I begin to unpack quietly, pulling out of the cases my fur coats – some moth-eaten, some sumptuous – followed by the numerous ball gowns, silk kimonos and antique tea dresses. It isn’t long before I’m surrounded by a group of girls looking on in wonder, as I explain about Southport jumble sales being such rich pickings. Soon there will be a constant queue to borrow things and I have the idea of giving each item a nickname to keep track of them. A fur coat with a big collar is called the Empress, another the Duchess, then the Lady, and the Tramp; my Forties trench coat is the Casablanca. I understand that they are a new kind of currency, one that brings instant popularity.
I now produce the star of the collection: the black off-the-shoulder dress my mother wore to have her dinner in New York as Queen for a Day. It has lots of tiny little buttons up the back and is cut to follow the hips down then curve into the knees and out again, in what my mother calls a fishtail. I can’t resist spinning the tale that goes with it, and they all sit enthralled and won’t let me stop. They hold the dress admiringly and I suddenly realize that Audrey, even as she drives north back up the motorway, has already woven her way into my new life.
I also see what a gift she is handing on to me with these, with our stories. This is my legacy … And now, at last, I can become the storyteller.
26
A Journey North
THE FIELDS SPEED BY US, the northern towns and countryside, and I watch the blur of it all, seeing it through my reflection in the train window: me alone, without her. We are headed for Southport, where, in a grassy suburban cemetery, someone will be digging my mother’s grave. They will be out in this pale early-summer sunshine, shovelling up the earth to make a place for her.
It still seems unthinkable.
This train journey was taken so often, through all those years stretching from childhood to adulthood, with her sitting right here on the seat beside me. She would step onto the train and glance around the compartment, and see just the right person for us to sit across from. I wasn’t allowed to help her with the case. It was a prop, part of her technique. She would struggle with it for a moment over someone’s head, until they stood to offer assistance. Sometimes I would watch my reflection watching her as if it were a movie.
‘So kind of you,’ she would say, eyes sparkling, and by the time we pulled in to Lime Street station in Liverpool these various men, as invariably they were, would be telling me, in wonder, that they had never had such an entertaining journey.
That seems so recent, and yet here I am, my suitcase packed with the grey, not quite mourning, clothes of the modern funeral-goer, realizing too late that she would probably have preferred the drama of me in an elegant black evening dress and veil.
Audrey herself never lost her drama and chic. Back in Oxford, I had only been at the college for a few weeks when she reappeared in a vaporous halo of Youth Dew, to steal the limelight once again. She had presents for all my new girlfriends, individually wrapped with their names on. They each opened them to find inside a gold insect locket that hung on a chain and when you squeezed its back legs its wings would open to reveal a tiny watch.
‘What do you get when you cross an insect with a rabbit?’ asked Audrey. ‘Bugs Bunny!’ As the girls laughed, I felt a strange stab of jealousy at hearing our old worst-joke game being shared with them. ‘Now you’ll always know when it’s time to have fun!’ Athough the lockets were definitely odd, they wore them all the time, and loved them just as they loved Audrey.
I’d soon become a fixture on the landing of St Clare’s, hogging the telephone to tell my mother the latest episode in my new adventure. Most girls had a call from a parent once a term, but every night someone would pick up the phone, and I would hear them laugh, and then call out with amusement, ‘It’s Audrey!’ She knew most of the girls by name, with an instinct for those destined for fame or notoriety. ‘How’s Paula,’ she’d ask, ‘is she there? Put her on!’ and I’d grumpily listen to Paula regaling my mother with some hilarious anecdote. Later Paula would achieve overnight celebrity by crashing into rock stars’ dressing rooms and photographing them in their underpants, and then she wore a magnificent scarlet ball gown to marry Bob Geldof, with David Bowie at her side. I remember my mother holding up a Daily Mail magazine to show me Paula’s dress, modelled on Scarlett O’Hara’s.
‘Look at that. I always knew Paula would make something of herself.’ I understood that nothing I could achieve in my own career would ever match up to that red ball gown.
But, away from her, my confidence grew. It took time for me to learn that I was still in some ways an outsider, just as she had once felt herself to be. In those first weeks away from home I heard two girls talking outside my room, and one asked, ‘What’s her name, you know the girl who sounds like Cilla Black?’ And the other giggled, ‘Oh, Sarah’ – I’d changed back to my christened name of Sarah instead of Sally, hoping it sounded posher – and in a hideous Liverpudlian whine she went on, ‘I’m Sarah from Southport, and one day I’d like to own a boootique or be an air ’ostess,’ at which they both shrieked in delight. Within weeks I was speaking like everyone else at the school.
A few years ago I was reminded of this when I overheard another conversation, this time in a dress shop near Harrods in London. I’d arranged to meet my mother in a boutique that she told me she often visited because of her friendship with the two ladies who worked there. When I arrived, these women were both at the desk, smartly dressed and well spoken, and as I glimpsed her through the shop window, happily walking towards us. They noticed her at the same moment, and one said, ‘Oh God no, it’s that funny little woman from Southport again,’ and they both groaned.
This slight to her cut me deeply and brought back the faint whispered remarks I had heard throughout my childhood. They had felt so unjust, but I knew that they were all facets of her. She was so many things: a social climber and an imposter; a delinquent but loving mother; a good-time girl but a devoted wife; a fantasist, a dreamer and a romantic, and at the same time ruthlessly practical. I would never be able to quite pin her down, and perhaps I didn’t need to.
But the fear of becoming her had been strong enough to galvanize me. It had been my rocket fuel during those early years. At first, I’d wandered Oxford in a dream, delirious with my new-found freedom, before I realized how powerfully I wanted those things she’d never had: the social acceptance, the career and some status that didn’t depend on any man. This drove me to overcome my feral habits and finally work for my A levels, which I succeeded in getting, along with a place to study English literature at London University. By the time I started living in London my accent had in it barely any trace of Liverpool.
Now, across the train aisle are my own teenagers, and they make my youth seem so long ago. They are almost adults, but today they are behaving like excited children in their delight at being together on an outing. They notice me from time to time and then try to look solemn. They loved their nana and found her entertaining and funny, but for them this is all in the natural order of things. It is different for daughters, and for us only children.
It took a long time for me to really step out of my mother’s shadow. In those early years in London, any thoughts of breaking away from her felt doomed from the outset, as the corrupting magic purse of my childhood was upgraded into something even more seductive – the cocoon of Carmel Court, a tall, thin cottage in a small cobbled courtyard off Kensington Church Street. The house had a tiny rooftop terrace from which you could glimpse the gardens on the roof of Biba, the fabulous Art Deco department store that had become my teenage mecca. Audrey loved Biba as much as I did, and she insisted that Peter bought a place for me to live that would also be somewhere they could ‘occasionally’ stay. Audrey and I would spend evenings in Biba’s top-floor Rainbow Room where the Pasadena Roof Orchestra played Fred Astaire songs we could sing along to, or have tea in the roof garden where flamingoes wandered past fountains.
My feelings about her more than ‘occasional’
visits were mixed, as she still brought such a cloud of glitter dust in her wake; the lights would twinkle but the air could be hard to breathe. The shadowy neighbours in the dingy boarding house across the courtyard would now be variously revealed as Michael Mannion, the self-styled Bard of Kensington, or Miss Primrose Lane, an elderly former debutante fallen on hard times who made her own hats. I would come home to have her ‘finds’ of the day introduced to me – ‘This is Spencer Harper the Third, Kentucky aristocracy, I thought he could stay?’ – and there would be people laughing around the kitchen table, their stories wheedled out and made extraordinary.
When Peter and Audrey weren’t staying, my friends would come to dinner and be surprised by the continual interruption of the phone ringing, not just once or twice, but several times in an evening. I would become agitated and have to admit that Audrey would be upset if I didn’t answer. ‘She calls every night,’ I would tell them, ‘but I’ll call her back when you leave.’ It was only later, amid the exhaustion of my own family life and career, that it became a necessity to wean her off that daily contact.
Once I’d finally moved away from her orbit, I became increasingly aware of the desperate patterns I seemed doomed to repeat. We learn the steps so well, the choreography of this complex dance of our parents’ lives, and when the music plays we find ourselves moving in much the same way, whether we want to or not. The strengths and weaknesses I see in myself seem both so Audreyish, and somehow so inevitable.
Since Dave, and our teenage Summer of Love, I was hardly ever without a man at my side, and in times of need I always looked around, as Audrey did, for a man to take care of me. I remember, in my early twenties, being in my New York apartment, in which I’d sprayed everything gold, including my boots. I sat among the gilded packing cases I used for tables, and realized that a crisis had finally struck and my money was all gone. Nearby was a lesbian cocktail lounge where for some weeks the owner had paid me in under-the-counter cash to wear a tight leather dress and chat up customers, until she panicked about my being an illegal immigrant and let me go. I was now completely broke, but I was still too in love with Manhattan to leave. It was the city that Audrey, in her own way, had conquered. Well, so could I, and besides I wanted some good stories to take home.
I began to pick up men each night outside my favourite restaurant, the opulent Russian Tea Room, and ask them sweetly to buy me dinner. I tried to see this as my Breakfast at Tiffany’s moment, rather than my Audrey moment, and I would even ask bemused businessmen for money ‘for the powder room’ as Capote’s heroine Holly Golightly had done, but I soon began to feel haunted. There was too strong an echo coming down the years, and it frightened me.
Like Audrey, my restless spirit was always greedy for more, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was searching for something – I just didn’t know what that something might be. The ‘Divine Discontent’ seemed to be my inheritance. After America I spent several months travelling alone in India, as the fortune teller all those years ago had predicted, living in a houseboat in Kashmir, crossing the Pakistani desert on a camel and trekking through the Himalayas. I lived for a year in Spain. I would scribble long accounts of my travels to send to Audrey, perhaps hoping to outdo her with my own, more intrepid escapades.
But then I’d gone home, and it was perhaps down to Peter’s presence, and that vision of their happy marriage, that I was eventually able to settle down and sustain a family life.
Sadly, Peter died of a heart attack soon before my first baby, Anna, was born. His love affair with my mother had continued for over twenty years and they’d seemed only to become happier as time went by. In the months following his death it was painful to see quite how lost Audrey was.
I missed him terribly too. For years I kept a jumper of his and would secretly smell it, to conjure that rush of warm feelings, of safety and tenderness, that he’d woken in me. I’d remember funny things – the northern way he said ‘chuffed’ and the comedy routine he did with his glasses mimicking his beloved Eric Morecambe, and most of all that patient kindness of his, powerful enough to move even an angry teenager. He had saved me in so many ways, and I had loved him very much. Now Audrey seemed torn between desperate grief for Peter, which sometimes had her howling like an animal, and the eternal impulse to begin the hunt for a new man. Life without one was still as unthinkable to her as ever, and it wasn’t long before she’d gone back to her old ways.
One day she was pushing Anna in her buggy down a road not far from my house; I’d encouraged her to look after Anna while I was at work, hoping this would distract her, although she was an eccentric babysitter and Anna’s nappy was usually put on the wrong way round and I suspected she had been fed on sweet tea and squashed-up chips. But Anna seemed happy, and would crow with delight when her nana appeared in the doorway in sparkly sequined cardigan, lipstick and high heels. The two of them spent much of their time sitting in the minicab office near my house where the young cabbies, who made my mother laugh, smoked weed all day. I wondered if this cloud of marijuana smoke accounted for Anna’s wonderful habit of sleeping through the night.
One day they came out of this odd tea party to see two youths in hoodies go into the next-door office in a suspiciously sneaky way. My mother peered in and saw them standing over a man who was sitting behind a desk, clearly threatening him and trying to force him to open his petty-cash box. She barged the door open with Anna’s pushchair and gave them one of her most savage and blood-freezing tongue lashings. They soon shuffled out, apologizing and shamefaced. To thank her the man behind the desk offered to buy her lunch and from that moment on they became inseparable.
Franco De Rosa was a handsome and once rather successful Italian actor nearly twenty years her junior. He was charming, fun and kind, and he instantly adored Audrey, moving in with her and being a devoted partner. My mother was convinced that blazing stardom was still ahead of him and they then set about the project of his career revival with madcap delight.
The two of them would appear most days, stepping over Anna’s toys and the debris of family life, usually with a story that they could hardly tell me for laughing so much. They were often just back from blagging their way into a party: ‘We talked to Joan Collins, she remembered Franco from when they both acted together in The Stud, of course.’
Franco De Rosa, 1980.
Or they were back from the Cannes Film Festival, where they had managed to get onto someone else’s boat and stand next to Burt Reynolds. They’d stormed a screening by giving false names; the publicist had actually written down ‘Her Duckiness of Southport’ and then they’d followed Sean Connery up a huge staircase lined with a fanfare of trumpeters, only to be rumbled at the top and have to walk all the way down again past the trumpeters with everyone staring. They acted this out, hysterical with laughter. They had a wonderful collection of photographs of Hollywood stars looking astonished as Franco embraced them and Audrey flashed the camera.
Audrey was still collecting her own stories even at the end, stashing them away to pull out later, to astonish or amuse. And this form of sustenance has been passed on to me: the belief that a good story will get me through anything. That, and the thousand and one songs that, thanks to her, I seem to know the words to.
27
Arrival
THE TRAIN PULLS IN TO Liverpool Lime Street, and we are crossing the city centre to Exchange station for the connection north up the coast towards Southport. As a child I loved this walk through the city, with the density of people and the shouts of the newspaper sellers: ‘Liverpool Echo’ was rasped out, like a horn, simply as ‘ko!’, the sound mixed with the roar and clatter of the traffic. My small hand would feel warm and safe wrapped in my mother’s soft, gloved hand as she guided us across the confusing junctions and we threaded our way through the hurried rush-hour pavements. Liverpool was dark then, a blackened city, the tall buildings stained with the soot from thousands of coal fires, the railways and marshalling yards, and the grit and smoke thrown
up from the docks. On turning a corner, a great cylindrical tube would suddenly appear above the buildings, the brightly painted funnels of the ships, often with thick black smoke pouring out, struggling to make it up into the sky. That sky could be lowering, threatening rain from the Irish Sea to wash away any vestige of colour, but in that foggy gloom Audrey’s fiery mane of hair and bright red lips would glow in a kind of defiance. I remember the thrill of being her pal, and how special she seemed, and all those heads turning to watch her go by.
We are all staying at the Prince of Wales Hotel for a few nights before and after the funeral. There is little trace of its past glory, and it now gets by on offering cheap breaks to pensioners. I look into the ballroom where I once played my Happy New Year game, and an organist is playing to some sleeping people who sit on plastic chairs.
I have left the children there, while I go to sort through some of my mother’s things.
As I open the front door I have a feeling of overwhelming emptiness, of the world without her in it.
There on the table is the familiar contacts book, her old address book with its faded jungle-pattern cover, still held together with an elastic band. In it are all those names and places, those random pinpoints on the map that we would find ourselves heading off to all those years ago.
Next to it is a tape that I had given her for Christmas. On the label I’ve written ‘Hello Audrey’ and a list of which celebrities appear on it.
After my travels I’d become a film-maker, and when I met anyone well known I’d ask them to look at the camera and say something to her, and then I’d put all these moments on a tape to give to her. This one has Paul Newman on it, and I remember being at his house outside New York and telling him how Audrey had watched him play tennis all those years ago in the club in Palm Springs.
Diamonds at the Lost and Found Page 22
