Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 5

  “I hear you were raped again as you flitted through St. Oswald’s washroom yesterday evening on your late-night trawl,” he would say as he passed one a chocolate digestive. “You really must stop encouraging poor X. His passion for you is making him unmanageable in class. You must get your mother to send you a new dressing gown. The one you have is too décolleté. Remember what happened to Diana Dors.”

  “She bit off more than she could chew, sir?” (I had a huge overbite and was often compared to that great siren.)

  New words, new ideas and a healthy disrespect for everything were the order of the day. And when Algy Haughton retired to Lothlorien, Mr. Davie was appointed head of the theatre. He announced that the next year’s exhibition play would be Schiller’s Mary Stuart. I was to take the title role and Wadham was to give his Virgin Queen. Meanwhile, he delegated to another of our clique, a brilliant boy called Dominic Pearce, a production of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Noel Two, who it may be remembered played Koko in my prep school’s production of The Mikado, was also in the play, and Barnes who had shone as Bottom played Madame Arcati. My character, Elvira, was a ghost who had died in front of the fire in her nightie, and so during the next holidays I dragged my bemused mother around the sales to get just the right negligee, holding various outfits against me.

  “You’ll never get a wink of sleep in that,” said my mother testily.

  “Mummy, I’m not going to be in bed, I’m going to be on stage!” I shrieked. I was losing my patience with this woman.

  Our kitchen at home was taken over as I tried to dye my new negligee a ghostly grey, and I managed to ruin one of my mother’s prize saucepans, but I felt quite smug at the end of the holidays when, along with my school uniform laid out on a bed next to my open trunk, lay a pair of tights and a negligee with my name tags sewn in.

  The play was a triumph for Wadham and me. I was perfectly suited to play the skittish Elvira, and Wadham was a chilling dowager. It was my favourite term, and we bubbled over with joy. I erected a dressing room for myself on the theatre’s fire escape, complete with signed photos, wig stands, three telephones, and an electric buzzer on the floor so that when I received guests I could press it with my foot and pretend to field phone calls from all my imaginary agents. Wadham and I subscribed to PCR, the professional casting magazine, and when The Boys from Brazil was going into production Wadham sent a photograph of himself as Queen Elizabeth I to the casting director. We were obsessed by Franco Zeffirelli and would write each other letters from him, inviting us to Cinecittà to take part in a new film. Finally, though, Father Charles, the fire monitor, dismantled my dressing room and I was back with the boys in the green room.

  Homosexuality bloomed like a poisonous flower, a deadly nightshade that came out after dark for secret assignations in the shadows of the bell tower or the trees beneath which lay yesterday’s monks in the monastic graveyard. Thus in my mind the image of sex was entwined with death. I discovered myself under the blanket of a cold night sky on a bed of skulls and shrivelled hands locked together in prayer clutching their rotting rosary beads. The religion was lashing out at me: I dreamt endlessly of the Last Judgement; I would be naked in the cemetery and the monks would rise up from their graves and drag me down to hell. Thanks to this expensive Catholic education my mind was being split down the middle like a watermelon. During the day I was one person and at night I became someone else. During the term I was one thing and during the holidays I was another. I wanted to be an actor. I was sure, but I had a sense of dread because I was clearly such a sinner. One only had to dip into Genesis to know that Yahweh could be a pretty vengeful queen. The monks would cheerfully tell us: “Some of you will be chosen by God. You will have a vocation. You cannot fight it. It falls upon you.” Was God scouting from his cloud? Would he zap me into a monk in a musty habit trudging off to matins and not a bubbly soubrette in some West End dressing room?

  Mary Stuart was my swan song. Encouraged by Mr. Davie I had decided to leave Ampleforth. I couldn’t wait to get out: I’d had enough of priests, and I’d had enough of upper-class blobs. Sadly, I was not a great Mary Stuart. I had no depth. Wadham, on the other hand, was sensational as the Virgin Queen. The stage was divided between his side, upon which we had built a spectacular Elizabethan window, and my side, which was Fotheringhay Castle with a spiral staircase and an ominous cardboard door through which I made my final exit.

  The play was a symbolic moment. Mary took holy communion one last time before going to her death. The play was my last communion with Ampleforth. I was going to die to the past if it was the last thing I did. I wanted to wipe away every clue that connected me to it. But there was a hitch: on the last night of the play—the big one—someone had forgotten to set the plumed quill on stage with which Wadham was to sign my death warrant. I was waiting on my side in my snood, my crucifix clutched to my breast, watching him go through the agonising decision of whether to kill me or not. Noel Two, playing Burleigh, had the death warrant in his hand and was pushing her/him to sign. Finally in a marvellously haughty moment Wadham grabbed the warrant from Noel Two, but there was no plume on the table. Wadham was momentarily nonplussed, but being a consummate professional said to Judd, a rather irritating boy who was playing a herald, “Boy, where is the royal plume?”

  Judd quivered. He had not been taught improvisation. Nobody moved. People gathered in the wings, aghast. This was the high point of the play. You could have heard a pin drop. And no plume, even though the whole plot hinged on it.

  “Go!” boomed the Virgin Queen. “Fetch me a plume!”

  Judd scuttled off and came back on stage with a blue Bic biro, which he gave to Wadham with a flourish. Wadham looked at the biro for a second and then burst out laughing. Then Noel Two laughed, and then everyone laughed. Laughing on stage, which is called corpsing, is sheer delight. You know you’ve got to stop, but you can’t. It gets worse and worse. Everyone avoids everyone else’s eyes and calm is eventually restored, but one glance at a fellow actor can set the whole thing off again. Well, we couldn’t stop. The audience of our parents politely pretended not to notice. Finally Wadham managed to pull himself together, wiped his eyes and signed the death warrant. I braced myself for my last communion and my final moment on the Ampleforth stage. I managed to stop myself giggling but as the priest put the host in my mouth, the image of Wadham signing my death warrant with the biro flashed upon me, and I spluttered with suppressed laughter. The host shot out of my mouth onto the floor.

  There was a huge collective gasp. None of us knew whether to pick it up or what, because, remember, in the Catholic Church the host is Jesus’ body and there are all sorts of rules concerning it, and one is that you are not allowed to touch it under any circumstances. Only your tongue can, which raised the question: would Mary lick it up off the ground at this point? Our audience was well versed in Catholic ritual, so they understood my dilemma and started to laugh. I was literally crying. My false eyelashes were halfway down my cheeks on a river of mascara and I’m afraid to say that Mary went to her death on the wave of a huge round of applause.

  It was 1975, the year Pol Pot christened zero in Cambodia and the grown-ups talked endlessly about Vietnam. But all that meant nothing to me then. I was just sixteen, three years into the five-year sentence of public school, and I couldn’t wait to get out. That weekend I had to persuade my parents to let me leave and pursue a career on the stage. I had expected enormous resistance from my father, but when I asked he just said yes. My mother, on the other hand, behaved like the chorus in a Greek tragedy: “If you leave school now your life will be a disaster.” She set about persuading my dad to renege on our deal. But once my father had made up his mind, there was no changing it. He knew that I had blind ambition. He had it himself. He knew the best thing to do was to test it, keep our fingers crossed and see what happened. My mum, on the other hand, knew virtually nothing about life and couldn’t see that what I really needed was to be set free. She was going to fight me all the
way.

  Goodbye means nothing when you are young and impatient. The future is there, just out of reach, the only thing that counts. Nothing and nobody means anything by comparison. I went to say goodbye to Mr. Davie. It was late afternoon on the last day of term. The setting sun poured through his open window and the gleeful shouts of jubilant marauding boys on the eve of freedom wafted up from the yard below. We chatted about this and that for a while and then fell silent. The kettle boiled. We silently made coffee.

  “One last chocolate biscuit?” said Mr. Davie. He hid it, but I knew he was sad. He had taken me out of my chrysalis and now I was ready to fly out of the window without even looking back.

  I hurriedly finished my coffee, got up and stood at the door. I could hardly contain myself. He sat back in his chair, a wise old Buddha with his hands smoothing his large stomach. Smiling, he gave a little wave: “Toodaloo.” He blew me a kiss and I flew out on it.

  CHAPTER 6

  London

  London crept onto my consciousness in a series of grainy snapshots. In 1962 my father left the army and we all dutifully piled into the Hillman to set off for Chelsea and the pursuit of his dreams. We didn’t last there very long—perhaps the Marquis of Bristol and his import-export business were too heady a wine for a man hitherto contained within the granite colonnades of the staff college at Sandhurst. Soon the memory of town was hidden with the rest of the world behind the trees at the end of our garden in Essex. But as time went on this small corner of London came back into my life in a game of hide and seek. Each time closer, more vivid. I would turn around and find myself there again.

  Between the river and the King’s Road, between Oakley Street and World’s End, lies one of London’s sweetest villages: St. Thomas More’s Chelsea. Hardly anything remains from Tudor times but two or three eighteenth-century streets still stand. Cheyne Row and Upper Cheyne Row flank an ugly Catholic church, The Holy Redeemer, and behind them lie a little warren of lanes. Nineteenth-century London squeezes in on every side, and now the noise of the Embankment is a constant anxious rumble, creating tiny vibrations in every cup, saucer and windowpane. But back then, Chelsea was a quiet bohemian backwater, misty in winter and lazy in the summer; and the King’s Road was a suburban high street of greengrocers and the odd art shop.

  The Holy Redeemer, with its mesmerising and aristocratic priest, Father De Zulueta (Zulu to his flock; he later drowned off the coast of Spain), was the thriving centre of a rather grand Catholic community in the sixties. I don’t know whether this was a contributing factor to my parents’ decision to live near by. More likely, it was because my mother’s second cousin Sylvia, a formidable family spinster, lived around the corner with her huge water-retaining legs. Either way, one of my first scratchy recollections is of being carried across the street for high mass on Sunday. Aunt Sylvia and my mother walked ahead, in black lace scarves and gloves. Nanny, Simon and I followed behind as our father locked up the house. If I shut my eyes, I can still hear the organ, the church bells, and see Zulu on the steps in his billowing cassock, receiving the faithful as if he were at a dreary cocktail party in the House of Lords.

  On weekday mornings my mother and I would drop my brother off at school on the corner of Glebe Place, while my father, whose job fell through the day we arrived in Chelsea, sat in his little study, afraid to leave the house. In those days a man without a job was not to be trusted.

  In the afternoons Nanny took us to a garden in some square and sat with the other nannies under the trees while we played on the grass. In my memory London was lit for an endless summer. Rows of prams stood in the shade. Couples sat on rugs and deckchairs. A jungle of lilacs, rhododendrons and towering plane trees were held at bay from the street by cranky uneven railings caked with layers of black paint. The noise of the odd taxi chugging round the square, the distant hum of the city and the gossip of nannies accompanied me as I chatted quietly to myself and picked bunches of daisies for Nanny.

  But our labrador, Susan, put an end to our London sojourn by her inability to relieve herself anywhere but inside the house. She would squat with a troubled look at the top of the stairs. It was her dirty protest and it drove my mother to distraction. But Susan wasn’t the only one unsuited to a life in town. My parents were country folk at heart and pretty soon the removal van returned and took our family back on the road. For the next five years London turned into a word. The reality—the experience—was almost entirely lost. It was the word that explained my father’s absence at work in the City, but as a small schoolboy I came across it again, as if for the first time, from a different perspective. It became an endless jumble of streets falling away through the back window of the taxis that took us boys from stations to dentists, and from dentists to other stations, and so back to the safety and calm of the country. As the school train pulled into Waterloo or King’s Cross, our mothers could be seen at the barrier as we craned out of the windows and waved frantically. The noise and smell of London, and an animal need to reclaim our mothers’ bodies, crashed over us and made our eyes tear as we leapt out before the train had stopped and ran down the platform towards them. On the journey back to school we sat in the cab with our tails between our legs, and the streets fell away in half the time, swallowing with them the bliss and comfort of the holidays.

  Either way, trunks and lunch-boxes were crammed in beside us and my mother presided like a peahen on a moving nest. She always wore gloves and a hat in London. Any contact with the street was always blurred by the protective mothbally swish of her mink coat and accompanied by the smart clip of her high heels.

  But when my brother was deemed old enough, we would no longer be met at the end of term, either by her, my father or by the mysterious Christopher Lucy who was sometimes sent to take us to my father’s office for lunch. We were to make our way from Waterloo to Liverpool Street on the tube alone. These were our first tentative steps into the wild and we both loved them.

  First we took “the drain” to Bank and then changed to the eastbound Central Line. Our hearts were in our mouths. My brother pretended his was not but I knew by the intense way he studied the signs that it was. I still couldn’t read much but I stood beside him in blatant imitation, acting as if I could. It was another turning point. As we climbed onto the escalator a hot dusty metallic wind blew up in our faces, the sexy breath of a city coming in for a first deep kiss. Down on the platform I held on tight to my brother’s hand. The ominous black hole of the tunnel seemed to beckon. We flinched against the walls at the rumble of the oncoming train and then we gingerly edged our way into a packed carriage. For a moment I thought I saw Christopher Lucy watching us from behind a Financial Times, but when I looked again he was gone.

  The lights flickered and the carriage jolted into the tunnel. Bodies pressed against each other in frozen embraces. Businessmen and secretaries lost in their thoughts as the lights leapt back on. The claustrophobia was delightful and terrifying at the same time. It made me want to scream. Hands hung by my face: big hairy ones squeezed into gold wedding bands; delicate worn ones with cracked nail varnish on the ends of fingers bruised from typing. All clutching at something: a briefcase, a handbag, the Evening News or a pack of Players turning in restless fingers.

  At Bank we followed the swarm of bodies through a maze of tunnels and escalators towards the Central Line. My brother was our grandfather and we were on the Wayfarer. He held on to my hand as if it were a tiller and he ploughed intently through the sea of commuters, grim and vigilant. For the first, but certainly not the last, time in my life I had the feeling of being followed: a strange sensation of heat on the nape of my neck. I turned around but everyone was following. This was another London, coming towards me and not falling away . . .

  Finally as we arrived in the vast grimy space of Liverpool Street station with its sing-song directions to the fleshpot destinations of Clacton, Frinton-on-Sea and Colchester, my father popped out from behind a wall like the White Rabbit and Christopher Lucy appeared from the r
ear. My brother and I let out huge moans of frustration, tinged with relief. The two men shook hands as if they were at the end of a military manoeuvre.

  “Good work, Lucy,” said my dad.

  “Thanks, Major,” said Christopher, and he disappeared into the crowd.

  During my second year at Ampleforth I made friends with a boy called Dominic Bohne. “Boney” lived in Fulham with his mother who was a painter; she had a glorious mane of jungle-red hair and dressed in long cheesecloth skirts. Her boyfriend was one of Boney’s elder brother’s best friends from school. It was a scandal. They all lived together in a small flat, Boney, his mother, his sister, his brother, and the brother’s best friend. It seemed unbelievably sexy to me, but obviously my mother took a very dim view of it all and during the holidays always tried her best to sabotage my trips to Fulham. Boney and I never went to the Great American Disaster or Harrods like other public schoolboys of our age. We hung out instead in Biba and Kensington Market, and bought patchouli oil and joss sticks, and tried on high-heeled boots and embroidered knee-length Indian shirts. We listened to Mahler and Sister Morphine. I spent all my pocket money.

  Boney had long hair that was parted in the middle. A career of imitation began and I grew mine. On one of my trips to Fulham, Boney’s sister dared me to feel inside her knickers. The three of us were sharing a room together. My shaking hand went up her thigh only to come across a piece of string coming out from inside her . . .

  “What on earth—” I said, visibly recoiling. I was still terrifically proper. Boney and his sister broke out into peals of laughter, and then he pulled up her nightie in a practical, matter-of-fact way that shocked and impressed me.