Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (45 page)

But John would have picked out the poet and his black-haired girl anywhere as though he himself had created them – Mary, with her violet-eyed Celtic beauty, and Roy the deep-browed giant wildly bearded like a lustier Yeats. This was only a few years back, but trembling Roy, as he talked, became again the hero of Martigues, towering in his strength above the small blue fishermen, their brawling champion at arms, out-sailing, out-rowing, out-drinking them – then spending inexhaustible nights of love.

‘We never grew tired of it, did we, girl? We must have broken half the beds in the town.’

‘Roy – please,’ his wife murmured, touching her lavender lips. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear all that.’

They asked me to stay the night, and I slept in a little room off the patio, on a mattress propped up by books. Other books lay scattered across the floor, together with sheaves of unfinished poems. I remember peering at one of them, a single line in the candlelight – something about storm-hornets snoring in the wind…

Nobody stirred the next morning, except the carolling housemaid, who brought me some breakfast and took my shirt to wash. I got up and wandered about the deserted patio, where I found a note suggesting I stay on if I wished; so I went back to the inn, collected my bags from the old ladies, and returned gratefully to the book-filled room. Roy reappeared at lunch, still tousled with sleep, and talked brokenly throughout the meal, shaking about him as he ate tattered plumes of nerves but slowly regaining his claims to glory.

He’d sailed whalers, swum Hellesponts, broken horses on the Camargues, fought bulls, and caught sharks barehanded. He’d stirred up two hemispheres, as well as the olive-belt between, and restored blood and muscle to poetry. His voice, growing hoarser as though blown through a shell, continued to boom like an ancient mariner’s, not so much determined. I felt, to convince me of the truth of these legends as hoping to suggest that this was how a man should live.

hi fact, there was something curiously inoffensive about his boasting, it was warm-hearted and even childlike, breathless, confidential, as though he wished you to share in the secret – that anyone on earth could have done such things if only they’d been lucky like him.

After lunch, and the long tidal flow of wine, Roy staggered off to have another sleep. But Mary and I sat on through the hot afternoon while she instructed me about religion. It was only then that I noticed the crucifixes in the house, decorated with knots of jasmine, and recalled where the Campbells had chosen to live, in this street pressed close to the walls of the cathedral, wrapped in its mantle of bells and incense. I was a heretic, of course, and opinionated; jaunty with my lack of belief. But Mary Campbell, soft-voiced and shining-eyed, reproved me with gentle calm. And in her, for the first time, I saw the banked-up voluptuousness of a young and beautiful convert, holding to this single passion in which all hungers were answered and all doubts quietly put away. Here, romantic love was kept on ice, sealed by an unfaltering spiritual flame, and accompanied by a vocabulary of torment, physical denial and ecstacy which promised an eternity of sensuous reward.

It may also have been the first, and most dangerous, time – as I sat with the poet’s wife through that hushed afternoon, watching her finger her beads in the airless shade – that I felt the pull of that seductive faith.

But I argued against it – at that age I wanted action, not the devout pause before some deferred consummation; I wanted the excitement of doubt, the satisfaction of mortality, the freedom to make love here and now on earth. Beautiful Mary would have none of it; she sat among her pin-up icons, smiling quietly, un-shakably contained. ‘Don’t you see?’ she kept saying (we were damned if we didn’t). ‘You can’t
imagine
the utter peace…’

I stayed with the Campbells for about a week, and was treated with a matter-of-fact kindness which surprised and charmed me. I’d arrived from nowhere, but nobody bothered me with questions; I was simply accepted and given the run of the house.

During most of the daylight hours Roy lay low and slept, appearing at nightfall like some ruffled sea-bird, leaning against a pillar with his arms stretched wide as though drying his salt-wet wings. One saw him gathering his wits in great gulps of breath, after which he would be ready for anything.

Mary and little Anna lived in an intimate calm of their own, quietly busy with their spiritual chores, and could be seen in the morning going off to Mass, veiled and modest as shadows, and so native in appearance that when I met them in the street I often forgot and addressed them in Spanish. When they returned from their devotions they would come back transformed, light-footed and chirpy with gossip, their early silence now swept away, and their eyes sparkling, as though they’d been to a party.

One evening, to keep my hand in, I played for an hour in the streets and made over seven pesetas, in copper. I carried it back to the house and poured it out on the table, to the delight of the astonished girls. We bought a few litres of wine and went up on to the roof, where there was a terrace with a view of the city. It was still light, and the humped little red-tiled houses, scaled and patchy, clustered around us like crabs.

We ate supper and drank, and as the evening darkened, Roy coughed and began to sing, croaking the corny laments and border ballads that were near to his expatriate heart. His voice was blurred as usual, and rough as a sailor’s, yet deeply charged with feeling; more than that, he sang with a poet’s care, renewing the worn, familiar words. ‘Scots Wa Hae’, ‘The Bonnie Earl of Murray’, sounded as if they’d just been written – with the blood of the slain still wet. To me, until then, they’d just been songs of the schoolroom, now I heard them fresh and bitter, while Roy sat with hunched shoulders, rocking backwards and forwards, often at the point of tears.

Suddenly the maid, from somewhere down in the house, hearing his singing, started up too – not a brash interruption, but like a night-bird answering to the husky call of another. Sad Castilian airs, harsh but haunting, came floating up the well of the stairs. Each new song from Roy would call up another from the girl, rising like bubbles of grief in the darkness, not clashing with his but hovering round the edges, offering a compassionate echo.

Later, the night grew cold, and we huddled under furs and blankets, talking till nearly dawn. Summer lightning and shooting stars lit up the Toledo sky with little soundless conflagrations,flickering across the cathedral and over the faces of the poet and his wife like ripples of phosphorescence.

Roy drank four and a half litres of wine a day, he said – thin, sharp stuff, lobster pink in colour, and one of the consolations of living in Toledo. Another, for him, was the paintings of El Greco, which were stacked all over the town. ‘Never seen him? You must. Bloody marvellous, boy. Wake me up tomorrow, and I’ll take you round.’

We began by going to the Museo de San Vicente, to see the ‘Annunciation’. Campbell stood quietly before it, bare-headed, slightly bowed, his eyes blinking beneath their sun-bleached lashes; and I first saw the canvas as it were through him, by his physical stance and silence. Then muttering, without jargon, but with a kind of groping reverence, he explained what the painting meant to him. ‘A bloody miracle, that hand. And look at that light in the sky. Pure Toledo – only he was the first bugger to see it.’

Then we went higher up the town to El Greco’s house – still preserved in its sloping garden; a beautiful, shaggy, intimate little villa, full of dead flowers and idiot guides. Inside were the paintings; colours I’d never seen before, weeping purples, lime greens, bitter yellows; the long skulls of the saints and their sunken eyelids, eyes coated with ecstatic denials, limbs and faces drawn upwards like spires ascending, robes flickering like tapered flames – compared with the robust flesh-painting I’d seen in Madrid, these seemed to be reduced to the fevered bone.

El Greco exhausted us both. It was torrid noon, so we spent the rest of the day in the bars. Roy had started out that morning with a trembling melancholy, walking unsteadily, stuttering with weakness. As we drank, he grew stronger, taller, happy, embracing and singing, full of intimate asides. ‘Marvellous girl, that Mary. Wonderful wife. She keeps her thoughts to herself. She’s got more genuine saintliness in her little finger than the whole of this god-damn town.’

But it was clear that he was known with affection in Toledo – at least, by the men in the bars. Leathery hands reached up to lean on his shoulders, processions of dwarfs brought him tumblers of wine. Heads were raised, slightly cocked, to hear what he had to say. Meanwhile he introduced me to everyone.

‘A champion, this boy. Walked all the way from Vigo. He walks a thousand miles a week. It’s true, by God…’ Dwarfs brought me wine, too. Roy kept repeating: ‘The funny thing is – he’s English.’

During the long afternoon, amidst waves of euphoria, Roy would also be visited by brief moments of panic. He’d suddenly say it was midnight, and that he’d got to go to Mass, and start searching his pockets for a collar and tie. The shepherds would take him by the arm, lead him out into the street, and show him the position of the sun – at which he would blink and nod, say ‘Bless my soul’, and return relieved to his drinking.

In the evening we drank brandy. I don’t know where we were, but we were sitting on barrels in a kind of cave. The brandy was smooth and warm, straight from the cask, and had a flavour of muscatels. Roy talked about his career and was surprised at it. He spoke of his poetry with humility. Edith Sitwell had written to a paper to say he would make a likely Poet Laureate, and this had amused him and also helped his sales. He told me how much money he’d been paid by various publishers for books he would never write. This amused him too. And so did his autobiography.
Broken Record,
which he’d recently published and which he said was largely a spoof to confuse his enemies.

That night, mixing drinks, he also mixed his emotions, swinging between love and hatred – singing, cursing, offering to lend me money, shaking with pleasure at some success of his youth, praising God, the Virgin Mary, and Mary his wife, and punching out satirical couplets. He loved the Afrikaans language and described its primitive vigour. He hated Amelia for going to Mass dressed like a whore. He hated socialism, dog-lovers, and English dons. He loved fighting, heroism, and pain.

Yet for all his verbal arrogance, chest-beating, and boasting, I found him a curiously gentle companion. ‘Look, I must get you some books. You don’t mind, do you? And I’ve got a razor you can have…’ His manner to those he accepted was warm, modest, and at times almost haltingly apologetic, and the locals we drank with that night treated him not as a joke foreigner to be fleeced, but as a poet and man of their own.

I spent my last morning at the Campbells’ shaking the brandy fumes from my head and enjoying the final luxuries of the house. The maid scrubbed and sang. Mary carried roses to the church. Little Anna ran about watering the flower pots. Roy slept, while Amelia sat sewing near by and darting angry glances at his door.

At midday there was a meal of stuffed marrow and salad, accompanied by bottles of Malaga wine. I was packed and ready. ‘Don’t go in the heat,’ they said. Anna said, ‘You don’t have to go at all.’ So I lingered through the afternoon in another metaphysical exercise with Mary, ending with tea and sugared cakes. Snatches of England – flowered china and silver teaspoons – haunted the heavy Spanish air.

Roy woke up in time to take me down to the bridge, by which I would cross the gorge of the Tagus. Here we said goodbye. ‘Write if you get short of money,’ he said, looking down at me like some puzzled and anxious parent. ‘Come back if you want to. Er – we might have gone to Mexico – but we’ll always be glad to see you…’ He coughed and shook hands. Crossing the bridge I looked back and saw him still standing in the road, legs astride, shoulders hunched, head drooping. He raised his wide-brimmed hat and held it high for a moment, then turned and stumbled back into the town.

Now it was the end of September and I’d reached the sea, having taken almost three months to come down through Spain. Cadiz, from a distance, was a city of sharp incandescence, a scribble of white on a sheet of blue glass, lying curved on the bay like a scimitar and sparkling with African light.

In fact it was a shut-in city, a kind of Levantine ghetto almost entirely surrounded by sea – a heap of squat cubist hovels enclosed by medieval ramparts and joined to the mainland by a dirty thread of sand.