Waiting for Orders (15 page)

The radio was still bleating about the need to guard against looters. I asked Nellie what she thought.

‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ she said; ‘apart from us, there’s only two kinds of people with transport in Bel Air, the gardeners and the pool men. The gardeners are all Mexican or Japanese; the pool maintenance men are mostly white. It’s the blacks the police are afraid of. They know that if the blacks really started to move in, they’d have to call in the army to stop them.’

I thought she was exaggerating. This was two years before the first big Los Angeles riots devastated the Watts area. I thought that the covenant in the title deeds of the house which prohibited our selling it to an ‘Ethiopian’ a quaint survival of a bygone era. I was wrong. That same euphemism for ‘black’ or ‘Negro’ was still in use by the Immigration service. It was normal in Bel Air, as normal as the high fire risk and as normal as the rage I learned to feel when I saw a gawping tourist toss a glowing cigarette butt out of a car window into the scrub at the side of the road.

Some time after three in the afternoon we saw our first fireman of the day. He was a middle-aged man with a smoke-blackened face streaked by rivers of sweat. We had reported a fire at eight forty that morning. He was checking up on those who had called in. He did not apologize for our having received no help and I did not raise the subject. I asked how many houses he had on his list. ‘Nearly two hundred,’ he said; ‘but we’re still counting.’ His voice was like mine, a smokey croak. In some sections it was every house, in others, like ours, the fire had skipped. He was putting us down as a total loss. What about
looters? He said he hadn’t heard of any looting. There had been some trouble at Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house. She was away and the Bel Air Patrol had caught what they thought was a souvenir hunter. He turned out to be a fan of hers, a student from UCLA who was rescuing her silver from the house and throwing it into her swimming pool. Not a bad idea if you had a pool. Best place to be if you had a house on fire. I told him about my fireproof safe and he looked over our bits of salvage. Apart from Joan’s fur coat there were three pictures. Two were Venard trompe-l’oeils that belonged to Lesley Blanch who had left them with us for safe keeping; the third was a John Piper canvas which we had bought earlier that year and of which we were already fond.

‘I wouldn’t worry about looters,’ the fireman said, ‘but I’d get that fur coat out of here or it’ll smell of smoke for ever. And I wouldn’t stick around. The police are closing both Bel Air gates. If you get out you won’t get in again today. But you won’t want to will you? It’ll be twenty-four hours at least before it’s cool enough to get near that safe.’

Nellie left soon after in her car taking Joan’s things and promising to telephone our business manager to report what the fireman had said. I stayed there until it was dark, drinking water from the stand pipe and dozing in my car. I was feeling quite ill by then and it was Dexter, son of another unburnt neighbour, who drove me to the Beverly Hills Hotel.

There I found that everything that could be done had been done. Joan had bought me a toothbrush, shaving things and a change of underwear from the hotel drugstore. Nellie had enlisted the aid of Dudley Walker, an English manservant who had been Barbara Hutton’s butler, then her son Lance Reventlow’s minder and valet and then, when the young master had killed himself in a sports car race, a freelance valet and party barman. He was a good man in emergencies. I found myself the temporary possessor of a Sulka dressing-gown, silk pyjamas and monogrammed slippers. The monogram wasn’t mine but the slippers fitted. I managed to get out of the clothes I was wearing and soap myself under the shower before I passed out.

I came to in bed with a doctor listening to my chest and tapping it. ‘Delayed shock,’ he said; ‘you fainted. No damage, though you’re going to have difficulty swallowing for a few days.
Smoke. I’m going to give you a shot now and you’ll go to sleep for a couple of hours. When you wake you’ll be hungry. I’d order something soft like scrambled eggs, hash browns and coffee. When you’ve eaten you should go back to sleep almost at once and sleep until morning.’

The shot worked as he had said it would. When I woke the first time I found that Dudley had been in and taken all my filthy clothes; they would be returned clean and wearable in the morning. I never found out the name of the shot that worked so well. As the taste of smoke went away I forgot to ask; and I had other things to worry about.

Two days after the fire the count of houses totally destroyed by it had gone up to four hundred and eighty-four. With our business manager I went out to inspect the remains of ours and to take photographs for the insurance and income tax deduction claims. We were under-insured, of course, like everyone else, and in the Californian real estate boom then in progress that meant that our lost house had had a market value of twice what we had paid for it, and four times the value for which it was insured. At some point we would have to decide whether or not to rebuild. All I wanted just then, however, was to go and get at the safe and retrieve my manuscript.

The safe, we found, had fallen from the upper floor right through the ground floor into what had been the crawl space under the steel-grade beams of the foundations. I had left the safe key in the lock – it had been protection against fire, not theft – and in its fall it had snapped off. The safe, however, was intact. Our man of business said that we would have to get the safe-crackers in.

They came two days later and I was there to meet them. They were an impressive team, serious men in immaculate sky-blue coveralls with the worded
BONDED
in white, back and front, above their firm’s name. Their vehicles were impressive too: small armoured vans, one towing a compressor, the other a generator of the kind of energy that turns ferro-concrete to butter in seconds. Both the vans and the towed equipment were spotlessly clean. So were the men. Two of them walked up to the ruins with me and I showed them the fallen safe.

‘What’s in it?’ the head man asked; ‘anything heavy?’

‘Papers.’

They put two canvas slings under the safe and lifted it up on to the patio, door uppermost. The head man examined the broken end of the key then nodded to his colleague who went back to the vans for tools – tools for lock-picking I had hoped – but all he brought back with him was a long chisel and a sledge hammer. The chisel he applied to the hinge side of the safe door. His leader then swung the hammer and gave the chisel a sharp tap. The door of the safe popped open to reveal a mass of grey ash that turned to powder when it was touched. The only recognizable object there was my UK passport. The blue cover had turned to black toffee, but my name was readable.

‘It was supposed to be fireproof,’ I protested.

‘No,’ said the safe cracker and pointed to a code number stamped on the maker’s tag welded to the door. ‘That means fire resistant. This box would stand a thousand-degree heat for half an hour. This has had two thousand degrees or more for over six hours. Look at that steel I-beam down there. It bent, almost melted. Those papers didn’t burn – not enough air in there – but they sure cooked.’

I took the passport, to show at the British consulate if they wanted proof of loss. I didn’t waste time with the remains of
The Light of Day.
Joan and I had decided to go to England for Christmas and see our families. Before we could do that, however, we had to find somewhere to live. The Beverly Hills Hotel had been helpful but was proving astonishingly expensive. We needed a furnished house and quickly. Other Bel Air and Brentwood refugees were after the same thing. We took the first on offer that had the number of rooms we needed and was available that week. It was on North Roxbury Drive and looked inoffensive enough from the outside. Inside there was a lot of fairly nasty pink. My work room had once been a teenage girl’s bedroom and she had had a collection of dolls, dozens of them in glass cases which lined the walls. They had no merit, historical or artistic, that I could discern; they were just toy department dolls that looked as if they had been bought in the fifties. I tried to have them removed but they were itemized on the inventory and, I was told, highly valued by the owner of the house. Nellie, who knew something about antique dolls, said they were rubbish; but she was also entertained by the fact that I would have to put up with them. She had a Yorkshire terrier
named Winston whose piercing yap I had objected to more than once. The effects of the smoke inhalation were more or less forgotten but the sense of bereavement with which I was trying to come to terms was of an unfamiliar kind. I found myself behaving absurdly.

People in Hollywood work long hours and there are fewer big parties than the legends suggest. But for those within easy driving, or even walking, distance of one another there were small parties where the host barbecued spare ribs and the guests helped themselves to the jambalaya. It was on one of these usually cosy evenings that, as we were leaving, the hostess asked about the losses we had suffered in the fire. We had become fairly used to this. What they really wanted to know was how well we had been insured and how boring we were likely to become with our particular hard-luck story. We had a reassuring message: the government was going to be generous; all losses that were not covered by insurance would be claimed as a deduction from income tax. That satisfied the hostess, but the host thought differently. He was a screenwriter from way back and he had had successful plays on English-speaking stages all over the world; he wasn’t a very good writer, to my way of thinking, but he was a pro. He looked past Joan at me. ‘It’s bad luck about the Thomas Hope sideboard Joan bought last year at Sotheby’s,’ he said; ‘but what about the books you lost? You can deduct their cost, you can buy others, but you can’t replace them. You’ll have to make a fresh start. Here’ – he grabbed a book from the shelf nearest to him – ‘you can make a start with this. It’s a spare copy. With our love.’

The book was a Roget’s Thesaurus, not a reference book I used or liked. I had long ago found that looking in Roget for synonyms or alternative ways of expressing myself was always a strong indication that I did not know what I really wanted to say. A good dictionary was more conducive to clarity. Roget was for crossword-puzzle compilers and business conference speech-writers.

He meant well, I’m sure, and a polite smile with my thanks would have been a reasonable response. Instead, I burst into tears. They did not last long but it was all most embarrassing. Years later the man with the spare Roget told me that at that
moment he had written me off as a writer, that I had become a casualty in the good old Hollywood crack-up tradition.

Joan, charitably, put my lapse down to the drinks we had had before going to the party. Though she was indeed mourning the loss of the Thomas Hope sideboard she was much more deeply hurt by the loss of her family papers and other personal things. I understood. Books, after all, could be replaced; and it wasn’t as if I had collected rare books or first editions.

Indeed it wasn’t, and I was as puzzled as she was. What I kept recalling, though, was the time before the war, twenty years or more earlier, when I had taken pride in my state of having no personal possessions except a dictionary, a foolscap pad or two, a pencil sharpener and a suitcase. I was back to that state now. What was there to snivel about?

In London I began to think about
The Light of Day
again, but not with the idea of recalling and reproducing what I had written before.

I have never really planned a book, certainly not on paper; I have usually seen it first, hazily, as a journey to be made by characters who are all regurgitated and reassembled bits of me. Sometimes, as the journey progresses, I get tired of it. If the characters fail to live up to their promise, even after much rewriting, and the telling of the story becomes laboured, I discard the whole project. The decision to do so is not taken lightly and, lest I should at some later date weaken and try to revive a duck already pronounced dead, I have usually destroyed the manuscript.

Now, the decision to destroy had been made for me and although the duck was undoubtedly dead, I did not like the way it had died. If there was any killing of that sort to be done, I liked to do it myself. Naturally I looked for someone to blame, someone to punish. I found only myself, the crass believer in fairy tales, the clown who bought fireproof safes. Very well! The clown must suffer the humiliation he so richly deserved.
The Light of Day
would rise again but it would become an autobiographical novel and, worse, a comedy.

Arthur Abdel Simpson, pimp, pander, guide, pornographer and sneak thief was my stand-in for the part of the clown hero and he served me well. Of course, I am not the first writer to work his way out of depression by turning to comedy, but I have
been one of the lucky ones. Readers of genre fiction do not like a writer with whom they have come to feel safe suddenly changing his tone of voice. Normally friendly reviewers were inclined to dismiss
The Light of Day
as an aberration. In Europe, however, I gained readers. The book was made into a successful film called
Topkapi
with Peter Ustinov playing my egregious Arthur Abdel Simpson and winning an Oscar for the performance. It was the film that sold the book in France and Italy.

We built a new house with a flat roof and a small swimming pool which could be pumped into our own fire hoses next time we had a fire. I used to test the system once a month. The house was all right, but we never liked it as much as we had liked the old one. We began to travel more, inside the United States on film business, outside to see and smell the less well-travelled countries of northern South America: Surinam, Guyana and Venezuela. We were in Georgetown, Guyana when Sir Winston Churchill died and we were among those who signed the condolence book put up in a sentry box outside Government House. As a result we were invited to an evening of one act plays given by the Georgetown Little Theatre Club. The Government House information officer was a member.