‘Were you surprised when you made money? I mean, proper money?’ This seems an odd question to ask of a slight acquaintance after a forty-year gap. I can only tell you it didn’t feel odd at the time to either of us.
‘Everyone who is very successful will tell you that the initial response is entirely schizoid. One part of you thinks: All this for me? There must be some mistake! And the other greets immense, good fortune with: What on earth took you so long?’
‘I suppose self-belief is a key ingredient.’
He nodded. ‘So they tell us. But it’s never quite enough to prepare you for what’s happening. I made a lot of money when I sold the shops, but even so, when I did the sums for the projected profit on the first development I thought I’d put in too many noughts. I couldn’t believe it would generate so much. But it did. Then there was more and more and more and more. And everything changed.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘Oh, but I did. In those early years I went completely crazy. I was a jackass, a micro-manager to a truly demented degree. My home, my clothes, my cars, everything had to be just so. Looking back, I think I must have been imitating some notion of how posh people behaved but I got it completely wrong. I kept complaining in restaurants, and insisting on different shades of towel and different kinds of water in hotels. I wouldn’t go to the telephone when people I knew rang.’ He paused, bewildered, trying to understand his own remembered lunacy.
‘Why not?’
‘I thought that important people didn’t. It was crazy. Even the President of the United States goes to the telephone if he knows the person at the other end, but I wouldn’t. I had armies of assistants, working from sheaves of messages, with endless lists doled out to all and sundry. And I cancelled; boy, did I cancel. Last-minute duck-out. That was me.’
‘I’ve never really understood why people do that.’ I haven’t. And yet it is an increasingly common phenomenon among the would-be great.
He sucked at his lip. ‘Nor me, really. I think I felt trapped the moment I’d agreed to do anything, because the coming event, whatever it was, wouldn’t be under my control. Then, as it drew nearer I would begin to panic, and on the day I’d decide I couldn’t possibly go, usually for some nonsensical and irrelevant reason, and all the people I paid to kiss my arse would tell me that my host or hostess would understand, so I’d chuck.’
‘When did that end?’
‘When I’d been dropped by everybody. I still thought I was a sought-after guest, until one day I realised I was only ever asked to celebrity stunts, but never to where anything interesting was happening. Politicians, performers, writers, even thinkers, I wasn’t invited to meet them any more. I was just too unreliable.’
This admission fascinated me, since I have known so many film stars and television faces who’ve gradually removed themselves from society, or at least from the society of anyone remotely rewarding who is not a fan. As a rule they are quite unaware of it, and continue to think of themselves as pursued and desired when they are neither. ‘My grandmother used to say that you should never be more difficult than you’re worth.’
‘She was right. I broke her rule and paid. I was much more difficult than I was worth.’ His tone had gone through a kind of exasperation and was suddenly full of real pain. I looked at him. ‘That was when Joanna left me. It was understandable. She’d married me as a protest against the rules of the Establishment and suddenly she was living with a man who thought it was important to have his shirts made with a quarter of an inch difference in the length of the two sleeves, who could only buy his ties in Rome or have his shoes mended by a particular cobbler in St James’s. It was all so boring. Can you blame her?’
I thought it might be time to lighten the mood. ‘From what I remember of your motherin-law, I imagine she rather approved of the change in you. That and the money, of course.’
He looked at me, as the waiter brought the first course. ‘Did you know Valerie Langley?’
‘Not well. I knew her as Joanna’s mother, not as “Valerie”.’
‘She has much to answer for.’ His tone was not jocular. I tried to think of something to add to this, but he hadn’t finished. ‘Did you realise that she only took us out to Portugal to split us up? Can you imagine a mother doing that to her own daughter?’
I could, really, when the mother in question was Valerie Langley, but there wasn’t much point in flinging petrol on to the flames, so I decided to move to different shores for a bit. ‘I gather you married again after you and Joanna split up. Is your second wife still around?’
He almost jumped, as if my words had distracted him from something he was busy with. ‘No. We’re divorced. Years ago.’
‘I’m sorry. It didn’t say that in your biography.’
Again he looked at me as if I were forcing him to discuss a parking ticket that had been issued to somebody else in 1953. ‘Don’t be sorry. Jeanne was nothing.’ Which was a chilling comment, but not just in its cruelty. Perhaps it said too much about his loneliness.
‘How is Joanna?’ He’d already mentioned her, so there didn’t seem to be any reason why I shouldn’t ask. ‘Are you on good terms these days?’
The question seemed to take him by surprise and return him to the present. My words had told him something beyond their content. ‘Why did you want to see me?’ he asked.
Suddenly I felt as if I had been caught shoplifting, or worse, putting a school friend’s torch into my pocket. ‘I’m on an errand, really.’
‘What errand? For whom?’
‘Damian.’ I hesitated, praying for inspiration. ‘You know he’s ill-’
‘And like to die.’
It almost amused me he should quote Richard III in this context. ‘Precisely. And he finds he’s interested in hearing about how his friends from those days…’ I wasn’t at all sure how to end this. ‘How they turned out. Whether life worked for them. You know. Rather as you were saying about your own past and how you like to talk about it.’ This last was a lame attempt to put them into the same boat.
‘All his friends? Or just some of his friends?’
‘Just some at this stage, and he asked me to help because he’s really lost touch with them and we used to be quite close.’
Which wouldn’t wash with Kieran and no wonder. ‘I’m astonished that you, of all people, accepted the brief.’
Naturally, this was a perfectly reasonable comment. ‘So am I, really. I didn’t mean to do it when he first asked me, but then I went down to his home to see him, and I felt…’ I tailed off. What had I felt that overturned a lifetime of dislike?
Kieran answered for me. ‘You felt you couldn’t refuse. Because death was pulling at his sleeve and you had only thought of him as young before you got there.’
‘That’s the sort of thing.’ It was the sort of thing, although that wasn’t the whole reason. Underlying any pity for Damian I may, I admit, have felt I sensed a kind of larger, general sadness growing in me, a sorrow at the cruelty of time. At any rate, Kieran had succeeded in making me feel awkward and undignified with my nosy enquiries and my bogus charity.
‘Which “some”?’
‘Sorry?’ The phrase sounded foreign. I couldn’t understand him.
‘Which “some” of Damian’s friends?’
I listed the women. He listened as he ate his cod’s roe, breaking the toast and pressing the pink squidge on to it with the kind of fastidious neatness that seems to tell of a man living alone. Not camp at all, nor fussy, but disciplined and neat, like a locker in an army barracks. He finished his plate before he spoke again. ‘Has this got something to do with my son?’
Of course, the words were like a punch in the gut. I felt quite sick and for a second I thought I was actually going to be sick. But at least I decided to end the dishonesty at once, since it was clear I was as mysterious to Kieran as a sheet of laminated glass. I took a breath and answered, ‘Yes.’
He absorbed this, seemingly turning it round and round his
brain, looking at it from every angle, like a connoisseur unconvinced by the reputed excellence of a highly priced piece of old porcelain. Then he made a decision. ‘I don’t want to talk any more about it here. Do you have time to come back to my home for some coffee?’ I nodded. ‘Then that is what we shall do.’ And before my eyes he threw off the intimate, self-deprecating persona he had demonstrated, and replaced it with a mask of smooth and easy sophistication, chatting away breezily about countries he liked to visit, how disappointing he found the government, whether the ecology movement had got out of hand, until we’d finished and paid and he led the way out of the hotel to a large Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur, who was standing by the open door.
Kieran nodded at the magnificent car. ‘Sometimes the old ways are best,’ he observed lightly and we got in.
We drove to one of those new and, it must be said, unlovely blocks that have recently been built by the side of Vauxhall Bridge. Never having entered any of them, I rather wondered at his choice of dwelling. I think I must have expected him to live in a ravishing manor house in Chelsea, built originally for a cheery gentleman farmer in the 1730s and now on the market for enough to refinance Madrid. But on stepping out of the lift at the top-floor landing, then into Kieran’s flat – I always resist the word ‘apartment,’ but I suspect it would be a more accurate term – I understood at once. At the end of a long, wide hall the whole of one side of the building, about thirty feet deep and who knows how long, was a single, vast drawing room. There were tall windows in three walls, giving a view of London second only to the Millennium Wheel. I looked down at the curling, night-time Thames, with its busy, toy boats, twinkling with coloured lights, at the dinky cars whizzing along the ribbon-roads, at the tiny pedestrian dots, hurrying down the pavements under the lamp posts. It was like flying.
Nor was there less to wonder at inside. The whole place was filled with the loveliest things I have ever seen in a private dwelling. Normally in a family house, even a very grand one, the exquisite pieces are occasionally interlarded with a pair of chairs covered by Aunt Joan and something Daddy brought back from the Sudan. But there was none of that here. Two matching Savonnerie carpets covered the gleaming floor and on it sat furniture so beautiful that it looked as if it had all been removed from one of Europe’s major palaces. The paintings were mainly landscapes rather than portraits and, while I usually find them a trifle dull, I could not say that about these spectacular jewels of the genre. These were landscapes by Canaletto and Claude Lorraine and Gainsborough and Constable and other names I can only guess at. There was one ravishing painting of La Princesse de Monaco, by Angelica Kauffmann, which caught my eye. Kieran saw where I was looking. ‘I don’t like portraits as a rule. I find them sentimental. But I bought that because it reminded me of Joanna.’ He was right. It was very like her. Joanna wearing a wide, flower-trimmed hat and the looser casual fashions of the 1790s, which seemed so carefree until you remembered that the sitter was less than three years from her hideous death. The unfortunate princess had ridden in the last tumbrel of the Reign of Terror. The officers heard the rioting of the Thermidor coup d’ètat break out as they drove towards the guillotine but, unfortunately for their passengers, they decided to complete the grisly journey, reasoning that no one would blame them if the regime was overthrown, but if Robespierre survived in power, they would all die for sparing the victims. They were probably right.
The picture was above an elaborate chimneypiece, which I admired. He told me it was from the scattered trove of a great house that had been demolished in my time, releasing a flood of doorcases and fireplaces and balustrades and other plunder when it bit the dust during the hopeless years of the 1950s. The family are still there, happily ensconced, these days, in a charming converted orangery.
‘Can you burn a fire in a building as new as this? Is it real?’
‘Certainly. I wanted the penthouse, so I could construct a chimney. I hate a drawing room without a fire, don’t you? They weren’t too difficult about it.’ He talked as if he’d installed an extra bathroom.
Not for the first time I wondered what it must be like to be astonishingly rich. Of course, we’re all astonishingly rich when compared to the inhabitants of enormous parts of the globe and I do not mean to sound ungrateful. But what is it like when the only reason not to do something, or buy something, or eat something, or drink something is because you do not want to? ‘It would be so boring!’ one hears people say. But would it? It’s not boring to have hot water every morning, or a delicious dinner every night, to sleep in good sheets or live in pretty rooms or collect a few nice pictures, so why would it be boring to be able to treble all these blessings at a touch? I am fairly sure that I would love it. ‘Have you got a house in the country?’ I asked.
‘No.’ He spoke with a slightly tolerant air, as if I should know better. ‘Not now. I’ve done all that.’ He chuckled. ‘At one point I had an estate in Gloucestershire, another in Scotland, a flat in New York, a villa in Italy quite near Florence, and a London house in Cheyne Row. I’d arrive at each of them, fret about everything that had been done wrongly since I was last there and leave. I never seemed to stay in anywhere for more than three days at a stretch, so I never got beyond the complaining stage. Although I do quite miss the house in the Cotswolds.’ A pink cloud of nostalgia hovered over him for a moment. ‘The library was one of the prettiest rooms I’ve ever seen, never mind lived in. But no.’ He shook his head to loosen these disturbing, self-indulgent images. ‘I’m finished with all that. There’s no point.’
This was an odd phrase, but I let it go. Kieran had ordered some coffee while we were in the car and now a discreet manservant brought it in. Once again, I was on the set of a Lonsdale comedy. I wonder now whether I fully realised what I would see of the modern world when I took Damian’s shilling. Was it a shock that all this way of life, which we were told so firmly in the Sixties was most definitely dying, was instead alive and well, and not even very unusual any more? I consider myself able to move about pretty freely and I have spent a good deal of my time in enviable houses of one sort or another, but I was beginning to grasp that it wasn’t, as it used to be, that there was the odd person still living in an Edwardian way, the occasional millionaire who invented electricity and we should all be grateful to him, dear. Nowadays there is a whole new class of rich people leading rich lives, as numerous as under the Georgians. The only difference is that now it goes on behind closed doors facilitating the dishonest representation of these things that the media go in for. As a result, the vast majority is largely unaware that there is a new and affluent group who live in this way but do not, unlike their predecessors a century ago, take much responsibility for those less blessed. This new breed feel no need to lead the public in public, but only from the shadows behind the Throne.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat in a tapestry-covered bergère, fashioned, I would guess, during the middle years of the eighteenth century. I felt we might as well get things started. ‘So, how is Joanna?’ I said, since that was where we had broken off.
Kieran looked at me quite steadily for a moment. Even he must have realised this was why we were here. ‘Joanna is dead,’ he replied.
‘What?’
‘And dead, I’m afraid, in a sad way. She was found in a public lavatory, not far from Swindon, with an empty hypodermic needle beside her. She had overdosed on heroin. When the police got there, they thought she’d been locked in the cubicle for about five days. They were alerted by the smell which, in that setting, as you can imagine, had to be pretty strong before it was noticed.’ It was at this precise moment that I realised Kieran de Yong was a man cursed. This horrible, sordid, tragic image was always with him, of a woman I would guess he had loved much more than he believed he would at the start. It was a picture that hovered an inch or two behind his thoughts unless he was asleep, and then I am quite sure it visited his dreams. I saw that he had agreed to meet me because all he ever really wanted to talk about, or think a
bout, was Joanna and I had known her. But when we did meet, he had found he couldn’t begin the conversation without this account, and, whatever he may have originally planned, he couldn’t give it in a crowded, noisy restaurant. Having acquitted this task, he almost relaxed.
Sometimes one hears or witnesses a thing so shocking that the brain cannot programme it for a second. I remember I was once in an earthquake in South America, and as I watched the ornaments and books jump and leap about, it took a second or two before my brain would tell me what was happening. This was just such a moment. Joanna Langley, enchanting, ravishing Joanna, was dead and in a way more suited to the forgotten, the abandoned and the lost; not to a darling of the gods.
‘Christ.’ For one tiny instant I thought I was going to burst into tears and when I looked over at Kieran it seemed that he might too, but then he recovered. At last he nodded slowly, as if my exclamation had been a comment. The fact is there are some deaths that have a gentle aspect, that bring a kind of comfort of their own to help the survivors bear their grief. This was not one of them. ‘When did it happen?’
‘October 1985. The fifteenth. We’d split up a couple of years before, as you probably know, and we didn’t speak for a bit, except about Malcolm, because we were having…’ he hesitated. What were they having? ‘An argument. A disagreement.’ He was gathering momentum. ‘A fight. But then we got the judgement, which was at least a decision, and I felt we could move on, that we were both getting through it.’ He gave a gesture of hopelessness with his hands.
Past Imperfect Page 29
