Murderers and Other Friends (19 page)

Looking back on those days of murder, violence and sudden death, I wonder what that close association with killers did to us. I don't think it made us callous, lessened our hatred of violence, or diminished our belief of the sanctity of life on earth. I suppose we got a little nearer to understanding the nature of the crime. Very few of the murders I was engaged in were planned, or premeditated in any real sense. They were the result of moments which slid out of control: quarrels in pubs, quarrels between friends and lovers, husbands and wives. Those guilty of them had no time to think of the consequences and would certainly not have been deterred by the death penalty. Taking those pale, calm, curiously remote people out and hanging them would merely add further unnecessary killings to a sufficiently blood-stained society. The death penalty, as an American judge said recently, has nothing to do with deterrence and everything to do with revenge, which, as the man who didn't write the plays of Shakespeare told us, ‘is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out'. And yet most of us, at the height of a quarrel, however passionate, don't kill. Why should anyone do so? Is it chemistry or morality, free will or the will of God? These are questions which no trial, however careful or prolonged, can hope to answer and so doesn't care to ask.

When Laurence Olivier played the cantankerous old painter in
The Ebony Tower
we took him down to see the artist in Fawley Bottom. As magical in its way as Le Nid du Duc, the Pipers' house is built, like all old Chiltern farmhouses, with brick and flints. It has a long, high barn where John Piper designed his stained glass windows. His other studio was a converted cowshed attached to the kitchen. There is an enlarged cottage garden – not the sort of gentrified garden which regards colour as vulgarity and all the flowers have to be white, or off-white or greenish (a horticultural and social snob once said, ‘If you want colour in your garden, get your cook to go and buy the seeds!'). The Pipers' garden glows with huge poppies, peonies, golden rod and deep yellow anemones and petunias, stocks and irises; just as the walls of his studio glow with the great flower pieces he did in his last years and with his paintings of French
châteaux,
Welsh castles and parish churches under dark and dramatic skies. It was there that the painter showed the actor the movements he might go through while depicting the dark interior of a forest.

The rest of the house is similarly inviting, with stone floors, log-fires, an army of white candlesticks, flowers in big pots, two pianos (on which John and his son Edward, and sometimes Richard Ingrams, played jazz), tapestries, and one of those lowering portraits of Windsor Castle painted against the typical Piper sky, which caused George VI to tell John he was frightfully sorry about the weather. The kitchen has a great Welsh dresser full of bright mugs; posters for Britten operas, for which Myfanwy Piper wrote the words; and smells of unobtrusive cookery. Myfanwy, now over eighty, dives fearlessly into the pool when she comes to stay in Italy, and she's still writing – a libretto for an opera based on
Easter,
one of Strindberg's relatively cheerful plays – and cooking dinner for an infinite number of friends and her extended family. John Betjeman wrote a poem to Myfanwy whose ‘fortunate bicycle' he mentioned and went on:

Golden the lights on the locks of Myfanwy,

Golden the light on the book on her knee,

Finger-marked pages of Rackham's Hans Andersen,

Time for the children to come down to tea.

And I remember him saying that he had amorous thoughts of Myfanwy, wearing a white overall with F for Fuller's embroidered on the bosom, serving him walnut cake in a tea shop. During the war, when petrol was short, Myfanwy drove a pony and trap round the narrow lanes. In her more advanced years, John Piper would ask her to put on exotic underwear and lace-up boots and make drawings of her.

John is in the house as though he were still alive, his paint table clean, his paints set out neatly, his collection of tapes and records in order. He was thin, grey-haired and aquiline, with a face like a cardinal and a taste for drinking a good deal of red wine with everything. He and Myfanwy met at a holiday cottage rented by another painter, Ivon Hitchens, and fell instantly in love. As they talked and argued, the old days came swimming back – the time when John was an abstract painter and not yet one of England's great topographical artists. Memories of Kenneth Clark and Sandy Calder, Ben Britten, Osbert Lankester and Betjeman, would come back to them and they would bicker gently about what exactly had happened and when, telling each other that they were completely impossible to live with in a way which showed clearly that their love had never died. All the same, John was a domineering character to whom Myfanwy devoted her life, and deprived herself of much time when she could have been writing. However, she says that without John Piper, she probably wouldn't have written at all.

John and I decided we would have a joint birthday party at Fawley Bottom on a summer evening. There were long tables covered with white cloths and flowers, and ivy climbing up the pillars of the tent. There were many children and grandchildren; small girls in white dresses ran between the tables and out over the grass as the light faded. A number of people met for the first time that evening and fell in love. John had always had a passion for fireworks, which exploded in great profusion at all Piper celebrations. He designed them, chose their colours and falling patterns for royal and state occasions, and a friend of his was a wizard with gunpowder. When the sky was blacker than even he painted it, it was filled with shooting stars and lazily descending coloured cannon-balls, which exploded and divided and reproduced, sending down showers of light and colour. And then, in letters of fire over the Chiltern hill, came the message
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN AND JOHN
That night John Piper was eighty, I was sixty – old by anyone's standards, but I had, I thought, very little excuse for not being entirely happy.

‘I'm growing old,' the blonde girl approaching thirty said in a voice of doom. ‘I know it. I'm getting lines. My face is growing old.'

We were at dinner with Niven in a Chelsea restaurant. He was bronzed by the sun and serene as ever, wearing no tie and a coat and trousers selected at random from different suits. He looked amused as he said, ‘I can't feel too sorry for you. Even if I take every pill and hormone, and do whatever diet's going, there's no way I'm going to be alive in ten years' time.'

A few nights later he was interviewed on television. The stories were as funny as ever and even more brightly polished, but his speech was slurred. His doctor, who had watched the programme, left him a note at the Connaught saying that he might have had a slight stroke.

I don't remember how much later it was, a year, perhaps two, that I was driving across Switzerland. We had been staying at Verbier and I was on my way to Niven's other home in Château d'Oex. I knew what had happened. It wasn't a stroke but the cowardly and treacherous motor-neurone disease, which either takes its time or kills you in a rush. Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, it paralyses the nervous system so you can't eat or swallow. I knew that Niven had gone to the Mayo Clinic in America and travelled the world in search of a cure, but motor neurone disease, like God, moves in a mysterious way and no one has yet forced it to reveal its secret.

When I got to the house, a big, wooden chalet on a hillside glittering with snow, Hjordis was telephoning and seemed cheerful. She went out with a friend and then Niven came downstairs, gently, almost soundlessly, like a ghost, and when he spoke only the faintest sounds came out of him. ‘Fundador!' he greeted me. ‘What about a jar?' So we sat and drank white wine and he told me about all the cures he had tried. ‘Someone advised me to sit in a bath of ice and water,' he whispered. ‘So I sat there in misery and watched my lifetime's friend and companion shrink to the size of a gherkin! Now, tell me again about the dwarf you once defended.' We really didn't want to hear new stories; we wanted to enjoy old ones, told again. We sat together for a long time, until the sun had vanished and the snow was freezing hard, and I could hardly hear him when he said, ‘I think it's having talked far too much during my life that's taken my voice away.'

So I drove back to Verbier, to the apartment full of ski boots and anoraks and exhausted children. We slithered down the street to a bar where chalet girls and middle-managers were laughing and shouting and throwing bread, and I never saw Niven again. A paparazzo got a picture of him sitting in his garden in the South of France, a photograph he must have hated, in which he looked even more ghostlike, almost transparent. He died soon afterwards and a great deal of joy and laughter slipped quietly out of the world.

I'm not sure what Niven felt as he faded slowly. Did he want to hurry on the process? I don't believe so. Euthanasia, or ‘easing the passing' as Dr Bodkin Adams, who did away with many of his elderly patients in Eastbourne in the name of mercy, called it, has become a fashionable subject, and keeping old people alive has come to be seen as politically incorrect as fox-hunting or telling women that they look beautiful. I have doubts on this subject. I remember all the will cases I have done and the ruthlessness of relatives harkening after grandma's savings, or even her sticks of furniture. How easy it would be to persuade the old girl that she really owed it to her family to drift into painless oblivion so that the spoils might be divided. My doubts were greatly strengthened by a case I did, appropriately towards the end of my life as a barrister. I appeared for an elderly man who worked for an organization which exists to persuade the nation that passing should be eased whenever necessary.

The angel of death was called Mr Lyons. He wore a bobble hat and carried a white stick on account of impaired vision. His teeth were unreliable so he seemed to subsist mainly on tea and biscuits, which he called ‘bicks'. He was the only man, I think ever, to have mixed up fish and chips and boiled sweets in a food processor and eaten the result. He was no great believer in free will but referred frequently to his puppet master, some unseen spirit who was in charge of his destiny. His terrestrial boss was a well-educated, youngish man who had come to a theoretical and philosophical belief in the virtues of euthanasia. People would ring Exit complaining of terrible pain and, the prosecution claimed, he would dispatch

Mr Lyons to put them out of their misery. This was done by encouraging them to wash down a special brand of sleeping pill with a good deal of whisky. A black plastic bag was then put over their heads and fastened with an elastic band. When they dozed off, the air in the bag would be reduced, they would suffocate and Mr Lyons was able to move on to another customer. If they took a long time dying, Mr Lyons was alleged once to have said something like, ‘Hurry up, please. I've got others to go to this afternoon.' Before he left, he was thoughtful enough to feed any cats that might have been left unattended.

It's fair to say that all his clients embraced death voluntarily. Some cases, however, were clearer than others. A talented portrait painter with a brain tumour, knowing he would never work again, painted his last picture and decided to die, surrounded by his family, with the help of the strange man in the bobble hat. Other charges were more difficult. A suicidal young man with a drink problem rang Exit and it was alleged that Mr Lyons arrived to help him. He was also accused of having agreed to help a very sick woman out of this world without either of them telling her husband who came home from work to find his wife suffocated.

Unhappily, Mr Lyons kept a careful diary of his activities. The entries were short and gave little more than names and addresses, the times when the operation was complete and whether he got tea and ‘bicks'. He also added a note of the money he had laid out on elastic bands and ‘placcy' bags. Ever eager to provide evidence against himself, he started to tell the story of the passings he had eased to a pretty model he found himself next to on the top of a bus. She invited him into her house, gave him tea and ‘delicious bicks' and, being a sensible young woman, and the daughter of the radio and television presenter David Jacobs, reported the matter to the police.

In England suicide was once a felony, and those who committed it would be buried at the crossroads with a stake through their hearts, and their property was forfeited to the Crown. Some unhappy people were imprisoned for unsuccessful attempts at suicide. When the crime of suicide was abolished, an offence of aiding and abetting the act was retained, and this was the charge faced by Mr Lyons and his director in Exit. It's remarkable that suicide has never been a crime in Scotland, so north of the Border Mr Lyons could have helped invalids on with their plastic bags in perfect innocence.

Mr Lyons was a verbose, not to say rambling, old man. His behaviour, and his attitude to life, did not make him the most sympathetic of defendants. When I first saw him, he was furious about his treatment in Brixton Prison, where he was remanded awaiting the trial. ‘They pinched my copy of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas,' he told me. ‘And the tea, well, you could hardly call it tea!' If the tea was weak, I thought it was hardly a secure foundation for an application for bail, so I told him that if he wanted to he could tell the judge about it. No sooner had the judge sat down and chosen a pencil but Mr Lyons started to harangue him from the dock and went on for a very long time indeed. When, at last, the stream of words ran dry, the judge, to my amazement, turned to me and said, ‘You know, Mr Mortimer, I am extremely concerned about your client's copy of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas,' and he granted him bail. The next morning I arrived very early in court and found the judge, alone on his bench, working on his notes. He beckoned to me and, as I approached, leant down from his elevated seat and said confidentially, ‘I say, John, I had a call from Brixton Prison.'