Emma did what she does, which was remain white and cool. Alexander, having much and distinguished Irish blood, must have seen a drunk Celt before but I was terrified to meet anyone’s eyes at breakfast, so I stayed upstairs for as long as I could reading Paradise Lost. I also found, read and was scared by Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger. Its photographs of dead people in undignified settings, head in the oven, perfect hairdo hanging out of a ruined car, stays with me. It set one register of my bad dreams. Somehow the shamefulness of the book attached itself to my shame about having got so drunk.
I reassembled myself and occurred brightly into the others’ normal day at about eleven with the gelatinous acted normality that will be familiar to all who are or know alcoholics.
We progressed to New York, where Emma lived on Central Park West. Again the note in the house was of the Left, of books and the want of show. I discovered that New York was a walkable city, like Edinburgh, and loved it. I was unprepared for its expressive beauty, the variety of shapes, the quality of reciprocated light thrown between the buildings. Amschel fell for a Moholy-Nagy in the Guggenheim and drank gimlets at the Plaza Bar. We visited a bookshop at midnight and called in meals; what could be better?
Years later, when I was just over thirty, my Girtonian friend Miss Montague of Greenwich Village got married. She asked me to be one of her matrons of honour. There were, I believe, eight of us. I was much the tallest and the smallest was a groovy society photographer called Roxanne Lowitt who could look good in a brown bag. Sarah herself was a vision as a bride, lacy, light, frothing. I may have to go into the background of the garments worn by those of us in her train. Her mother was a balletomane and was to be found, as a rule, wherever in the world Nureyev was dancing. Sarah had one precious piece of material designed by Bakst for the Ballets Russes. It was a shimmering jungle silk, but there was hardly enough of it to go round eight people, so a plan had been devised. Each of our dresses, cut exactly to fit our disparate measurements, would bear at its neck a lozenge of the precious cloth.
So it was, on the afternoon after Sarah’s graceful and affecting wedding ceremony, that I was accosted by Christopher Hitchens, somewhere near Union Square. I did notice that we were surrounded by people who were not conventionally dressed but, hey, this was the time of club culture and I must hang with it.
Christopher has one of the most compelling voices alive. I confess I bought on CD his book god Is Not Great simply in order to hear those tones, so smoothed by cigs, so enriched by the booze, so clever and hardly vain at all, so lubriciously dated and grand.
‘Hi, Claude,’ said Christopher. ‘Happy Halloween. And what are you dressed as? A parsnip?’
As we returned to England in the aeroplane in 1976, Amschel asked if I’d like to be his lodger in Warwick Avenue. When I said yes thank you, I had no idea to what I was acceding. I did not know London in any sense at all. I had visited Madame Tussauds, a few antiquarian book-shops, Vogue House which is at number one Hanover Square, and perhaps a handful of fashion boutiques, Biba, Bus Stop and Laurence Corner Military Apparel, whose khaki siren suits were, with gold stiletto-heeled boots, my relaxation wear throughout the nineteen-seventies. I had no idea about the wires that hold a life together. All I knew was that I had that job on Vogue.
Warwick Avenue is a boulevard running down from Blomfield Road and the Regent’s Canal. Ava Gardner had lived around here. The green cabmen’s hut is famous among cabbies for the quality of its fry-ups. Amschel’s flat had been lived in before by his sister Emma and Alexander Cockburn and had clearly lain at a nerve centre of sixties radicalism. The journal Three Weeks was published from there. The chastity of the décor was something that I have come to think of as a particular form of le goût Rothschild. The first flight of stone stairs was bare. At some point a large quantity of serviceable elephant-grey carpet had become available and there it was on the floors of the drawing room, the serious library, all the way up the next flight of stairs and into each bedroom beyond and so right to the very top attic room, which was to be the epicentre of some heartbreaks. Amschel himself was fastidious and exquisitely dressed. His trousers came from Beale & Inman, his suits from Anderson & Sheppard. He was twenty-one, his jeans were ironed, his shoes from Wildsmith. But he looked like a saint, not a dandy. He was attending the City University. He would return from the country with his clothes for the week beautifully ironed and ready for his week’s study. Later he became the circulation manager of Ian Hamilton’s New Review. No situation could have been more elegantly suited to him in all its minimalism. At weekends he raced classic cars. His room contained his bed and, leaning against the wall, one ormolu-framed mirror that may have come from Mentmore.
The drawing room at Warwick Avenue was furnished with a desk made of a single curve of wood, a sculpture by the Greek artist Takis that when switched on at the wall flashed its alternating yellow, green, purple and blue lights, and an elephantine set of sofa and chairs, comfortably expiring. We did have a telly. I think it sat on a pile of telephone directories. There was a pencil drawing by Léger over the desk. Occasionally, Amschel might visit the kitchen, halve an avocado with a surgeon’s care, ease away its stone, and spoon a little Hellman’s Mayonnaise into the depression. Once or twice I saw him cut a slice of bread and turn it by various processes into toast and Marmite.
His generosity in having, as lodger, one so improvident and domestically gifted only at cleaning rather than cooking, was typical of the sweetness within the formality of this complicated yet simple-hearted man. I paid no rent. We had no romance. I suppose it was poor Amschel upon whom I learned to cook. I spared him the dish that got me through much of Cambridge, rice cooked with Bovril or tomato ketchup or, when the occasion demanded protein, whelks. I am not sure I could look a whelk in the face now. I am not talking about winkles, but whelks, that have a keratinous front door the size of a thumbnail, a flesh-coloured body that looks like a plastic model of the inner ear, and, tremendously evident khaki digestive arrangements.
Amschel’s father, who had mesmerising and often alarming charm, asked me one day whether I could cook Sole Colbert. I liked saying yes to Victor and sometimes his early morning calls demanding, for example, a crested ear trumpet, were challenges that it was amusing to rise to. I cannot imagine how his tenderly beautiful wife Tess and he got down the astounding brew I had made over three days’ reduction of beef bones. I had reinvented Bovril itself. I suppose Tess, as she always did, made it all right.
Meanwhile, I was learning the magazine trade from the bottom up. I am uncoordinated and not good with knives. Layout in those days involved the cutting out of individual letters with a scalpel and their placing at the actual point upon the page demanded by the art director. Vogue’s art director at the time was the innovative Terry Jones. The really fascinating people in the art room were the retouchers, who did by hand what computers do now, that is, make perfection real, with eyes as minutely observant as those of a jeweller, using brushes as fine as the tip of an ermine’s tail. With almost buddhistic patience and only the most cryptic of chat, these quiet, gifted people would lift a face on film from pleasantness into beauty by the application of tiny dots. At least one was a refugee from Austria. I could imagine her retouching for Horst, for Baron de Meyer. I imagine the retouchers spoiled their eyesight, though they did have lenses much like those a watchmaker might use. The rhythm of our weeks was ruled by ‘The Book’, which was the magazine itself. Copy dates were long and dictated by the seasons of the couture, so we lived always in an unreal, future time. There was nothing more precious than the dummy of the next issue, which would be full of ‘stories’ that had been thought out by the fashion room well in advance and dictated by some shift in collective mood as mysterious as the great annual migrations.