horrified at the violence done to it, pleaded for it to be thrown back into the sea. I remembered that he objected to the taking of animal life, living virtually on eggs, but he was the first man and probably the last I had ever known to be deeply distressed - on the verge of tears - at the plight of a fish on the hook.
In the end Hodeida was reached, a crystalline sparkle of dwellings on the dun Arabian sh.o.r.e, and soon a canoe paddled out to us bringing out a splendidly jewelled and be-daggered harbour master who announced that His Majesty the Imam Yahya had ordered a house to be prepared for us in the town, and that a committee of notables would shortly come out to take us ash.o.r.e. They had been delayed by their civic duty to witness a public execution about to take place in a s.p.a.ce reserved for this purpose on the sea front, clearly visible from the dhow. The delay had arisen, as we learned, over the necessity to obtain a confession of guilt before an execution could be carried out. This, it was explained to us, was always forthcoming as the accused man"s p.e.n.i.s was tied up and he was induced to drink water, while the waiting headsman and the notables pa.s.sed the time playing a simple game of chequers invented to combat the tedium of such occasions.
We were anch.o.r.ed rather more than a quarter of a mile off sh.o.r.e, from which distance little was to be seen other than the confused comings and goings of the crowd of onlookers that had gathered. Our captain who believed that attendance at such spectacles was a pious observance to be bracketed with a visit to the mosque, asked to be allowed to raise anchor and move the dhow in a couple of hundred yards closer to the sh.o.r.e. Most regretfully the harbour master told him that this was a request it was beyond his power to grant.
We watched, seeing nothing of the drama concealed by distance, and could judge only that it was at an end when, restless and sated, the sea-front crowd began to disband. Shortly a boat left the sh.o.r.e, making in our direction. It carried four motionless white-robed figures, and was moved by six negro slaves. In a moment the three dignitaries of the reception party, with their accompanying interpreter, were helped aboard, and settled themselves on the banked-up cushions ready on deck. They wore turbans curled like elaborate caracols, moved in a slow, almost dreamy fashion, and their skin was of that absolute pallor of people living in hot climates who never uncover themselves to the sun. The interpreter intoned a verse from the Koran, and this was followed by silence while the notables watched us a little sleepily, with thin, measured smiles, and an odour of camphor spread from them as they fanned their nostrils with delicate white hands to disperse the fetor of the dhow.
Kishr was brought; we sipped it and waited, while the notables summed us up slyly and caressed the jewelled hilts of their daggers, then at a sign from their leader the interpreter posed a direct question. Where were the articles we had brought? His employers were ready to inspect them.
Articles? There seemed to be some mistake. We had brought no articles but our personal baggage. A muttered conversation followed between the four men, and the interpreter tried again. The articles ordered by His Majesty, he insisted, for which a price had already been agreed, payment to be made as stipulated in golden sovereigns.
Now it was clear enough that we were the victims of a terrible confusion. The Yemeni had expected a cargo of arms, and the permission we had received to go to Hodeida had been intended for someone quite different. The harbour-master"s face became clouded with coldness and suspicion. Further questioning by the interpreter had produced no motive to justify our presence there. We had no machine-guns for sale, we had shown no interest in hides or coffee. We desired to exploit no mines. What, then, did we want?
The notables and their interpreter rose to their feet, unfolding their bodies with the suppleness of cats. They pressed our hands and, drawing folds of lawn with gestures of exclusion across their faces, turned away. The slaves who had been swimming with a vigorous dog-paddle round the dhow struck out for their boat, clambered in and were ready with the oars.
We knew that we should never enter the Yemen.
Never, to sum up, was a journey richer in experience, and the fact that the avowed object of the expedition remained unfulfilled was of little importance, because such was the scope of power of Ladislas" imagination that he wrote a fairly convincing account of his adventures in the Yemen all the same (The Riddle of Arabia, London, 1939). For more than two months we had lived in the dazzling simplicities of the Middle Ages, and I had learned to do without all those things that distinguished modern times from the long past. In addition I was forced into an encounter with Arabic, filled immediately with a respect verging upon awe for the richness and subtlety of its vocabulary and the brilliant mathematics of its grammatical construction. The form spoken in Aden was rustic and deformed and sullied with many intrusions, yet it awoke the desire for a closer acquaintance. I came back with a great collection of words with no currency in any other Arab country. In an attempt to remedy this and introduce some order into confusion I began a course at the School of Oriental Studies, always realizing that there would never be time enough to explore more than a corner of this vast linguistic tapestry.
Chapter Twelve.
IN MY ABSENCE ERNESTINA had been involved in some mysterious accident which had left the slightest possible change in her facial appearance, and a white scar across the septum of the nose just above the curve of the upper lip. Something in her spirit had changed, too. There was a slight scar there as well, which I could only hope would soon disappear. Florence, Franco"s widow, still an occasional visitor to Gordon Street and an eager imparter of ill-tidings, was happy to suggest to me that she had been knocked down by a bus in a suicide attempt. It was significant that all reference to the small evidence of physical mishap was scrupulously avoided in the Corvaja household. I had long since been trained never to ask a potentially embarra.s.sing question.
It was a time of some stress for the Corvajas as a whole. Eugene had gone off to the Spanish Civil War to drive an ambulance on the Republican side, which seemed doomed to defeat, and after the success of the Corvaja parents" return to Italy something had gone wrong with their plans for further visits which might have led in the end to a permanent move back to Sicily. One night, a month or two after the trip to Rome, the doorbell had rung and Ernesto"s agent, Di Luca, who had come hot-foot from Palermo, was on the doorstep. Di Luca, with his stained eyes, his small, wistful face, and the arch-conspirator"s high-crowned black hat, was always the carrier of weighty news. He spoke in the thickest Sicilian dialect, of which I was only ever to understand a single word sangue (blood), when at the time of our first meeting he kissed my hand and mumbled a conventional formula of allegiance. All Ernesto said on this occasion, after he had left, was, "I have changed my plans." The Corvajas, too, had watched Mussolini"s badly-trained and ill-armed legions on the march again, and from conversations with such leading fascists as Count Giordano they were sure that war was coming and that Italy would be dragged in.
Ernestina"s loss of satisfaction with life was symbolized by an increasing obsession with comedy in all its forms. Like so many in those days she had made a brief incursion into psycho-a.n.a.lysis, been a.s.sured by the a.n.a.lyst that she was without creative power, and been recommended to accept life as a spectacle. Now she was more isolated than ever, because a close friendship of many years" standing had come to an end. The friend, an Anglo-Indian girl, had moved into Gordon Street, being welcomed by the Corvajas as another daughter. Now Ernestina discovered that her friend had had a longstanding relationship, kept secret from her, with an elderly lover. It was a deception she was unable to tolerate, and although such were the rules of Sicilian hospitality that the ex-friend continued to live under her parents" roof, the pair no longer spoke to each other.
The spring of 1939 came, and with it I made my brief incursion into the world of serious motor-racing. Between us my friend Arthur Baron and I had bought a wreck of the Bugatti in which Mervyn White had been killed in the Ulster TT. This was a Type 51 and a celebrated car, for, driving it, Earl Howe had for a short time held the Brooklands lap record of 136 m.p.h. Arthur rebuilt the car with certain improvements and we entered it at the opening meeting at Brooklands on 17 March.
The car had performed excellently in minor events throughout the 1938 season, but on the day of my Brooklands debut the weather was bad, with mist and rain, and poor visibility, and I lacked the experience to handle an extremely powerful car in these conditions. On the second lap of the mountain circuit, I skidded, struck a sand bank, and nearly went over the top of the banking - an eventuality which, as far as I know, no one ever survived. Recovering, but going too fast, I was faced by the anarchy of several cars completely out of control at the fork ahead, and when I applied the brakes I spun the car several times before stalling the engine and coming to a standstill.
We consoled ourselves with a.s.surances of the valuable experience gained. The truck, the car and the weather had each taught us lessons. Unfortunately they were lessons from which we were destined never to profit. This was the end of car-racing for us, when it had hardly begun. Very soon Brooklands was to put on its wartime camouflage, and when it emerged it was a race track no longer. I never sat at the wheel of a Bugatti again.
Now Ernestina was seized by a desire to go to Cuba, where a friend of her Spanish schooldays had taken refuge to escape the Civil War. They exchanged excited letters, and the friend begged her to come out. I waited for this mood to pa.s.s but in vain. Ernestina read everything she could lay her hands upon about the promised land, and her obsession became steadily more acute.
She was having treatment for nervous tension. "Humour her," the doctor said knowingly. "If you can raise the wind, go. My uncle used to be a ship"s doctor, and he was there once. It"s a weird sort of disease-ridden hole. Probably change her mind when she sees it. Get it out of her system."
It took some months to get together the necessary cash, then in July 1939 we were off by third-cla.s.s pa.s.sage to New York. All the New Yorkers were convinced that war was now inevitable, and many wore large badges of the electioneering kind, that said "KEEP AMERICA OUT". So universal was this lack of enthusiasm in the United States for embroilment in European affairs that the stewards on the Grace Line boat we took down to Havana admonished us, as English, on the dangerous likely outcome of British aggression. We entered Havana harbour, and suddenly all was forgotten. This was a different planet.
A norther, lifting the sea, had thrown a great curtain of spindrift over the city"s faade, over the bay"s curve of lean houses, granite-grey, pink, coral, pistachio as their owners had painted them in the colour of whichever political party they supported. Moon-faced negroes with dislocated joints were dancing down the Malecn, in and out and around the long cannon pointed out to sea. Music from drums banged at us from all sides as our carriage rattled through the streets. An altar with a black-faced madonna rocked on the seat at the driver"s side. He took us to an apartment house of the cheaper sort, where we were asked to wash our feet before we entered. Then the lady of the house brought us sweet, tasteless fruit that stained our lips with indigo, and her son, standing by, played a flute while we ate it.
Much of the day we spent in the Central Park, watching. When we sat on a bench and kept quite still, doves no bigger than sparrows would alight on our arms, even our heads, in the search for crumbs. A bus rumbled by, every one of its pa.s.sengers wearing an animal mask. An official hero of some old revolution, as a label he wore proclaimed, raised his c.o.c.ked hat as he pa.s.sed. A family dressed as if for a wedding escorted a manacled lunatic on a day-pa.s.s from the madhouse. Smoke spiralled everywhere from the finest of all cigars, and above us in the trees at least a thousand canaries, released to bring song to the city, twittered and chirped. Some time that afternoon I heard a sound recognizable only from American gangster films, the unmistakable heavy, slugging rattle of a Thompson sub-machine-gun. Following the crowd movement, we came upon three men in tattered clothing sprawled in their blood on a perfectly kept and weeded path. Their story was announced without excitement in the evening newspapers. There was an election on, they had agreed to sell their votes for a dollar apiece, then gone back on their bargain and demanded one twenty-five. For this, pour encourager les autres, a politician had killed them.
After this we stayed for a while with Ernestina"s friends, the Castaos, in the new Vedado suburb. They were fascists living in Santander where Ernestina had been in school, and had managed to escape from this staunchly Republican town within days of the outbreak of the war. Now, following the Nationalist victory, they were making their plans for a return. In the meanwhile they enjoyed life in Havana, and had become hangers-on at "The Palace", the name by which Batista"s ornate villa was generally known. At this time Fulgencio Batista - for some years the real ruler of the country - was at the height of his popularity, the idol of the crowds. The worst severity he had so far committed was to have a magazine editor who opposed him thoroughly dosed with castor oil, and it was only in later life that he became addicted to murder and canasta. The Castaos were overjoyed to have been invited to a party at which Batista and his guests retired after dinner to listen to attacks on his character, which always greatly amused him, made by a communist radio station he never interfered with in the slightest way.