How to Disappear (23 page)

This last, undated, is the letter in manuscript (Graham's hand is upright, loopy and legible), so presumably it was never posted or Alastair made a fair copy. Benvenuto seems to have decamped to Germany with Cockburn for some reason. Mrs Davidson also had two letters from the Loraines begging Alastair to go to Ankara with them but he refused, though he did briefly visit them there and found the place depressing – wolves came out at night and raided the dustbins.

Some weeks later a second gaudy envelope arrived from South Africa containing a stack of photographs and another long letter from Jane Davidson. The photographs included a number of Graham out and about New Quay and the Middle East, and also several of his mother Jessie, no beauty but looking natural, unfussy and compact in Edwardian dress. The most important was a close-up of Graham at the age of eighteen, on the eve of going up to Oxford. Soft wavy hair brushed to one side, a spotless complexion, and wonderfully serious eyes. The mouth is wide and well shaped but the lips are thin – a hint of the peevishness which would see the corners of the mouth turn down in later years. The weakest feature is the nose, somewhat fleshy. Not film star looks but an English sweetness and vulnerability you could definitely fall for.

Mrs Davidson wrote: ‘Mrs G kept him short of cash and he always travelled 2 nd class. Rosa Lewis used to make up hampers for him to take away with him. In 1925 he came out to visit us in Kenya and my mother wrote to an American aunt that “Ali seemed completely uninterested in everything and never made any comments about the country but he got on well with his riding.” Which was news to me. I thought he only rode camels – he loved camels, told me so. I found a letter from the Jesuit Father Martindale sent to Ali in Kenya saying he was worried about having let him join the R.C. church as he felt that really it was only Ali's artistic nature which had attracted him to it. He also said he was worried about the people Ali associated with at Oxford!! + warned him – too late!! rather amusing since these people were nearly all Catholics!!!'

In the summer of 1924 Evelyn and Alistair were at Bar-ford planning a walking tour to Ireland. ‘Typically they passed the hat round – and got £10!! Ali and Sybil used to bait their mother + were
rude all the time.
I enjoyed staying there alone with her and so did Evelyn. Evelyn noticed that the service was not so good when Jessie was away and Ali was in charge, but she was keen on press-ganging the boys to help in the garden sweeping up leaves etc., which is why they were always hiding from her. She took amazing risks – quite frightening!! She climbed 24 foot expansion-ladder at Barford cutting down the ivy on the Clock Tower with BOTH HANDS FREE!! AGED 70. I SAW THIS MYSELF!!!'

It does something to exonerate Alastair's awkwardness that Mrs Davidson should mention that her mother, Graham's sister Sybil, also had problems with Jessie. Joan Davidson related next an incident which throws much light on Waugh's sudden severance from the Graham household. For Alastair's 21 st in 1925 Mrs Graham had, with typical ardour, built a large extra room on to the house. Equally typically the projected ball never took place, but afterwards on a long stool in this room there always reposed the king-sized
Times Atlas of the World,
the idea being that it would always be available for easy consultation. But in 1931, after leaving Malvern and his riding lessons with Jack Hance (he was determined to fill the gaps in his social equipment), Waugh stayed at Barford alone with Mrs Graham and ripped out a whole page from this atlas to use on his upcoming African trip. Since she consulted the atlas a great deal herself, she noticed at once and was so outraged by his vandalism that Waugh was banished for ever from her house and from her society. It was such a violent thing for him to have done that he must have been prepared for the worst. His ruthlessness was deliberate desecration.

Jane Davidson ended her second letter with ‘Hope this info into Alastair's life some use – they were an amusing crowd. Of course all the CASH EVAPORATED
very quickly!!
Willy left practically everything to his mistress!!'

Christopher Hollis was, like many others, surprised by how complete was the break between Graham and Waugh. In his book
Oxford in the Twenties
Hollis wrote… ‘in general Evelyn was more faithful than anyone whom I ever knew to his old friends and always welcomed them gladly to the end of his life, but Alastair Graham, who was the closest of all his friends, passed completely out of his life'. Hollis over-looks the difficulties in Graham's personality; Waugh was not less difficult but more gregariously so. And their relationship had been an affair, not straightforward friendship, and when affairs end some unease or rancour can enter in.

When my correspondence with Mrs Davidson resumed by telephone I wanted to be quite sure there were no misunderstandings and asked ‘Can I use this material in my piece?'

‘Of course! That's why I'm giving it to you!' A clutch of exclamation marks sprouted in the air. She obviously loved her uncle very much, but she loved the real one, not the pretend one.

‘Why do you think his friendship with Waugh ended so completely?' I asked.

‘Well, Evelyn was a terrible social climber – and he got worse. After his first marriage broke up he got awfully grand. The thing was he came from a low church, almost Baptist background, you know, that class, and I think he had a chip on his shoulder. I once asked Ali “Why aren't you friends with Evelyn any more?” and Ali said “Oh, you know, Evelyn became such a bore, such a snob”.'

‘Yes, someone told me Alastair wasn't snobbish.'

‘That's right – he was a very good mixer. He loved the pub in New Quay and the people there.'

‘One can't imagine Waugh being able to chat up the locals. Among Alastair's papers, was there anything from

Waugh?'

‘I was surprised to find nothing. Alastair kept nothing from Evelyn.'

‘And why do you think he became so withdrawn as a person?'

‘Ali got Barford and its contents but my mother -Ali's sister – got most of the money. So really he couldn't afford to keep up the social round. Nancy Mitford stayed at the Wern – she was the cousin of his friend Mark Ogilvie-Grant. And Gerry Wellington stayed there. But Evelyn never attempted to visit.'

‘You know what I mean. He didn't take up with anyone else.'

‘Then in middle age he…didn't suffer fools gladly.'

‘But after Waugh, Alastair is not associated with anyone romantically. Was he lonely?'

‘Perhaps he wanted to be. Alastair never knew what boredom meant. He preferred to read all day. History mostly. He used to go out trawling – he was friends with a trawler captain – and lobster fishing. Whenever you went to see him you always got lobster – and toadstools, the sort you can eat, he was very keen on those. And he liked to do needlepoint, petit point, to pass the weeks which sounds rather cissy but he needlepointed all the dining-room chairs beautifully with lobsters and crabs and pink seaweed. But it ruins the eyes, you know, and he had to give it up.'

‘Not a very happy life.'

‘Well, actually.. .Alastair's was not a very happy death.' ‘Would you tell me?'

He'd been ill for some time. With no one else in the house he was obliged to enter an old people's home up the coast at Aberaeron. He hated it. ‘And some awful woman got into his bed. That really upset him. He went to have a bath and when he got back he found this completely mental woman occupying his bed.'

Alastair rallied slightly from his illness and decided to return to Rock Street but soon after getting home he started to cough up blood. The doctors thought it might be tuberculosis and he was taken to the chest hospital at Machynlleth. In fact he didn't have TB. He died in Machynlleth Hospital in October 1982 from cancer of the pancreas. There were no obituaries, there was no burial, there is no gravestone. His ashes were scattered on the sea from a lifeboat off New Quay and he was finally able to do what he so often wanted to do, to disappear from the world without memorial or trace.

Yet the reason for this self-sequestration in a place far from his previous existence, that question still tugs. Anthony Powell said ‘I think he was just like that. I always found him sort of buttoned-up, an odd figure, awfully difficult to talk to.' Others have claimed the threat of homosexual scandal, and certainly British law at the time could employ state terror against homosexuals if it chose; when one is tempted to dream of ‘the good old days' it is well to remember that in the United Kingdom they were often splenetic, soot-covered, and primly cruel. At the age of thirty-three Alastair retreated to New Quay, as remote as anywhere on mainland Britain, and hardly left the place again. Sir Charles Graham also told me that Wales is the only part of the United Kingdom where the Graham family has no blood connections whatsoever.

But finally one of my contacts, Jack Patrick Evans, said something very pregnant when I visited him in his nursing-home one windswept afternoon. Two things actually – the first was ‘Our paths crossed while Graham was still at Oxford.' It is clear now that Evans knew a great deal about Graham's private life and that they'd slept together, but he never gave on that score. The second thing he said was ‘Yes, he was warned out of London by the police. Yes, there was the threat of prison. But it had nothing to do with homosexuality. What it had to do with was – there was a furore over a piece of jewelry.'

What on earth was that supposed to mean? Jack Patrick refused to be drawn further but was adamant that it was so – though added that he knew few of the details. Then he died. I have not been able to develop this lead in any way but I record it for a simple reason: it allows Alastair Graham to keep his mystery still.

Looking over this material one last time, it occurs to me that when at my first meeting with Alastair in the pub he said of Waugh that ‘he wasn't well endowed in the other sense', I could well in my vulgar way have jumped to the wrong conclusion. Perhaps Graham was simply saying that Evelyn was poor, had no money, and Graham was remembering the onetime dearest and then ungrateful friend who had cadged off him, whose overdraft Alastair had guaranteed, and who had ended up bellowing drunkenly in White's club about buggers and pansies. Waugh bellowed thus in a desperate attempt ‘to belong'. But Waugh never belonged: he was a misfit too – and he knew it.

It was the summer of 2007. I was working on a novel, a ghost story, one which is a fictional companion to this book, in that the novel also concerns itself with the disquieting state in which someone is neither present in one's life nor absent from it, and explores the abyss which can open up between someone or something
being there
and not
being there.
One place I didn't want to be was central London in July, so I was delighted when the authoress Susan Hill said I could rent the flat in her barn while the regular tenant was in the Far East. Susan and her husband owned a stone farmhouse near Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds and she said that the opposite end of the barn was currently occupied by a family of owls. It sounded idyllic – and was. It was also a bit strange. Susan, across the lawn and immured in an upstairs room in front of a computer, herself occupied an interzone between being there and not being there; for throughout my four-week residency in her barn I was never invited to break bread under her roof. I tried to take her out to lunch – but she fended me off. This perplexed me, because Susan and I got on very well otherwise. It also set up a kind of tension of civility inside me; I felt an obligation to breach the invisible wall and so invited her and her husband Stanley to eat with me in the barn the evening before I left, in effect entertaining them on their own property.

But not long after my arrival there was a bigger drama, one heralded by a violent thunderstorm at dusk. Cloudbursts crashed over the hills and pink-hued lightning flashed on the walls of my sitting-room. The room was large, its walls white, and it had windows on three sides, so the experience of the storm was Wagnerian.

The next morning it was still raining. I looked out of the window with my mug of breakfast tea. Heavy flat rain. And Susan's drive was a yellow torrent. The back drive round the barn was another yellow torrent. Where the two linked up, in the direction of the road, there was deep flooding, while the ground floor of the barn itself was under several inches of water. We were marooned. And the rain continued. Susan rang the flat to make sure I was OK. By the end of the afternoon, water was pouring directly off the hills and this region of England was undergoing the worst flood in living memory.

All of which is to set the scene for…Barford. Later in the week, when the drive had drained a little and we could get in and out again, I hit the road in the car. To breathe. Thought I'd head up to Warwick and take a look at the castle. I found myself flying past Barford village on a shiny new by-pass with a trading estate recently put up. But the River Avon had burst its banks and Barford was on the far side of a silver sheet of floodwater half a mile across. It looked like the Isle of the Dead. The bypass fed me on to a massive and confusing motorway interchange but I kept my head and doubled back and was soon flying past Barford in the opposite direction. There must be a way to reach it, I thought. I saw temporary yellow signs, directing me onto this new speedway, that new speedway, past half-built housing developments, new factories springing up, and everywhere immense silver sheets of floodwater, and the signs to Barford always pointing to the far side of them. Suddenly the road coiled round on itself – I don't know how it happened – and I was driving over an ancient stone bridge up to its neck in water and into a settlement for human beings, with delightful red-brick cottages, and there along on the left was, yes, it was still stubbornly there, Barford House.

I pulled over beside the brick wall which shielded its front garden. A mass of dull modern houses had been built opposite. The wall was tipping backwards and the garden was now an overgrown jungle which entirely obscured the house from the road. The main gate had gone but an inner gate was just about holding together, its wooden palings snapped off and unpainted. There were three cars parked in the turning space but the house itself was shut-up, dead, rotting. Its once smart white was almost all washed off, exposing the brownish plaster beneath, unpainted since my previous visit decades before. But the six Ionic pilasters still looked sturdy – the central four rounded and the ones on either end squared off – with the dome intact above. The conservatory, attached to the left side, was green with mould and collapsing. I drove down a side road to view the back of the place, but couldn't get close because of another new housing development, but I did see that the walled garden had been severed from the main property and turned into public allotments. The drone of traffic from the motorway was low and incessant, contrasting eerily with the dereliction of the site. In this district of bright new prospects Barford House was the only abandoned thing, yet from its tangled, ruinous grounds there rose an immense variety of birdsong.