Always Unreliable: Memoirs by Clive James

Author:Clive James [James, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330526722
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2012-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

13. LIKE A BURNISHED THRONE

Charlie came to my rescue, unfortunately. In that great age of the company director, Charlie was the company director epitomized. He had a one-man import-export business. He could get things for you. If you had things you didn’t want, he could take them away. Around the Chelsea pubs he was a conspicuous figure, not just because of a major squint but because of his promiscuous taste in fast foreign cars. Peter Sellers had a new car every week but Charlie had a new one every day. On Monday it was a Maserati with a body by Touring of Milan and on Tuesday it was a Mercedes-Benz 300SL with gull-wing doors. None of the cars really worked, but he didn’t own them long enough for them to stop working entirely. They stopped working entirely for the people he sold them to. While he was driving them, they went, just. ‘Hop in,’ Charlie would say from an out-of-date yet eternally beautiful Zagato-bodied 2 + 2 Ferrari. After you had hopped in, you would wonder why the car was going so slowly. You couldn’t wonder it aloud because of the noise kicked up by the chain-driven overhead camshafts. At the next pub, Charlie would explain convincingly how everything would be all right tomorrow, once the drip-feed venturi to the rocker-boxes had been greased. ‘Fancy another jar? Your round.’

Charlie said I could live on one of his boats: the one moored at Twickenham. The rent sounded stiff but he reassured me by saying that the boat was an ocean-going job. ‘None of your put-put boats what fart about on a river.’ As we headed west in an off-white Lancia Aprilia drop-head with my suitcase in the back, I had visions of a modest but comfortable state-room on the sort of yacht that would not be ashamed of itself if anchored in the lee of Niarchos or Onassis. And indeed The Relief of Mafeking was the biggest thing in the basin, but only because it was a coal barge. An ocean-goer in the sense that it had long ago made regular trips to and from Newcastle by sea rather than canal, my new home was so broad in the beam that it was practically circular. Charlie soon had me convinced that this was an advantage. ‘Your so-called sleek lines can’t give you this, mate,’ he said with an expansive gesture in the living space between decks. ‘What you’ve got here is width.’ As we stood there with our heads bowed, I had to agree that there was width. What there wasn’t was height, but I failed to remark this, being too excited by the prospect of the well-joined planks below and above. I hardly needed Charlie to tell me that there was no workmanship like that nowadays. He showed me how the Calor gas cooking ring worked, warned me that the toilet might be a bit tricky, and left me to unpack. Standing on deck to wave goodbye, I felt like Horatio Hornblower on the bridge of his first command.

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