How to Disappear (18 page)

‘Ah,' said Nick, ‘I think I know who that was. I met him myself once, years ago, in my teens. That was also in the Dolau. I was with my father and when I started talking to him, my father called me away. When we got outside he said “You mustn't talk to that man again. He's well-bred -but unclean”. The thing I always remember is that his nails were so highly polished I thought he must've been wearing nail varnish. We talked about the film
A Clockwork Orange
which he'd recently seen and was very interested in.'

‘But who is he?'

‘He's called Graham somebody and arrived in the district before the war with a retinue of servants and, the rumour went, ten thousand a year. But he was always considered a dubious character. I wish I'd made more of a stab at getting to know him.'

‘He told me that Evelyn Waugh had a small cock.'

‘Goodness me – did he say more about it than that?'

‘No, he didn't. But the pub landlord called him Mr Graham.'

‘That's it, Alastair Graham. I did hear once that he'd had a fling with a New Quay postman. Now look, you've got to finish that fish pie. I did it specially for you.'

Two years later, living in London again, I was talking one afternoon to Charles Sturridge at a friend's flat in Linden Gardens. He was directing the television series of
Brideshead Revisited
and said ‘The great mystery is – where is the real Sebastian Flyte? The model for the character was someone called Alastair Graham. Waugh met him at Oxford and they were lovers in the Twenties. Then after leading an interesting life, Graham suddenly vanished from the scene in the Thirties. We don't know where and we don't know why.'

You may recall that Sebastian Flyte is the youthful drunkard with whom the narrator of
Brideshead Revisited
falls in love when they are undergraduates together at Oxford. Charles was full of the show and soon moved on from the mysteries of Graham to the wonders of directing Laurence Olivier. At the time nothing registered. So great was the disparity between the two images – young radiant Lord Sebastian Flyte and the jittery old codger in the pub – that it wasn't until the following week that I recalled my seaside encounter years before, and the penny dropped, and I realised that although I didn't know why, I certainly knew where. Sebastian Flyte was living in New Quay.

Naturally I wished to return there, establish contact and discover his story, particularly to find out what had made him run away at such an early age from everything he knew. Meanwhile Charles Sturridge arranged for his television company to do a search of the printed sources and send me the results. They amounted to quite a stack of pages, much of it from Evelyn Waugh's diaries, and with the help of this preliminary material I was able to pencil an outline profile.

Graham was born in 1904 and went to Brasenose College, Oxford in 1922, that memorable year of Eliot's
The Waste Land,
Joyce's
Ulysses,
Wittgenstein's
Tractatus,
the death of Proust and the opening of Le Boeuf sur le Toit, the first modern nightclub. Graham drank too much, failed his exams, and came down in 1923. He and Waugh were constantly together at Barford House in Warwickshire to which Graham's mother, who was called Jessie, had moved. After her son's flop at the University, Mrs Graham enrolled the boy in an architectural school in London but he never attended any of its classes. Next he became an apprentice at the Shakespeare Head Press at Stratford, where he published Waugh's first work, an essay on the Pre-Raphaelites, but that didn't last either. In 1928 he joined the Diplomatic Service – and left it in 1933. End of career. No more jobs. All this sounds perfunctory and disjointed, and one gets the impression that these activities occurred spasmodically, against a background of drifting and boozing which were the really coherent activities. Obviously Graham had dropped out before he was thirty years old. But the question is – had he ever dropped in?

Waugh in his autobiography
A Little Learning
gives Graham the name ‘Hamish Lennox'. In a book of very many names, only two others are deemed so sensitive as to require aliases (‘Preters' and ‘Captain Grimes'). Waugh calls Graham the
friend of my heart.
And for a number of years…
we were inseparable or, if separated, in almost daily communication…Hamish's home was uncongenial to him. His father, the younger son of a Border family, was dead and his mother was high-tempered, possessive, jolly and erratic…

This mother was an American and came to be (Waugh wrote) the model for Lady Circumference in
Decline and Fall.
In his autobiography Waugh also mentions, misleadingly, that his friend went to live abroad and became a recluse – taken together these remarks imply that Graham hid overseas from some threat. In
Brideshead Revisited,
his fate is worse. Sebastian Flyte lives with a German boyfriend in Morocco and Athens but after the German later hangs himself in a Nazi camp, Sebastian drifts back to North Africa, collapses into permanent alcoholism and sickness, and is taken in by a monastery near Tunis where he scuffs about as an under-porter and dies.

And that was all on Alastair Graham. He wasn't even mentioned in Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster's
Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure,
an otherwise fairly comprehensive dossier of Oxfordian shenanigans in the nineteen-twenties. After 1933 Graham's trail disappeared completely. Even those in the know didn't know what had happened to him.

Does it matter? Well, it's tantalising. Recluses and absconders always are. They bring out the mischief in one as well as the curiosity. You suddenly ran away, old fruit, and have been hiding for fifty years. We want to know why. Something unsavoury no doubt. Also the story of this Anglo-American misfit is the only piece missing from the otherwise well documented Brideshead Generation. Graham is its most shadowy figure and yet the one most important to Waugh himself. Their correspondence, perhaps lying in a Welsh drawer alongside thick photograph albums, would be of great importance, especially as Waugh destroyed his Oxford diary claiming, in an hysterical tone, that it recorded a period during which he was ‘quite incredibly depraved morally'.

And so I decided to return to the seaside village of New Quay and call on Alastair Graham and invite him out to dinner. No harm in that – surely? It was October 1981; I drove across England to Presteigne and asked Nick Jones-Evans to accompany me for support. He had a good idea –
Burke's Peerage
– and we combed his 1938 edition. Alastair Hugh Graham was listed under Graham of Netherby, a baronetcy in Cumberland. His father, Hugh Graham, died on November 25 th 1921, the year before his son went to Oxford, and as a result one presumes Alastair came wholly under the influence of the possessive mother. No wonder he drank.

According to
Burke's Peerage,
which incorporates detailed genealogies, Alastair Graham's mother, Jessie, was a daughter of Andrew Low of Savannah, Georgia, and she died in 1934. This was the year after Graham's vanishing act. His father's sisters – Alastair's aunts – were the Duchess of Montrose, the Countess of Verulam and Lady Wittenham. Grander than one had expected.

Alastair had a brother and a sister who both died young. A second sister, Sibyl, married a farmer in Kenya in 1920. So it also turned out to have been a family of many unhappy losses. Alastair was listed in 1938 as owning a house called Wern Newydd in New Quay as well as Barford, his mother's old place in Warwickshire. She'd been dead for four years but he still kept Barford on, which struck me as curious.

‘Wern Newydd sounds quite big,' said Nick, ‘which would explain the retinue of servants we all heard about.'

Next day Nick and I drove to the coast and booked into the New Quay Hotel. Nick was wearing his tweed cape and deerstalker and also smoking a pipe. He quite often does but on this occasion the Sherlock Holmes get-up was absurdly appropriate. As usual on the west coast of Wales, the weather was windy and drizzly. The first thing we discovered, I think from the proprietor of our hotel, was that Alastair Graham no longer lived at Wern Newydd, which was in the countryside nearby. He now lived in New Quay proper, in Rock Street which was a row of stone cottages above the harbour. Graham inhabited Number 8.

We trudged over to the Dolau Inn where there was a major setback.

‘You used to be able to time your clock by Mr Graham. But he hardly ever comes by these days. He hasn't been well. And he won't let you in. Round here we call his house the Kremlin.'

Perhaps it was naive to expect someone who'd deliberately withdrawn from society to give a welcome to strangers – and ‘Kremlin'? It sounded dreadful. But undeterred and optimistic, we walked over to Rock Street and to number 8 which was the finest in the row, double-fronted, painted dark pink, with an eighteenth-century porch. A dolphin stood on either side of the entrance. I knocked on the front door which was blue. There was a long interval. Nick and I looked at each other nervously. At last there was the sound of a lock being turned and the jangle of a chain being disengaged. The door opened sheepishly, a third of the way. Those blue sad eyes, which I recognised at once, peered over a pair of spectacles in steady, watery silence. It was the same old man I'd met in the pub years before, the same trim beard, the same freshly pressed nautical clothes and blue deck shoes. Not very tall. But he looked much thinner. There was no ‘Can I help you?' from him, nor even a ‘Yes?'. Only a stare. So I said please forgive us for calling like this and I introduced Nick and myself, mentioning that actually we'd met before, and I explained my interest in Evelyn Waugh and the nineteen-twenties – whereupon he started to flap like a cornered bird and became quite desperate.

‘I've had a stroke, I can't remember anything, I've nothing to say!' His eyes registered even greater consternation as he caught sight of Nick's Sherlock Holmes outfit.

I was stumped. For some reason a response as abrupt as this had never crossed my mind. I've used the word ‘naive' but a better one would be ‘innocent'. I'd been innocent.

I considered my interest in history, literature and life to be entirely legitimate and in need of no special pleading. How wrong I was. I played another card: ‘Would you like to join us for dinner this evening?' In the circumstances it sounds bloody mad, put down like that, and his reaction was worse still.

‘Oh, no! I can't go out, I'm not fit to be seen! I had a stroke last year, I'm an invalid, I can't think at all, everything was so long ago – he was older than me, you know.'

Well – that last observation of his popped out oddly, accompanied by something slightly less frantic in the eyes. ‘He was older than me, you know.' What on earth was going on in his head? It suggested guilt, an attempt to transfer responsibility for something bad. Graham, his eyes having now attached themselves to the polished doorknob, began to fiddle with it – he was too well brought up to slam the door in our faces. He had slender, beetroot-red hands, with those fingernails of deathly white, no pink in them, which I'd noticed at our first encounter.

‘But weren't you Sebastian Flyte?' I blurted out, now in some disarray myself.

He flinched back into the hall. ‘No, not me, not me – er, it was a friend of mine.'

‘But Waugh said it was you.' I blundered appallingly on. ‘And in the original manuscript of
Brideshead Revisited
Waugh wrote Alastair instead of Sebastian'.

‘Please, no, I'm an invalid, I can't remember anything.'

One could tell from the intense clarity of the eyes that he had all his wits and could remember everything. But it was pathetic. His whole demeanour was of a man in mortal fear of exposure. It was impossible to persist and I apologised, wished him well, and came away thoroughly embarrassed. But one had to give it a try. If you are drawn by something or someone, you have to give it a try. Rejection is hurtful but not even trying is worse. I'd foreseen a charming harbourside dinner while Graham reminisced flavoursomely to a pair of fans; old people are usually happy to talk to younger people about their lives, rarely having much opportunity to do so. Instead of that it had been a disaster and I was acutely ashamed of myself.

Nick felt as shabby as I, but added ‘Did you see inside?'

‘No.'

‘Marvellous stuff.'

While I'd been trying to engage Graham, Nick – who is extremely tall – had been rubber-necking behind me and had missed little. Icons in the hall, chandeliers too big for the rooms, gilded furniture, old polished wood, a Georgian bracket clock, roped curtains. ‘And very very clean,' added Nick.

‘But that terrible remark of his.'

‘Which one?'

‘I'm not fit to be seen. It sent a chill down my spine.'

‘Well, he wasn't very attractive.'

‘You know that's not what I meant.'

It so happened that Alastair Graham's housekeeper worked part-time in the bar of our hotel and that evening we met her. Her name was Lottie Evans. She was guarded but not closed-up, and she told us that every day except Sundays she went into Mr Graham's at 10 am until twelve. She'd been housemaid under the housekeeper Mrs Cooke at the big house, the Wern, when Graham lived there.

‘Mr Graham has books sent up from London,' said Lottie, ‘and reads all the time, in the back – he never uses the front two rooms, always in the back he is.'

‘Why do you think he abandoned his life and retired here while still a young man?'

At this she did clam up and confessed that she didn't feel happy about saying anything more. Generally speaking the remarks of the locals wove an uneasy secretiveness around Alastair Graham, so that he gradually became a figure touched more by tragedy than by scandal. Nick and I drove past his old house, Wern Newyyd, two miles out of New Quay on the left. A stone mansion with twin gables, hunkered down in a gulley among woods as though trying to bury itself. Both the house and its setting were timelessly beautiful, as far away from everything as a man could get.