Murderers and Other Friends by John Mortimer Page B

approached by way of fiction.
    Writing the Shakespeare stories was an enormous pleasure. It was interesting to see the great female roles acted by boys before all male Shakespeare became fashionable. And I worked with Peter Wood, a director of truly Elizabethan flamboyance. He would sit in the control room surrounded by his props: silver jugs of coffee, bay rum after-shave, and an assortment of pills, admiring the beauty of his shot and congratulating himself. One day he looked at the screen and said, ‘Peter, Peter, that’s really sensational! You combine the eye of a Rembrandt with a magnificent narrative drive. But silly, silly, Peter, you forgot to cue the actors!’ We built the Globe Theatre on the lot at Elstree and filled it with groundlings. One very hot day they were alarmed when the director appeared on the stage wearing little but a pair of Y-fronts and a Mexican hat. ‘You may think I’m a bastard now, but you’ll learn what a bastard I really am before the day is out!’ he bellowed at them through a bull horn. They took fright and began to trickle away to the town, where numerous customers in doublet and hose were spotted pushing trolleys through Tesco’s. I have the greatest admiration for Peter Wood who taught me something of great value: an hour’s drama on television, which might be thought of as a one-act play or a long short story, is greatly enriched if it has not one plot but two or, better still, three. I have always found plots hard to come by; all the same I stuck to Peter Wood’s rule when I came to tell stories about my own character, not the Swan of Avon, but Rumpole of the Bailey.

Chapter 7
    I’m writing in a Moroccan hotel. It’s February and in England the skies are grey, the ground frozen, the daffodils have poked up before their time but dare not open. Here, all sorts of flowers are out at the same time: roses, carnations, geraniums, hibiscus, arum lilies and bougainvillaea. The sun is shining, the trees are heavy in the orange groves and there are lemons clinging to the wall. The sky is bright blue and far away you can see snow on the Atlas Mountains. There are a number of elderly English people in this hotel; it’s very quiet and a good place to work.
    Last year Penny and I were here, watching the other guests, trying to work out their relationships, or speculate on their lives, which is the chief pleasure to be got from staying in hotels. There was an Englishman, frail and birdlike, wearing elderly but expensive clothes and a brown trilby hat. He was in the company of a thickset, crop-haired, moustached and tattooed man with a North Country accent, perhaps half his age, who might have been a bouncer or a PE instructor. We thought he was the old man’s bodyguard. At dinner, we noticed, they did themselves extraordinarily well, ordering lobsters specially brought from Agadir and pink, French champagne. After a while they invited us to join them for dimer and we found out more. The older man was called Tony. Mike, who had the tattoos, was his cook, housekeeper, gardener, driver, companion and friend.
    â€˜Tony’s only got about a month to live,’ Mike said, as all four of us sat at dinner. ‘It was just a little while ago I sent him in roast pheasant with all the trimmings: bread sauce, gravy, sprouts and game chips. Though I say it myself, it was done perfect. Not at all dry, nice and moist, really appetizing. And Tony took one mouthful and he couldn’t eat it. So I told him then, straight out, “Cancer of the oesophagus. That’s you.” He’s not got long to go now. Of course, I suppose he could be kept alive a bit longer with all sorts of drugs and that. But we’d both much rather he went as he is now. I want to always think of him as he is. At his best.’ And to this, Tony, who had heard the entire speech, nodded a gentle and smiling approval.
    Tony told us more about himself. He’d been