Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (44 page)

Then I was in another bar. It was quieter now. People were settling down to the middle hours of the night. Four men by the counter stood with their heads together, hands resting on one another’s shoulders, intimate, hushed, middle-aged, and oblivious, taking turns to sing the verse of a song. Each one sang in a distant, ghostly falsetto, while the rest bent their heads to the words, and their long jowled faces, intent and listening, were creased in silent pleasure. Such a group, heads joined in an English pub, would have been known to be swapping dirty jokes; and the songs these men were singing were also sex-jokes in a way, but polished by a thousand anonymous poets – stinging rhymes about passion, the decay of powers, seduction, defeat, and death.

I ended that night, my last in Madrid, with a visit to the Bar Chicote – not the prophylactic night-spot it later became for tourists, but a place of unassumingly local indulgence. More like a private room than a public tavern, it had an atmosphere of exhausted eroticism, and the girls sat quietly in the shadows, subdued but glowing, like daughters waiting to run away from home.

The clients included a few priestly old men and a handful of worn-out dandies, all scrupulously dressed and sprawled at their drinks as if the furniture had been fitted round them. On a stool in one corner a fox-like guitarist whistled through his teeth as he played, and there was a diminutive singer, anxious and hungry, who gave sudden little yelping laughs, and who sat, when not singing, with his lips at the ready, folded back round his shining gums.

Having a few pesetas left, I found a table, and soon there was a girl beside me, whispering wooingly in broken English, full of instant charm and lies. I remember the small gypsy face, fine as an Indian dancer’s, and the chaste white buttoned-up blouse. She told me she had a gentleman-friend in America who sent her a hundred dollars a month. ‘But I am a bad girl – Lowry – much too bad.’ She stroked my arm with her purple fingers. ‘Because how romantic I am. How just poetic. I am for nothing but the heart, you know.’ She had summed me up quickly. ‘I love England, Lowry. I love Cardiff and Hartlepool. I would go with you anywhere.’ She ordered more drinks, her head a few inches from mine, energy lighting her face like water. Whispering across her glass: ‘My friend in America, he has four, five children. He sends me their photographs. He won’t come back. How just romantic I am. Lowry, you take me with you. I wouldn’t be bad against you…’

Another drink, and I was imagining this girl barefooted, walking beside me, rolled in my blanket at night. But suddenly there was a racket at the door, followed by one of those theatrical entrances – a minor bullfighter with his court of gypsies. Shouts, embraces, a busy stir at the bar, a yelp of song from the awakened singer. And I was alone again, watching the girl’s empty glass rolling sideways across the table.

I walked back through the streets with a rocking head, thinking simple ironic thoughts. It was long past midnight, almost dawn, and for once Madrid seemed deserted. The posada was closed, but the door opened to my shoulder and cats darted across the yard like lizards.

As I stumbled upstairs a hand touched mine in the darkness and drew me into a jumbled moonlit room. ‘I’ve got your clothes,’ said Concha. She stood close against me, holding my shoulder-blades, and I could smell her peppery flesh. ‘Man,’ she whispered. I swayed on my feet, full of hazy, unthinking dumbness. Somewhere in the room a child called ‘Mama’, and the woman paused to give it a spoonful of jam. Then she took off my boots and helped me to bed. Before she joined me she made the sign of the cross.

Two days later I walked into Toledo, about forty miles to the south, and there the Castilian sun caught up with me at last and struck me down with a twenty-four-hour fever.

I’d found a brilliant white inn just inside the city gate, so dazzling it seemed to be carved from salt, but the bruising impact it made on the eyes soon warned me that something was wrong.

I remember climbing into the town, hugging the narrow shadows and accompanied by rainbow hallucinations, then staggering into a wineshop for a glass of water and dropping unconscious on the floor. When I recovered, I remembered two men carrying me back to the inn and laying me down by a water-trough. Racked with icy heat, I pressed my face to the stone, grateful for the smell of its damp green mould, and dimly aware of the crackle of female voices discussing my poor condition.

They sat in a circle around me, a group of thin old women, pyramids of black against the shimmering walls, carefully keeping their distance but watching me closely with a mixture of concern and exasperation. ‘Ay! .. . It’s his head… He walks without a hat… The foolish… The sad young man…” Meanwhile I was left alone to sweat and sleep, and not even the dogs approached me.

I was still lying out there in the middle of the night, still lying where the men had put me. I could feel the stone of the water-trough against my cheek, and there was a cold white moon overhead. Everybody else was asleep, and the courtyard was empty, but someone had covered me with a sack.

By noon next day the fever suddenly went, leaving me purged and ravenously hungry. The women were back on their chairs, knees spread, hands folded, grouped silently around the walls. Seeing me sit up, one of them brought me some food and told me not to be such a fool in future. The others nodded in chorus, pointing their fingers at the sun and shrinking away in postures of dread. ‘Bad! bad!’ they cried, drawing their scarves across their faces till only their eyes and knuckles were showing.

That evening I was back on the job, playing to the open-air cafes in the Plaza de Zocodover – a sloping square of uneven cobbles which was the town’s main centre. No traffic, no radios – only the sun-down crowds quietly sitting and watching each other, the waiters mostly idle or flicking at flies with slow caressive movements.

I’d not been there long when a special party arrived and made their way to a nearby table – a curiously striking group and immediately noticeable in the ponderous summer twilight. There were four of them: a woman in dazzling white, a tall man wearing a broad black hat, a jaunty young girl with a rose in her hair, followed by a pretty lacy child.

They were clearly not Spanish, yet they had a Spanish air. I thought they might possibly have been Portuguese. The man sat at the table with a distinguished stoop, while his companions arranged themselves gracefully beside him, spreading their shawls on the chairs and beaming round the darkening square as though in a box at the opera. I finished my last tune and began to take a collection, which brought me at last to their table. The woman asked me in French if I was German, and I replied in Spanish that I was English. ‘Ah,’ she smiled. ‘And so am I.’ And she invited me to join them.

The man shifted and coughed. He had a long scorched face and the eyes of a burnt-out eagle. He offered me a strong but shaky hand. ‘Roy Campbell,’ he said. ‘South African poet. Er – reasonably well known in your country.’

His voice was musically hoarse, yet broken and interrupted as though being transmitted on faulty wires, and it seemed to quaver between bursts of sudden belligerence and the most humble of hesitations.

In a series of stuttering phrases he rapidly let it be known that he hated England, that all his friends were English, that English literature was an unburied corpse, that he was in Spain because England had no manhood any more; and was I broke and could he help me at all?

The diatribe was short, all over in a moment, like a quick shuffling of totem-masks. Then with affectionate dignity he introduced his companions, inclining his long broad back to each. Mary, his wife, his small daughter Anna, and their Catalan friend, Amelia.

It was the poet’s saint’s-day, and the party had dressed in his honour and were drinking his health in fizzy pop. Campbell himself drank wine in long shuddering gasps, and suggested I do the same. I was more than satisfied by this encounter, which had come so unexpectedly out of the evening, pleased to have arrived on foot in this foreign city in time to be elected to this poet’s table. All things were as they should be – the artist in exile, generous and defiant in mood, his red eyes glittering like broken glass as the phrases came stumbling forth. Still tense and lightheaded from my recent fever, I felt the glory of the Word around me, and accepted the stature of the man without surprise, imagining all poets to be made like this.

Then Mary Campbell inquired how long I’d been in Toledo, and whether I was on my own. ‘D’you like rissotto?’ she asked, and said she was sure there was more than enough if I cared to go home with them for supper.

The Campbells had rented a house under the wall of the cathedral, in Cardinal Cisneros – a typically bare-fronted place with an elegant patio inside surrounded by a gallery of little rooms.

Supper was served in the patio under the open sky, with several bottles of local wine, and I found myself sitting down to a well-laid table for the first time in almost two months. The young girls were excited and ready to make the most of the feast-day, and they dressed up as gypsies to entertain us – dancing and weaving among the old stone pillars to the fluttering light of candles. Little Anna, who was about five years old, had blue eyes and thick black hair, and she danced like a firefly, floating over the flagstones with a precocious, iridescent skill.

Afterwards, they changed again and acted out a shrill Spanish play – aided by the housemaid dressed up as a hag. The epic was long, in dialect, and devoted to the complications of jealousy, during which Roy and I fell asleep.

When the girls had gone to bed, we woke up again and talked until early morning. Roy also read a few poems in his thick trembling voice, monotonous, yet curiously moving, and nothing could have suited me better at that hour, and at that place and time of my life. I was young, full of wine, and in love with poetry, and was hearing it now from the poet’s mouth. It came out in agony, bruised yet alive, and each line seemed to shake his body. He read some of his shorter poems. ‘Horses on the Camargue’, ‘The Sisters’, ‘Choosing a Mast’, and the words seemed to flare at the nostrils, whinny and thunder, and rise like steam in the air.

Half-dazed with sleep, I felt my eyelids falling, printed with succulent images: sisters called to their horses, naked in the dark, and met them with silken thighs; a rich Zulu nipple plugged the mouth of a child; mares went rolling beneath the hooves of stallions… What had I read till then? – cartloads of Augustan whimsy: this, I felt, was the stuff for me.

Presently he finished reading and began to talk and gossip, swaying to and fro in his chair. He spoke of his friends and enemies, pinning scandals to most of them, boasting of quarrels, feuds, and fights. The scene, as he described it, was of a six-foot South African striding contemptuously among the pygmies. Famous names were set up to be torn apart, somewhat confusing to me at the time – Eliot, A. E. Coppard, Wyndham Lewis, Marie Corelli, Jacob Epstein, T. E. Lawrence, the Sitwells. ‘Osbert Sitwell? – knocked him down in – ah – Charlotte Street. Him and his coronet… Didn’t like Coppard – I kicked his ass. Mary will tell you. That’s the truth now, isn’t it?’

Mary sat listening and saying nothing, cool and white in her dress. In fact it was T. E. Lawrence, he admitted, who had helped to place him as a poet, bringing his first book to the critics’ attention. He was one of the few of his friends for whom he had a good word that night – apart from Augustus John.

The Campbells had first met John, Roy told me, before they were married, when they were living in the south of France, at Martigues – a village on a lagoon near the mouth of the Rhone, full of bad water and drink-crazed fishermen. John had adopted the lovers, as well he might, for they must have been an unusually handsome pair: and had helped, in due course, to arrange their wedding, which took place in the wilderness of the Camargue. It had been a ‘gypsy’ affair, designed like an early John canvas, with caravans, campfires, ceremonial mixings of blood, heavy drinking, and trials of strength, reaching its climax when the couple mounted a couple of horses and galloped away across the midnight plain. (This was a typical Roy fantasy: in fact he met Mary in London, married her soon after, and they spent their honeymoon with the Johns in Dorset. True, there had been a loud ‘gypsy’ party – held in a pub near Parkstone – and later indeed they had gone to live in Martigues.)