When I was a child, I envied my older brother and sister because their godfathers were famous. My brother Tom’s was Eric Gill, my sister Sophie’s was Graham Greene. Sophie’s was the most enviable, not just because Greene was the more famous but because he was also exotic. He went from one to another of the world’s trouble spots to gather material for his novels; he had a house in Capri and flats in Paris and Antibes; and my mother, who never bothered with pas devant les enfants, would tell us stories of Graham’s amorous escapades.
We never saw either Gill or Greene. The latter’s friendship with my parents had blossomed briefly when he was editor of Night and Day, and had hired my father, an arch-highbrow, to review thrillers. The magazine collapsed; so too did Greene’s marriage.
His son Francis was sent to Ampleforth, only five miles from where we lived in Yorkshire, and Francis’s mother and sister would come to stay for the Exhibition, Ampleforth’s equivalent of Eton’s “Fourth of June”. But no Greene. When he heard that my father was gravely ill with cancer, he offered him his house in Capri to convalesce from his latest bout of treatment. Sadly, it was too late.
The next I heard of him was when the publisher of my novel Monk Dawson received a generous endorsement from Greene. Later, he praised my work of reportage, Alive, after which I took a wagon-lit to Antibes to thank him and pay my respects. Graham met me off the train and took me to the Hotel Royal, where he had booked a room overlooking the sea. Over the next three days he was generous with his time: we walked along the ramparts of the Fort Carré and dined Chez Félix.
His flat in La Résidence des Fleurs overlooked the harbour and only had a single bedroom: he said he had no spare rooms in any of his dwellings so that he could not have anyone to stay. He introduced me to Yvonne Cloetta, who lived in nearby Juan-les-Pins. “Her husband spends 10 months of the year in Africa; for the two months he returns, I travel,” he told me. He said he had not been to Confession for 25 years “because one affair led to another”. He felt incapable of a firm purpose of amendment, and thought it would be cheating to go to Communion while in a state of sin.
Graham had first left England because he felt he might be prosecuted for some tax dodge that had gone wrong, but had remained in Antibes to be near Yvonne. If he had few qualms of conscience about adultery, tax avoidance troubled him even less. He loved the subterfuge, showing me how his name and address on a letter from his bank in Luxembourg were written in pen and ink in a girlish hand – it might have been a love letter.
Yet he did not particularly like the Côte d’Azur, with its boutiques, expensive restaurants and population of “rootless cosmopolitans” like himself: he called it the Côte d’Ordures. He said he had often thought of retiring to an English village where he could walk to the pub – but then “all my money would go in death duties”.
“But why do you feel obliged to leave money for your children? Why can’t they look after themselves?”
“Perhaps because of the guilt I feel at breaking up their family.”
Reading Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, with its eloquent description of the joys of marriage and the family, it saddened me to think that in this area of life Graham had missed out, paying too high a price for the freedom he considered necessary to his life as a writer – solitude, a new place, a new woman, a new book.
Yvonne brought some stability into his life, and he became fond of her family. Some years later, Graham intervened in the bitter legal dispute between Yvonne’s daughter Martine and her husband, writing his J’accuse – a humiliating abuse of his reputation as a world-famous writer, but an expression of a paternal solicitude that had been absent earlier in his life.
Graham was a man of great kindness, generosity and charm. His was a boyish charm: one sensed that in some respects, particularly in his attitude towards women, he had never really grown up. Later, we fell out over an article I wrote in The Tablet criticising liberation theology. It was around that time that he said the Vatican had much to learn from the Kremlin, and compared Kim Philby to the Jesuit martyrs during the reign of Queen Elisabeth I. But however paradoxical or quiescent Graham’s Catholic faith, it was never extinguished. Before he died, 25 years ago, he asked for and received the Last Sacrament of the Church.
Piers Paul Read is a novelist, historian and biographer
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