How to Disappear (19 page)

Back in London, I muckraked with negligible results. However I did by chance speak to Claud Cockburn only weeks before his death in November 1981.

‘Alastair was a roaring Roman Catholic when I knew him,' said Claud. ‘He had a car called Zazou which broke down. We opened the bonnet but neither of us knew anything about mechanics. In frustration Alastair struck the thing with a spanner and said “We must pray”. A muscular Protestant British parson happened to come by and asked “Anything I can do?” Alastair said “We're praying” and the parson said “I can't see that'll do much good” and went on his way. Alastair hated towns, except for Venice. He adored Venice. Before the war anyway. I don't know where he went after the war. When was the last time I saw him? In Tangier in 1936, and I was struck by his complete indifference to the Spanish Civil War, then at its height. After that he simply disappeared.'

Claud Cockburn was always amazed by anyone not as totally hung up on Spain as he was – it was while in Madrid that Claud fucked Isherwood's ‘Sally Bowles' (Jean Ross) and gave her a daughter.

January 1983. Nick Jones-Evans telephoned to say that he'd heard from an acquaintance on the coast that Graham had died the previous autumn ‘taking his secrets with him'. To Nick's knowledge there had been no sale and he didn't know what had happened to Graham's papers.

February 25 th 1983. I was having dinner with Harold Acton at La Pietra, his house above Florence. Waugh had dedicated his first novel
Decline and Fall
to Harold and I told him of Graham's death.

‘How extraordinary that you can tell me that,' he remarked. ‘It really is extraordinary, because not a single one of his contemporaries would have known it. I didn't know him well because he kept to himself. I don't think anyone knew him well except Evelyn. I can say he was very good-looking in a delicate Pre-Raphaelite way and had the same sort of features as Evelyn liked in girls. The pixie look. He was not a hearty but he dressed like a hearty, in the country style, plus-fours and
tweeds.'
Harold, also an Anglo-American, gave me a twinkly eye as he used that word ‘tweeds', always his classic put-down.

‘And although Graham was rather quiet,' he continued, ‘he drank like a fish. I believe the mother was part of the problem. She is portrayed in Evelyn's story, Winner Takes All'. (This is Mrs Kent-Cumberland, another of Waugh's Red Queen women. She is less amusing and nastier than Lady Circumference.)

‘Oh yes, he and Evelyn were always together,' mused Harold with an odd smile. ‘An infatuation. And it went on for quite a few years. We hardly saw anything of Evelyn at that time. Oh, definitely an infatuation.'

Harold of course was in
Brideshead Revisited
too. He and Brian Howard were blended in ‘Anthony Blanche', the aesthete of Christ Church. So momentarily – ha! – I was listening to Anthony Blanche's sly complaint, sixty years after the event, that Sebastian Flyte had stolen the narrator Charles Ryder from him.

The Graham trail petered out. I lost interest. Until one day I found myself in Warwickshire, on the road between Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon. It was one of those spacious, wintry English days – bit cold, bit windy, bit wet – which combine pensive and tonic qualities. I noticed a sign which said ‘Barford'. It was a few moments before its significance registered – oh yes, Barford – Barford House was where Alastair had lived with his mother all those years ago – whereupon an inquisitiveness welled up strongly and I decided to turn off. Suddenly I wanted to see Graham's boyhood home and the scene of Evelyn Waugh's youthful imagination. I wanted to go back seventy years.

I've searched my annual diaries, which are for appointments (which I keep) and dates of parties (which I may or may not got to), and I've searched my journals which are sketchy not systematic, and simply cannot establish what year this was, the year of my fortuitous visit to Barford. But it must have been in the late nineteen-eighties. Certainly before the coming of the M40. Since my visit, the M40 extension has been constructed alongside the village and more or less seen off the place. But in the late 1980 s Barford, when finally I reached it via serpentine lanes, was still peaceful and at a distance from things. Barford House was on the edge of the village and the first surprise was that it wasn't at all in the stately-home class and was quite close to the road. It was a substantial white stucco building embellished with Ionic half-columns on the front and a picturesque conservatory to the left. The second surprise was that like Brideshead Castle, and Castle Howard which was used in the television series, it had a dome and lantern on the roof above the centre, albeit on a modest scale. Waugh, who was passionate about architecture, would have registered everything.

It was 3.30 in the afternoon. Children were trailing home from school with satchels and rucksacks, but though near the roadway, the house was apart from such traffic, screened by a mature stand of evergreen trees. I hovered for a while at the entrance to the drive, hoping to see someone, but the house was lifeless, as though its heart stopped for ever when the Grahams and the Waughs of this world went away. No clue as to its present occupancy was discernible and, after the slap in New Quay, I was disinclined to knock, uninvited and unknown, on its front door (and I've never done so anywhere again!). But the visit to Barford did rekindle my interest in the fate of Alastair Graham. Perhaps now that he'd died, people would talk more freely.

At home in Notting Hill I took out the dusty file and browsed its contents. I thought I might as well quiz those two stalwarts of memory lane, Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell, and yes, they both remembered Graham from Oxford and like everyone else used the phrase ‘good-looking' – ‘extremely good-looking,' emphasised Powell, ‘with rather Dresden china shepherdess sort of looks.' And also like everyone else who'd known him in the 1920 s, they knew nothing of his whereabouts since that time. I could see that Alastair Graham's evanescence was part of his appeal and originality.

Selina Hastings came up with something solid: two surviving letters from Alastair to Evelyn. She thought there were no others but I managed to unearth a third – where from? Oh yes, Auberon Waugh copied it for me from the Waugh archive. All three are unpublished and undated but from the period 1922-25. The most evocative is the Burgundy letter sent from London in 1923 or 24, addressed to Waugh at Hertford College, Oxford. Enclosed with it is a photograph of Alastair standing naked on a rock with what appears to be a waterfall in the background. Whether Alastair himself put the photograph there, or Evelyn did later on, was uncertain (Bron said). It was one of the few things from this period that Waugh, despite the later virulence of his religion, couldn't bear to destroy. The letter reads:

The tone of whimsy and sad sweetness is so exactly that of Sebastian Flyte that it is clearer than ever how much of Alastair's stripling manner was the basis for that character. Not to mention the outing to drink ‘some bottles' in the countryside – such an outing on a sunny summer's day is the first magical set piece in
Brideshead Revisited
.

Another of the letters to Waugh, sent from The Bury, Offchurch, Leamington, probably in 1925, contains these telling lines:

Both Narcissus and the recluse are glimpsed in these letters but of course narcissism and reclusiveness are profoundly linked: you can gaze into your pool only so long as you are undisturbed by others.

Alastair's brief diplomatic foray was the most active period of his life and also marks the final phase with Waugh. It is, like everything else, largely unrecorded. But I scavenged every possible source – journals, letters, forgotten autobiographies – and feel reasonably confident in putting together the following.

He had begun to travel independently soon after leaving Oxford, partly to avoid his mother, partly to explore his sexuality. While homosexuality was illegal in England and America, the Mediterranean was the place for Anglo-Saxon gay men to escape to, and Tangier, Ibiza, Capri, Taormina, Florence, Rome, Mykonos, Tunis, the South of France, became enticing destinations largely on account of allowing misfits of all kinds to breathe more easily and be themselves. Germany provided a more specialised release for Auden and Isherwood, Egypt and India for E. M. Forster, China for Harold Acton: the list could go on and on. Curiously the situation has now in many respects reversed. As the Anglo-Saxon world has developed a high degree of lifestyle diversity, people from other cultures, especially from the Islamic world, flock to it to escape the crushing conformism of their own societies. Yet the Mediterranean still retains its air of liberating, sensual sunshine. Waugh's
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
(1957) is a thinly disguised account of his nervous breakdown and it is his most honest book. In it he calls the Mediterranean ‘that splendid enclosure which held all the world's history and half the happiest memories of his own life; of work and rest and battle, of aesthetic adventure and of young love.'

Although I do not particularly feel a misfit myself, I'm not terribly excited by conventional company. I find people who don't ‘fit in' attractive and, on reflection, I discover that all my important lovers have been eccentric in some way. But in the fuller sense, everyone has their misfit aspect -philosophers have called it the human condition – and we are each of us embarked on an unpredictable journey. Is this especially true in our age of dislocation which some call globalisation? One could go further and suggest that ‘fitting in' can seem like suffocation in the twenty-first century. The idea that one's background (class, culture, language, country) is irrelevant is absurd, and yet increasing numbers of people do resent being detained or described by their origins in any way. So there is conflict, because the whole world is hung up on two lies: that we are all the same, that we are all different. But we were warned. At the root of Western literature is
The Iliad
which is about leaving one's home to go out into the world and realise oneself in the battle of life. Only after, as a sequel, comes The
Odyssey,
the attempt to return, the wandering search for home once again – and hoping to recognise it when you find it. These great seminal books told us long ago: expect to be surprised by the human adventure, expect to be hurt, expect to be moved, upset, mirthful, angry; and give love, find love.

Alastair's voyaging generally took him to ‘the Levant', which to-day one thinks of as those lands on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. But in the nineteen-twenties the word might connote Greece, Crete, Cyprus, and also Malta which was the staging post for Tunis. The Levant was particularly fashionable at the time and one may ascribe this not only to Muslim bisexuality and to the adventures of Lawrence of Arabia during the Great War but also, in our more strictly literary circle, to E. M. Forster having introduced Cavafy to a British readership in
Pharos and Pharillon
(1923). Moving around the Levant in the 1920s were William Plomer, Steven Runciman, Robert Byron, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, David Talbot Rice and his wife Tamara. A group of them, including Alastair, had a riotous party in Istanbul 1933 on the night that Ataturk banned the wearing of the fez for men (he'd banned the wearing of the veil for women some years earlier).

It was Steven Runciman above all who made the area his own. He has written seductively of his youthful arrivals there on the Orient Express, taking the train from

Calais to Salonika to Istanbul, though he never so much as hinted at his
amours
(concerning which he was agonisingly bashful – his memoirs plumb new depths of sexlessness, although I did learn from them that Runciman had also been stormbound in Catania port for two days, on his grandfather's yacht in 1924). When I was an undergraduate in 1968, I used the Orient Express on the same route as Runciman. By then it was on its last legs – or wheels – and would soon disappear altogether, but there was still an old Ottoman dining car attached which was enough to make one's breakfast of rolls, goat's cheese and coffee a highly romantic experience. As we steamed into Istanbul railway station, I remember looking out of the window and seeing a corpse beside the tracks partially obscured by windblown newspapers, and thinking ‘Ah, this is life!'

When Waugh arrived in Athens at Christmas 1926, Graham was established there in a modern flat with Leonard Bower, an attache at the British Embassy. Waugh wrote in his diary: ‘The flat is usually full of dreadful Dago youths called by heroic names such as Miltiades or Agamemnon with blue chins and greasy clothes who sleep with the English colony for 25 drachmas a night'.