Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder by John Calder

Author:John Calder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2017-03-01T16:16:08+00:00

Chapter 6

Politics

It was now March 1969. I spent a week staying in the Caledonian Club and then took a small room with a bath in North Kensington, a once middle-class area that had a little shabby elegance left, but had gone to seed and offered short-term accommodation to migrants and the displaced, like myself, at low weekly rents. I still had a discreet relationship with the novelist I have called Vera, but I always had to be out before six in the morning, which was a bore. When I told her my situation, she laughed and asked if I intended to commute daily from Ledlanet. Tanja had gone abroad again, and when she returned there was always some problem at her place, where two or three other people were boarding, and where she received frequent nocturnal calls from John Wolff, a previous lover who was usually drunk by the evening but did not want to give her up. John was also a literary agent, and he had an attractive wife, Charlotte, whom I could not help fancying myself. There was one night when the four of us had dinner, and we somehow ended up in my North Kensington room that had one double bed, where we all slept chastely, although John tried to get Tanja alone into the bathroom during the night and I woke up to find myself snuggled pleasantly against Charlotte. We were all partly undressed, but not totally. A funny night, made worse by the necessity of having to find a shilling for the gas meter every two hours. The situation seemed designed for us to sleep two and two with new partners, but the logistics of the situation made this impossible.

John became ever more alcoholic and then moved to Europe, while Charlotte, who I think was going through a period of acute depression, killed herself shortly afterwards. At about the same time, I abandoned my uncomfortable and inconvenient room and moved in with Tanja at Overstrand Mansions, which faced the south side of Battersea Park. Her boarders gradually moved out, Ann Beckett being the last.

Tanja had another suitor: she went out with him occasionally and she did spend a night or two at his place. He was André Deutsch, who also had a long-term relationship with a lady called Gwen who nobody I knew had ever met. I think that André was unaware of my presence on the scene. Rainer Heumann found out about me with time, but was not overtly hostile. When the three of us went out to dinner, I was a little uneasy about the many compliments he always tossed my way – not about anything serious, but about my clever driving to pass another car or my taste in wine. He brought Tanja an air gun, a kind of pistol with which you could kill pigeons or small animals. At one point I threw it out of the window and, after she had rescued it, removed it to my office, where it sat in a drawer.

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