I asked Pauline to leave her husband and come away with me, and though she spent a few days considering the matter, she was finally more flattered than attracted by the proposal. In my heart I couldn’t blame her, though the disappointment did nothing to daunt my love, for I must have known it was inconceivable for her to run away with someone who had no more than an RAF pension to live on.
At the end of September she and her husband left to spend the winter in Malaga. Mike Edmonds was already there, and had written suggesting we take a flat together and share the rent. All in all, this seemed to fit in well with my hopes and intentions.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Since my birthday early in the year, celebrated for the first time with champagne, I was consciously glad of being twenty-five, as if some vital watershed in life had been crossed. Expanding confidence suggested that a more adventurous maturity could not be far off and, no longer (as I wrote in a letter to Ruth) the unblemished blue-eyed young man who had embarked for Menton nearly two years ago, I set out by the overnight boat and arrived in Valencia on 9th October. My luggage in the taxi to the Estacion del Norte was much less bulky: I had sold some of my belongings, given various things away, sent a few items to Ruth, parked the cat with an acquaintance, and left odds and ends for Elizabeth Trocchi to look after until my return to the island, whenever that might be.
The correos train took seventeen hours to travel the 500 kilometres to Granada, and went through such scenery as occasionally kept me from a pocket edition of Cellini’s Autobiography. The pension chosen in Granada stank worse than a brothel, so after one night I moved to a clean place used by students. There were prominent exhortations over the walls of the town for Franco to live for ever, but I spent a few days peacefully roaming the Generalife and Alhambra, guided by plans and text in my Baedeker, while at the same time trying to fight down a heavy cold.
Mike rented a ground-floor flat on the Carreteria, adequate for the two of us, except that a few days after I got there the place was burgled. Mine was the only room from which things were taken, since it was on the street, and though there were bars at the window some clever rat had fished objects out with a long stick while I slept. Apart from three pounds in cash (a real loss, however) I was deprived of my demob mackintosh, smart jacket, trousers, pyjamas, underwear, woollen waistcoat and, worst of all, my pen. There were so many people at the police station notifying similar thefts that I walked out, convinced that Malaga was a city of thieves.
With foresight I had arranged to collect my quarter’s pension in Gibraltar, and one of Mike’s Australian friends drove me through whitewashed picturesque villages joined by the ribbon of an execrable road. The blackmarket exchange rate was several pesetas to the pound more than at a Spanish bank and, undeterred by the prospect of smuggling money over the frontier, I made enough extra cash to buy English tobacco, a pipe, a couple of paperbacks and a new pen.
A better appointed and safer flat on the Calle Mariblanca, for a pound a week each, had five rooms, kitchen and bathroom, the only disadvantage being that with so much street noise it wasn’t always easy to sleep.
During dinner with Pauline and her husband, at their somewhat posher place in the centre of town, I sensed that he knew of our liaison, or at least was justifiably suspicious, so decided that we had to be careful in seeing each other. Pauline agreed, and Mike helpfully vacated the flat whenever a visit from her was possible, which arrangement worked well until her departure.
I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man sent by Ruth, and From Here to Eternity which Mike lent me. Rose Macaulay in Fabled Shore wrote that Richard Ford, author of the famous Hand Book of Spain for the John Murray guide series, had given his opinion that Malaga merited only one day of the traveller’s time, which she herself found to be true. The all-pervading poverty reminded me too forcefully of former days, with so many derelicts and beggars on the streets that I began to feel more threatened than sympathetic. Maybe this was because of my own precarious financial situation, in which it was hard to see far ahead with any sense of security. At times the impulse to go back to England had some appeal, having been away nearly two years, until I realized that there could be no kind of life in a place where one would be expected to have a job.
Cold weather made it difficult to sit in the unheated flat, but in November, after work on a long poem which Trocchi had asked for but later rejected, I began turning ‘The General’s Dilemma’ into a novel. Man Without a Home and The Deserters, returned to me from London, were tried with another firm, which was also to send them back. An English novelist, Charles Chapman-Mortimer, lived in the same building. He was forty-six years old, and had recently won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his book Father Goose, published in 1951. After looking through some of my writings he thought them sufficiently promising to put me in touch with his agent Rosica Colin, which favour was to be particularly helpful.
One night Chapman-Mortimer, Mike and myself went to the gypsy caves outside the town. Frederick Thon, an American playwright, and his wife Harriet also came with us. They had been in Majorca with their two children, and were taking in Malaga as part of a European tour.
Street lights no longer visible, our party stumbled over holes and gullies of a plateau, the black shape of Malaga’s unfinished cathedral looming behind. Coming to a low escarpment Mike shouted someone’s name, a nick of light showed at the cliff face, and we were led to one of many openings.
One compartment housed a white donkey, another a row of sleeping children. The floor was tiled and the walls whitewashed, flame from a lit wick waving in a shallow bowl of oil. The only furniture was a couple of quilt-covered boxes for us to sit on. Dark faces returned our greetings, and uncorked wine soon set everyone singing and dancing — men and women, and even children who came out of their sleeping places at the noise. A humpbacked girl of about fifteen, with large breasts and arms folded on them, leaned against the wall as if she would capsize on moving away. Jokes were made about when an old woman addressed as grandmother was going to die, but she gave back a toothless smile as if to say she would outlive the lot of us.
The wooden door was closed but, with so many people smoking the American cigarettes we had handed out, the chief of the group had to let in some air. Rain drummed down, but we were well protected and dry. In the Civil War both fascists and communists had massacred many gypsies, though now they danced, as did we after a while, stamping and clapping to a guitar, their faces reminding me, in the dim and changing light, of Tamils in Malaya.
In December I finished the 200 pages of The General’s Dilemma, then let it lie while working at various essays for a future book on Spain. I eventually sent the new novel to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, but that too was turned down. Rereading the Book of Nehemiah I for some reason pencilled a mark against the verse: ‘And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me; neither told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem: neither was there any beast with me, save the beast that I rode upon.’