How to Disappear (11 page)

Nonetheless Bapsy had been quick to exploit her apotheosis as the Premier Marchioness of England. Given the tenor of the replies, it is not difficult to divine the gist of what her own letters must have contained. Only days after her marriage, she is pestering the Chester Herald at the College of Arms over what she should wear for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The reply is a polite be-patient. Knowing what we know, subsequent letters on the same subject from the Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms at the Earl Marshal's office in Belgrave Square are poignant indeed:

But she wanted more.

Those Bluemantle Pursuivants of Arms think of everything – though it's rather creepy to find one of them so assiduously at work on New Year's Day. With estrangement from the Marquess on her mind, Bapsy's attempts to avoid being marginalised turned to panic. Repeatedly she badgered the Earl Marshall's office to be included in Royal or State occasions or indeed in any occasions whatsoever. The Earl Marshall's secretary from 1954 was Richard Graham-Vivian, who had been Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms in the nineteen-thirties. He was the cousin of Evelyn Waugh's boyfriend Alastair Graham (of whom much more in chapter four) and Graham-Vivian showed great skill in neutralising her appeals without either giving offence or giving an inch. If protocol or her harassment of them allowed no way out, courtiers would resort to the time-honoured snub of sticking Bapsy behind a pillar at the occasion into which she'd forced her way. Barbara Cartland too was sometimes on the receiving end of that one, for example at the marriage of her step-granddaughter Diana Spencer to the Prince of Wales.

It is remarkable to relate but the last Bapsy box – the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties – shows virtually no difference from the first box in the nineteen-twenties, except that in the absence of an Indian Viceroy, the Royal factor proper has gone up. Letters to all members of the British Royal Family on their birthdays are politely and affably answered by courtiers (who are well trained in this tedious task and have been accustomed to huge quantities of unsolicited communication throughout history). And the poor darling is still sending out copies of her one and only book; for that singular gift, thank-yous arrive from the Library of Congress, the Royal Geographical Society, Harvard University. One only wonders why these august bodies had not received their copies donkey's years before. Perhaps they had.

Bapsy's breathtaking resilience, her social crudeness, her absolute refusal ever to pick up a dropped hint, also keep her up to snuff on the London-Bombay-Washington round. She has already for many, many years been writing to the children or grandchildren of the people she used to write to, expressing sorrow and sympathy over their parents' or grandparents' demise. By now Bapsy was surreal, monstrous, an ineradicable constant and risible hanger-on in a rapidly changing world. In this final box the replies from persons-in-waiting or secretaries to members of the British Royal Family outnumber all the other letters in it: she'd become a crank who, judging from the unfailingly courteous apologies often contained in these letters, frequently wrote again if the answers were insufficiently prompt or grovelling. And all the while, as I squirrel through the cardboard cartons at the oak table, there hangs on the wall at my back an aerial photograph of Winchester city before the terrible demolitions began, to remind one of the glorious streets which have been ravaged or altogether lost.

For the year 1992 there is recorded a donation by Bapsy of £24,000 to Oxford University, founding two awards in inter-national peace and understanding, in memory of her and of her brother. What happened to the awards? I've never heard of any such award. I must write to whomever you write to about such things. Perhaps I could snaffle one for this piece you're reading. Not that twenty-four grand would generate much. A thousand quid per annum max? That's all right, even to-day. I could have great fun with a thousand quid. Oh dear, I hope Bapsy's not contagious – her heckling for responses, answers, resolutions. In life one can't have all the answers. There are always more questions. If you push it, everything peters out in questions in the end. And all this ‘in memory of'; she had no children of course or serious reputation or other form of perpetuity.

On December 26th 1992 Bapsy was ninety years old; the letters of congratulation from the Royal Family downwards are all in reply to those from her informing them of this triumphant anniversary. And the one unsolicited person in the whole world who was trying to find her – me – couldn't! If only I had a handle to my name, her nose would've tipped up in the air and by infallible instinct she would have been on to me within the hour. This birthday also means that
The Times
obit had it wrong; she was not 93 but still only 92 when she died. Unless she'd decided to give herself an official birthday as well as a real one, choosing in the former case to follow Jesus by twenty-four hours. Bapsy is last registered at the Washington Hilton in 1993, and she received correspondence at the May Fair Hotel up to 1994. This is incredible really, that she kept it up for so long, even with two passports. She was obviously one of those double-passport people, which I've never been. They're getting more and more common, aren't they, the double-passport people. I've never knowingly met a triple-passport person but having three passports, that's probably a rapidly increasing genus too. Like so many misfits, Bapsy was a pioneer. As for her madcap social behaviour, it was tailor-made for the internet: lots of clicks, little substance, and all smeared into a personal fantasy of self.

Then to Bombay for the fade-out. It is in that great Victorian city of her birth that she receives the final letter in the archive. It is from Clarence House and is dated 3i st of January 1995, the year of Bapsy's death, and after all that exasperated and exasperating correspondence, something a little more personal, a little more real:

How happy this letter must have made Bapsy, the personal wave at last from the great world she had never really entered, coming as it did from the fount of all feminine nobility and belonging and influence, from none other than Elizabeth the Queen-Empress herself, wife of George VI, the last King-Emperor of India. With impenetrable Indian ink, Bapsy has obliterated the Bombay address it was posted to. Her final abode must have been insufficiently glamorous for posterity's eyes. But that last letter reminds us how by taking a little trouble now and again, by thinking a little about the other without any great inconvenience to oneself, by daring to be simple and truthful and well-mannered, one can cancel a void, and bring ease and delight where there was uncertainty and pain. Margaret Rhodes had accomplished more than she knew with that friendly, humane touch; or perhaps she did know, which is why she had the job.

Mrs Brisbane, the Winchester archivist, poked her head round the door. ‘Finished?'

‘Yes, thank-you.'

‘Do you want to see the portrait?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘It's a big gaudy thing. We don't know what to do with it.'

‘I think I've finished.'

But not quite.
The Indian Yearbook
entry on her father – I'm looking at it now – said that he had three sons and three daughters. Bapsy must have had family back in Bombay, plenty of family, even though not a jot in the archive makes any mention of them. I rang Mr Dalal. He said ‘She took everything back to Bombay except the material she donated to Winchester.'

‘You don't know if any other papers exist?'

‘I'm afraid I don't.'

‘And what about her family – cousins, nieces, nephews?'

‘I'm not sure of the family set-up. But I'm going to Bombay soon and can ask for you. She was going to donate money to us for a library but placed so many conditions on it that we couldn't accept. The main stumbling block was that she said the room had to be named after her. I explained that at Zoroastrian House we don't name things after people. It was a principle we felt we couldn't break and so we lost the donation – but created the library anyway with money from another source.'

‘I see. Can I ask you another question?'

‘Please do.'

‘How do you bury your dead in England?'

‘We don't have a Tower of Silence here unfortunately.'

‘Well, we don't have vultures here either.'

‘You don't need vultures – you have crows. But in 1861 we bought a burial plot in Brookwood – it's near Woking – where we have either cremation or interment available, according to wishes. Jal and Bapsy Pavry had hollow graves at Brookwood, in case they died in England. They didn't need them in the end, but we put inscriptions on them anyway.'

‘What do the inscriptions say?'

‘Oh nothing. Very simple.'

‘But can you tell me what?'

‘Yes, of course. Just so-and-so, the name – with the dates.'

The problem of Bapsy's Will was resolved when Winchester City Council at long last refurbished a reception room in the Guildhall and named it after her. It was opened in June 2009 and is dominated by Frank Salisbury's ‘big gaudy' portrait. And Keith McVeigh tells me that the Augustus John portrait of Bapsy, which hung in the Royal Academy, was sold at Christie's in 2000 for £7637, a little over half its estimate.

S
cotland is not a place I'd normally wish to visit, but Luca was persuasive. ‘I want you to do the story,' he said. It was sunny and surprisingly warm in the late summer of 1995 when he flew to London from Zurich. We met at King's Cross Station, 11.30 am on a Friday, and took the express up to Edinburgh. I still had my doubts and felt displaced; I'd done the Scottish capital some years before and had no reason to hang about there. Neither fortunately did Luca who found our connection and chivvied me on to the Highland railway which transported us before sundown to Mallaig on Scotland's west coast.

We spent the night in a B&B with pink plastic curtains and the following morning boarded a ferry to the Hebrides. This was more like it. I remember as a young boy, three or four years old – this is one of my earliest memories from when my family lived in Harrow – being deeply affected by the song ‘The Skye Boat Song'. Not that I knew where Skye was, but the song was a popular radio request and some-thing sweetly strange and yearning touched me even at that age, not only in the beauty of the tune but also through the sound effects of waves and seagulls on the recording. Is this early evidence of a vagabond soul? And now fifty years later the Hebrides were happening to me for the very first time. The interpenetration of sea, sky and land, in which no one element dominated the others or was indeed readily discernible from them, struck an exalted note which lifted our spirits. Well, Luca's didn't need lifting but mine did (it had been a rotten year).

But we were sailing not to Skye but to its small, secretive neighbour, the Isle of Eigg. At our advance it rose from the sea like a fortress of pewter and was distinguished by a dramatic natural feature at its centre, a tower of rock, which at our present distance resembled a shark's fin, giving the prospect an air of menace out of Rider Haggard or Steven Spielberg. On deck I buttoned up my Levi's jacket and was grateful for its quilted lining because there was a chilly edge to the wind. The ferry bumped and foamed through fluttering waters and as it came closer, Eigg's forbidding outline inflated into three dimensions. Detail emerged in bright colours – green, purple, brown, splashes of red and white – and Luca started to bob about with his camera. The island is only twenty-four square miles in extent but has a great variety of landscape due to the distortions brought about by the cooling and erosion of volcanic rock. Among its craggy elevations, dominated always by that massive, threatening plug of stone, we would discover flowery meadows, pocket woods and lakes, and little lush valleys. I'd never seen anything like it. Joseph Brodsky, in his poem
Odysseus to Telemachus,
claims that to a wanderer, all islands look more or less the same. But this is untrue. A wanderer is not a blind man and every island has its particulars. At first glance it was already clear why an artist had bought this one.