Familiar Rooms in Darkness

by Caro Fraser

  ‘Right. We can all go. I may invite some people from the play, make up a proper house-party. Yes, let’s do that.’

  ‘OK.’ Charlie nodded, then tipped back the remains of his Scotch. ‘Look, I’m sorry this has to be a flying visit. It’s already late, and I’ve got to be in court in Uxbridge tomorrow morning. I’d better be off.’

  Bella got up and walked Charlie to the front door. ‘If I do hear anything from Derek–’ She paused.

  ‘Derek?’

  ‘In Deptford. Our brother.’

  ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘If I do hear from him, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘You don’t have to. I’m fine as I am.’ He looked at her. ‘Not that that’s going to stop you, is it? You’re determined to make me part of this.’

  ‘You already are a part. Flesh and blood. Family.’

  He shook his head, whether in negation or despair, Bella couldn’t tell.

  ‘Goodnight.’ He kissed her.

  ‘Goodnight, Charlie.’ She watched fondly as he loped downstairs to his car, and wondered if she could ever feel about Derek the way she felt about Charlie. Not possible. Not remotely possible. Perhaps that small truth needed close examination.

  In tracking down Richard Compton-King, Adam once again enlisted the help of Giles Hamblin. There seemed to be very few people of any note in London whom Giles did not know, or know of.

  ‘One of Harry’s editors from way back mentioned his name,’ Adam told Giles. ‘I’ve checked through all Harry’s articles and interviews and the name doesn’t crop up anywhere. All I know is that he used to work in the music business – pop, that is – and that he was close to Harry in the sixties.’

  ‘Compton-King, Compton-King… Rings a bell… Leave it with me. I know a fellow at Sony who might be able to help.’

  Later that afternoon, just as Adam was putting the finishing touches to a review, Giles rang back.

  ‘OK, this is your man. Richard Compton-King, now in his late fifties, started out working for Don Arden in the early sixties, became manager of the Cupids, Tight Finger, Bod Jeffries, and latterly the Keith Harvey Kickband.’

  ‘Good grief.’

  ‘Went on to form RTO, a glam-rock independent record company, then hit the big time in the eighties with a band called Domain. Remember them?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Very big in Japan. Opened up the market there, you could say. Oh, and he also wrote a biography of Peter Noone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Herman. Of Herman’s Hermits. Don’t worry about it. Anyway, Compton-King’s still in the business, but only just. His record company folded in the mid-nineties, left him with a lot of debts. I gather his star is somewhat on the wane. He gets by managing various maverick bands that the big boys won’t handle. Lives in St John’s Wood.’

  ‘Have you got an address and phone number?’

  ‘I have. Ready?’

  Adam took down the details. ‘I’ll give him a ring.’

  ‘Should prove interesting. Then again, possibly not,’ said Giles. ‘Let me know how you get on.’

  When Adam rang Richard Compton-King and explained about the biography, Compton-King’s response was enthusiastic.

  ‘Fabulous. Love to talk about the old days, and about Harry.’ There followed background sounds, and an extraneous exchange between Compton-King and a woman about something they appeared to have lost. His attention to Adam didn’t re-engage for several seconds, and when it did, he sounded distracted. ‘Look, why don’t you come to lunch?’ His voice faded off-receiver again. ‘No, I didn’t put it there. Why would I put it there?’ Back he came. ‘Sorry, Alan–’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘Of course. Where were we? Yes, let’s do lunch…’

  Suspecting that Compton-King’s attention was about to fade again, Adam said quickly, ‘I’m free any day this week.’

  ‘Are you? Well, that’s terrific…’ There was the sound of the phone being laid down, then papers being moved, and then a long period of nothing happening at all. Adam could hear feet crossing a room. Time lengthened. Adam was about to hang up, convinced he’d been forgotten, when suddenly Compton-King’s voice came back on the line. ‘OK. OK, here we are. Friday. How does Friday sound?’

  ‘Yes, Friday is great.’

  ‘Right – say, twelve-thirty. Listen, lovely chatting to you. Have to go. Ciao.’

  The phone call didn’t inspire Adam with confidence. As he parked his car in the leafy St John’s Wood road that Friday just before noon, he half-expected to find no one at home. He made his way up the large front garden to the Compton-King residence – a large, double-fronted detached house of some grandeur, but in need of a coat of paint – and rang the bell. As its echoes died away, only the sounds of summer, of susurrating leaves and idle birdsong, filled the silence. The July day was languorously warm. Adam waited. He rang the bell again. Somewhere a dog barked. Dispirited, but not surprised, Adam turned and walked back down the path. He was halfway to the gate when he heard the sound of a door opening, and turned to see a very tall man dressed in baggy striped shorts and a dressing-gown. He called out, and Adam went back up the path.

  They shook hands.

  ‘Sorry. I was out back at the pool. Didn’t hear you. Shona usually answers. Don’t know where she’s got to. Come in, come in…’

  Richard Compton-King was not quite what Adam had expected. He looked younger than his years, marvellously handsome, with a leathery, tanned face and a wide, charming smile. He was well over six feet tall, and wore his long, greying blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Only the incipient sinewiness of his long legs gave his age away, but he seemed to Adam to be in pretty good condition for someone in his late fifties.

  Compton-King, towelling robe flapping, led Adam through the house and out into a large, sunlit garden, in whose foreground sparkled the synthetic blue waters of a swimming pool of rather small proportions.

  Compton-King squatted down beside a small drain at one end of the pool and fiddled about briefly with something in its interior.

  ‘Bloody pump needs looking at…’ He rose, strode to the open patio doors and roared ‘Shona!’ He came back to Adam, smiling his fabulous smile. ‘Sorry about this. Won’t take a moment…’

  A girl in her twenties came through the patio doors, dressed in cropped trousers and a T-shirt. ‘What?’ she asked crossly. She didn’t even look at Adam.

  There followed a confabulation about the faulty pool pump, and the girl was dispatched to phone someone up about it.

  ‘Shona’s my PA,’ said Compton-King, as she disappeared back into the house, ‘my right-hand woman, my amanuensis… Can’t run a thing without her. Used to have a complete entourage, but times are tough…’ He picked up a pair of sunglasses from a table and settled into one of the poolside chairs, gesturing Adam to another.

  ‘OK, Adam, I’m all yours.’ He smiled, shifted the sunglasses a little up the bridge of his aquiline nose. Adam, pleased at the businesslike approach, murmured his usual thing about recording their conversation, set up his tape on the table and was about to launch into his first question, when Compton-King said expansively, ‘Isn’t this fantastic weather?’ Adam agreed that it was.‘Had the pool put in last year – been just amazing – have a swim every morning before getting down to work. Day didn’t dawn till around eleven for me today, mind you – out rather late last night. This new band I’m managing… well, not so much a band as DJs turned music-makers – Mule Skinners. Have you heard of them?’ Adam confessed he hadn’t. Compton-King looked at him doubtfully. ‘Really? Going to be very big – sort of garage disco sound, with a hint of ska, but with really solid four-four rubric. Fantastic… Look, we need some lunch, and something to drink. Hold on a moment.’ He padded off to the kitchen, and Adam sat back, sighing, and switched off his tape recorder.

  After a few moments Adam became aware of the sounds of a muted altercation coming from the direction of the kitchen. Compton-King strode back to the pool-si
de, and Adam thought he heard the words ‘fucking woman’ muttered sotto voce. Compton-King had a bottle of champagne in one hand and two glasses in the other. He gave Adam a regretful-host smile.

  ‘Shona’s just putting a few things together. Afraid it won’t be much of a lunch. Still, shouldn’t be long.’ He set down the bottle and the glasses on the table. ‘This’ll do to be going on with.’

  He popped the champagne, poured a glass and handed it to Adam, then settled into his chair, sunglasses on nose, and crossed his long legs. ‘I first met Harry,’ he announced, ‘at a party. God knows whose. Don’t ask me. It was back in the sixties. I remember I was really interested in meeting him, because I thought he might be useful in some way. I was twenty, desperate – my sole ambition in life was to make it big. Everyone wanted to make it big. You operated on the basis that anyone who was vaguely well known might turn out to be useful. Connections. All about who you knew. Anyway, I was working for Dick Leahy at Philips Records – sort of a glorified errand boy. The music business wasn’t turning out to be the goldmine I’d imagined, and I had this idea that maybe theatre was the place to be. So I introduced myself to Harry, had a chat, got his number, then I met him again a couple of weeks after that at a place called the Ad Lib Club. Now this was a seriously trendy club back in the sixties, I mean absolutely everybody hung out there. You had to get to it by a lift, and the walls were lined with fur, as I recall. There was this tank of piranha fish, and a mirrored dance floor…’

  ‘Sounds like something out of Austin Powers.’

  ‘Very hip in those days, I can assure you, full of trendy people, people in the music business, the arts, television… Anyway, there was Harry having a drink with Joe Orton, as I recall.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Adam with interest, thinking of Bella. ‘Oddly enough, Harry’s daughter is appearing in an Orton play at the moment, in the West End. What was he like?’

  ‘Orton? Dark, schoolboy-like, quiet at first, till you got to know him. I don’t think he can have been all that well known back then, the first time I met him. It was around ’64, I think… I remember him wearing a sort of corduroy cap – a John Lennon cap, as it was called – and he had a wig in a box, which he wouldn’t check at the cloakroom – insisted on keeping it with him at the table. Harry kept joking about it. Anyway, I suppose I saw a good deal of him over the next three years, generally with Harry. Orton rarely had a decent word to say about anyone, but he was rather admiring of Harry. Perhaps fascinated is a better word. Ah, here we are…’ Shona had appeared with a large tray bearing lunch, which apparently hadn’t required a great deal of preparation, consisting mainly of French bread, cheese and pâté. Richard busied himself putting up a wayward patio umbrella to shade the table. Eventually, when everything was arranged to Richard Compton-King’s satisfaction, they began lunch.

  ‘So, why was Orton so fascinated by Harry?’

  Compton-King helped himself to a slab of pâté and tore off a chunk of bread. He chewed reflectively for some seconds. ‘Complex, Adam. Very complex. I mean, on the one hand, he thought Harry was a frightful hypocrite, proselytizing on behalf of the working classes when he knew his audience were middle-class, theatre-going intellectuals – the kind who liked to look down on the likes of Jimmy Porter in the same way that they’d looked up to the upper-class inhabitants of the worlds of Rattigan and Coward… Here, help yourself to some of this aubergine stuff. Very good. Have you got enough shade? Because we can move the chairs round if you haven’t –’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine. Go on.’

  ‘Yes, well… on the other hand, he admired the things Harry said in his plays. Both driving at the same kind of subversion, you see. Sexually, it was the same thing, only they worked from different angles.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘Joe envied Harry. It tickled him enormously to think that Harry should have built such a façade to conceal his true nature, but he hated the fact that Harry thought he had to do any of those things. Set up smokescreens, deceive the world. All very interesting, really.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What smokescreens? What d’you mean?’

  Richard Compton-King gave a long, considering look. His breezy, charming manner had given way to something more serious and thoughtful. ‘Come on, you’re his biographer, surely you know.’

  Adam shook his head.

  ‘Astonishing.’ Compton-King paused contemplatively, turning his champagne glass slowly with long fingers. ‘It always surprised me it never came up before. You know, profiles of Harry, stuff written about him when he was up for those big prizes. I knew. Plenty of people knew. Maybe it was because they were all part of that strange charmed circle. People were far kinder back then, you know. Discreet, tactful. Understanding.’ He drank off his champagne and poured them both some more.

  For a few seconds Adam was too astonished to say anything. He picked up his glass and took a couple of steadying gulps. ‘You’re saying Harry was gay?’ This, if true, was going to make something very big of the biography. He felt momentarily dizzy.

  Compton-King lifted his chin and looked at Adam pensively. ‘Yes – though not entirely. Lots of people like that back then. I don’t know whether he and Cecile strictly had what you would call un mariage blanc… but I think it was a form of protection. That’s what really got Joe – he hated the social taboos that forced people into those corners. Couldn’t decide whether Harry was giving in to conventionality, or cocking a snook at it. He and Harry argued about it a good deal. In a friendly kind of way. Joe didn’t see why homosexuality had to be regarded as outcast and criminal, thought everything Harry did reinforced that. Of course, that was why Joe behaved as he did, all that cottaging, that promiscuity. Said that it was a way of rejecting prescribed patterns of sex. “Sex is the only way to infuriate them,” he used to say. Hated the idea of the well-adjusted homosexual, saw tolerance as a repressive concept.’

  Adam was working to keep up with this. Compton-King was more than just an old pop-group manager and hustler, clearly. Behind the lazy, lightweight façade lay a busy intellect. Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it had a perverse effect on him, making him serious, instead of the other way round. Whatever, Compton-King was turning out to be the best thing that had happened to Adam since George Meacher. If any fleeting misgivings struck him concerning the rest of the Day family, Adam stifled them for the time being, preoccupied with the significance of what he was hearing.

  ‘Joe would go on at Harry about his hypocrisy – Harry would simply point to Joe’s relationship with Halliwell and tell Joe he was trapped in his own homosexual marriage, but without any of the tax benefits.’ Compton-King grinned. ‘Give him his due, Joe was generous enough to accept the truth of that. Which was why he envied the way Harry had arranged his life. Joe saw Harry as having class. It was something Harry tried to disguise, or at any rate downplay in the old quest to be a social dramatist, but it shone through, and Joe liked that. He wanted to move easily through the social milieu like Harry. Harry was quite content to manipulate the truth of his own life, accept conventions and work within them. He wasn’t angry, like Joe. For all the social realism of his plays, he wasn’t setting out to change the world. It was Joe who remained true to himself – the ultimate bedsitter playwright.’

  ‘But you said yourself that Harry’s plays were subversive. He was one of the great social realists. He was ground-breaking, surely.’

  ‘No. He was simply doing what a great many people, including myself, did in the sixties.’ Compton-King gave Adam a kind smile. ‘He was cashing in.’ He emptied the dregs of the first bottle into Adam’s glass and popped another. Adam allowed his glass to be refilled without demur. He was feeling very good indeed.

  ‘Mind if I have some more of this cheese?’ he asked.

  ‘Go ahead. I’ll get Shona to bring out those strawberries.’ He hauled his lanky frame from the chair and flapped off into the house.

  Adam put his recorder on pause and sat in a state of incredulity. U
nlike with the Meacher situation, he didn’t doubt one word of what Compton-King had told him. But how was it that, over all the years, not so much as a hint of any sexual scandal concerning Harry had ever surfaced? How had he managed to conduct himself as a very public personality without scraps of truth emerging, former lovers cashing in, some resourceful journalist getting wind of something?

  He asked Compton-King this when he returned. Compton-King, who had brought out a second bottle of champagne, filled Adam’s glass, despite his protests, and settled himself back in his chair. Adam flicked on his tape recorder.

  ‘Well, now, to answer that one, you have to understand the way things were back then. Homosexuality? Utterly beyond the pale. Till they changed the law in the late sixties, if you were queer you could be sent to prison for life. Utterly appalling, wrecked people’s lives and careers…’ Shona appeared with a bowl of strawberries and set them down. Compton-King stretched out a large hand and picked up a few, and began to bite them off at the base of their stalks with leonine teeth. Adam helped himself to a handful, and found himself wondering whether Compton-King himself was gay. It was hard to tell.

  Compton-King chucked the spent hulls of his strawberries on to a plate and wiped his hands together. ‘So–’ He picked up the bottle and poured out yet more champagne. ‘–put Harry in that environment. Think of him – young man in Soho in the late fifties. Hangs around certain kinds of bars and clubs. Plenty of them in Soho. Gets drawn into the homosexual scene, as can happen. Few years later, turns into an established playwright, with a reputation to protect.’ Compton-King shrugged. ‘As I recall, Harry had girlfriends as well, but no matter how half-hearted a homosexual you might be in those days, you stood to lose everything – career, reputation, family, liberty – if you got caught. Harry was probably just one of any number who got married and kept up an appearance of respectability. Can’t say I ever blamed him, even if Joe did.’

  ‘But d’you think Cecile realized? I mean, do you think when they got married that she knew?’ asked Adam wonderingly.