by Alan Clark
She’d turned and gazed at me intently. She’d seemed to be searching my eyes for something, just as I’d been discreetly searching hers. After all, it was her only child whose bloated body had been pulled from the bottom of the harbour three years before. But I’d seen nothing unusual there, only a sudden shiver underneath the suit of peach-coloured linen which had turned the heads of the drab women in the village. We’d taken turns throwing a lily out onto the water until they’d all been carried away on the early tide towards the distant mass of Skye.
‘Well that’s done,’ Granny had said. ‘Shall we have an ice-cream?’
And we had. Then she’d decided we deserved another one. She’d put her arm tightly round my shoulders and we’d licked our way back to the car.
‘Joined at the hip, aren’t we, my darling?’ she’d laughed, tapping the top of her false leg. ‘Joined at the hip.’
THREE
At Battersea Dogs’ Home, there will be a barking and a gnashing of teeth. In leafy suburban avenues, fascist loonies will be stuffing shite into envelopes with my name on it. The fickle finger of fate has poked down through the clouds and tickled me under the chin. I have inherited Mount Royal and all that goes with it. I have no idea how or why.
She went in the middle of the night. They’d found her in the morning. Another massive stroke. It would have been quick and without pain, they’d said. But how the hell did they know that if nobody had been with her? I didn’t like to think she’d been frightened.
They’d asked if they could keep her false leg; ‘to maximize the life-style quality of a future mobility-challenged resident.’ Can you believe that? At their rates, they could have supplied prosthetics to half the casualties of the Somme. At first I’d told them to fuck off, but then they’d pointed out that it wouldn’t burn anyway, so I gave in on condition it was only attached to a needy Jew or homosexual.
She’d wanted a service in the chapel at Mount Royal but its crumbling condition had thrown up health and safety issues which, her solicitor decreed, could rebound on the estate in the event of injury. So a week later, there was the usual fast-track disposal in the red-brick caverns of Golders Green, attended by myself, Vic d’Orsay and a pick ’n’ mix bunch of weirdos; desiccated nobility with cracked lips and bad breath; creepy middle-aged types in cheap suits, even a few shaven-headed young bruisers.
Vic d’Orsay had just been sprung from the nursing home and was back in his flat off Sloane Street. After our first encounter, we’d met two or three more times over the following weeks as my grandmother had slithered downhill. I’d actually, as promised, taken him out to lunch at a country pub. He’d managed to top me in the telling of filthy jokes; there had been one about clitoral farts even I’d have baulked at. I’d liked him, I’d felt sorry for him, though I’d made no plans to fertilize the acquaintance. But when Granny died he’d called me up and offered his help in organizing the funeral. Totally clueless, I’d been only too grateful. Mind you, Granny had left fairly precise instructions. It was just to be a few of her favourite hymns and Bible readings croaked in monotone by shuffling relics of a long lost age. She’d ruled against any sort of eulogy but as the vicar stood up for final prayers, Vic hissed in my ear.
‘Jeez, somebody has to say something’.
He went over to the coffin He addressed not the congregation but the corpse, leaning towards Granny just as I’d seen him do when he tried to understand what she was struggling to say. He talked about journeys and paths chosen, about the crosses we carry, about the loneliness of it all and the comforts we sometimes turn to, rightly or wrongly. He talked about forgiveness too, as he’d done with me on that first day I’d gone to see her. And then, tears on his podgy cheeks, he kissed the coffin.
But I didn’t cry. I don’t now. Haven’t for a very long time. Ms Prada doesn’t approve. But I’m all cried out, as the fat lady once sang. However the gastric reflux was going at full blast and for days I’d been in a ‘Milton’ that just wouldn’t shift. I stared at my wreath on the coffin, so white and fragile against the harsh mahogany, the same lilies we’d thrown into Mallaig harbour. Then the flowers and Granny slid silently away to wherever they were going.
The weirdos started gathering their hats and coats and shuffling towards the exit. Suddenly, the piercing scream of a woman came from the mysterious spaces into which the coffin had disappeared. Everybody froze. I thought Vic might have a second stroke. We found out later that a trainee disposal operative had caught her finger in the machinery that rolled the box towards the ovens. The finger had come clean off. Good old Granny. Fucking-up people’s lives till the last possible second.
*
The obituaries had been extensive but not very charming.
Lady Sibyl Constancia Blaine. Born Mount Royal, London, 1913. Only child of the Earl of Ashridge (earldom now extinct). Married Sir Archibald Blaine, Scottish shipbuilder 1932. Divorced 1935. One son, Hector Rufus (predeceased). Socialite. Member of Edward VIII’s circle. Loses leg when crushed by horse; 1968. Personally shoots horse before being taken to hospital. Prominent figure in right-wing politics from late-1970s. Creates neo-fascist salon. National Front candidate in elections of 1979 and 1987. Imprisoned in Holloway for incitement to racial hatred; 1989. Becomes Spitting Image puppet; 1994. Attacks Michael Foot with walking-stick on Hampstead Heath; 1997. No charges pressed. The Guardian called her ‘a sad corruption of noblesse oblige’. The Daily Telegraph mourned ‘a misguided woman whose excesses obscured her sometimes valid arguments’. Pete ’n’ Denise blogged that ‘she spoke for us all’, while Ollyboy felt ‘she was a fuckin nutter, may she rot in hell.’ The last word however went, as it should, to The Times. ‘She is survived by a grandson.’ Well, sort of.
A few days later, I’d taken delivery of the ashes. I’d hidden the urn in a distant cupboard with my folk CDs till I figured out what to do with them. And I’d assumed that would be that. But then there was a summons to a posh office in the Temple. Her Ladyship had scribbled a codicil to her will a few days before she died. Bingo.
I, Rory Blaine, am one of the few gay men in London who can honestly tell you I’ve never been to Hampstead Heath since reaching the age of consent. Thirty years ago, I’d thrown a self-imposed cordon around NW3 which, until this very day, I’d never once crossed. NW3 is where Mount Royal stands.
It was quite bizarre of course, when I returned from Oz and started living a couple of miles away. Tricky too sometimes. If friends living there invited me to dinner, I’d always suggest a West End restaurant. If a business meeting called, I’d plead illness or send somebody else. If I were flying in from the east, I’d never look down in case I glimpsed the cupola. But over the years, it somehow worked. I’d created a black hole in the landscape of the Borough of Camden. A place that no longer existed. Dreamscapes however were another matter. They were less amenable to annihilation. In dreams, I went there constantly.
Once upon a time, you see, I’d been a Blaine of Mount Royal, an insurance policy in bricks and mortar against the worst vicissitudes of existence, guaranteeing a life-long payout of respect and deference. Then suddenly I’d no longer been covered. But now, through some fluke of fortune, it had come back to me and I didn’t quite know how to handle it. Ms Prada was really excited, saying that a physical return to my childhood could represent a major milestone on my road to total mind-management. She also felt I should increase the frequency of our sessions. There were some brochures for the Maldives on her desk.
With two more exceptions, I decided not to tell anyone else, at least not yet. The first of these was Vic d’Orsay who answered my email with just four words: ‘Justice has been done’. The other was Miss Elspeth Wishart, my old matron from Glenlyon. She replied, by second-class post, with a warning about rich men, camels and eyes of needles and an enquiry as to how punitive the Council Tax might be.
Granny’s will was still in probate. But one morning the final papers on the house were signed. Among the reams of legal guff, I was handed a ye
llow Post-It note with a scribbled security code for the gates of Mount Royal. With six wee numbers, I became the owner of one of the greatest mansions in England. Shite, what did I do now?
I went back to the flat, made some cheese on toast and watched a TV programme about a semi-literate Bradford couple struggling to set up a B&B in a derelict farmhouse near Avignon. I put out the rubbish and tried to remove a wine stain from the carpet I’d been living with for months. In this way I managed to delay for three whole hours. Eventually I swore at myself and grabbed the car keys. I suddenly wished I had somebody to go with me so I asked the cat if it fancied a jaunt and it squeaked that it did.
The journey back across thirty years took about twenty minutes. As I drove up the leafy tunnel of Fitzjohn’s Avenue into Hampstead village, it felt like I’d never been away. Though pockmarked now by the usual chain stores, it still oozed its effortless conceit with the Mary Poppins lamp-posts, cobbled alleys and wee bow-fronted bookshops bulging like hernias. A nice middle-class sun, not too hot, not too cold, shone down on the glossy ladies with the well-groomed dogs taking coffee at the pavement tables. A dishevelled man was selling The Big Issue outside Maison Blanc but none of them seemed to see him.
The Merc climbed up to Whitestone Pond on the breezy brow of London. A few hundred yards along Spaniards Road, I swung across the traffic and onto an overgrown path, hemmed in by towering oaks, which ended below a high wall and dark-green metal gates. I punched the numbers on the yellow Post-It note onto a keypad. The gates hesitated before creaking open. Maybe they weren’t glad to see me; I could hardly blame them for that. Driving through, I was blinded by fierce summer sunlight. The trees had given way to a vast clearing where everything was sky and space again. And there, against the water-colour backdrop of the city, was Mount Royal.
With the sun on my retinas, its image was hazy, as it had sometimes been in my dreamer’s eye. The geometric perfection of its walls and windows was diffused; its outline seemed to sway a little, like the oaks that guarded its entrance. But then I angled the car into some shade and all such fragility vanished. The walls reared up like a honey-coloured cliff, arrogance in every stone.
As the cat and I got out of the car I had a frantic urge to piss. I often do. Rod, my genito-urinary mechanic, says it’s not prostate, just another manifestation of tension. I did it into an urn of half-dead geraniums, guiltily, till I remembered they were now my urn and my geraniums. Back up in the oaks, as they’d always done, the rooks were gossiping loudly, no doubt about me. A scruffy caravan parked inside the gates disgorged a fat, sixtyish man in an unkempt security guard’s uniform.
‘It’ll be Mr Blaine?’ he asked in a fierce Irish accent, attempting a half-baked salute. ‘Welcome, Sir, welcome.’
He handed me a chubby bunch of keys, each one neatly labelled. Did I need him to accompany me? He was clearly glad when I declined. A Bruce Willis film was about to start on TV and he never liked to miss one. You never knew when a Die Hard scenario might arise in today’s security environment.
‘A very fine house, Sir,’ he said, contemplating his charge. ‘But the heart’s gone out of it. Still, not my place to say so. Shout if you need me.’
The gravelled carriage circle enclosed a roundel of shabby grass. At its centre was a marble plinth with the figure of Father Thyme. We were old buddies. I used to dress him up in sunglasses, a string vest, a bra stolen from a maid, anything I’d thought might make Granny laugh. I leaned against him and stared at the place which, despite my best endeavours, I‘d never stopped thinking of as home.
‘Well look at you,’ I said.
Christ, it was a stonker of a house. They said that Wren had doodled it on an envelope then handed it to a minion while he got on with St Paul’s. Money had been no object; the first Earl of Ashridge had gone into exile with Charles II and been rewarded with baubles, bangles and job opportunities. Artists, sculptors and woodcarvers had crammed Mount Royal with treasures. Nell Gwynn, Mrs Fitzherbert, Lily Langtry had strolled in its gardens, Walpole, Pitt, Disraeli had nattered in its rooms. For three hundred years, it had stood as evidence of what civilized people could achieve when they weren’t beating the crap out of each other.
But Bruce Willis hadn’t been wrong. Her Ladyship had neglected her legacy. The stone was pitted with pollution and the shining slate I remembered was scabbed-over with bird-shite. Pediments had crumbled and window-frames cracked, gutters were broken and loose drainpipes reeled off the walls like drunks. And though time had been merciless, the hands on the Clock Tower had, paradoxically, long stopped ticking. But despite the ravages, the beauty was imperishable. The sunlight still glanced off the panes of the cupola that crowned the roof, the lions were still rampant around the portico. Maybe Bruce Willis had written it off too soon. Perhaps there was still the possibility of rejuvenation, with Rory Blaine as its saviour of course. But that was a fantasy. Granny’s solicitor had made it pretty clear that inheritance tax meant the Chancellor was the real new owner of Mount Royal. Sooner or later, it would be raped by developers, drawn and quartered into yuppie apartments or sold off to become some fat Arab’s harem.
The cat had already climbed the wide shallow steps to the front doors. I wondered if it might be experiencing agoraphobia never having been further than my teeny roof terrace, though no doubt a cat from Harrods can handle anything. But I wasn’t quite ready to go inside yet. Instead I went through the gate in one of the wrought-iron screens that framed the north front and began to circle the house, warily, as if something might leap out at me.
On three sides Mount Royal was simple, austere almost. As if it were totally sure of itself, not needing to dress up and show off. Only on the south front, which overlooked the gardens and the city, did it show a splash of flamboyance, like an accountant in a blue suit. Here the wings of the letter ‘H’ flung themselves further out, the pediments were more ornate and, just below the roofline hung the huge stone shield with the Ashridge coat of arms and its Latin motto which basically translated as ‘fuck everyone but us’.
Below the terrace, a horseshoe staircase curved down into the Italian Garden with the Great Fountain, the statues, the giant urns and, at the furthest point of the axis, the Orangery. But the paths I remembered were long gone, buried somewhere under thigh-high grass and years of indifference. Here and there, chorus lines of ancient dahlias, blowsy in scarlet and purple, brazened their way up through the chaos. But the tall glass doors of the Orangery were chained now, the latticed panes crusty with dirt. The dry fountain basin was clogged with long-dead leaves, a ripped bag of compost and a pair of mouldy wellingtons. As I pushed my way onwards, my shoes crunched on the skeletons of rooks and squirrels.
I sat down on a mucky stone bench and gazed up at the house. Where did I start with all this? I felt a bit detached, as if it weren’t me going through the experience. With its rows of shuttered windows, the house looked fast asleep but I felt sure it was watching me. Okay, that sounds bonkers but you don’t know it like I do.
‘You’ve been in deep shite for a while, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘Me too.’
Back round on the north front, violent mayhem was blasting out of Bruce Willis’s caravan. Shouts of ‘Die, motherfucker!’ weren’t the background music I’d imagined to putting my key in the lock of Mount Royal, but life’s a funny thing.
The high double doors, the wood fissured and filthy, didn’t want to budge. Perhaps, like the gates, they felt some token reluctance was appropriate. I stepped back, unsure what to do. Then a cry of ‘Take that, asshole’ exploded from the caravan and inspired my left foot. Thirty years after being kicked out of Mount Royal, I kicked my way back in.
It was almost pitch black inside, the air thick as unstirred porridge. I threw the doors wide and prised open the shutters, letting air and light puncture the gloom. The chandeliers tinkled inside their shrouds. Wow. Mount Royal wasn’t a wall-flower that made you wait for its charms, it delivered right away. The Gilded Hall was the grandest room in the house,
rising two storeys high to a wild Verrio ceiling. At ground level it was dominated by a pair of marble chimneypieces, cavernous enough to park a Mini. On the white panelled walls were endless Ashridge portraits, some the size of billiard tables. Twin staircases flew up its opposing walls and linked arms at the top. On three sides of the first floor, open galleries led to the rooms in the east and west wings. But though the gilding was flaking and the chequered marble floor had been hidden by bargain-basement rugs, the sheer nerve of it still hit you between the eyes.
The cat and I went for a prowl; the Saloon, the Library, the Music Room, the State Dining-Room, the Chapel. Some rooms were still in their original Caroline clothing; masculine, darkpanelled, rooms with no fat on them. Others had been remodelled by Wyatville in the early nineteenth century, flibbertigibbets in plaster, silk and damask, girly by comparison. The huge spaces shrunk you like Alice. Even now, damp and grubby, the furniture under dust-sheets, they still did the business. As much as Glenlyon, these had been my school-rooms. I’d taught myself about everything in them, the chairs and tables, the silver, the china, the carvings. The pictures on the walls were old acquaintances; the swan-necked ladies and their complacent lords, the ribboned girls on swings with sad, attendant blackamoors, the dishy nobleman with curls like Marc Bolan. Sometimes I even knew their names and stories; the frail countess who’d died in childbirth, the younger son who’d been lost in a shipwreck. Long dead, they had still breathed for me. Along with Granny and the servants, they’d been palpable presences. We had all lived together, a world in a house. They will be your charges one day, Granny had said. I’d not forgotten a single one of them.
But it was tiny things that carried the shock of familiarity; the same tongues of cold air darting out round the same corners, the beefy doorknob that had squeaked forever, the unchanged touch of a satinwood banister. The smell hadn’t altered either; something given off by the wood, the fabrics, even the stone of the walls, a strange fusion of opulence and decay. What wasn’t familiar was the silence that enveloped the house, as if Mount Royal were holding its breath, waiting to see what was going to happen now. When a distant door banged somewhere, the cat and I jumped together.
