Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  Following which we’d started seeing each other; she was almost the only person I did see. Dismayed by the notoriety attached to ‘Penny Brahms,’ she now went by the modelling name of Jamais, or Jamie as I called her, and her life had changed considerably. After the breakdown of her marriage to Kim she’d relocated herself in Paris to resume her modelling career. This went well until she had the misfortune to fall in love with, then marry, David Lyons, an American oil entrepreneur. Based in the USA, the two enjoyed a reckless lifestyle. Lyons fell foul of the SEC, an arrest warrant was issued for fraud. Living on the run, they were hunted, shot at, and finally caught by the police. Lyons was jailed. Wired on amphetamine, Jamie had by now lost the ability to sleep, finally cracking up in the transit lounge between flights at Kennedy and ending up in hospital. Following which she had known bad times but come through them.

  Jamie was a loner, addicted to solitude as myself. She was as broke as I was – another bond. In his essay ‘On the Want of Money’, Hazlitt says that, of all people, actors bear the condition best for it sits light upon them. ‘Their life is theatrical … rags and finery, tears and laughter, a mock-dinner or a real one, a crown of jewels or of straw, are to them nearly the same.’ Jamie showed a fine indifference to money I admired. We could never afford to eat out, but occasionally my old friend Mark Ramage – who’d sold his agency to become ‘richer than I’d ever believed possible’ – would invite us to lunch, always somewhere splendid. There was a childish thrill in dressing up to adventure into the beau monde. Neither of us had the least problem in looking rich, and there was real pleasure in such good company and superb food costing – I glimpsed Marco Pierre White’s bill – over £400 for the three of us; and an ironic savour to enjoying it in the knowledge I had just enough in my pocket for two bus fares back to Chelsea.

  Soon Jamie and I were strangely close, coming together with the eerie sense of encountering a twin. Though we were in touch each day we did not meet regularly, but on Sundays often she accompanied me to Westminster Abbey. She was my love and connected me to life … but how without money to maintain that life was the problem occupying my mind that misty autumn evening as I walked out of Waitrose with a remaining capital of 2p and strolled back to my apartment to meet my friend and lawyer Ernest Chapman …

  I already owed Ernest and others a lot of money. Over a bottle of Waitrose red in my run-down flat I borrowed a further £1,500 on the understanding this was the last time I would ask.

  The money bought a little time. All my life seemed to have been governed by chance and accidental encounter, something might turn up as it had in the past. I’d never been in quite such desperate straits as these, but thanks to Ernest I had a final stake. Once I would have gambled with it, now I wanted not to challenge chance but give her the maximum opportunity to smile upon me. I determined to live on a budget of £3 per day while I awaited her wilful glance to slant in my direction.

  George Orwell, an expert on restricted means, says that ‘between an income of £500 a year and £5,000 there is very little difference; between an income of zero pounds and £500 there is all the difference in the world.’ He was writing in 1934, one has to scale it up, but I came to realise that, above today’s £500 equivalent, poverty and wealth are largely an attitude of mind. What, after all, does one need? Shelter, food, warmth, light, fresh air, occupation for the brain … more than that is wealth. So throw in a couple of suits, half-a-dozen shirts, a pair of re-soled Guccis and consider the lilies of the field, I thought with assumed bravado as I leafed through the pages of Marcus Aurelius.

  I’d been short of funds for quite a while and was coming near to broke, but I did not consider myself poor. I did, though, occasionally wonder what my lifestyle would have been if I’d succeeded in selling the mill and had the million or so dollars in the bank I’d been anticipating. I would now be travelling more and eating out when I felt like it, but I did not believe I’d be living much differently from how I was. I’d changed since my coronary; the change was progressive and, in a way I didn’t entirely understand, seemed still to be continuing. Before it I’d always sensed an edge of restlessness and boredom behind everything I did; now, though all I did was read, listen to music and take walks, I was never bored.

  Most precious in that list of things I possessed was privacy. And I had books. Books had made me. Father and Mother were readers, as were their parents and grandparents. The manse had been crammed with books, some mildewed, some chewed by mice, not all legible. As a child all I had ever wanted was to be left alone to read. Books formed a larger, infinitely more noble universe than the world adults wanted me to inhabit. Then I’d grown up, adventured into the ‘real’ world of people and events, entered advertising and become so distracted and manic I’d almost lost the ability to read. But now I could: Emerson, Tolstoy’s essays, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis. I craved substance, not diversion, and my small room became my library and cell.

  The pages of my address book, photocopied, Tippexed, amended and added to over the years, took up an A4 display binder; the earliest entries dated back to 1956. I’d given my own number only to a handful of those listed in it. Now my telephone remained permanently on answerphone. Not always did I ring back, and over the months my recorded messages grew fewer.

  I’d stopped going out. It was not just that I could not repay people’s hospitality, but the things they mostly talked about at a dinner party – job, children, politics, exotic vacations – formed no part in my own life. And conversation on any of these subjects soon related to money. It was impossible to discuss anyone’s house without learning its current value; people talked about money the whole time. Money is an interesting topic but, as with flogging, religious mania etc., one can hear too much.

  My regimen was frugal but entirely adequate. To my surprise I discovered you can eat well and drink wine with dinner on £3 a day. Apart from Jamie I saw perhaps one person a month. She and I exchanged faxes or spoke every day, met sometimes for dinner in my flat and attended the Abbey most Sundays. She was bruised from too much living in the world, so quiet had appeal to her but even then – and more so now – I was astonished and grateful she could accept so meagre a life-menu as I offered.

  I’d given up television because I could not afford the licence; now I stopped reading newspapers and listening to the radio. To be free of these distractions – for that is how I had come to think of them – created a wide spread of time but strangely no sense of emptiness or tedium. Without purpose I would have been lost, but I was kept human by the love of a good woman and for purpose I had Marcus Aurelius and the path he and others I was reading lay out.

  Stoicism is not anti-possessions, but it recommends you hold them lightly, avoid attachment, and put no faith in them. Thomas à Kempis takes it further: ‘Seek to be found naked in all things’ … It wasn’t so hard, the work of dispossession had largely been done for me already. The mill was no longer mine, I had no car, my entire wardrobe fitted into two shelves and 15” of hanging space. The only ‘things’ I owned were a Cartier watch and a few pieces of silver from Gilston Road, and these I now gave away to Sasha, my brothers, friends. All that remained were books, and these too I got rid of sparingly and appropriately, except for a few I could not live without.

  There’s pleasure in giving things to people, but there was an animated sense of lightness at being back to possessing nothing except a few clothes. I realised it was curiously reminiscent of how I’d felt as an immigrant in Connecticut when I was twenty.

  ‘Forsake all and thou shalt find all,’ says Thomas à Kempis, and holds out the promise of ‘the truth that sets you free’.

  Well that all was what I’d look for, I determined. Though there was little merit in my decision – for renouncing the world becomes much easier if the world first renounces you – I felt a swell of exhilaration and excitement at having made it. Ahead lay an adventure into the unknown.

  ‘Live lightly in the world, don’t put down roots,’ Buddha advi
ses. ‘Keep thyself as a stranger and pilgrim upon the earth, for here thou hast no abiding city,’ says Thomas à Kempis. Nanny had put it another way: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ she’d told me, aged six and afterwards. I’d never known whether moss was supposed to be good or bad.

  30

  Arisaig

  In the Highlands the bracken was rusty red on the heather-covered slopes of the mountains and the leaves had started to turn. The manse was warm and much more comfortable than it had been when I was a boy. It belonged now to my brother Hamish; he and his partner Stephanie had refitted the primitive kitchen and bathroom, installing an efficient hot-water system, and redecorated the house, though much of the furniture remained as I remembered.

  In the kitchen at the back, which looked on to the mountains, I sat in the same place at the same scrubbed wooden table I’d sat at more than fifty years before, eating the same meal of baked beans on toast, only that time it had been cooked by Nanny.

  Souvenirs of childhood were everywhere in the house, though sadly the arsenal of assorted weaponry, bombs and stocks of ammunition we’d possessed were gone. Brother David had handed them in to the Mallaig police – who were awestruck by the sheer scale of the gift.

  Looking through a stack of family albums one evening I came upon photographs of Nanny taken by Terry Donovan thirty years before. As a child, her influence upon me had been greater than anyone’s; she’d been the only person I loved. She had worked for the family since she was fifteen. The teenage sweetheart she may have kissed but certainly never slept with had been killed in the trenches in 1914, since when she’d never had any life of her own. It had been given to others – who took her entirely for granted – in return for a small, undependable wage she was not always paid.

  ‘Goodness’, I guess, is a short word for it, and Terry had caught it in his photograph. In a wholly different way, I’d loved Terry too for the exuberance of his full-frontal personality. Cheerful, irreverent, he was the greatest fun to be with and always made me laugh.

  With Ramage and Jamie I’d gone to his memorial service. The church was packed with the most eclectic mix imaginable, ranging from Princess Diana and Maggie Thatcher to a group of shaven-headed 15-stone karate experts. All were Terry’s friends. He’d been such a big, vital and endearing man, the last person in the world I’d have thought to kill himself.

  In another album I found photographs dating from my time in the army, including one of Fisher as a cavalry subaltern. Of all those I knew, I thought he was the one who’d completed his life most successfully. He enjoyed an ideally happy marriage to a clever and pretty wife who adored him. His children were grown-up, healthy, happy and loved him. A life fulfilled – but fulfilled plus, as he’d disclosed a while earlier over lunch in the Natural History Museum, where he worked unpaid two days a week cataloguing the innumerable private collections bequeathed to the museum. It would take him 140 years, he calculated. He’d just retired from Citibank with a hearty golden handshake. Two of their children were happily married, the youngest had finished university and was in a job. ‘Life’s going so well, it’s worrying,’ he said. But there was a further reason for the wry smile on his monkish face; he revealed why after lunch at his workspace in the cavernous upper reaches of the museum.

  All his life he’d passed his holidays in far-flung inconvenient places hunting for moths. And he’d discovered an unknown type. He showed it me, a pretty little thing with diaphanous outspread wings that looked like a Schiaperelli cocktail dress. It was named Gortyna corelii, Fisher’s Estuarine Moth. He’d caught it on the marshes below his house near Harwich, where he’d been setting lures for more than thirty years.

  As parents he and Bridget had been impeccable. One has noticed this is no guarantee of perfect children, but with theirs it seemed to be the case. And a further example of how a traditional parental upbringing can produce a happy and successful child was my own daughter Sasha, whom I’d grown to know since she became an adult. Articulate, witty and well-balanced, it was always a pleasure to see her, for surprisingly she seemed to harbour no rancour that I had proved so delinquent a father. A tall, dark-haired young woman with spontaneous charm and her mother’s legs, her childhood, adolescence and youth had been exemplary; she had caused not a single problem. Tania and Don, her step-father, had proved the best of parents; from them she had learned sound values, discipline, character and faultless manners, while from me she had received that priceless gift of absence and paternal neglect I had valued so highly myself as a child.

  By her mid-twenties Sasha had become the youngest director of Union des Banques Suisses and drove a Porsche. She’d asked me to a party she gave, where the other guests were her own age and peer group. Young men and women with short hair, stylishly sober-suited, exhilarated from their day on the trading floor, most of them were drinking mineral water. It was very different from the parties I’d given or gone to when I was their age in the ’sixties, and for Sasha to invite Tania, Don and myself was a gracious gesture, though she must have been aware there was a danger we might lower the tone.

  We, the three oldies, had arrived together. Sasha welcomed us and led us to the bedroom to leave our coats. Closing the door, she said, ‘I’m so glad you could all come and meet my friends, but just one thing … while you’re here, please, no drugs.’ However much you try, parents never turn out the way you hope.

  Opposite the photograph of Fisher-the-subaltern was a snap I’d taken of Ivor and Natassia Mottron at the same period. Lounged on the casino terrace at Travemünde, they gave off an air of reckless daring that was pure Scott Fitzgerald; I still thought them the most beautiful couple I’d ever met. Their marriage unsurprisingly had not lasted. She had remarried a financier and lived in Geneva; Ivor I’d last seen in Beverly Hills in 1985. He looked fit and well and was drinking orange juice, but I recognized the same wayward glint at the back of his pale Weimaraner eyes. He too had remarried, as he explained. LA was his wife’s hometown, ‘ … but we spend most of the year travelling,’ he added. I asked him how he liked living here. ‘It’s the pits,’ he said. ‘A bunch of demented luvvies surrounded by a vast court of crooked lawyers in designer leisure-wear. With the possible exception of Lagos, Nigeria, this is the most repulsive city in the world.’

  On a later page in that same album was a shot of Nigel Broackes in uniform. Along with Alex Howard – last heard of walking over the mountains into Afghanistan with a mule train of weaponry – Nigel was my oldest friend; we’d met as new boys in my first term at Stowe. His subsequent career had been amazingly successful. Trafalgar House, which he’d founded, had grown to become the most profitable of all British conglomerates in the early ’seventies. Later, though, it had gone wrong, and I knew Nigel had resigned as chairman.

  Just before coming up to Arisaig I’d decided to call him to suggest we meet. Having lost contact, I thought I’d telephone Trafalgar House to ask where I could reach him. Looking up the number, I found it had an 0181 prefix. Under Nigel’s rule their offices had been Cunard House, opposite the Ritz; I was surprised to see they were now in Croydon.

  I called the number, requesting to be put through to the Personnel Department. When a woman’s voice answered I asked if she could please give me a number for Sir Nigel Broackes. ‘Who?’ she queried in a night-school whine. ‘Who?’ Never ’eard of ’im.’

  And in the library at Arisaig I came across yet another picture that struck a chord. Not a photograph, but the cover of Peter Mayle’s book Anything Considered. Three years before, when I’d been at the mill, low in money and spirits and fretting at how impossible it seemed to sell the place, he’d called to say, ‘I’ve got this novel coming out about an ageing beach bum on the Côte d’Azur. The sort-of hero is based on you.’ The book’s cover showed the hero seated alone on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, wearing a white tuxedo. On the table by him stood a bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket and a single glass, three-quarters full. It was evening; beyond him and the palm tree
framing his languid pose, the curved sweep of the croisette encircled the sable water of the bay of Cannes in a glittering necklace of diamond light. The man’s fingers toyed with the stem of his fluted wine-glass; the pleasures of the night were before him and the Côte d’Azur lay at his feet.

  Bennett, he was called in the book, and I studied my fictive self with curiosity, for his circumstances were so very different from my own. I’d been living for a year now on £3 a day; nothing had come up and almost nothing of Ernest’s loan remained. Jamie had paid for the petrol to get us here in her old car, and again I was facing destitution. I nodded to my alter ego, wishing him well, and put Peter’s book back on the shelf.

  Bennett was an improvident wastrel who came right in the end, and Fisher had found a new moth. By contrast, in my own life I’d discovered nothing, accomplished nothing. It had been wholly misspent – but my timing to misspend it was immaculate. To have missed the war, caught the ’sixties young with plastic in my pocket, been twenty-six when the Pill transformed young women’s overnight habits overnight, and recanted fornication by the date AIDS transformed them back again … The chronology could not be faulted. And within that chronology lay an event of extraordinary significance. On Christmas Eve 1973, the day after the Arabs raised the price of oil from $5.10 to $11.65 a barrel, I’d stood on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, one of Europe’s prime shopping streets, and seen it stationary, with not a single moving car. I didn’t realise it until long afterwards, but that was the moment when people ceased expecting the world to get better and started to believe it would get worse. On that date I saw Western civilisation peak and tip into decline.

  During our last day in Arisaig clouds rolled in from the west and it started to rain heavily. The view out to sea from the windows of the manse was closed off and the islands of Eigg and Rum on the horizon were hidden behind the mist.