Vanished Years (39 page)

‘Mummy says you and Martin have split up,’ he says casually. Sudden tension.

‘Yes,’ is all I reply.

I don’t really want to get into it. It’s too late for all that. We turn the corner into St James’s. My father is thoughtful for a few minutes, framed in the juddering taxi window, with all symbols of Empire falling away – St James’s Palace, Berry Brothers, White’s.

‘Is there nothing you can do to fix it up?’ he asks finally. We look at each other for a moment.

‘Not really. No. I don’t think there is.’

The rest of the ride goes by in silence. We get back to his flat, where I have to push him up the stairs, my hands on his bottom, and hold him up as he rummages for the keys.

The undertakers arrive. They are typical of their trade, grey and puffy-eyed, with long fingers to handle the dead. They are extremely nice.

‘You might want to leave,’ says the head man after the discussion is over and the time has come for Daddy to go. My mother takes the hint.

‘No. I’m fine,’ I reply.

They get their stretcher, disguised in a blanket, and put it on the floor by the bed. One of the undertakers takes Daddy’s legs and another takes his shoulders and they expertly roll the body onto the stretcher. It flops over and for a moment the full import of death is upon me. Daddy’s arm falls over his body. His face lurches to one side but it’s done before it has begun. The men expertly zip him up inside and that is the last I ever see of Tony Everett.

People hate funerals. I know that I have turned that fatal corner in life – from the busy street into the churchyard, because, while I loathe weddings, I really enjoy a good passing, and the one I have enjoyed more than all the rest is my own father’s. It’s perfect funeral weather, bucketing down with rain. The church is packed. Colin Fox administers – even though my father was in fact a Catholic.

The world of the dead person comes together for one last singsong, before losing itself in the crowd. Viewed from the pulpit, which I climb to read from the last volume of my autobiography – the bible according to
me
– I am tempted to sell copies in the nave because I see before me a captive audience. It’s an amazing congregation of my parents’ surviving friends and colleagues, of local people and my mother’s family all in a row. My brother is here from Africa. He sits next to my mother in the front pew.

She is perfect once she’s on stage. It is often a surprise to learn where the acting gene comes from. Hers is flawless. So is mine, although my role is easier. Hers is a great performance because inside she is falling apart. Nobody wants hysterics in this practical country world. There is no one left from my father’s side of the family, and many of his acquaintance are already dead.

Nonetheless, marvellous old generals and colonels, stockbrokers and bankers with eyepatches and regimental ties, sunspots and liver spots – all the ravages of time, sun and drink – sit to attention with
their mostly younger wives, pretty and resilient in the Victorian pews, as the rain pours down the windows. They are a breed verging on extinction, wartime soldiers and sailors who relinquished Sandhurst for Threadneedle Street in the sixties. The sexual revolution, the Beatles and the Stones had little influence on them. They conduct themselves according to a sexual constitution laid down during Empire. Pink tickets are the order of the day – affairs with other men’s wives – to the tunes of Confrey Phillips’ big band at hunt balls and Annabel’s. They apply the rules of the parade ground to the Stock Exchange floor, considering insider dealing in the same light as other wartime necessities like torture. These ex- soldiers have nerves of steel in a crisis, a sang-froid their successors never learn.

‘Bloody Americans,’ my father always used to say. ‘Panicking again.’

They are the colour of my early childhood, an extraordinary bubble in the landscape of time. They have survived magnificently in the asset-stripping world they helped to create (and then regretted), and they live in modest wealth – by today’s engorged standards – in Georgian rectories and Tudor manors up and down the country. Age and experience have softened their hardline conservative edges. A lesbian daughter here, a heroin addict there, HIV in the eighties: they have learnt to adjust their views. They love dogs and gardens and holidays in India with bottles of whisky tucked into briefcases bought in Duty Free. And funerals.

They stand up now at the invitation of the organ. I wish I could say it grinds into a grandiose wall of sound and that the air throbs, but ours is an old tubercular wheezer, and so it impotently tweets the introduction, with wrong notes thrown in, but Daddy’s friends make up for it. They have sung these words on parade grounds at Partition and ever since, at a hundred similar send-offs, and they stand to attention now and bellow fiercely at the coffin.

The service is over and the moment has come for the coffin to leave the church. It is a feeling similar to the school train leaving. This is it. The men from the funeral home – where I have gone last week to deliver Daddy’s pyjamas, lovingly washed and ironed for the last time by his wife – pick up the coffin and carry it out of the church, followed by my mother, my brother and me. Two old soldiers clinking with medals hold regimental standards and we march out into the driving rain. The pallbearers hold the coffin suspended over the grave. The old soldiers stand to attention a little way off, soaked and bedraggled. They are going to catch pneumonia – so I take my umbrella over to where they are and cover them both.

‘You had to be alone, even then,’ reflects Connie sadly over the phone later that night.

My mother and brother stand by the grave with the vicar. The rain pours down his face, his hair is stuck on his cheeks and his bible is waterlogged. Connie and Hugh stand chanting on one side. The rain covers any tears. My heart thumps up my neck as they lower the coffin into the ground and that’s that. A whole chunk of life – like the cliff of an iceberg – has just plunged into the depths. My mother’s face is concentrated, my brother’s blank. We leave the churchyard through the lych-gate, covered with the names of the dead in two wars, and go back to the house for the wake.

It is Christmas night 2010. For the first time since I can remember there is snow on the ground. It’s a Christmas card with glitter.

‘Deep and crisp and even’ confirm the congregation at the midnight Mass. I am standing outside the church by my father’s grave, smoking. The old stained-glass window behind the altar throws a strange spangled light on the snow, and the organ and the singing sound muffled – like a memory – through the thick flint walls of the church. A lopsided moon hangs over the spire and the stars burn fiercely in the void.

The hymn ends, replaced by the friendly voice of the vicar, Colin Fox, proclaiming the good news in that comfortable Anglican brogue – caring and slightly sung, simple and familiar to villagers up and down the British Isles who still worship tradition, if not God. In the silence after the song, the natural world goes about its business. The nearby river gurgles towards the bridge. A moorhen is woken with a splash and an indignant cry. The local barn owl hoots far away on the plain.

Inside the church the congregation begin to chant the Lord’s Prayer.

My father is wearing his blue pyjamas and his old red slippers in the cold ground tonight. He has been dead for over a year.

A
nd so, dear reader – if you are still here – we clunk to the end of the road, straining up the last slope on the last rambling phrase, which is written in Jamaica where I am still wandering.

Today I am at Firefly Hill, the house where Noël Coward lived and died. Firefly is a living tomb, the perfect place to end a book largely about death. Uncannily, everything is more or less as the master left it. He collapsed in the bathroom early on the morning of 26 March 1973. Maybe he was looking for something inside the cupboard above the sink, his That Man talc for men, or his Collyre Alpha eyedrops. They are still there – little medicine bottles: Collyre Alpha and Mycil, ancient Q-tips and Coppertone in old tubes and jars, never moved from the rusty shelf since the day he died. The ‘Room With A View’ (written downstairs at the piano) is an open studio with a desk and two chairs inside a vast picture window that frames the entire north coast of Jamaica – stretching as far as the eye can see into the haze. Its jungles tip from the mountains into the azure, carved into huge bays under the constant pressure of the sea, which breaks endlessly in lace cuffs against the rocks and the
recoiling forest. You can see the roundness of the earth on the wide verge between the sea and sky.

I am sitting at Noël’s desk. He surrounds me in five faded photographs hanging lopsided on the wall. In one he must be no more than eighteen, in a top hat and wing collar. It’s the only picture of him without a cigarette. They are masterful portraits. The twinkling eyes, the no-nonsense regard, the accessible and yet stiff upper lip curled towards some amusing observation, clipped and precise, like the shutter of a camera, are brilliantly contrived. The snapshots around the house, on the other hand, are less polished. Noël is beached on a chaise longue, a fat tummy on piano legs, a face grown over with oriental eyes, reaching out to the camera, unable to move. They nicknamed him Chinese Nell in Jamaica.

The rich and famous are perched on the edges of the chairs in which he is slumped. They all come from the same school – Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, Charlie Chaplin – snapped, sloshed in straw hats, smiling but anxious. Noël rallies at the sight of a lens but his only real interest is the cigarette in his hand.

The house is approached by a steep winding lane that cuts sharply off the old coast road, just before Port Mary. In Noël’s day there would have been a black-and-white striped signpost at the crossroads but all that old order has gone. The lanes of Jamaica look very much like the English countryside. On acid. The forest hangs over the road, always encroaching. You can really feel plants living and breathing in Jamaica, and the hedgerows crackle with life. Halfway up the hill there has been a landslide and the lane has collapsed. A nearby house has been snapped in half and is perched comically on a cliff with one side hanging off.

Navigating the potholes of these terrible old roads is an art like riding rapids. One must keep going. To hesitate is fatal. The road passes through a small village, where young men and boys lounge outside two makeshift bars, listening to reggae blasting from speakers on the street. They shout ‘White man’ as I drive by. In a field carved out of the forest other boys play makeshift cricket. The driveway to
Firefly snakes around the hill, overgrown with giant bamboos. They tower into arches over the drive, creaking in the wind, and the sun flickers through them. At the end of the drive – the light at the end of the tunnel – is a simple whitewashed house commanding one of the most breathtaking views in the world.

I am elated when I first discover Firefly. It happens to be – by chance – the anniversary of Noël’s death, in March last year. When I get to the white marble slab and I read the date, my blood runs cold. I have just completed my season on Broadway in
Blithe Spirit
and it feels as if I am expected. I am thrilled to sit by his grave and gossip about Angela Lansbury learning the lines, Christine’s Marilyn wig, and tell him how sorry I am for all my terrible behaviour while I was doing
The Vortex
, twenty-five years earlier in London.

Then – 1989 – his best friend Joyce Carey came to the show and told me that Noël had come into the auditorium during the second act. She held my hand and imparted what I presumed was Noël’s message from beyond the grave. It wasn’t a rave.

‘You must speak up, dear,’ she said with eyes wide with horror.

At the time I shrugged off the note, wondering only what could have happened to those big flapping ears of Noël’s in heaven. Now years later – a writer of sorts myself – I cannot help but sympathise with him as I remember out loud doing half the play in French one night. How dismissive I was of him then in my proud madhouse. At least I gave my all in
Blithe Spirit
, though.

I am chatting away and the big black caretaker is watching me from the shadows of the giant rubber tree. He is laughing but I don’t care. It feels extraordinary to be sitting there with the view, and Noël lying under the ground. I wonder what he is wearing.

I wander through the house, which smells of unopened cupboards. In the sitting room the framed pictures of Myrna Loy and Maggie Smith have faded in the sun. There are two baby grand pianos, spooning and browbeaten, unplayed for decades, hopelessly out of tune. Piles of dog-eared sheet music – every show tune
imaginable – lie around an old Decca gramophone with a forty-five of ‘Any Little Fish’ on the turntable. In the master’s studio his oil paints and brushes are still where he left them, an unfinished canvas on the easel. The paintings are everywhere, black boys walking up from the sea, a winter scene in England, a man in hot pants with a visible package. They aren’t bad. But they aren’t Gauguin. Old sofas and armchairs watch, blank and collapsed. The table downstairs is still laid for the famous lunch with the Queen Mother, who drove four hours from Kingston to see him. The table is laid for eternity.

But this year there seems to be a terrible sadness coming from this living tomb – surely the most unusual of all the tribute museums in the world to a dead star. The house is empty and silent, just the distant boom of the sea crashing against the reef far below. Sitting at his desk in the room with a view, I feel suddenly engulfed in a sort of locked-up misery.

I think Noël died of a broken heart. He moved into Firefly at the age of fifty in 1951, unaware that, apart from a new career in cabaret, his golden age had passed. A new era in theatre was dawning, and people found him hopelessly old-fashioned. He unwisely ranted about hippies and kitchen-sink drama in a string of articles for the Sunday Times in England in 1961. (He thought John Osborne a fake and was underwhelmed by the Beatles. I agree.) His war work was overlooked. After all, he spied for Britain and took enormous risks. Then, as the sexual revolution began to rage, he was torn down and scrapped like the Happy Prince. I don’t think he ever recovered from the hurt and it still echoes through the house. He threw terrible tantrums, banished everyone, and melted his brain going over it all again and again in his head, puffing himself slowly to death. Knighthood came insultingly late, thanks apparently to the homophobia of the Duke of Edinburgh. Finally the wind blew the bitterness away and left an empty space. Noël Coward stopped talking.