Low life
Excuses, excuses
Jeffrey Bernard
Aman walked into the pub one day last week and introduced himself as Bren- dan. I knew straight away that he was going to be a nuisance. You can see it Coming. He told me that he and his wife share an enthusiasm for this column. That was all right but flattery from strangers almost always heralds an onslaught of ear-bashing. He went on to say that he had been up all night gambling in Charlie Chester's casino and had lost his lot: £500, to be precise.
I could tell by the cut of his jib, never mind jacket and trousers, that the £500 must have been all that he had in the world. So what's new? I wouldn't mind a fiver for each of the sob stories I have heard in pubs and the post-mortems I have heard on racecourses. But then this Bren- dan said he was going to telephone his wife to make excuses and that it was likely that she wouldn't be speaking to him for a while. This is all old stuff and I have been there myself but never have I had the gall to request the favour he then asked me. He said, 'Seeing as how my wife likes your stuff so much, would you please speak to her?' Bloody cheek. Excuses for friends yes, but for complete strangers, I don't think so.
Mind you, he had been talking so much that he was hardly a stranger any more. He was also buying his rounds. There was something rather sad about him — one of life's prisoners of war. Then a picture came to my mind, an awful one. In 1964 Frank Norman and I collaborated on a book called Soho Night and Day. The advance Secker and Warburg gave me seemed a lot at that time. 1 lost it in five minutes flat on the green baize. I am no stranger to sickening remorse.
Anyway, I said I would speak to her and perhaps he was a shit and perhaps she was sitting alone with no food in the house and just gloom. But she sounded cheerful enough when he handed me the telephone. I said, 'Brendan's all right, but I am afraid I led him astray last night. He was on his way home to you when I met him in a pub and you can guess what happened. All my fault.' She actually laughed. I felt uneasy. But worse still, Brendan wouldn't go and neither could he stay the pace, as we say on the Turf. He was floundering in his glasses of whisky. What I fear now is that he may become a weekly fixture. There are nuts who think that because they read you they own you. Excuses, excuses.
Twenty years ago I asked a friend to telephone my then wife in the country to say that I had been too ill to get back from London. He spoke to her and said, 'Jeff couldn't get back because he spent the entire weekend in bed with Henrietta.' A bayonet in the back never mind a stab.
'I love walking my dog through this part of town.' Jealousy. He fancied Henrietta. And the entire weekend in bed wasn't quite true. We broke off relations on the Saturday afternoon to go to Sandown Park to back Spy Net, who won the Imperial Cup at 100-6. That evening I took him out for an expensive supper.
I must give that wife all credit due. She was more angry with him than with me. She asked him, 'Why are you telling me all this?' and apparently he said, 'I consider it my duty as a friend.' Some friend. A little melodrama like that today would have me yawning but in those days all our skins were thinner. That particular grass is still around but he comes into the Coach and Horses less and less, thank God, unless he wants to borrow some money. I was once innocent enough to think that shits always got their comeuppance eventually. How stupid of me. Naïve. There must be thousands of the bastards drifting con- tentedly into their sunsets.
But on the subject of excuses I have found that over the years the truth is best. It stuns some people. Knocks them over. You can almost hear them thinking, 'Why isn't this man lying to me?' Editors should send out printed notes reading, 'Please lie as the truth can often give offence.'
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