How to Disappear (9 page)

Luckily I still possess the tiny Letts appointment diary I travelled with, which helps to resurrect those far-off days. And some weeks ago, sorting through a cupboard of old papers, I came across a notebook, written – and drawn (it has a lot of psychedelic drawings in it) – in the course of this meandering voyage which later took in Calcutta, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Penang. My God, the names of the pills it records are as exotic as the locations – Dri-namyl, Soneryl, Nembutal, Durophet, Doriden, Tuinal, Desoxyn etc. I'll doubtless publish material from it, if I write a memoir of the nineteen-seventies, that wonderful wild decade which almost killed me. Its entries began in Galle, March 15th 1975, 6.30 pm, and make evident that the triangular adventure with the two women was causing me great difficulties too. Were we three running away from anything? Not really. It was more like we were running towards something – and it was more exciting when you didn't know towards what, because the important thing was to keep breaching the horizon, to enact the romantic idea of openness. If, as Coleridge said, the classical is the finite, then yes, this was the romance of travelling, the movement into a kaleidoscopic future continuously opening ahead of us. The fundamental problem of existence is infinity, that it is not possible to place limits on the infinite. All theory breaks down at that point, including that of curved space. So the finite can never harmonise one with reality. Only a sense of the infinite can do that. This was the pull.

Yet none of us was able to answer the needs of the other two. The notebook records my last night with Rita in Colombo. It was a Saturday and Sarah dropped out at the Intercontinental Hotel stage. ‘Dinner Ceyfish Restaurant – Galle Face Hotel, gin and cakes – Mount Lavinia Hyatt, drinks over sea – Ceylon Intercontinental, cocktails and ice-creams – Samudra, Capricorn Nightclub to 4 am – Rita and me: smoking on beach – Galle Face Hotel, breakfast 6.30 am. Mind in a mess of drugs, sentimental departure chat (Rita says “I don't think I'll see you again for a long, long time”), intense feelings of fatigue and God knows what.'

I'd hurt Rita without realising how much I'd hurt her. Yet though I couldn't be what Rita wanted me to be, I never blanked her. If once you enter the arena of intimacy with someone, you owe them honest explanations to the best of your ability. You must never blank people when intimate relations have arisen; you must never slam the door in their face. I've been the victim of it several times – and it's the worst. It gives you no chance of dealing with it and working it through. You just stand there in the middle of the road wondering what happened, what did I do. Rita couldn't really talk about it in India or in Sri Lanka because we were three. But we talked about it afterwards back in England, we sorted it out, and remained close friends. You can sort things out if only you talk honestly. Honesty is the key. That's another thing Rita taught me, one of the most important lessons in life: how not to be shy of the heart. So many people can't talk about what they feel. So they stew and hide and everyone gets muddled up. But if Rita had ‘got me wrong', I could never shake off the feeling that in many ways she knew me better than I did myself. This was part of her hold on me and fascination and purpose: her emotional intelligence.

OK. So one evening I was chatting to a stranger in the Champion pub in Notting Hill Gate. It turned out he was a barrister and his name was James Pavry.

‘Really?'

‘Yes, really. Why, shouldn't it be?'

‘Do you happen to be related to someone called Bapsy Pavry?'

‘I think I am, yes.'

‘Do you know what happened to her?'

‘No, I don't think I do. In fact I'm sure I don't. We lost contact with her years ago. I presume she died. She was very old even at that time. You should ask my brother – he knows more about that sort of thing. Have you seen her portrait?'

‘No. Where?'

‘It's by Augustus John and hangs in the Royal Academy. You should go and look at it.'

So I did. It hung in the gallery of the Norman Shaw staircase near the restaurant. The portrait of Bapsy was vivid and strangely aloof, the face pale and red-lipped, the eyes almost on the verge of tears. Her mass of black hair was partly covered by the drape of a cream sari. A woman of contradictions. And like its subject, the portrait was unreachable. One could view it across the deep stairwell but not get any closer because the gallery where it was placed had been permanently closed to the public. And to-day it is not on view at all, presumably packed away somewhere in the dungeons, too much of an inexplicable thing in the Royal Academy's glassy new world of blockbusters and gift shops.

When I rang James Pavry's brother, he knew nothing and asked ‘How did you come to be interested in her?'

As I gave him the outline, soft velvet curtains opened on the interior stage of my memory and additional scenes from the nineteen-seventies presented themselves. I recalled that the Abkars at Ootacamund had said that they knew
about
Bapsy Pavry, but I'd been too pissed to pursue it. Presumably they were dead now. But I thought I'd take up the matter again with Richard and Dolores Maclaine-Clarke; after my return from India we had exchanged Christmas cards for a few years but the contact fizzled out. In case they'd moved, I wrote to them care of the Ooty Club.

Not long after – in December 1994 – I was sitting with my friends Von and Keith in a restaurant in Kensington Church Street called Boyd's which isn't there any more (restaurants do come and go with great frequency). Halfway through dinner I was telling them of my twenty-year quest for Bapsy Pavry, when an old lady in black, looking Indian or Anglo-Indian, walked past our table on the arm of a page-like boy. White crystal brooches glittered on her black straw hat. She had an air of great distinction but was at the same time very much a fish out of water.

‘That could be her, the very one,' I whispered excitedly.

‘Go after her,' urged Keith. ‘Ask her if she's Bapsy.'

‘Do you think so?'

‘Look, you're losing her, be quick, go on!'

I was on the point of following when the old lady faltered and almost fell down the step. She was salvaged by the boy but there was minor commotion and it was enough to inhibit me. Soon they were climbing into a cab and were gone. Had the long arm of synchronicity touched us? Was this Bapsy's last outing?

James Pavry recurred – he turned out to be a friend of old friends of mine, Simon and Jenny Willans, and when I saw him at Jenny's fortieth birthday party, I said that I'd had no luck with his brother and asked him about the Parsis.

‘Actually my family became Roman Catholic but there are quite a lot of Parsis in London. Since she was the daughter of a high priest, they should know something.'

Under ‘Parsi' in the phonebook there was nothing. I tried ‘Parsee'. Like ‘sari' and ‘saree', the two spellings are interchangeable. But again nothing. I tried Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism. Nothing. I rang India House. After numerous transfers I spoke to a Mr Vadya who told me to contact a Mr Rusi Dalal, President of the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe, at his home in Ealing. When I rang Mr Dalal, his wife told me he wasn't in, but she said he would be in later and he would ring me. I knew what that meant -nobody rings back any more. But I was wrong and he did.

‘Mr Dalal!'

‘Yes, sir. How can I help you?'

‘I'm trying to find out about someone called Bapsy Pavry.'

‘You are talking about Marchioness?'

‘You know!'

‘Indeed. We were looking after her.'

‘You were? Is she dead?'

‘No.'

‘No?'

My God – no. She's alive.

‘And you know where she is?'

‘Yes.'

Finally…

‘She was here until very recently,' he went on. ‘But she is very old. You know that one – not best of health. She has just gone to Bombay and has asked us to make certain arrangements. She said she won't be back. You understand.'

‘Yes.'

Mr Dalal sounded a lovely man. His manner of speaking reminded me very much of Krishnamurti's.

‘But if you are interested in such a lady, there was here a Lady Bomanjee, wife of a Parsi baronet. She died in Har-rogate and they declared a public holiday. Her daughter is a Nehru and greatly revered. Miss Nehru is still here. In Harrogate.'

‘Thank-you very much. But really it was Bapsy Pavry I was hoping to find. And since she is still alive, um, I could go to Bombay, couldn't I? How old is she?'

‘Well over ninety years of age. I don't want to be discouraging, not at all, but – I wouldn't barge in if I were you. She might not be in fit state. You understand what I mean? I was in Bombay for a few days not long ago, but I didn't call there.'

‘Might I send her a letter through you?'

‘Yes, yes, of course, that would be the wisest course of action. But please don't misunderstand; I wish to help in any way.'

‘Can I ask you another question?'

‘Please do.'

‘Do Parsis practice circumcision?'

‘It's optional.'

What a nice religion it sounds.

I wrote a letter to the Marchioness requesting an interview, Mr Dalal wrote back to me saying he'd forwarded it, and we waited. During the wait I discovered a little more – that ‘paradise' and ‘magic' are Persian words and that Bapsy had been spotted at receptions at India House hiding sandwiches inside her sari. ‘She was so poor,' said my Indian informant mischievously, ‘that she scavenged them to eat later. She married the Marquess thinking he was rich and he married her thinking she was rich and they were both disappointed.'

In July of 1995 I received a reply from the Secretary of the Ootacamund Club, Mrs Patel, saying ‘I regret to inform you that both Mr and Mrs Maclaine-Clarke passed away some years ago.' Oh.. .so he never did buy that property in Scotland, and Dolores was so jolly one can hardly imagine her succumbing to anything. Because I didn't witness their decline, for me they will always be alive, he shy and quiet, she cackling away on the verandah of the Ooty Club for all time…

It was now that the second climax in this weird story took place. The Swiss photographer Luca Zanetti and myself were on the 16.10 train from Mallaig to Glasgow. Mallaig is on the west coast of Scotland and we were returning from our search for a German artist called Maruma (and the story of that will be recounted in the next chapter). The point here is that at the kiosk in Mallaig I'd bought a bunch of newspapers and upon opening
The Times
(September 7th 1995), there it was staring at me. The same lay-out, the same headline, the same photograph, that very obituary which somehow I had seen, glimpsed, dreamed, conjured up so many years before. The Dowager Marchioness of Winchester, it said, had died in Bombay on September 6th at the age of ninety-three. The first climax had been the discovery she was alive; the second that she was dead.

Other obituaries soon appeared. Most were patronising and written in a tone of dry ridicule. But information started to flow and I was able to put together more of the story. It turned out that stealing sandwiches at receptions was not out of necessity but from frugality. Bapsy at the time of her death had been well-off and had made numerous bequests – to the universities of Oxford and Bombay, for example, to good causes and religious groups. Many of these offerings were dedicated to the memory of her brother Dr. Jal Pavry. But the obituarists had made it obvious that she and her brother both before and after the Second World War had been a kind of double act, seeking advancement in London society by serving on charity committees and writing letters to titled and influential persons. In Bapsy's case this went beyond snobbery and became a lust for self-aggrandisement, a high romantic passion capable of crossing into the absurd; on occasions she was importunate, maddening, pitiful. Paradoxically that zealous and lifelong campaign to put herself on the world map had had the contrary result – and she'd disappeared. People had learned to see her coming and deflect her before she arrived. Oh, I wish I'd been able to meet her. All those years searching and there she was, somewhere in Ealing, longing to be brought out of her dark corner and into the light again.

Bapsy's great triumph was her marriage to the Marquess – and despair followed almost at once. Such an abrupt reversal of fortunes can plant a deep and destructive rage, leading to years of incomprehending obsession. You meet someone – and if it's the right person it is always unexpected. One can never scheme for meeting the right person. It is always by chance, an accident, but you know it's the special one because suddenly life throbs with colour and opportunity and meaning. Your deepest needs are fulfilled. You have everything. You're in heaven. Seconds later – it seems only seconds – that ‘someone' closes their heart to you. The vistas vanish. All is cancelled. None of it makes sense. But you are in Siberia. You spend the rest of your life trying to grasp what on earth happened, or poisonously seeking redress.

Not only was Henry Winchester very old – Bapsy's father-in-law was born in 1801! – but he'd gone bankrupt in 1930 and had lived more or less hand-to-mouth on the Riviera ever since, trading on his title. In the year following their marriage, the Coronation of Elizabeth II loomed. Henry, for reasons of health or problematic relationships, decided not to attend. Bapsy was mortified. The Coronation? Not go? If she couldn't budge her husband, she'd go alone…But the Earl Marshal denied her permission to attend in her own right – it was one of Bapsy's bitterest moments. Next thing Eve Fleming moved in with Monty (Henry Winchester was often known as Monty) at the Metropole Hotel – what a blow. How had that come about? Well – Mrs Fleming had in fact been engaged to Monty in 1951. But she'd broken it off for fear of losing the widow's stipend which had enabled her to live very well. So the following year, in a hope or a huff, we'll never know, probably a mixture of the two, that's what it usually is, mixed motives, only a zombie can be truly single-minded, let us say then on the rebound, Monty married Bapsy at Caxton Hall in London. How exactly she'd met him and how precisely the marriage had come about I was unable to fathom. But the old boy continued (as one would expect) to keep his hand in with Eve Fleming. Why Eve should have wanted to keep her hand in with him is yet another mystery. It can't have been the title because that had already gone to her rival. It can't have been love-making prowess unless Monty was an utterly different man when his clothes were off, which seems unlikely. Eve actually claimed ‘Our association was as pure as an Easter lily', and one suspects that sadly there was no alternative. Perhaps it was Mrs Fleming's sheer cussedness. Anyway there she was, shacked up with another woman's marquess at the Metropole where they occupied separate rooms.