How to Disappear (8 page)

The Abkars couldn't stay for dinner – we tried to persuade them but they said the hour was too late. The dining-room was vaulted with black beams and set for a hundred. Fresh flowers were hopeful on every table but we were the only diners. Dolores said this was normal. We talked of language and I said ‘When the Indians call me Master I feel marvellous. I haven't been Master since I was a boy.'

It was true, that being called Master gave one a really pleasant feeling – not of racial or class or gender superiority, but of superiority full stop, the sweetest simplest kind of uplift, as though a quiet blush were suffusing one's ego. It was flattery combined with a wish to be helpful. It's so important to receive compliments and therefore no less important to pay them. Many people are embarrassed by the idea of paying compliments – which is dreadful. We all need these boosts along the way. I remember once calling an old tramp ‘sir' and he went into a transformation under my very eyes. Some chemical was released in him which hadn't been released maybe for years. And at a cocktail party in Mexico City the host said to me ‘The trouble with the English is that they are suspicious of compliments.' He was right. The English tend to associate flattery with corruption, insincerity, and the lower forms of sexual seduction. They prefer charm. The trouble with charm is that only some people have it, whereas everyone can pay a compliment.

Of other forms of address, Sarah recalled that a gang of hooligans driving along in a banger had shouted to us ‘Halloooo, my dears!' and Dolores said that ‘my dear' was a widespread term of familiarity in the Nilgiris, even among hooligans. Inkie's adorable little son, in his school cap and satchel and grey socks, called his father ‘sir' and me ‘uncle'. I loved it when he called me ‘uncle'.

Can't remember what food we ate that last night at the club but for some reason I got far more smashed than the others and lost it all in the gentlemen's washroom. Rita told me afterwards that one of the boys came to the table and said ‘Excuse me, Madam, the Master is lying on the lawn,' and she'd replied ‘Don't worry, he often does that.' A servant brought pudding out to me and laughed as he tried to persuade me to enjoy it. There were smears of stars and a brilliant moon but I don't recollect seeing the greenish mechanical object in the sky or even caring about it, though Rita later told me that she'd looked for it and it had gone. The lilies, masses of them cascading down the hillside, shone a fierce white. I do remember very well the astounding luminosity of those lilies, floodlit by the moon in the black Nilgiri night. Taking off my clothes and extending my full length I rolled from the top of the hill all the way down, crushing lilies as I went, wetting my naked body with cool lily juice.

About eighteen months after my return from India the strangest thing happened. Though I'd say I was a sensitive man, I'm not a great one for supernatural experiences. Anything odd I've usually been able to account for in relatively comprehensible terms. What now took place, however, I have never been able to explain away.

It began when I read in
The Times
newspaper an obituary under the headline ‘The Dowager Marchioness of Winchester'. To my astonishment this woman turned out to be Bapsy Pavry. Well, well, well, along the way Bapsy had hooked a marquess – and not any old marquess either but the Premier Marquess of England. Well done, Baps. All of which was quite new to me. But I was very sorry she'd died. I'd missed the chance of meeting an unusual personality and listening to her colourful stories. I bet she was beautiful to the very end; she looked the type who would be.

At the time I was involved as a free-lance editor with a punk glossy magazine called
Deluxe
and I thought a piece on Bapsy would hit the spot. But when I came to research it I couldn't locate the Bapsy Pavry obituary. I thought I'd torn it out and kept it but, searching high and low without success, God knows what I'd done with it, so I thought I'd ask
The Times
to forward me a copy. After examining their records they reported back – to my great surprise – that no such obituary had been published by them. How odd. Maybe I'd befuddled the source? The nineteen-seventies were a befuddling period. Perhaps it had been in the Telegraph. When I contacted the
Telegraph
however, they said the same. Hadn't published an obit of Bapsy Pavry. I rang all the relevant papers and drew blank, blank, blank. No obits anywhere. This was perturbing and – well – had she in fact died? None of them had the foggiest idea. They didn't even know who she was.

This unnerved me. So I backtracked and tried to work it out. I'd read an obituary in the newspaper – but no obituary had been published – and it was of someone who would certainly have rated an obituary had she died – but editors seemed not to know of her existence – so maybe she hadn't died – so what had I read? Quite apart from the possibility of a phantom obituary, you'd think it a simple matter to ascertain whether or not a woman who'd been married to the Premier Marquess of England had died. Not a bit of it. I rang all possible authorities. No one knew whether she were alive or dead – and many didn't know of her at all.

Soon after this puzzle arose, I had lunch with John Betjeman. Which I
did
write up for
Deluxe.
The article incorporates the Reverend Gerard Irvine and his sister Rosemary who joined us at John's house before we left for the restaurant. The relevant portion of the article ran as follows:

I don't think Rosemary ever forgave me for calling her brother Gerry. She insisted that he was always called Gerard. But I know that before they arrived, John had referred to him as Gerry and it stuck. The second thing I'd got wrong in the above was about Mrs Fleming sueing Bapsy – it was the other way round. The enormous row between Bapsy and Ian Fleming's mother was another whole limb of Pavriana I'd barely grasped. (Eve Fleming, widowed and very well-provided for when Valentine Fleming was killed in action in 1917, was subsequently one of the many mistresses of Augustus John and had a daughter by him.) Dempster also suggested I try the May Fair Hotel where sometimes Bapsy had lived. The May Fair made a search and said a woman of that name, either name, wasn't staying there and – inexplicably in the light of subsequent events – claimed to know nothing about her. Debrett's didn't know anything and the more thoroughgoing Burke's had ceased publication. I looked her up in my Burke's 1959 under ‘Winchester'. That didn't say much except that her husband was born in 1862 and had married Bapsy in 1952, he aged almost ninety. I did later discover that the Marquess died at the Metropole Hotel in Monte Carlo in 1962, just short of his hundredth birthday. Nowhere could I discover
her
birthdate and couldn't recall it from the phantom obituary. I chanced across a second photograph of Bapsy, still the beauty, in Andrew Barrow's book
Gossip.
I think the photo was taken in the 1950s. But when I asked Andrew he couldn't add anything to that. It seemed an idea to write to the current Marquess of Winchester to ask the whereabouts of his ‘kinswoman' – if that's the term. Reference books gave his address as 6a Main Road, Irene, Transvaal, South Africa. Oh God, another one who jumped ship. There was no reply.

Although the Bapsy story was getting more and more peculiar, my life was getting more and more complicated, and after several further shots at trying to discover whether or not she were alive, I gave it up as hopeless. The woman had vanished without trace.

Nearly twenty years went by. Many things happened, including Rita's death. She died in her fifties from a stroke. It hit her in church while she was discussing the details of her mother's funeral with a priest. She keeled over in the aisle. And days later, in Stoke Mandeville Hospital where she'd been a much-loved hospital visitor, it was all over. This is not the place to write at length about her, except to mention that, after Ootacamund, Sarah and I accompanied Rita back to Sri Lanka; she returned to stay with the de Mels and we two took a room at a small hotel in Cinnamon Gardens and pursued our antics and intoxications.

The point about getting out of one's head on substances, especially in youth, is that things happen which otherwise wouldn't. One minute we were spending a night with Greek sailors on their ship Hyperion in Colombo harbour – all I remember is skidding across water and climbing up the side of a metal cliff; must've passed out because I came to in a small cabin roused by a big soft cock tapping gently against my cheek. The next moment we were on our way to the Oliphant Estate house at Newara Eliya where Rita was installed in a four-poster bed by the owner. Somewhere along the way we acquired a tall and handsome American called John who worked for the Peace Corps and rowed for Yale. When he joined us he was in straight clothes but by the time he left us he was talking to the birds in Kandy's Royal Botanical Gardens and wearing a sarong – so we did some good there I suppose.

But on other occasions Sarah and I must've been a pain in the neck, falling about like boneless banshees. Exorbitant behaviour was interposed with periods sitting, waiting, lying on beds, looking at ceilings, stranded, trying to organise money. Re-reading the letters to my parents (which they preserved), I'm horrified at how much of the content is about wheedling money out of them. The seductive trap was that one could live for months in these Third World places on a few hundred pounds. I supplemented this with reviews for an amused Frank Granville Barker at
Books & Bookmen
who loved the idea of posting a hardback volume to an Asian outback and eventually receiving a review some months later in fluorescent ink with twirly cartoons round the edge. Such material as the
Spectator
was able to publish supplied a little more cash – however my letter of introduction from the editor was more valuable for giving
entree.
Officials at the British Embassy in Bangkok were so astonished that I should be a roving foreign correspondent for such a magazine that they rang the
Spectator
office in Gower Street. Gill Pyrah, who was editorial secretary at the time, picked up the phone and asked them ‘Have you seen him wearing tight, bright-yellow flared trousers?' ‘Yes, we have as a matter of fact.' ‘Then that's Duncan.'

At the Fisherman's Inn in Galle, Sarah and I discovered that Robin Maugham, whom we were to meet, had moved on the day before. Galle was one of the hottest places I've ever been. The tropical gardens of the hotel were sticky with exuded juices and never caught even the slightest breeze. The sea itself was hot; at least that part of it was which we were able to access. We sat in the slurping, shallow wavelets of a cove wondering why we were there, but after a while even that question-with-many-answers was too precise. Lethargy flattened us.

Sarah and I took turns at reading
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
which I'd purchased at the Hotel Taprobane in Colombo. Its pages stored a vitality which had been entirely sucked out of our surroundings by the heat and we fought limply for possession of it. There were a couple of evening visits to the New Oriental Hotel in Galle Fort, where we sought solace beneath the fans and sat side by side staring into space with iced drinks in front of us. I can see now the condensation from those tall glasses soaking the tablecloth. Attempts to link up with Rita and her hosts were not successful. The de Mels were part of the political establishment and she was torn between looning with us and keeping us at arm's length. Rita was ‘apart' in other ways. Where possible without offending the locals, Sarah liked to sunbathe topless, or naked in secret spots; I loved sunbathing too but, after burning my balls in Goa, usually dropped a little scarf over my bits. Rita however couldn't go into the sun at all. There was a generational difference too, not so much in years as in epochs. Sarah and I were in our mid-twenties but Rita was an older woman who'd had a straight married life before she knew us. We were 1960 s kids, she'd been a 1950 s girl. In the end a tough telegram from April Ashley told Rita to return to England and look after her four children. ‘She's envious,' said Rita, which was doubtless true, but that didn't alter the facts – Rita had to go back.

Rita left Sri Lanka very unhappy with me and in due course I received letters from some mutual friends in England who wrote that I had been cruel to her. Before leaving she said to me ‘Sarah's won'. But it wasn't true. Rita had got it all wrong. All of a sudden the person she wanted me to be, and thought I might become in a faraway paradise, had vanished off her radar – to be replaced in her mind by another person; that other person was equally fallacious but was more hurtful to her. Rita also knew that these weeks travelling with us was her last taste of freedom, that to return home to the care of her children and a job (in quality control for CBS Records) was it, was all she had to look forward to, the end of the dream of renewal. The melancholy of being left behind – by another, by events, by time itself – was made more difficult for her because she imagined me disappearing into an ever-fresh dawn with a rival. Sarah and I would have many more extraordinary experiences – the week following Rita's departure I would be in hospital in Madras after what the doctor called ‘an infra-glauconic seizure' – before the two of us parted from each other in Bangkok, but we were never the couple which Rita's imagination had constructed.