Vanished Years
Page 31
They stand up now at the invitation of the organ. I wish I could say it grinds into a grandiose wall of sound and that the air throbs, but ours is an old tubercular wheezer, and so it impotently tweets the introduction, with wrong notes thrown in, but Daddy’s friends make up for it. They have sung these words on parade grounds at Partition and ever since, at a hundred similar send-offs, and they stand to attention now and bellow fiercely at the coffin.
Thine be the glory, risen conquering son,
Endless is the victory thou o’er death hast won,
Angels in bright raiment roll the stone away,
Kept the folded grave clothes where thy body lay.
The service is over and the moment has come for the coffin to leave the church. It is a feeling similar to the school train leaving. This is it. The men from the funeral home – where I have gone last week to deliver Daddy’s pyjamas, lovingly washed and ironed for the last time by his wife – pick up the coffin and carry it out of the church, followed by my mother, my brother and me. Two old soldiers clinking with medals hold regimental standards and we march out into the driving rain. The pallbearers hold the coffin suspended over the grave. The old soldiers stand to attention a little way off, soaked and bedraggled. They are going to catch pneumonia – so I take my umbrella over to where they are and cover them both.
‘You had to be alone, even then,’ reflects Connie sadly over the phone later that night.
My mother and brother stand by the grave with the vicar. The rain pours down his face, his hair is stuck on his cheeks and his bible is waterlogged. Connie and Hugh stand chanting on one side. The rain covers any tears. My heart thumps up my neck as they lower the coffin into the ground and that’s that. A whole chunk of life – like the cliff of an iceberg – has just plunged into the depths. My mother’s face is concentrated, my brother’s blank. We leave the churchyard through the lych-gate, covered with the names of the dead in two wars, and go back to the house for the wake.
It is Christmas night 2010. For the first time since I can remember there is snow on the ground. It’s a Christmas card with glitter.
‘Deep and crisp and even’ confirm the congregation at the midnight Mass. I am standing outside the church by my father’s grave, smoking. The old stained-glass window behind the altar throws a strange spangled light on the snow, and the organ and the singing sound muffled – like a memory – through the thick flint walls of the church. A lopsided moon hangs over the spire and the stars burn fiercely in the void.
The hymn ends, replaced by the friendly voice of the vicar, Colin Fox, proclaiming the good news in that comfortable Anglican brogue – caring and slightly sung, simple and familiar to villagers up and down the British Isles who still worship tradition, if not God. In the silence after the song, the natural world goes about its business. The nearby river gurgles towards the bridge. A moorhen is woken with a splash and an indignant cry. The local barn owl hoots far away on the plain.
Inside the church the congregation begin to chant the Lord’s Prayer.
My father is wearing his blue pyjamas and his old red slippers in the cold ground tonight. He has been dead for over a year.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Firefly
And so, dear reader – if you are still here – we clunk to the end of the road, straining up the last slope on the last rambling phrase, which is written in Jamaica where I am still wandering.
Today I am at Firefly Hill, the house where Noël Coward lived and died. Firefly is a living tomb, the perfect place to end a book largely about death. Uncannily, everything is more or less as the master left it. He collapsed in the bathroom early on the morning of 26 March 1973. Maybe he was looking for something inside the cupboard above the sink, his That Man talc for men, or his Collyre Alpha eyedrops. They are still there – little medicine bottles: Collyre Alpha and Mycil, ancient Q-tips and Coppertone in old tubes and jars, never moved from the rusty shelf since the day he died. The ‘Room With A View’ (written downstairs at the piano) is an open studio with a desk and two chairs inside a vast picture window that frames the entire north coast of Jamaica – stretching as far as the eye can see into the haze. Its jungles tip from the mountains into the azure, carved into huge bays under the constant pressure of the sea, which breaks endlessly in lace cuffs against the rocks and the recoiling forest. You can see the roundness of the earth on the wide verge between the sea and sky.
I am sitting at Noël’s desk. He surrounds me in five faded photographs hanging lopsided on the wall. In one he must be no more than eighteen, in a top hat and wing collar. It’s the only picture of him without a cigarette. They are masterful portraits. The twinkling eyes, the no-nonsense regard, the accessible and yet stiff upper lip curled towards some amusing observation, clipped and precise, like the shutter of a camera, are brilliantly contrived. The snapshots around the house, on the other hand, are less polished. Noël is beached on a chaise longue, a fat tummy on piano legs, a face grown over with oriental eyes, reaching out to the camera, unable to move. They nicknamed him Chinese Nell in Jamaica.
The rich and famous are perched on the edges of the chairs in which he is slumped. They all come from the same school – Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Charlie Chaplin – snapped, sloshed in straw hats, smiling but anxious. Noël rallies at the sight of a lens but his only real interest is the cigarette in his hand.
The house is approached by a steep winding lane that cuts sharply off the old coast road, just before Port Mary. In Noël’s day there would have been a black-and-white striped signpost at the crossroads but all that old order has gone. The lanes of Jamaica look very much like the English countryside. On acid. The forest hangs over the road, always encroaching. You can really feel plants living and breathing in Jamaica, and the hedgerows crackle with life. Halfway up the hill there has been a landslide and the lane has collapsed. A nearby house has been snapped in half and is perched comically on a cliff with one side hanging off.
Navigating the potholes of these terrible old roads is an art like riding rapids. One must keep going. To hesitate is fatal. The road passes through a small village, where young men and boys lounge outside two makeshift bars, listening to reggae blasting from speakers on the street. They shout ‘White man’ as I drive by. In a field carved out of the forest other boys play makeshift cricket. The driveway to Firefly snakes around the hill, overgrown with giant bamboos. They tower into arches over the drive, creaking in the wind, and the sun flickers through them. At the end of the drive – the light at the end of the tunnel – is a simple whitewashed house commanding one of the most breathtaking views in the world.
I am elated when I first discover Firefly. It happens to be – by chance – the anniversary of Noël’s death, in March last year. When I get to the white marble slab and I read the date, my blood runs cold. I have just completed my season on Broadway in Blithe Spirit and it feels as if I am expected. I am thrilled to sit by his grave and gossip about Angela Lansbury learning the lines, Christine’s Marilyn wig, and tell him how sorry I am for all my terrible behaviour while I was doing The Vortex, twenty-five years earlier in London.
Then – 1989 – his best friend Joyce Carey came to the show and told me that Noël had come into the auditorium during the second act. She held my hand and imparted what I presumed was Noël’s message from beyond the grave. It wasn’t a rave.
‘You must speak up, dear,’ she said with eyes wide with horror.
At the time I shrugged off the note, wondering only what could have happened to those big flapping ears of Noël’s in heaven. Now years later – a writer of sorts myself – I cannot help but sympathise with him as I remember out loud doing half the play in French one night. How dismissive I was of him then in my proud madhouse. At least I gave my all in Blithe Spirit, though.
I am chatting away and the big black caretaker is watching me from the shadows of the giant rubber tree. He is laughing but I don’t care. It feels extraordinary to be sitting there with the view, and Noël lying u
nder the ground. I wonder what he is wearing.
I wander through the house, which smells of unopened cupboards. In the sitting room the framed pictures of Myrna Loy and Maggie Smith have faded in the sun. There are two baby grand pianos, spooning and browbeaten, unplayed for decades, hopelessly out of tune. Piles of dog-eared sheet music – every show tune imaginable – lie around an old Decca gramophone with a forty-five of ‘Any Little Fish’ on the turntable. In the master’s studio his oil paints and brushes are still where he left them, an unfinished canvas on the easel. The paintings are everywhere, black boys walking up from the sea, a winter scene in England, a man in hot pants with a visible package. They aren’t bad. But they aren’t Gauguin. Old sofas and armchairs watch, blank and collapsed. The table downstairs is still laid for the famous lunch with the Queen Mother, who drove four hours from Kingston to see him. The table is laid for eternity.
But this year there seems to be a terrible sadness coming from this living tomb – surely the most unusual of all the tribute museums in the world to a dead star. The house is empty and silent, just the distant boom of the sea crashing against the reef far below. Sitting at his desk in the room with a view, I feel suddenly engulfed in a sort of locked-up misery.
I think Noël died of a broken heart. He moved into Firefly at the age of fifty in 1951, unaware that, apart from a new career in cabaret, his golden age had passed. A new era in theatre was dawning, and people found him hopelessly old-fashioned. He unwisely ranted about hippies and kitchen-sink drama in a string of articles for the Sunday Times in England in 1961. (He thought John Osborne a fake and was underwhelmed by the Beatles. I agree.) His war work was overlooked. After all, he spied for Britain and took enormous risks. Then, as the sexual revolution began to rage, he was torn down and scrapped like the Happy Prince. I don’t think he ever recovered from the hurt and it still echoes through the house. He threw terrible tantrums, banished everyone, and melted his brain going over it all again and again in his head, puffing himself slowly to death. Knighthood came insultingly late, thanks apparently to the homophobia of the Duke of Edinburgh. Finally the wind blew the bitterness away and left an empty space. Noël Coward stopped talking.
Cole Lesley, his butler, and Graham Payne, his ex-lover (big cock, small talent), went up to see him on the evening before his death. They were not invited to stay for dinner. In those days he ate alone. They left him at 8.30 and walked down the hill to Blue Harbour, Noël’s other house, cackling in Polari, as the frogs beeped. Noël settled down on the plantation bed – still there – with a tray, to read a bit of E. Nesbit.
‘Goodnight, my darlings,’ he said, watching Cole and Graham disappear into the fragrant night. ‘See you tomorrow.’
The old queen on the edge of the jungle turned out the light.
I have been writing here for a few days now. Occasionally the sound of a minibus grinding up the hill, nearer and nearer, breaks the silence. Minutes later six or seven fabulous hags from Broadway hobble over the brow of the hill. Sometimes upper-class couples from the UK make the pilgrimage. They are Noël Coward’s last living fans – people who actually saw him in shows.
‘Gee, look at Myrna Loy,’ chants a Texan lady downstairs, while an English lord, face the colour of a blood orange, remembers how much his nanny loved Lilian Braithwaite.
One woman looks at me and gasps. ‘Rupert? Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ I reply, still typing.
‘Omygod! Geena, get over here! We saw your last performance in Blithe Spirit.’
More ladies appear. They all came to Blithe Spirit. It’s a party. I am thrilled, moved and suddenly – inexplicably – Noël is absolutely there and the hairs on my arms stand up.
Night swoops in fast as the sun falls behind the mountains. I drive down through the hills behind the coast road, past small villages clustered on the edge of the jungle. The lazy smell of burning wood wraps itself around the evening breath of the forest and the day fades dramatically. People walk along the side of the road towards the car, suddenly lit by the headlights, expressionless and unreal, zombies almost. It is Saturday evening. Lights twinkle from all the tiny wooden churches of unheard-of denominations that are scattered along the winding road. They overflow with large women singing or listening to the shrieks of the loopy preachers predicting meltdown. The roadside bars – shacks, really – are the churches for men, silhouettes now in the glow of paraffin lamps and fairy lights. The music blares and the air is sweet with ganja. They stare as if one was the first arrival on the island.
‘White man,’ they shout.
Even a little baby, learning cricket between his father’s legs in the middle of the road, converted into a family pitch, looks at me as I drive carefully past. ‘White,’ he whispers, smiling.
Fade to black. The End.
On the wall of Noël’s studio, his last poem hangs, typed, framed and fading.
When I have fears, as Keats had fears,
Of the moment I’ll cease to be,
I console myself with vanished years,
Remembered laughter, remembered tears,
And the peace of the changing sea.
The testosterone team. Ross Kemp, Alastair Campbell, Danny Baker, me and Piers Morgan in The Apprentice
Special needs Madonna and her ami nécessaire hobbling towards Liberty
NBC’s dynamic duo
Mr Ambassador: looking more relaxed than I was
Mo and Geppie and My Big Gypsy Caravan
Isabella’s twenty-first birthday
Me, Isabella and the Thane of Cawdor (Colin) at Area in New York
The Death Hat
Me with the ladies of the great photographers: Nan Bush
and June Newton (Chancellor Schröder and the whizz-kid gay mayor of Berlin behind.)
Even cherubs smoke in Berlin
Bruce Weber at Helmut Newton’s grave
Unaware of it, but in our prime, Natasha and me in Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers
The wedding group: Tony Richardson, Joan Didion, Jeremy Fry, Rachel Kempson, Vanessa Redgrave, Angela Fox, Joely Richardson, Betty Bacall, Katharine Grimond
Me and Tasha
The tallest girls in showbusiness serenade the newlyweds with ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?’ (Curiously Vanessa knew all the words.)
Dreams do come true. (In pink.) Mummy, me and Aunt Angela at the Shubert Theatre
Mr Geoffrey
The final curtain
My first long dress
Leaving for Lourdes
One of the only photographs I have ever taken. Daddy riding through the Himalayas