Love is Where it Falls E-Book

Simon Callow

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 332

Beschreibung

Simon Callow's candid and moving memoir of his passionate friendship with legendary literary agent Peggy Ramsay. 'This extraordinary memoir brilliantly evokes one of the most formidable and influential figures in recent British cultural history, Peggy Ramsay, muse, patron and scourge of the post-Look Back in Anger generation... Those of us who loved her will be astonished by the vivid accuracy of Simon Callow's portrait; but even those ignorant of her existence will surely be touched, fascinated and challenged' Christopher Hampton, Sunday Times 'This is the story of an unusual love affair - between a writer and his agent... Callow has allowed Peggy to play the leading role in this book and she emerges triumphantly: perceptive, funny, unexpected and passionately devoted to the truth about the art she loved the most' John Mortimer, Observer 'Exquisite... Perhaps the best theatrical memoir of our day' David Hare

Leseprobe

Simon Callow

Love isWhere it Falls

An Account of a Passionate Friendship

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

We have not begun to liveuntil we conceive of life as a tragedy

William Butler Yeats

This book is dedicated to J., B. and M.,in the name of love

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Part Two

13

14

15

16

17

18

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

And he went back to meet the fox.

‘Goodbye,’ he said.

‘Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’

‘What is essential is invisible to the eye,’ the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

‘It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.’

‘It is the time I have wasted for my rose – ’ said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

‘Men have forgotten this truth,’ said the fox. ‘But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . . ’

‘I am responsible for my rose,’ the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

From The Little Princeby Antoine de St-Exupérytranslated by Katharine Woods

Nothing I have written has been more directly personal than the present book. It passed through many drafts before reaching its final form, and in order to achieve anything like an objective view of it, friends – a small army of them – have been bombarded with successive versions. Their reactions have played a crucial part in shaping the book, and I thank them all deeply, with particular gratitude to David Hare, Martin Sherman, Peter Gaitens, Angus Mackay and Ann Mitchell. I should also like to thank Nick Hern, editor, publisher and friend, for equal quantities of patience, encouragement and perception during the book’s seemingly interminable evolution, and Maggie Hanbury, my agent, for her entirely correct conviction at a crucial point that there was a ways yet to go.

S.C.

Part One

1

Somewhere in a safe in a room in a solicitor’s office in London is a small urn, containing the ashes of a remarkable woman: Peggy Ramsay, the most famous play agent of her time. It is nearly seven years since she died, and I have still not summoned up the courage to do what she asked me to do: to take her ashes to the cemetery of San Michele in Venice and scatter them there. Why can I not do this simple thing for her?

*

It was a sunny summer’s morning in 1980 when for the first time I ascended the spindly staircase, festooned with posters of theatrical triumphs past, that led to Margaret Ramsay Ltd, in Goodwin’s Court, off St Martin’s Lane, in the centre of the West End of London. I had come to collect a copy of a play in which I had acted a couple of years before, in the theatre, and which I now hoped to persuade the BBC to do on television. Straight ahead of me, at the top of three flights of stairs, was the door with the agency’s name on it, under several layers of murky varnish. The last thing I expected or wanted to do was to talk to Peggy Ramsay herself, but when I opened the door, there she unmistakably was, sitting at a desk – or rather on one – as she flicked through a script, almost hitting the pages in her impatience to make them turn quicker. Her skirt was drifting up round the middle of her thighs to reveal knee-high stockings. Hearing me enter, she looked up with an expression which seemed to mingle surprise, amusement and challenge, as if she’d been expecting me but had rather doubted I’d have the courage to come. It was a curiously sexy look.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m – ’

‘I know exactly who you are, dear,’ she said. ‘Tell me,’ she continued, as if resuming a conversation rather than beginning one, ‘do you think Ayckbourn will ever write a reallyGOOD play?’

‘It’s an interesting question,’ I replied nervously, slightly inhibited by the fact that I was at that moment appearing in a play by the author under discussion, and that he was by far the most successful client of the woman asking the question. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, calling over her shoulder for ‘tea and kike’ to one of the young women in the office, as she ushered me into what was evidently her private office. Adjusting and readjusting her skirt – a flowery item, beige, silk and diaphanous – she kicked off her shoes and seated herself at her desk, while I settled down on the sofa.

‘Ah, that sofa . . . ’ she murmured, mysteriously, with many a nod and a smile, as she absent-mindedly combed her fine golden hair. The room had an air of glamorous chaos about it, half work-place, half boudoir. There were shelves and shelves of scripts right up to the ceiling, their authors’ names boldly inscribed in red down the spine: in one quick glance I saw Adamov, Bond, Churchill, Hampton, Hare, Rudkin. There were books, in great tottering piles; awards, both framed and in statuette form; posters (all of Orton, Nichols in Flemish, Mortimer on Broadway); plants everywhere, trailing unchecked; discarded knee-high stockings, scarves, hairbrushes, makeup bags, mirrors and hats: huge, wide-brimmed, ribbon-toting hats, four or five of them, draped over the furniture. The air was headily fragrant, confirming the room’s overpoweringly feminine aura.

In the midst of it all was Peggy, clearly the source of both the glamour and the chaos. She was now answering the telephone in a startlingly salty manner. ‘Well, you’ll just have to tell them to fuck off, dear,’ she was saying to one caller, ‘I shall tell Merrick that we mustHAVE a million’ to another. ‘But your play’s noGOOD, dear,’ she cried, to a third, informing me in an entirely audible aside ‘It’s Bolt; I’m telling him his play’s no good,’ then informing him, ‘I’ve got Simon Callow here and I’m telling him your play’s no good.’ Whatever his response was, it made her chuckle richly. ‘Well it isn’t, dear, is it?’ There were more calls, all rapidly despatched; to my astonishment, she seemed to think that talking to me and, even more surprising, listening to me, was more important than the day-to-day business of running the most successful play agency in the country, perhaps the world. She dismissed that in a phrase. ‘The word agent,’ she said, ‘is the most disgusting word in the English language.’

Names flew about the room, resonant, legendary, as the conversation got under way. She was on, not first but – so much more intimate – last-name terms with them all: Lean, Ionesco, Miller; nor was she confined to the living, or those whom she might have known personally: Proust, Cocteau, Rilke, were all swept up in the torrent of allusion and anecdote. It was immediately evident that she judged her clients, and herself, by direct comparison with the great dead. This gave the conversation uncommon breadth; but it was the least of what made the meeting extraordinary.

The overwhelming impression was of the airy, fiery presence of the woman herself. She was never still, not for a second, but there was nothing restless about her. She seemed rather to be performing a moto perpetuo, choreographed by some innovative genius into the physical representation of a dancing mind. Her long-fingered hands fluttered, her hair flew out of control, her slight frame drew itself up and up as if she were preparing for a high dive, then would suddenly flop down till she was almost horizontal in her chair, arms stretched out, legs shockingly wide apart, nether regions barely concealed by whichever small part of her transparent skirt was theoretically supposed to be covering her. Sometimes, to make a point, she would reach for a book or a script, wrap her fist round the arm of her spectacles, then whisk them off, thrusting her face flush up against the page. When she’d read what it was she was looking for, she’d unceremoniously throw the book or script down and shove her spectacles back onto her face. Even this alarming procedure was somehow gracefully effected.

The incessancy of movement was complemented by a voice as beautiful and expressive as any actress might hope to possess: perfectly modulated, feathery light and caressing, then suddenly rough and emphatic, but never when you expected it. Harsh things were said beautifully, beautiful things harshly; four-letter words were deployed like jewels. ‘I always thought,’ she said, liltingly, ‘how touching it was that when Ken and Joe couldn’t find anyone else to fuck, they would fuck each other.’ Her vowels bore the very slightest trace of her native South Africa, which added a touch of the exotic, more a colour than a sound. Conversational life was made even more exciting with the appearance of an occasional hole in the fabric of her talk. A word would suddenly elude her, and she would search furiously for it. The oddity was that while hundreds of unerringly chosen words in several languages, evidence of the widest possible literary culture, would flow past with seamless elegance, there would be a sudden hiatus: ‘so I put the book on the – the – what do you call that thing?’ ‘What thing, Peggy? What sort of thing?’ ‘You know perfectly well: the thing you use when you want to put other things on it.’ ‘Dumb waiter? Sideboard?’ ‘Ya cha-cha-cha,’ she would cry, dismissively. ‘Trolley, Peggy?’ A look of withering contempt. And then, in desperation, one would say, ‘Table?’ ‘Table. Exactly.’ And we were off again. This could apply equally to proper names; again, hardly the ones you’d expect, after disquisitions on Jean-Jacques Bertrand and Montherlant, laced with citations of large slices of Franz Werfel, all perfectly attributed. ‘I first met Schneider because he’d done the American première of Waiting for Godot and he wanted to meet . . . he wanted to meet . . . ’ (triumphantly) ‘whoever it was that wrote it.’

She had a characteristic method of phrasing which bore some resemblance to Queen Victoria’s epistolary manner. Words were swooped on and singled out for special attention. Her style was essentially musical: a long legato line in the main body of the sentence, and then the crucial words drawn out in a deeper tone, accompanied by noddings of the head and downward floating motions of the hands: ‘the important thing in life is to do whatever you want but then . . . always . . . to pick up . . .THE BILL.’ The phrase would then hang in the air for silent moments while you both contemplated its majestic truthfulness.

Life, and its handmaiden, Art, were her topics, even on this first impromptu meeting. She fiercely announced their paradoxical twin demands: on the one hand, discipline, industry, and solitude; on the other, a life lived to the hilt, mentally, physically, above all emotionally. Between these two poles, in either art or life, there was, as far as she was concerned, nothing whatever of the slightest value. Marriage, friendship, parties, pastimes: all fruitless and destructive, she insisted. Independence, from people or from things, was the essential: ‘expect nothing, and everything becomes a bonus.’ Whereupon, ever-surprising, she suddenly informed me, having discovered that I had had my start in the theatre in the Box Office, ‘of course, the Box Office is the only truly romantic part of the theatre.’ And she meant it: she described the excitement of doing a deal, the thrill of watching the money come in; she had, she told me, a kind of Midas touch, and loved playing the Stock Exchange, for which she showed some talent. Clearly though, this was a holiday from the serious business of reminding authors of their sacred obligations, to Art and to Life.

Every word that came out of her mouth that day was completely unexpected, as unforeseen as our meeting. My jaw hung open most of the time, when, that is, I wasn’t roaring with laughter, or suddenly moved almost to tears to find someone who spoke so unashamedly and with such hard-edged unsentimental eloquence about art, its power and its demands. It was my own view entirely, as was her view of life itself. Agony or ecstasy, I, at the age of 30, thought, and to hell with the bits in between; and so did she at what I later discovered to be 70, though the evidence of my eyes would have rejected that figure, had I been told it, as preposterous. At this first meeting we spurred each other on higher and higher with great thoughts and terrible truths until we finally fell silent, having completely exhausted ourselves. I got up to go and we shook hands, oddly, awkwardly. She sat at her desk, combing her hair and repairing her lipstick as I left the office. Going back through the reception area to pick up the script which I dimly remembered had been the occasion of my being there at all, I caught the eyes of the secretaries and blushed. It was as if Peggy and I had been making love.

2

As I walked away from the office, dazed and exhilarated, back down the perilous staircase, past the announcements of Bond in Oslo and Hare in Bochum, I laughed out loud at the improbability of what had just happened. My eagerness to avoid meeting her when I had first entered the office had been founded on a long-distance brush we’d had some years before, an incident she seemed now, to my great relief, to have totally forgotten. The play I had collected that day was Martin Sherman’s Passing By, and it was another play by the same author, Bent, which had been the cause of the incident. I had been a play-reader for the Royal Court Theatre at the time; Max Stafford-Clark, then running the place, had asked if I had read any new plays I thought worth doing. I recommended Bent, which Martin had shown me as soon as he had written it. Max wanted to see a copy; Peggy’s office apparently had none. Martin being out the country at the time, I helpfully taxied at top speed what appeared to be the only copy of the play in London from Shepherd’s Bush, where it was, to the theatre in Sloane Square.

The moment this coup of mine was reported to Peggy, she let off a broadside to Martin of such vigour that he and I were both stunned into silence, an extraordinarily fierce display of professional territorialism on the part of the woman who had just told me that agent was the most disgusting world in the English language. ‘Some actor,’ she wired him, ‘is interfering with the agency’s work. Stop him immediately, or consider yourself unrepresented.’ At Martin’s understandably urgent request, I desisted. The play was put on some while later (at the Royal Court Theatre, in fact, as it happens) to enormous acclaim, but the incident had given me a healthy respect for her formidable fire-breathing authority, even at long distance.

This fierce exchange had not prepared me in the least for my recent encounter at Goodwin’s Court. This was no Wagnerian dragon, far from it. Beauty, fire, passion, sex, brilliance, elegance, charm and a sort of impersonal, egoless force of character, were the qualities that came to mind. Her sheer animation, coupled with the lightest, most graceful of touches, was the single most striking impression, hard to convey except by extravagant simile: a fire-breathing butterfly? A cross between a dolphin and a humming-bird? I felt as if I had met a great figure of the past, a Mme de Sévigné or a Harriet Martineau. Not that there was anything old-fashioned about Peggy, unless you counted her unbreakable conviction that nothing was more important or more powerful than art. In every regard, she seemed years younger than I in her tastes and fascinations.

There was no denying that she was eccentric. Reporting that first encounter, I amused myself, and others, by saying that Peggy had behaved like a madwoman suffering from the delusion that she was the greatest play agent in the world.

What I actually thought was that I’d met someone touched by genius.

I found out everything that I could about her, which was not a great deal; most of it was contradictory. There were stories without punch-lines, vague rumours of liaisons with Ionesco, with Adamov, with Beckett; someone thought she’d once been an actress, someone else that she’d been a singer. There was a story about her walking out on her husband the moment he and she arrived in London from South Africa. Her age was shrouded in mystery; Christopher Hampton claimed that a secretary who had accidentally found it out when entrusted with her passport had shortly after drowned in mysterious circumstances, taking her secret with her to a watery grave. What was not in doubt was her unique contribution to the British Theatre: she seemed to represent every living playwright of any importance except, I noted with curiosity, those whose names ended in -er: Shaffer, Pinter, Wesker. On examination, in fact, there were plenty of distinguished writers whom she didn’t represent (Stoppard, Bennett and Osborne among them); but every agent in London acknowledged her as their doyenne and a model of what an agent might be: putting lead into her writers’ pencils and iron into their souls, money in their purses and sometimes roofs over their heads; giving courage to timid producers and advice to uncertain directors. She had, above all, a positively papal reputation for being right. It was very daunting and deeply intriguing.

Shortly after our meeting at Goodwin’s Court, I received a letter from her, the first of many in an unbroken flow that only stopped with her death some eleven years later. In this first, almost formal, letter she suggested a play that she thought might interest me, a French piece in which a pig addresses the audience at some length before being taken to the abattoir. It was the first occasion that Peggy attempted to do something for me, also the first of many, many such attempts. I was still playing at the National Theatre in repertory, in Amadeus, As You Like It, Galileo (translated by Peggy’s client Howard Brenton) and Sisterly Feelings (by Peggy’s client Alan Ayckbourn), and I was beginning to do a series of pre-show Platform Performances in which I introduced and performed Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a new sequence devised by Dr John Padel, building up to the extraordinary occasion one summer’s afternoon when I would perform all 154 in the Olivier auditorium. I was at the theatre day and night.

One evening quite soon after my first meeting with Peggy I arrived at the theatre to find the stage door staff in a state of some excitement: a crate of vintage wines from Fortnum and Mason had been delivered, simply labelled ‘National Theatre Stage Door’. No one knew who it was for or from whom it had come. In the absence of a legitimate claimant, the stage door keepers were already in their mind’s eyes knocking it back themselves; eventually, to their chagrin, the National’s press department placed a piece about the phantom plonk in the Londoner’s Diary of the Evening Standard. The next day Peggy Ramsay’s office called the National with the information that it was she who had sent it, and that the intended recipient was me. I phoned to thank her. She was amazed that neither I nor anyone else had realised that the wine was for me. She had, she said, been walking down Piccadilly, musing on the fact that it was Molière’s birthday and that not a single actor in England would know, much less care. Musing on this sad reality, it had suddenly struck her that, yes, there was an actor in England who would know and care: me. And so she had gone into Fortnum’s and ordered the wine and had it sent to me, to celebrate, with my actor friends, the great play-wright’s birthday. I could hardly admit that my ignorance of the anniversary was quite as great as, if not greater than, that of every other actor in England, so instead I spoke passionately about Molière and his work (this at least was not a fraud) and suggested, en passant, that she might like to attend a performance of the Shakespeare Sonnets the following week.

The letter she sent me after that performance was quite different from the first one she had written me, quite unlike any letter anyone had ever written me. She had written to Peter Hall, she told me, telling him that I was his rose and that he must look after me. ‘In case you don’t know the St Exupéry book Le Petit Prince,’ she wrote, ‘the little Prince finds a rose and tends it, and defends it from the wind, and from other dangers, but he complains that it’s a strain, and that, after all, his rose is only one of many roses. The storyteller then speaks very firmly to the little Prince and says that because he has cared for it and protected it, it is his rose, and not like any other, and that it is because he has taken so much trouble that the rose is so important, and that he is therefore responsible for it.’ Then she added: ‘It’s really all about love,’ and continued, characteristically, but inaccurately, ‘Exupéry was a homosexual, and had, I suppose, these hidden passions for the ‘forbidden’ . . . he is talking about the responsibility of loving, even if it is unrequited.’ Somewhat unexpectedly she added: ‘It is appropriate to the ‘pure’ feeling P Hall has for you and I’m telling him he is responsible for you!’ She promised to send me a recording Gérard Philippe had made of Le Petit Prince, and finally signed off, ‘The understanding and passion of your performance was an overwhelming experience. One began by listening to the sonnets, and then one became part of Shakespeare in the greatest depths. Yours Peggy R’. A day later she wrote to me ‘If you’ve now read the English Petit Prince (the tape is being made for you), didn’t you love the Fox saying that the PP should warn him when he was coming “so that he could prepare his heart”.’ Then she added, ‘This reminds me of Ionesco, whose wife didn’t like him spending much time in my company. After we’d spent an afternoon together and he was preparing to face the dreaded Rosica he turned to me anxiously and said, “Are my eyes too bright?”– “est-ce que mes yeux brillent trop?’’’

This letter came accompanied by three pages of handwritten quotations, of which the most striking was a passage from Maupassant: ‘We must feel, that is everything. We must feel as a brute beast, filled with nerves, feels, and knows that it has felt, and knows that each feeling shakes it like an earthquake. But we must not say that we have been so shaken. At the most, we can let it be known to a few people who will respect the confidence.’ Almost equally arresting was another quotation, from Gertrude Stein: ‘It is inevitable that when one has great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.’ Peggy’s next letter, a day later, equally full of intense expression, ended ‘Yesterday’s Shakespeare reading scorched me like a forest fire, and I am finding it hard to recover.’

‘Dear, dear, dear Simon,’ her next letter began, ‘you have a temperament which vibrates at the fall of a leaf and I seriously question if we should continue to correspond in case we disturb one another. The trouble is that your performance if anything throws out a secret. But what the secret is, one does not know: (This secret whispered to an audience is the mark of the great actor.) I have a kind of ESP and catch reverberations which are not usually heard (like a dog catches notes too high for the human ear). Also my Slav blood compels me to write letters one ought NOT to (like Tatiana in Onegin) and I should know better.’ Astonished and humbled, I realised that the extraordinary woman I was coming to know had experienced a coup de foudre. She had fallen in love with me, completely and instantaneously. Life was imitating art; the Sonnets, after all, are precisely about being taken over by an overpowering love for someone who remains essentially unknown. While I was working on them I had been in the throes of just such an emotion myself, and had been shaken to the core by my work on them. In rehearsal I had sometimes been unable to continue without breaking down. Even in performance, I would sometimes be overwhelmed by waves of feeling which perhaps distorted the meaning of the poems but which, I was convinced, were somehow true to the poet’s experience. It was this, I had no doubt, this personal engagement of mine with the experience behind the poems, which had unerringly communicated itself to Peggy.

It was because of the relationship that had so devastated me during my work on the Sonnets that I knew with such certainty what had happened. It had happened to me more than once in my life, the love which suddenly arrives, like a god in a chariot, but for once, this time, when I had fallen passionately in love with a young Turkish-Egyptian film-maker, exquisitely graceful and mysteriously elusive, called Aziz Yehia, he had, by what seemed to me the most miraculous good fortune, fallen in love with me, too.

He was an exquisite individual in many ways, perfect in his manners, acquired in the best Swiss schools and on the international circuit of the dispossessed Turkish and Egyptian haute bourgeoisie, beautiful to behold, bearing more than a passing resemblance to the young Alain Delon, slight, olive-skinned, brown-eyed and long-lashed, seductive in a feminine but not in the least effeminate way. He was also brilliantly eloquent in the manner of the brightest products of the French educational system: full of paradox, allusion and witty analysis, by turn sententious, semiotic and structuralist, volubly quoting Lacan, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss. In all of these ways, he left me far behind; I thought him a bit of a genius. He was also, as I was just beginning properly to understand, frighteningly aware of a dark emptiness at his centre, a void, a block, a paralysis of the soul, which drove him across ever-wider extremes of emotional experience in search of a sense of personal reality that grew more and more elusive. Highs got higher and lows got lower, until what seemed at first like a perfectly normal oscillation of spirits was unmistakably, even to a layman, and an infatuated one at that, manic depression. Even now, fairly close to the beginning of our time together, there were unexpected losses of centre, as if he had suddenly forfeited all sense of the parameters of his personality. There would be terrible conversational misjudgements, even physical solecisms, a hand too intimately applied, or too roughly. Under the influence of his preferred tipple, the fiercely strong Carlsberg Special Brew lager (he had no taste for wine or spirits), he could become quite vulgar or silly beyond belief, in curious contrast to the charm of his person, the polish of his manners, and the sophistication of his wit. I saw but dismissed these occasional and brief aberrations. To know him was to enter what was for me a strange and thrilling new universe, different from anything I had ever known. It was meat and drink, it was opera and it was a three-volume novel. I could scarcely believe that it was happening to me.

Our relationship had been going on for three overwhelming months when I met Peggy. I wanted to come clean about it straight away, but first she and I had to meet again, and take stock of our new relationship. Things had been moving forward between us with alarming speed. We were already becoming prolific correspondents, and now began to have epic telephone conversations, generally during the long hours when I was sitting in my dressing room between my scenes in Galileo. I became more and more fascinated by the beauty of her voice, and one day I told her so. The remark stopped her dead. I knew that my simple compliment had pierced her to the core. For the most part, we talked of plays, exhibitions, concerts. She was a great purveyor of high level literary gossip, much of it concerning the dead. During one of these conversations, I suggested casually that it would be nice to have supper one evening. She offered to cook for me; I accepted, eagerly.

Some time the following week, late on a balmy May night, I went on to her place after my show, and rang the bell of the basement flat in Redcliffe Square with a nervousness which mingled excitement and anxiety. I wanted to know everything I could about this remarkable woman. I had always had a rapport with women of a certain age (my grandmothers had been powerful and formative figures in my childhood), but with Peggy I felt a directness of communication that was different from any such relationship in the past, or maybe from any relationship at all. It was almost frighteningly intimate, frighteningly soon. The difference in our circumstances – our ages, our positions in the world – seemed not to matter at all, but I had no model, no framework for what was developing so quickly between us. Evidently there was no question, with this woman, of holding back; it must be all or nothing. There could be no choice but to let it happen: let the dice fall where they may. I rang again; eventually the door opened.

I hope Peggy didn’t hear my gasp. She had transformed herself into a young woman, her hair newly coiffed, her silk housecoat fluttering about her. Underneath was very little indeed, only a slip through which the outline of her shapely breasts was plainly visible. On it she had pinned an exotic flower, a gardenia or perhaps an orchid. The smell of this flower enveloped us both as I stooped to peck her cheek. When I did, she started to shake. She tore herself away, talking torrentially, babbling almost, asking questions but not waiting for replies, wafting me down the hall, which, like most of the rest of the flat, was plunged in darkness apart from a few strategically-placed candles, one of which she swept up to light the way. She was describing the flat, waving and gesturing with her candle-hand, hot wax flying in all directions. She had no shoes on, nor was she wearing her spectacles, which led to occasional collisions with furniture, but, bobbing and ducking and weaving, she managed to gather up quantities of food – chicken, ham, pâté, cheese, salad, dressing, snatching up bottles of wine as she went – and steered us into the garden. This was a vision in itself. With a hundred candles in small jars placed across the flowerbeds, she had transformed what I took to be a small nondescript space into a shimmering grotto. She produced blankets and we sat down for our midnight picnic. She was an anxious hostess, apologising for the food, the blankets, the garden. I told her that she looked beautiful. So she did, trembling with life and emotion, everything fluttering: hands, gown, heart. My praise again pierced her, seemed almost to hurt her, to give her physical pain. She took breaths in great gusts. I don’t know what we spoke about; nothing much, I think; the great conversations came later. Here, on this summer night, I was simply astonished to be sitting in this chimerical grotto, with this fragile, exotic creature fuelled by a sort of helium compounded of emotion and strong physical need.

A black cat suddenly appeared from on high, and sauntered over to partake of a little light collation. Peggy addressed it in cat language: ‘Come-eelong, come-eelong, wah wah wah. This is Button,’ she told me, ‘the little Button. I used to think that Button was a man. But he’s not. He’s a woman. When I found out that he was a woman, I felt filled with pity for her.’

The evening went on into the small hours. I could see no need for it to end at all, but finally, out of convention, took my leave. When I kissed her good-night, she shook again, and then let out a tremendous sigh. Almost pushing me out of the flat, she shut the door abruptly. I had the impression, as I walked home, that she felt that she had made a fool of herself. She hadn’t. She had simply presented herself in the most vulnerable way she possibly could have done. Gone was the scourge of lazy writers, gone the searching editor, gone the power-broker, gone the celebrated lover. In their place was a young belle on her first serious assignation, or Tatiana, as she herself had suggested in her letter, receiving Onegin. I only admired her the more for that, loved her for it, in fact. I knew then that I loved her. I did not desire her, as she must have known. I suspect that this al fresco evening had been in some way an unconscious attempt at seduction, regardless of the impossibility of the situation. Though our love grew stronger and stronger, she never ever attempted anything like it again. This evening was, I believe, a farewell to seduction for her, she who must have been the most potent seducer imaginable.

I had also failed to tell her about Aziz.

3

That night, as we sat having our little souper sur l’herbe, Peggy’s client David Mercer died in Israel, of a heart attack. His death winded her for a moment, though she thought it was all for the best. He was finished as a writer, she said, neutrally; what else was there to live for? She later told me about the tribute to him performed at the Aldwych Theatre, and how upset everybody had been. She thought that a wholly inappropriate response, although she took time to console David Warner, one of Mercer’s best interpreters. ‘Poor little Warner,’ she said. ‘He was distracted with grief. It took me ten minutes to calm him up.’ Calming up would be Peggy’s way.

We continued to correspond, on an almost daily basis, and she became franker in her expression of her feelings. ‘May I touch on my feeling for you? It’s the opposite of Aschenbach, who saw Tadziu as the bearer of death. I see you coming quickly into a room (or onto a stage), your hair is blowing outward, and you are talking and laughing and I am choked with emotion, because what is coming towards me is LIFE.’ In my letters to her, I took it head on; there could be no other way. ‘I’m overwhelmed to think that someone like you can feel that about me,’ I wrote to her. ‘Thank you. I do so passionately believe that the only meaning of life is life, that to live is the deepest obligation we have, and that to help other people live is the greatest achievement. It’s in that light that I see acting, and that alone.’ Then I told her about Aziz.

‘What you say about love,’ I wrote to her, ‘is EXACTLY what I believe. Loving is so much more important than being loved. I only recently understood this, realised that this was my greatest need. I allowed myself to love someone for the first time in four years (as opposed I mean to sexing, which is so easy and so unmemorable) and although he doesn’t love me the way I love him, he allows me to love him with such grace and good will that I don’t mind in the least that it’s not really reciprocated. (I do him an injustice – it is reciprocated, in so far as he can. He has no gift for loving – his gift is for being loved.) As for my feelings for you: I am thrilled that you’ve entered my life. Your vitality and nurturing passion ring such loud bells with me, I feel an extraordinary sense of sympathy between us, and hope to God that we can sustain that most beautiful and elusive thing, a passionate friendship . . . ’

I did not then attempt to describe Aziz to her; I simply registered the depth of my feeling for him. He and I had met some two and a half years before. He had then been involved with a mutual friend, but in the fullness of time, this involvement had come to an end, and I had seized my moment. To my amazement, we had become lovers on our first date and had pursued our romance with increasing fervour. I had been enchanted by him on first sight, captivated by the dark glamour of his looks, dazzled by his conversation, elated by his exotic background. Half-Turkish and half-Egyptian, born in Alexandria, he had escaped with his family to Switzerland at the time of Nasser’s coup. He had graduated brilliantly from the University of Geneva and then, having made a witty, stylish short film on Super-8, he applied to the National Film School in Beaconsfield, and they had accepted him. He had been studying there for the last four years, and had made two very elegant short films for them, one rather Hitchcockian, the other a little Marivaux-like anecdote. He was brilliantly witty in four languages, bewilderingly fluent in structuralist analysis, profoundly immersed in celluloid, and tortured by his relationship with his mother, about whom he spoke freely and amusingly, but with an underlying rage which was almost disturbing. ‘My mother,’ he would say, ‘wears my balls on a brooch.’ I personally was unaware of any absence of balls, but it was nonetheless clear that behind the brilliance, the grace and the vulnerability were some overmastering emotions which made it almost impossible for him to give wholly and freely of himself, however caring and playful he might be. He was sexual but not passionate, loving but not in love. To that extent, our relationship was not without its frustrations, for me at any rate, but it was still the most extraordinary emotional experience of my life so far. Something un-English, un-European, even, in him had had a profoundly liberating effect on me, physically, mentally, emotionally. Frozen oceans within me had melted, and I was often unable to deal with the attendant floods, which sometimes threatened to engulf me. I was a changed man. The very speed of my commitment to Peggy, in fact, would not have been possible without what I had experienced with Aziz.

I did not attempt to convey even a tenth of this when I wrote to her about him. I did nothing but state the bald facts. She replied breezily to my letter. Of course she knew about Aziz, she said – he had been spotted: ‘At the first night of the Brecht a lovely young man was pointed out to