We are all terribly worried about Charles. He disappeared on the evening of the Budget; apparently he spoke to his accountant at 5.45pm and then vanished. How let down he must have felt! Only a few days before, over an excellent Puligny-Montrachet, he'd expressed the hope that Healey was the man to do something truly "swingeing" to soak the rich. "And if we can no longer afford Molly's buggy," he said, "I'll bicycle to work."
Molly is his wife. Molly's buggy is a Mini-Moke, first purchased to service their five-bedroom cottage in Sussex, but recently brought up to Primrose Hill to take the strain off the Volvo Estate, so that Molly can run her boutiques and cope with all this VAT. I must say I admire Molly a lot: she reads the Guardian and despises the Telegraph crowd, and she wears simple gowns in black and oatmeal, with old silver bracelets she picks up in Persia and the Portobello Road. She and Charles share very progressive views about education and would certainly have sent their own children to the local comprehensive if only, as they put it, the school were truly comprehensive. Anyway, the children have a happy life at home with the au pairs, and then there's Mrs Crump who "does" five mornings a week, as well as the Spanish girl who whips up meals at the drop of a hat.
But I'm forgetting Charles. Charles is an idealist; only recently he joined in the occupation of Centre Point and even distributed copies of Workers Press to the police outside. At one time he was considering running for Camden Council on a revolutionary platform, but I gather there was some dispute about a mews property he'd happened to pick up and then left vacant while its value doubled.
Originally Charles was a barrister. He went straight from the presidency of the Marxist Club at Oxford to Lincoln's Inn. The trouble was, the expenses of legal practice are such that, in order to subsidise the many cases he fought on behalf of evicted black tenants etc, he found he had to take on more and more wealthy clients, and then he got sick of the whole contradiction and went into publishing.
Charles was absolutely right - all publishers simply regard books as sources of surplus value. His solution was utterly radical: to put out a handful of ghastly best-sellers and then funnel the profits into low-priced, soft-cover editions of books which would truly expose the whole anal-authoritarian super-ego of the military-industrial complex. (Actually, I mustn't give the impression that Charles is a puritan; he loves antique furniture, old silver and fast cars, preferably Italian, he dresses beautifully and he has a clever way of renewing his collection of contemporary paintings by selling the old ones just when they "peak", as he puts it.)
Anyway, Charles finally got driven out of publishing. It's appalling how ungrateful and unimaginative people are, as Molly said at the time. Charles did try to explain to the 20-odd editors, art directors and secretaries he employed that, in these days of graduate unemployment, he was demonstrating a socialist spirit in taking on so many of them at £850 a year. He also tried to explain that this was a collaborative, collectivist venture, that there was no question of a boss-employee relationship, and that everyone must call him Charles. Well, they did, but then these petty-bourgeois egoists went and joined a trade union, demanding recognition or bargaining rights or whatever, and Charles was dreadfully upset. An absolutely grim opportunist came down from the union to haggle, so Charles sold to Globe and quit.
It was about this time that Charles, repudiating his Stalinist errors and taking to heart the teachings of Kropotkin and Marcuse, travelled to Paris to take part in the revolution. He returned with an ugly bruise over his left eye and a splendid collection of Beaux Arts posters which, in later years, he sold off in small lots. This was definitely his wild period; in rapid succession he occupied Rhodesia House, the Foreign Office, the Aldwych Theatre and the School of Slavonic Studies. Relentlessly he denounced the "pigs", and it was only Molly's hysteria which persuaded him to call them in when the house on Primrose Hill was burgled.
Now Charles came face to face with his vocation: he would write and write until the sweat ran, in a studio he had fitted out on the top floor. To subsidise these efforts he was driven to labour as a wage-slave for a hideous American film producer, to form himself into a limited company (for the third time), and to take his family, on the advice of his accountant, to the West Indies. Naturally he visited Cuba.
It was so nice to have them back. I had missed the weekends at their place in Sussex, and was sorry to hear that the tenants, to whom they let it for a token £50 a week, argued rather nastily about vacating it at a week's notice. Anyway, Charles has converted the barn now (the council refused him a grant, can you believe it!) and installed a couple of pensioners to keep an eye on it. Of course he and Molly don't get down there as often as they would like because they're such popular guests at some of the grander country houses.
So now poor Charles has vanished, along with the Volvo Estate and his passport. I for one can empathise with his frustration in the face of this timid, reformist Budget. So often he said to me: "You know, if only one could really help the poor, or the pensioners, or the homeless, or the battered wives, or the miners, or the blacks, simply by giving away what I earn, or what my uncle left me, how gladly I would do it! But it would be a drop in the ocean, wouldn't it? The trouble is there are so many poor people in the world, and so few rich. What we need is a genuinely socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer."
Help us to trace Charles: let us know if you come across anyone resembling him.
