Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [184]
After breakfast, I stopped at a stationer and bought a small notebook and a fountain pen. I followed him everywhere, like a faithful dog, and as long as I was quiet, he didn’t seem to mind being shadowed by a teenaged companion. It was the same relationship, I later realized, that young Bobby Henrey had with Ralph Richardson, the philandering butler in The Fallen Idol. Despite the difference in our ages, we became friends—though it was Graham whose spirit was that of a mischievous, daring schoolboy, not me. It was Graham who took me to a lushly furnished brothel in Nice, just off the Promenade des Anglais, on the grounds that this was a side of life to which every young man should be exposed as early as possible. It was Graham who encouraged me to drive Alexa’s little Simca sports car and act as his chauffeur, despite the fact that I didn’t have a license. I took to smoking English cigarettes in imitation of him and soon got used to a martini before lunch.
Of the private side of his life, I knew nothing. Youthful, even childish, as his behavior sometimes seemed, I was at the age when I still thought of all grown-ups as old, even ancient. Of the fact that he had left his wife and embarked on a long affair with a married woman, Catherine Walston, whom he had encouraged to join the Catholic Church, I was as yet unaware, though I was later to meet her. In the absence of his mistress—Catherine was unable to leave her complaisant husband for the summer—Graham visited brothels and flirted gently with Alexa, apparently content.
Even at the age of fifteen, I could tell that he was attractive to women, both because he genuinely enjoyed their company—rare for an Englishman of his age and class—and because there was, beneath the charm and wit and superb intelligence, a feline love of gossip and an unmistakable, unapologetic interest in sex. Graham was fascinating on the subject of sex, as a matter of fact, in that respect rather resembling the great British explorer and erotic adventurer Sir Richard Burton, whom he much admired. Like Burton, Graham was a mine of lore about the brothels and geisha houses and opium dens of the East, and also like Burton, he did not take a romantic view of women. Besides, he made no secret of the fact that he was a Catholic, living apart from his wife and involved with a married woman, which gave him a certain daredevil-damned quality, as if he believed in the fires of hell and was perfectly willing to risk them for, as he would have put it, “one good fuck.” Since this was exactly what made Don Juan himself attractive to so many women, it is hardly surprising that it worked for Graham: Few women can resist a man who is willing to risk damnation for them.
During the course of the summer, Graham took over the role of sex adviser where I was concerned, having rightly concluded that my father was unwilling to bring the subject up at all. If I wanted to go to bed with a woman, I should ask her directly, he told me, and not beat about the bush—“Just tell her you want to fuck her. It’s usually the best way.”
While I was grateful for his advice, I was not yet in a position to try it out. Years later, I was to see it oddly echoed in a passage in The Quiet American, where the journalist Fowler, modeled after Graham himself, is talking to Pyle, the American whose childlike innocence and good intentions cause so much trouble. Pyle is in love with Phuong, Fowler’s mistress, whom he intends to make an honest woman. After comparing Pyle’s innocence to leprosy, Fowler savagely dismisses Pyle’s claim to have Phuong’s best interests at heart: “ ‘If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she’d rather have a good …’ The crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-Saxon word.” The Anglo-Saxon “f word” was one that Graham used rarely, but precisely and with pleasure when