How to Disappear (24 page)

I sat in the car for absolutely ages, unable to move on, held by an intriguing spell; and now writing this, I return completely to that moment, to that mood of mystery and fretful discontent outside the gates of Barford House, with its protective garden wall on the very point of falling inwards. What was I waiting for? A voice from the past? The final collapse? No. I was luxuriating in melancholy. And the experience had something metaphysical about it and puts me in mind of a wonderful remark of Vasily Rozanov's. ‘All religions will pass away,' he wrote, ‘but this will remain: sitting in a chair and looking into the distance.'

I
t had been the hottest August on record. The last day of the month came, a Sunday, and there was a good promenade concert that night at the Royal Albert Hall -Sibelius, Britten, Stravinsky. But I'd miss it since I'd promised to drive down to Sussex on the Sunday afternoon in order to help my friend Elisa whose mother had recently been transferred to a nursing home. Elisa had to go through the house prior to its sale, sorting out room after room of possessions, and she was dreading it. I got up at around 9 am, made a pot of tea, and switched on the box. Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash. Reports were only just coming through from Paris and the matter was still very confused.

Sometimes you find yourself doing things without having decided to do them, as though your conduct were being guided. Falling in love can be like this: you are swept up with someone and taken by events without consciously willing any of it. So on this morning I discovered I simply couldn't stay indoors in the flat, and at around 10.30 I found myself walking along Notting Hill Gate, holding a potted white cyclamen. Nobody had told me to do this. I hadn't even told myself to do it. And I'd never have guessed I would be doing it. In retrospect it's a great surprise to me that I did, because nothing in my life had been directly concerned with the Princess of Wales. But I was doing it. And I wasn't alone. There was a trickle of us on that strange Sunday morning, drifting through the flowery, stucco streets of Notting Hill towards Kensington Gardens, mostly single people, several couples, quite a few black women. And it was unusually quiet, as though somehow the streets were padded.

Suddenly the cyclamen felt heavy. I don't actually recall having bought it, or where I bought it, but I do remember being repelled by the cyclamens that were red and knowing that white, on this occasion, was the only and proper colour. There was an Arab cafe on Wellington Terrace called Cafe Diana which I'd never noticed before, or rather, I'd noticed a cafe but hadn't bothered to register what its name was, despite having walked past it hundreds of times. This morning was different. The cafe's owner had already set up a little memorial on the pavement, comprising a photograph of the Princess and a bouquet. I asked him about the origin of the name of his establishment and he told me they'd adopted it two years previously because Diana had often taken her boys there after collecting them from their day-school in Pembridge Square round the corner. I decided to put my cyclamen down at this impromptu site outside the cafe and continue onward to Kensington Palace to pay my respects.

Why Kensington Palace? Because, I suppose, it had been her home. But this wasn't something one was conscious of assessing. It was simply the only and obvious place to go. In the Broad Walk it was again apparent that others agreed with me. From all directions people were moving towards the Palace, not many, perhaps a hundred in all, but, viewed from the vantage of the north slope of the park, one could see how the Palace was exerting an irresistible, magnetic pull. Nobody was walking in any other direction. And it was all taking place silently.

At the great gilded gates facing south, people had begun to leave flowers. A dozen or so bunches were propped against them, some attached to the wrought iron scrolls. There were a couple of badly painted portraits of the Princess, seemingly the work of children, and a red satin heart with
Diana, we love you
on it. Obviously people were bringing personal items. A shrine seemed to be in the offing. Eventually a group of tourists arrived and began taking photographs but another mood took hold of them, their cameras halted and the tourists just stood there. I shifted about, vaguely nonplussed. Nobody spoke much, but there was unselfconscious eye contact and no
barriers between people.
If anyone said anything it was not in a whisper but in a quiet voice and was usually something like ‘I can't believe it.' Goodness knows how long I remained there. The atmosphere was enthralling.

When I got back to the flat, my brother Peter rang. He too had been affected by the news and said he found himself unable to settle or do anything. ‘It's like when John Lennon was murdered,' he said. ‘She was the star of the nation. We've got no one like that now.' But for me the Lennon comparison wasn't enough. I thought also of President Kennedy and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe. They weren't enough either. Leaving the Ritz in Paris with a lover and – bang! The most legendary personality of the age had made the most astonishing exit. But later that day I continued as planned and drove down to Sussex to help Elisa sort out her mother's house, pointing at objects, putting stickers on some of them, relegating others – it was fascinating and objective, with that thank-God-not-me pleasure one has when taking someone else to the dentist.

Inside a coffin Princess Diana duly returned from France, coming in at Northolt aerodrome northwest of London. She disembarked to the sound only of a wind blowing across the runway. You will be able to hear this wonderful wind on the film. There was bound to be a film. They were recording everything. Meanwhile the pilgrimage of the people to Kensington Palace had swelled to unimaginable proportions. The Queen and the Royal family held themselves aloof from the rising flood, trying to outgrand popular sentiment. But the only effect of this was that they began to look smaller and smaller. Their stultification became embarrassing, pitiful, scandalous. The Queen throughout her entire reign had never looked so cheap, and when public feeling began to spill over into outrage, Her Majesty was forced to bring down to half-mast the Royal Standard which until then had been flying at full pitch over Buckingham Palace. There had been explanations of why the Royal Standard did this; how it could only be this-or-thatted for such and such an occasion: none of it washed. The callous statement atop the palace had to learn its simple, humane lesson – and learn it it did. Down came the standard to half-mast and the nation sighed with collective relief.

It would be several months before the Queen's stoicism found its admirers; compassion, sensitivity and self-revelation are warm human qualities; but for life one needs toughness too. And in later life nothing so becomes one as stoicism. The Queen's endurance in the face of the endless daily round, of her children's ineptitudes, of the crude insults and constant sniping, of terrorist death threats and the betrayal of servants and the intense public pressure to invade her most private space and very soul, is a story for someone else on another occasion, but one does wonder -was this her most vulnerable moment?

At a party to launch a literary gazetteer of Russia, done by Anna Benn and Rosamund Bartlett, the male intellectuals were putting forth a sneery attitude to the mourning of Princess Diana, including, to my surprise, Anna's editor Peter Straus. They spoke of ‘mass hysteria' and ‘fascistic mobs'. English intellectuals are generally of a puritan cast and puritanism is a post-Shakespearean development in English society. The intellectuals feared being castrated by participation in popular feeling, and cynicism was their weapon against it – but the impression they gave was of being dead at their core. For what was so striking about the public mourning of Diana was its dignity. Rather more hysterical indeed was the chatter of the intellectuals, and it is faintly alarming that such people are unable to distinguish between acts of mourning and acts of political fascism. As for cynicism and stoicism, they are not the same; in the classical world they were opposing philosophies, I believe. It is true that sometimes a nausea can arise at an excess of emotion and even I, at the literary party, asked ‘Do you remember the previous Princess Diana?' ‘No. Who was that?' ‘Julie Christie in
Darling.'
Diana jokes appeared very quickly. What's the difference between a Skoda and a Mercedes? Diana wouldn't be seen seen dead in a Skoda. And far behind her, way off in the distance, hardly discernible, was another ghost, that of her Egyptian lover who died with her. Soon the conspiracy theorists would go into action. It would get nasty.

Regardless of one's particular reaction to the event, nobody was without a reaction. For the time being Diana's death abolished solitariness and we all lived in a village, everyone pushed out of the centre of their own existence by it. Yet among the heaps of nonsense which have followed in the years since, the question which has never been answered, and indeed not often asked, is why was there this bewildering and unprecedented reaction to her death? All the answers to the question so far have been too partial, too concerned with advancing an angled view. Nobody has quite nailed it. I don't mean the crash itself. We've nailed that. Of course it was an accident. This has been demonstrated over and over again in numerous court cases and public enquiries. What we haven't nailed is our response to it. Nobody has come up with a satisfactory explanation which marries human psychology to history, and this, presumably, is why the subject doesn't quite go away. The event may be fading into history but not that question, and its psychological aspect might begin with an analysis of this factor: the importance of being bewildered. Mystification is absolutely essential to our feeling of being alive.

People were drawn to Kensington Palace from all over the world. On my first visit, the Sunday morning of the crash, I'd been so intoxicated by the atmosphere that subsequently I could hardly keep away. One of the reasons so many people came is that they understood this unique atmosphere could be captured only by direct experience and never conveyed by pictures or sounds or words (sorry; I'm doing my best). On my second visit the transformation was mind-boggling. It was way beyond anything which could be called a shrine. Bouquets piled high, fluttering with ribbons, glinting with cellophane, flowed like a sea from the Palace gates all the way down to the Kensington Road, and all the surrounding trees and railings were engulfed too. Many perfumes wove about in the air including that of rot. You'd think it impossible for such a multitude of mourners to avoid hack phrases but the originality of the messages was very moving. One I wrote down. ‘To Princess Diana. Thank you for treating us like human beings and not criminals. You were one in a million. From David Hayes and all the lads at H. M. Prison Dartmoor'.

On this second visit it was once again a beautiful late summer's day, the whole of London clear and gently burnished. Kensington Palace was radiant in the sunshine. I'd never before observed it so attentively, a great country house in a park, nothing brash, its warm red brick settled in verdure and touched here and there with gold. Though solemn and sad, the mood was the opposite of depressing. It was nourishing and sexual. The drama of Diana's death had invigorated everyone's sense of mortality and this usually arouses the finest eroticism.

On that night of Anna Benn's Russian party, I took Elisa down to counteract the cynicism of the intellectuals, the mediocrity of that response (because even from a strictly sociological point of view these events were gripping). Was this my third visit? I can't remember. Thousands of people of all kinds were sauntering on one of the last balmy nights of summer. Throughout the park, spreading further and further from the palace, points of focus had been created where flowers and candles were placed round tree-trunks, and though electric lamps had been rigged up by the police, there were not so many of them as to ruin the delicacy of the scene. Indeed the throb of the generators provided an undertone to the tremor of candlelight among leaves. Groups of young people made bivouacs, sipping at the atmosphere as at the rarest wine. Their faces, lit by amber candlelight from beneath, looked suspended in serenity. The scents of flowers came and went, came and went.

At St James's Palace the books of condolence were placed in booths. The booths had to be increased from five to fifteen to forty-three, the maximum number which the rooms could accommodate. I did not go to sign. Joining a long queue to sign my name in a book was not for me. As for the cortege route, it was to have been from St James's Palace to Westminster Abbey, but those in charge were obliged to extend it because of the great numbers expected to line the roadside. The cortege would now leave from Kensington Palace, an altogether more fitting point of departure anyway, which would quadruple the length of its journey. Temporary loos, drinking fountains, and crowd barriers were arriving in the centre of town by the lorryload.

We were all amazed. We were amazed to be amazed but very willing to be amazed. We were all in something very much more amazing than usual. Greek tragedy plus individuality equals Shakespeare. We were all in a Shakespearean tragedy. This was not cinema or television or virtual reality, but actual, visceral reality, and yet like theatre there was something fantastic about it. Between Diana's death and her burial, many films of her were shown on television, moving images of a soul in limbo. It made one think – how very weird it is, this business of being a human being, of being alive. There's not much mystery about death. It's being alive that's the mystery. Death is the normality, life is the exception.

And who was this woman who lay everywhere upon the air like incense? She embodied so many archetypes and was so was rich in contradiction: virgin and ravished virgin, prey and huntress, married mother, single mother, Venus and Jezebel, aristocrat and friend, royal and deposed, rebel and saint, survivor and sacrifice, her life a playground between image and authenticity. Most of this was fortuitous and to my knowledge she destroyed no one, while many, many careers were forged by her death.