Madame de Gaulle's Penis Read online

  She opened the door as I was locking the car and waited calmly until I walked across to kiss her. “How did the interview go?” she asked.

  “Quite well, I thought.” I looked at her, wondering if I should tear her clothes off and take her on the doorstep. But the urge didn’t last. “His wife is a bit of a twit. I asked her what she was most looking forward to and she said ‘A penis.’ She meant ‘happiness’, of course, but it sounded exactly like ‘a penis’.”

  “You can cut that out, can’t you?” Seline asked seriously. “It was only a recording, wasn’t it?”

  Could anyone be so lacking in a sense of humour? For a second I was tempted to explain, but only for a second. Instead I nodded. “No problem.”

  “That’s good,” Seline said.

  I walked through to the living room and sat down in one easy chair of the suite that had cost me a lot more than I could afford. Seline had left the paper and the post on the coffee table, both having arrived after I left for work that morning. I glanced at the headlines and discovered de Gaulle was visiting London. The post comprised a statement from Barclaycard, a book club circular and a bill from my analyst, Dr Nicholaas Van Rindt. Between us, we were trying to discover why the light seemed to have gone out of my life.

  “Is salad all right for lunch?” Seline asked. “I made up rather a nice dressing from blue cheese.”

  “That would be lovely,” I said. We were nothing if not polite to one another.

  “Shall I turn on the radio? It’s almost one.”

  “Already?” I was home later than usual after an early morning stint. “Yes, do. You can tell me what you think of the interview.”

  She turned the knob and Hardcastle’s voice said, ‘ - World at One. First, the news.”

  I sank into reverie as Seline went off to get the salad. It struck me, not for the first time, how odd it was that a man in my position should have become a prey to discontent. Mortgaged or not, the house was comfortable. Expensive or not, the furniture was beautiful. The job paid well and held considerable prestige. If people never recognised my face, I can’t remember how many times I’ve been told my voice sounded familiar. My car - a Toyota Celica - was a lot smaller than I’d have liked, but it had a sporty look about it that compensated for a lot. There was money in the bank - not a lot, I admit: the last time I looked, the account stood round £700, but there was a £2,500 overdraft facility to back it should I ever need capital for a second car, or an extension to the kitchen. So no job worries, no prestige worries, no financial worries. Why was I discontent?

  Van Rindt thought the problem must be sexual, a diagnosis with which I tended to agree, although neither of us had any bright ideas on what to do about it.

  “What are your views on wife swapping?” I had asked him once. “Your professional views?” It was perfectly all right to ask a question like that because I was a suburban sophisticate and he was a Freudian.

  “I doubt if our cultural patterns are geared to it,” he said seriously. Then added intriguingly, “Some of my patients have tried it.”

  I sat up on the couch. “What happened?”

  “They developed guilt feelings. Society’s cultural conditioning towards monogamy and fidelity is extremely difficult to break through. We pay for our enjoyment with guilt.” It was the royal ‘we’ presumably. I could never imagine Van Rindt swapping his wife for anything more exciting than another office desk.

  “But was it worth it to them?”

  “I think not.”

  The promise of interest in the subject was draining away rapidly, but I was loath to drop it, “How do you feel it would work in my case?”

  Van Rindt sucked a tooth, one of his more annoying habits. “I suppose the first thing to consider would be how your wife might feel about it. Have you discussed it with her?”

  I hadn’t, of course, and he knew it. “No,” I said, subsiding back onto the couch. I imagined she would take it calmly enough, providing her new partner was free from deformity and venereal disease. Somehow the thought took away a good deal of my excitement.

  “It would probably be best not to raise the matter,” Van Rindt advised. “She might misunderstand your motivations and that would surely place a further strain on your relationship.”

  The strain on the relationship was another of his ideas, like the idea that all problems were sexual at root. I felt discontented and frustrated to be sure, but so far I didn’t see that my emotional turmoil was straining my marriage in the slightest. Seline was far too calm for that.

  All the same, I nodded. “Yes.” For this I was paying him £10 an hour!

  Seline came back in with a tray of salad, artistically presented for maximum visual impact in accordance with the rules she had learned at her Cordon Bleu course. She was wearing a green house dress in some light material, cut into a generous V at the front so that I could see the fresh white lacing of her bra as she bent over the table to set down the tray. Absently, I wondered who we might swap with. A little pressure on Van Rindt had revealed his patients, without exception, had come to an arrangement with their next-door neighbours; as much an indication of sheer laziness, I should have thought, as a comment on the promiscuity of suburban society. But that, apparently, was where the action was. My problem was I hardly knew our neighbours - on either side.

  I knew who they were, of course, but that was a long was from actually knowing them. On our left, the Dawsons. He a senior civil servant, sober, balding, running to fat. She, surprisingly, a plump little bubble of a thing, who might make an interesting roll in the hay if there was any way of broaching the subject. But how was such a subject broached? Even Van Rindt could not be persuaded to tell me, probably because he didn’t know.

  On our right, now I’d started to think about it, the Hargeaves. He was, I swear to God, an undertaker. I never fancied Mrs Hargeaves anyway.

  Neighbours aside, there was always the possibility of doing it with friends. I ran through the list and was astonished to discover how short it was. We did a fair bit of entertaining, of course, but it was mainly in the line of business. Actual friends, people invited over for the joy of their company with no ulterior motives, were limited to Pat and Pat (a curious combination of names I’ll explain in a moment), Morton and Phyllis Digby and, by the skin of their teeth, the Ryans.

  Of the three, I ruled out Morton and Phyllis right away. They were beautiful people and I loved them both dearly, but Phyllis had a permanent twitch, which I imagined would be as irritating in bed as Seline’s calmness. Furthermore, Morton made no bones about the fact he’d been stricken by psychological impotence following his vasectomy, a condition he seemed to greet with a certain measure of relief. Not the best of all possible partners for a swap session.

  Patrick and Patricia Carver - Pat and Pat - were an adventurous enough couple, but suffered from the fact that they were, respectively, Seline’s brother-in-law and sister. Patricia shared Seline’s good looks, if not her deathly calm, so that the prospect of a frolic with her was not unappealing. But the idea of Seline embraced by Patrick while I tried to tickle Patricia’s fancy had such a curiously incestuous feel about it that I felt Van Rindt’s prediction of post-coital-guilt was almost certain to come true.

  Which left the Ryans. Or rather it didn’t. Billy Ryan was one of my less respectable friends, a hangover from the brief period I spent on Fleet Street. He worked for the News of the World (or News of the Screws as he insisted on calling it) and specialised in crusading journalism. I could imagine the headlines with no effort whatsoever: SUBURBAN SIN: I GET INVITED TO A WIFE SWAP PARTY. Promiscuity must have been a lot easier in the old days when the news was carried around by wandering minstrels.

  “Shouldn’t your piece be on by now?”

  I dragged my mind back and realised two items had already followed the news with not a hint of my de Gaulle interview. Since
his London visit was the main news lead, I was certainly expecting the interview to head up the magazine section. Hardcastle was producer as well as presenter and had the final say, of course. But there was no way a man of his experience could have slotted the interview anywhere else but the lead. Unless there had been some technical hitch. It was unlikely, but not impossible. Maybe once a year a BBC tape gets accidentally wiped. With my luck it could have happened to the major interview of my career.

  We listened to the rest of the programme in silence while Seline nibbled delicately on her salad. The de Gaulle interview was not broadcast.

  “I can’t understand it,” I said as Hardcastle signed off.

  “Perhaps it was the penis business,” Seline suggested without a hint of humour.

  I shook my head. “Couldn’t be. It was right at the end of the spot. They could have edited it out easily.” They could, in fact, have edited it out wherever it appeared. I stood up. “I think I’ll call Bill and ask him what the hell is going on.” I might have been a bland interviewer, but there was nothing bland about me when it came to pushing my career. If I’d lost the chance of a broadcast interview with de Gaulle, I wanted to know why. And if some asshole really had wiped the tape, I planned to put the boot in with every ounce of influence I possessed.

  “Don’t you want your salad?” Seline asked.

  “It can keep.” I told her snappily. “This is important.”

  As it turned out, I had difficulty getting through. By the time I made the connection, Hardcastle had left the studio. The girl on the switchboard thought he might be in the canteen, but when she paged him there he didn’t answer. I told her to get me Barclay Haslett. He was bound to know what had happened.

  Barclay proved easier to locate, but when he came on, he didn’t give me a chance to ask any questions. “You’d better get over here, John,” he said. “Something’s come up.” I could have sworn he sounded pleased.

  “My stint’s over for the day,” I reminded him.

  “I know, but I still think you should come over. Can you make it before three?” Three o’clock was a magic hour for Barclay. It was the time, on fine days, when he usually skived off to play golf.

  “Yes, I suppose to,” I said frowning. “Look here, Barclay, do you know what happened to the de Gaulle piece?”

  “We can talk about that when you get here,” he said.

  I came back to the living room frowning. I didn’t like Barclay’s tone. “They want me to go in again,” I told Seline.

  “I’ll put your salad in the fridge till you come back,” she said calmly.

  Broadcasting House was in Shepherd’s Bush in those days (and may still be there now for all I know). Since the heady days of plane hijacks and terrorist bombs were still a year or two in the future, security was at a minimum. Even so, I did not, as you might imagine, walk through the main doors to a cheery nod from Sam the doorman. That sort of treatment was reserved for guests and callers who didn’t know any better. The staff had a private entrance round the side. There is a doorman there too, considerably bigger, tougher and less cheery than Sam. Unless he knew you, he wouldn’t let you in without a pass. I you insisted, he would punch you in the face. Such was the price we paid for privacy. Fortunately he did know me, so that I walked past with no more than a scowl and a vague, nervous pricking of the hairs on the back of my neck.

  Inside the door there was a silly, claustrophobic little corridor leading to a bank of lifts and a flight of stairs. Barclay’s office was on the first floor and I needed exercise, but I took the lift just the same, exercising my index finger on the button. As I got off, a young woman got on - one of the secretaries or production assistants who swarmed over the place like flies. I found myself wondering what she would look like with her clothes off. As the lift doors shut, the thought occurred for the first time that I might be cracking up.

  I appreciate that since you don’t know me, I must by now appear an overgrown adolescent, sexually obsessed to the point of mania. But such was not the case. At least, such didn’t used to be the case. I had climbed the career ladder with no more thought - or indeed time - for sex than the average business executive. And if I had a sexual problem with Seline, it had not been, until lately, a pressing sexual problem. She was not, after all, frigid. Nor was she ugly, or smelly, or malformed. And she was perpetually available. It is quite difficult to build up too much steam with a ready escape valve waiting - calmly - in your home. Yet somehow, for reasons neither Dr Van Rindt nor I could quite fathom, I seemed to be building up steam now at a truly alarming rate. Where would it end? I could not quite imagine myself launching on some unsuspecting typist with a view to rape. But then six months ago, I could scarcely have imagined my overheated state in the lift.

  I hurried down the corridor to Barclay’s office. BBC producers in those days rated secretaries from the pool, not personal guardians who protected them from casual callers. Thus I simply had to knock and enter, which I did.

  Barclay looked up from a stack of papers on his desk. “I’m afraid I can’t get you out of this cock-up,” he said without preliminary.

  Barclay was not a man I either liked or admired. I didn’t like his looks, which were scrubbed but florid. I didn’t like the way he dressed, which was conservative without flair, like a bank clerk or an income tax inspector. Most of all I disliked his manner. He was self-centred, pompous, shallow, unfeeling, dim, self-seeking and aggressive under attack - much as I was, then. When I eventually abandoned Freudian analysis for the more mystical Jungian brand, I came to learn that those characteristics you most dislike in others are almost always projections of your own Shadow, that hideous repository of things you hate about yourself. Thus it seems I loathed Barclay for the way he reminded me of my own weaknesses. I glared at him, not liking his tone. “What cock-up, Barclay?”

  “The de Gaulle business. It’s gone as far as the Director General.”

  I went chill, but it was overlaid with bewilderment. “What’s gone as far as the Director General, Barclay?” I asked evenly. I had a feeling that, despite his air of concern, the little bastard was enjoying himself hugely.

  “Oh, hadn’t you heard? De Gaulle complained because you insulted his wife. He made us can the interview.”

  The bewilderment increased. “I didn’t insult his wife!” I protested.

  “You sniggered when she said ‘penis’,” Barclay told me; and behind the frowning mask I knew, for a certainty, he was smiling.

  “For God’s sake -”

  He held up a hand. “Don’t scream at me - scream at the Director General. He’s the one who’s fired you.”

  I fell into that chill, dissociated state of total fear with which human beings tend to meet life’s most important crises. “Fired me? But he can’t fire...” I trailed off, noticing how alien the world had suddenly become.

  “Of course he can, John. He can fire anybody he damn well likes. I did my best for you, but -” He shrugged.

  I’ll bet you did, you hypocritical little weasel, I thought. Barclay had been out to get me from the day I joined the Beeb. Part of his problem was envy. I carried all the hallmarks of a man on the move, somebody destined to swarm up the hierarchies of the BBC, perhaps even make Director General one day, while he, manifestly, was stuck rigid in a dead-end middle management slot with little real power and less pay. The other part of the problem was that I took his favourite seat in the canteen. It sounds incredible, especially since I’d no idea the damn chair carried his mark invisible, but that was our first real row. He stood over me ranting incomprehensibly while I sat with a mug of foul, sweet tea in one hand staring up at him open-mouthed. I stared at him like that now, still not entirely certain what was going on.

  “The thing is, a man like de Gaulle carries a lot of clout,” Barclay told me unnecessarily.

  “But he didn’t say anything to me!”
I screamed. “Not one bloody word!”

  “Well, then, politicians are like that, aren’t they?” Barclay said smugly A small hint of the smile escaped from his control as he added, “Devious.”

  Chapter Three

  Jobless!

  I’d not been jobless since the age of eighteen when my silver tongue unlocked the door to a trainee executive post with an industrial concern in the Midlands. (Those were the days before I discovered I had a Voice.) It was a disturbing feeling now, as if somebody had just stolen my umbrella in a rainstorm. I felt helpless and exposed. The world seemed to stretch out endlessly from the spot on which I stood and it was full of threats, not least of which was hunger.

  The reaction had no relation whatsoever to reason. The Director General had declined to allow me work out a term of notice - that sodding old Frog of a General had obviously gone after my hide with a vengeance - and instead handed me a cheque to cover severance pay. It was a substantial amount: just short of £800, which meant that with the £700 in the bank, I had close on £1500 on hand. Again I’m struck by the way money values have deteriorated. There are, I’m led to understand, farm labourers who find it difficult to buy their share of mangleworzels on £1500 a month these days. In 1969, the same sum could be relied upon to keep me in modest luxury well into 1970, while really careful budgeting would have ensured survival for anything up to two years. On top of this there was my truly massive overdraft facility, although whether that would remain available after my bank manager learned the BBC had bounced me was a debatable point. Not that I was in any hurry to tell him the news, of course, but bank managers have an espionage system to rival Mossad.