How to Disappear (22 page)

Lottie remembered that ‘It made him very unhappy. The telephone hardly rang before, and now it didn't stop ringing. At one point he was frightened to leave the house.' Oh dear, my own guilt rankled…But then I thought, for God's sake, what a misery Graham was, for apart from Flyte's squalid end, the association was astoundingly flattering! And yet how perceptive Waugh had been in the book: the curse of Sebastian Flyte is his failure of nerve in the face of life's demands and opportunities.

Taking me into the front room of her council house, Lottie pointed to an Edwardian genre pastel in an oval gilt frame. It was of a boy with golden curls and blue eyes wearing a large straw hat.

‘That's Mr Graham when he was nine. I always loved it and his niece in South Africa gave it to me.'

It would have been done immediately before the First World War and was highly evocative of that lost paradise. Yet once again I heard some of Anthony Blanche's words from the novel: ‘You mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little insipid…When I hear him talk I am reminded of that in some ways nauseating picture of “Bubbles”'.

But that wasn't the important thing. What was important was that I had a new lead.

‘Did you say Alastair Graham had a niece?'

‘Yes. Two of them. Sybil's daughters.'

‘Did they find any letters?'

‘I don't know. The African niece, Mrs Davidson, got everything and cleared the house – you should ask her.'

‘Do you have the nieces' telephone numbers?'

Lottie did and she gave me both.

Firstly I rang Graham's younger niece in Scotland, Mrs Kitty Macduff Duncan. ‘I'm not going to co-operate,' she said. ‘You're going to drag up all that nasty business, I know.'

What nasty business? This threw me and I went off at a tangent and rang the head of the family, Sir Charles Graham of Netherby who couldn't have been nicer but who could only remember that Alastair Graham ‘wrote to me when I was engaged in 1944 and sent me a wedding present, purely as a cousin, but he didn't come to the wedding. His father Hugh was my grandfather's brother and I remember hearing as a boy that Hugh was a wonderful shot.'

‘Did you know that Alastair Graham was the model for Sebastian Flyte?'

‘Well, I never heard that! I'd no idea. I'm absolutely fascinated – and I know all about
Brideshead
because I was a great friend of George Howard and they filmed it at Castle Howard. Do you know what became of Alastair?'

‘He died about eight years ago.'

‘Did he. Did he.'

Finally, with very little optimism, I rang the other niece, Mrs Jane Davidson, in Pretoria. The phone was picked up almost at once. ‘You're jolly lucky to get me,' she said, sounding a great deal closer than she was.

‘Am I? Why?'

‘Because people almost never get me.'

This could have been Lady Circumference speaking to me on a sunny day, open, confident, affable, in a very English way. Forty-five minutes later she was still talking and bubbling over with the sheer pleasure of entering family history.

‘Oh, I remember Evelyn very well! He was awfully nice – very quiet but amusing. I only saw him when I came to England on holidays from Kenya where we lived but he used to lift me up through the skylight at Barford, which was that dome which you saw, and we'd go out on to the roof together where there was a marvellous view of the garden and the Greek temple which was the garden's main feature. Mrs G made a goldfish pond – Evelyn helped her build it – in front of the temple and they put a statue of Mercury in it like they have at Christ Church in Oxford.'

‘So they got on then?'

‘Who got on?'

‘Evelyn and Alastair's mother.'

‘Oh, Evelyn was far better with Mrs G than Alastair was! Evelyn used to take the dogs for long walks and practically lived there at times, even when Alastair was away, and used to write in an awful bare little attic room with a tailor's dummy in it and that skylight above because there were no windows. Mrs G – Jessie Graham – she dominated Ali with his artistic nature which she didn't understand. She hunted, gardened furiously, and thought nothing of cycling forty miles. She cycled all round France. When Evelyn married the other Evelyn they went to stay with Mrs G and there's a line in her diary for 1928 which says “the 2 Evelyns played about in the garden” as if they were puppies. And there's an interesting passage on Greece for the same year – Mrs G went to stay with Ali in Athens. But her writing is terribly difficult to read. Her father was a cotton merchant, you know, in Savannah and his mansion is now open to the public. Thackeray stayed there in Savannah with him and wrote
The Virginians
in one of the bedrooms. But Jessie was brought up a good deal in England and Evelyn I'm sure didn't really think of her as other than English.

‘You see, Jessie's father was widowed twice. Her elder stepsister Amy married into the Grenfell family and when Jessie's mother died she was sent to England to live with Amy Grenfell and one of this huge clan was Sir Francis Grenfell who was Sirdar of Egypt and afterwards Governor of Malta and Gozo – '

‘What's a Sirdar exactly?'

‘I think it's sort of head of the army out there and so of course this led to a family connection with that part of the world long before Ali was born. A stream of people went out to stay with Sir Francis, and Jessie and Hugh spent their honeymoon on the Nile, probably on the Sirdar's yacht. Her brother William was Andrew Low's only son and did quite well out of it. Willie Low transferred to England and lived only a few miles from Barford and he was also part of the Marlborough House set. He was a racing man, mad on shooting, and knew Edward VII, and then you see Rosa Lewis had been Uncle Willie's kitchen maid at one time and Rosa learnt a lot about southern cooking from Willie's negress cook Mosianna.'

‘So that's how Alastair and Evelyn came to link up with Rosa Lewis?'

‘Yes, it was a very natural connection and Ali sometimes lived at the Cavendish Hotel when he was in London. But he hated horses and shooting which is why he sold Barford although it was a white elephant, he couldn't sell it for years.'

‘So when his mother died, he tried to sell Barford House but couldn't, he was stuck with it?'

‘That's right. He certainly didn't want to live there, with all the memories, and all the locals who'd known Jessie and Willie; they were breathing down Ali's neck because he wasn't married and always wanting him to dance with their daughters which wasn't his thing at all.'

‘Alastair not liking shooting and horses would presumably suit Evelyn.'

‘Evelyn hadn't a clue about that sort of thing and wasn't interested either, being artistic like Ali.'

‘Ali's artistic nature, that's also why he wandered round the Levant.'

‘Of course it was, yes, but his diplomatic appointment was through Louise Loraine, Sir Percy's wife, who was related to the Grahams via the American connection. Sorry, this all gets a bit complicated but it's interesting the way everything connects up and it's a world gone by. Ali's job was to look after Sir Percy's entertaining and Ali loved that. When Ali was in Cairo he had to take Mussolini's daughter round the Pyramids, that sort of thing. But he first went to Egypt with Mrs G at the age of eighteen before he went to university and at Port Said he ran away, just like that, ran off into the town, and Jessie had to return to Eng-land without him. How he was discovered again I don't know but people said it was nothing new. People often remarked that Ali had a habit of disappearing! He then travelled a great deal in that part of the world
before
his diplomatic engagement. I found letters to someone called Claud dated 1926, 1927.'

‘That would be Claud Cockburn.'

‘Do you think so? Who was Claud Cockburn? Except for one written in Crete, they're typed copies. I don't know why Ali kept them. He didn't keep much else of a personal nature. I can send them if you like.'

Clearly Alastair had left everything to the right niece.

One week later a thick envelope arrived on my doormat, covered with bright African stamps. It contained photocopies of five letters from Graham to Cockburn, a letter from Robert Byron to Graham, various other material, and a covering letter of sixteen foolscap pages from Mrs Davidson herself supplying many further biographical points. It was as if she hoped, after years of maddening and largely pointless secrecy over her uncle, the record might now be made clear.

Are you getting accustomed to the spiral structure of this piece, how I acquired my information in a roundabout way? It doesn't matter whether or not you're able to hold all the details in your head as we go along – I've checked backwards to ensure that everything does cohere properly. But I hope I'm conveying a progressive revelation, as a painter starting with a few lines scattered about the canvas will eventually end up with a portrait as complete as he can make it.

Here are some of the many things Graham's African niece put in her long letter to me. General Robert E. Lee had been Jessie Low's godfather. Jessie and Hugh Graham rented houses until they moved to Barford in 1917, the first property they owned. Alastair was a timid child, frightened of cows. He went to a day school in Leamington Spa and was at Wellington College a very short time and left at fifteen. Mrs Davidson thought he must have refused to go back. He lasted only a short time at Oxford too, but went back to the University for the Railway Club dinner, November 28th 1923, on the Penzance to Aberdeen service. Mrs Davidson enclosed a photocopy of the menu, signed by ‘Harold Acton', ‘Peter Quennell' and other fellow travellers. I notice that Waugh is the only one who signs it simply with his Christian name, at a time when undergraduates, continuing the example set at school, customarily called each other by their surname plain.

Alastair's letters to Claud Cockburn are vivacious but straightforward accounts of the delights and pains of travel in that era. Here follow some extracts. His companion in the first is a man called Benvenuto who Mrs Davidson said was not Italian, so goodness knows what he was.