Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Read online

  “Well, you want to have a look, don’t you?” said Boney.

  “Oh, gosh,” I said, as we all studied the white string. “It looks like the fuse to a bomb.”

  “You can pull it out if you want,” said Boney nonchalantly.

  “I don’t think I will, actually,” I replied, somewhat stiffly (but not where it counted).

  Boney’s sister and me began a sweet cuddly affair, but it was Boney I really loved, though not in a sexual way; he was a haughty beauty and I was his acolyte. I felt like a different person in the gloriously anarchic world of their flat in Fulham. Sometimes, at night, I would watch Boney and his sister while they slept, the orange light from the street cutting across their pretty faces, casting shadows under their lashes. They were indifferent to the creaks and groans in the adjoining bedroom. They seemed to accept everything. Nothing was suppressed. I tried to imagine a similar episode taking place in my family: lying awake in a next-door room as my mother was bonked by Anthony Brew, my brother’s best friend. What would happen? My brother would be found hanging from a rafter in the stables and I would have left home with our forty-five-year-old groom whom I quite fancied (and who, I was sure, fancied me). Our family’s life ruined for ever: care for me, prison for Mummy and a life of shame for the major. And then, laughing out loud in the middle of the night, I suddenly realised that I wasn’t just in Fulham; I had gone to a place where my family couldn’t get me back.

  I loved Boney, his family and London. I always rushed to their flat from Fulham Broadway station, across the humpback bridge into that maze of endless identical streets, in a kind of ecstasy. The triangular blue skyscraper of Lillie Road presided over the low chimneypots; for me, it was the Statue of Liberty. Later, when Boney and I ventured out together, and the street was already cold and dark, the skyscraper caught and held the light, in a time zone of its own, splashed orange by the setting sun under a huge pink and white sky. It didn’t matter where we were going—the corner shop, Chinatown, the World’s End: it was all flashing lights and freedom.

  Returning once from a visit to the Bohnes, breezing down the platform of Witham station towards my perplexed mama, wearing what my father called “that bloody sari,” I embarked upon that process of isolation that precedes a full-blown teenage revolution. Family life was suddenly claustrophobic; it seemed as though time were running out. I had one thought in my head: I had to leave Ampleforth. London was a closing door, and I had to bolt through it before it slammed. With a mad click in my head I set off at a frenetic pace.

  And so I finally moved to the metropolis in September 1975. My mother had very carefully selected my digs, in the home of Mr. and Mrs. White of Cathcart Road in Earl’s Court, just behind the Fulham Road. Friends of friends with children of my age. For £16 a week I was lodged and fed. My mother had craftily contrived that weekends would be extra, but I had no intention of going home. I had £6 a week and a bicycle. My little room was on the top floor and pretty soon it was swathed in Indian finery from Barkers bargain basement (Biba had closed down) and drenched in a smog of sandalwood joss sticks.

  Mrs. White was a great cook and often entertained. Not being a member of the family, I would have my supper in the little television room between the kitchen and the dining room next door. It was very cosy: the polite burble and clink of the party through the wall; The Two Ronnies on the telly; the White family dogs Samson and Biscuit at my feet, waiting for leftovers and a late-night walk.

  I was enrolled in a rather louche sixth-form college called Mander Portman & Woodward, situated near by in Rosary Gardens. No one ever met Mr. Mander, but Rodney Portman and Peter Woodward were more like stockbrokers than headmasters, and lounged about their office in City suits and brightly coloured braces. They were on to a good thing: they’d rented a large ugly house and found a lot of rather amusing characters as teachers (guns for hire, with their own lives and ambitions beyond teaching). Once they had given the place a coat of white paint, covered the floors with a good solid hair-cord carpet, and got some tables and chairs—bingo: they had a school.

  I studied History of Art and English and, as far as I could see, so did almost everyone else. They were the easiest subjects: three lessons per course per week, and the rest of your time was your own. My new schoolmates were the unruly rich. Some had been asked to leave their public schools, some had left of their own accord, and some seemed hardly to have been educated at all.

  I enjoyed every moment of it and grew nearly a foot in a year, as if liberated from the constraints of boarding school. I was the only boy in a class of seven girls. I looked forward to tutorials, much as one anticipates a really good party.

  Flora McEwan was a tall, beautiful sixteen-year-old, with rosy cheeks and an infectious laugh that showed her teeth and gums to great effect. She had come straight from a convent in Ascot and lived with her family in the street parallel to mine. She jogged beside me as I rode my bike on the way to school. She looked undeniably eccentric, galloping through The Boltons across the Brompton Road, but I looked pretty kooky too in my grandfather’s knee-length naval cape, striped wool football socks under rolled-up trousers, and a long purple Dr. Who scarf.

  Emma de Vere Hunt, was straight out of the pages of St. Trinian’s. She was wafer thin, with long blonde hair and a gash of red lips on a birdlike face. She wore the tightest jeans imaginable, a tailored tweed jacket and perched on scarlet stiletto boots that matched the pack of Marlboros clutched in her long red fingernails. Much more sophisticated than the rest of us, she sauntered round the school as though she owned the place. For one thing, she had been at Holland Park Comprehensive where you might not have got A levels in class but you could certainly get Class A at any level.

  Her boyfriend was one of the misunderstood rebel heroes of our day, a man whose very name made upper-class mothers shudder: the beautiful and damned Charlie Tennant. He was the son of Colin Tennant who owned the island of Mustique, and his mother had been my mother’s bridesmaid. He would wait for Emma after school in dirty black drainpipe trousers and a leather jacket. He had golden-blond hair and was very good looking; but he had a stoop before he should have done and at twenty-one he had been through it all. He was saddled with terrible obsessive-compulsive disorders at a time before they had really been medically identified. Sometimes he would make ten attempts to jump over some unseen boundary as he tried to enter a room, or turn round and round in a kind of agony before getting into a taxi, waiting for some invisible green light to go off in his head. It was sad to watch as there was nothing you could do to help. Drugs eased things for Charlie, though not much. The matrons of Belgravia might shrink at the mention of his name, but actually he was extremely shy and well mannered, almost painstakingly courteous. We all worshipped him, of course.

  Charlie Nicholl taught us English Literature. He must have been twenty-five years old, a better-looking Bob Dylan. The girls changed completely as soon as he walked into the room. Suddenly no one laughed at my jokes. Les girls studied their Chaucer with a deadly attention. In-depth discussions on “text” continued well after the end of class. They all fancied the pants off him, and he them. I might as well have been dead.

  I tried to explain that Charlie was probably a communist and that, come the revolution, he would be sticking their pubic hair to their faces as beards on their way to the guillotine.

  “Only after fucking us, hopefully,” giggled Emma de Vere Hunt through a haze of smoke. “Anyway, I don’t have any pubic hair.” She winked knowingly at the others.

  “Well, you will by the time the revolution comes!” I replied.

  “Not while there’s a razor around, sweetie,” she retorted and all the girls cracked up. I was out of my depth.

  Years later I went to meet a writer whose book I wanted to option for a movie. I was staying in Rome at the time and he was living in Livorno. We arranged to meet halfway at Harry’s Bar in Florence. My train arrived late, so I ran past the Ponte Vecchio like a crazy ostrich, and was sweaty and breathless
as I walked into the restaurant. Who should be sitting at a corner table but Charlie Nicholl. Older, fuller, more Dylan than ever, the author of one of the best books I had ever read.

  “Always late, Rupert!” he said with a déjà-vu half-smile and slightly raised eyebrows. Over lunch we talked about his book but a host of forgotten memories made it hard for me to listen. For a start, I remembered his last school report. He read my mind.

  “I’m sorry if that last report seemed rather harsh,” he said finally over coffee.

  “That’s all right, Charlie. I expect I deserved it.”

  “Well, you were a bit of a . . .”

  “Twat?”

  Unfortunately I was never able to get Charlie’s book set up, although it is one of the most thrilling, funny and touching books I have ever read.

  Meanwhile, that autumn of 1975 the nights got longer, the temperature dropped and the city braced itself. The walk to school was blustery and grey, and there was a smell of burning leaves in the squares and parks. I was living in London but it still felt like a closing door. At the end of a day at MPW, I lingered in the hallway as everyone wrapped scarves and coats around themselves and exchanged details of the night’s promise before jumping into the deep cold stream, the hurrying mass, to be swept away by the tube or the bus to their real lives, to which this one was only an inconvenient sideshow. The school would suddenly be quiet. Finally, always the last to leave, I would cycle home to eat my dinner in front of the telly as the Whites entertained next door.

  I had plenty to do. My mother made sure of that. I learnt the piano on Thursdays and went to practise at the home of a family friend on Tuesdays. Greta was a Maltese Rita Hayworth and I adored her. She had known my parents when they were engaged in Valetta back in 1952. She was extremely wealthy and lived in one of the last unconverted Mayfair mansions in Hill Street, off Berkeley Square. I would sit for hours in the vast ballroom on the first floor, where the piano was, before going down for lunch with her and her little girl Felicia at the huge round table in the dining room below. In the corner of the ballroom was an old gramophone with piles of seventy-eights beside it. I would put on Horowitz Meets Rachmaninov and play inaccurately along. Horowitz’s piano and Greta’s were in a semitone of disagreement. If I think of myself that first winter, a lonely sixteen-year-old just bicycling around London, or lying awake at night, or being the clown at school, or sitting round the table with Greta and Felicia swapping news, it is to the ghostly discordant echo of Horowitz and me taking the slow movement together of the Second Piano Concerto. The crackly string section would soar up towards the ceiling of the huge old room, the three chandeliers would shake as an underground train passed deep below the house, and I would be lost in an instant gratification that no amount of serious practice could ever achieve.

  But life was about to begin. Mrs. White would look into the telly room as her dinner party clambered down the stairs from the drawing room. She always wore long satin skirts that stopped abruptly at her shapely ankles and her sensibly heeled court shoes with bows. A ruffled white silk shirt was tucked into the skirt, clusters were attached to her ears, and her hairstyle, which the Princess of Wales was about to make famous, completed the classic look of a handsome upper-middle-class English mother in the full (toilet) flush of a fallen Empire.

  “Everything all right?” she would say as Mr. White went shuffling past in his dinner jacket, a couple of bottles of claret under each arm. Samson and Biscuit would wag their tails and look at me. We had a secret bond. When the grown-ups had settled down for dinner, the three of us would embark upon the crispy night. Samson was a big black half-breed with a white stripe on his chest; Biscuit, a slightly older golden retriever, bore more than a passing resemblance to her mistress and certainly took her part as we began to explore further and further into the night-time city. One too many unfamiliar corners away from Cathcart Road, she would stop in her tracks and look at Samson and me. Her raised ears, a patiently rotating tail and an unwavering stare got no sympathy from us; I would look to Samson and he would look to me. We understood each other perfectly. “Drag the bitch, if she won’t come,” said Samson and he would canter off down the uncharted street.

  One night before Christmas, we were walking past a converted greengrocers on the Fulham Road called Wolseys Wine Bar, and there, in the big front window, sat Ralph Kerr at a table with a guttering candle stuck in a bottle. He had been in the year above me at Ampleforth and was in his second year at MPW, having failed his A levels on his first attempt and was spending another year to take them again. He was legendary in the school for having been found by Rodney Portman in the pub one day nursing a huge glass of red wine (his tipple of choice).

  “Don’t you do Maths?” wondered Rodney vaguely, as he settled down with a G and T and the paper.

  “Yes,” replied Ralph.

  “Because I rather thought the Maths A level was going on kind of now,” said Rodney.

  “Yes,” replied Ralph again.

  “Well, shouldn’t you be there?”

  “I suppose I should, really,” said Ralph, philosophically.

  He was quite small, with curly brown hair and the soft eyes of one of those girls who saw Our Lady on a tree in Portugal but then wished they hadn’t. He wore an enormous black overcoat and always carried an umbrella. Now he was sitting in the window of Wolseys like a character from Toulouse-Lautrec. In the half-lit background behind the bar stood a man with an afro in a silver-sequinned dress. He was drying glasses. The place was empty: just tables, chairs, candles, Ralph and the man in the dress. A lopsided Christmas tree flashed its lights half-heartedly. Ralph saw me walking by and raised his glass in a grim silent toast; I took the dogs home and then went back to the bar.

  For the next two years I spent nearly every evening at Wolseys in the company of Ralph. The barman in the sequin dress turned out to be a Scotsman called Alastair who lived in Edna O’Brien’s basement round the corner in Carlyle Square. He came from Burnt Island and was the first all-out freaky queen I had ever met. Sometimes, if he was really drunk, he would take his dentures out and lurch upon us at our table, his crumpled lips ranting a Glaswegian slang I was only to understand later, but the meaning of which was already fairly clear. (Some things went down smoother without teeth.) Alastair could be quite scary on these occasions but Ralph never lost his cool as we were confronted by this toothless drag gargoyle in the candlelight. He would simply do as he always did in moments of uncertainty: pour another glass of wine. This time for Alastair, whose name he loved to say backwards.

  “Riatsala, a glass of wine perhaps?” he would say politely as if Alastair had just said “What a lovely herbaceous border” instead of “See ye’se, see mae, see mae maith, ahl gie’yese u gummie.” (It was to be five years before I heard the word “gummie” again, and the person proposing it was down on his knees in a Glasgow alley.)

  But Alastair would always remember himself, be temporarily diverted and back off. Under his supervision Ralph and I became a regular pair of sixteen-year-old drunks without really knowing it. I had never before or since been a regular in a bar, but I must say it brings with it a warm community connection and a lovely befuddled distortion to one’s life. It stands there in the mind’s eye—a kingdom above the clouds, Shangri-La glimmering through the thick forest of your day, waiting to take you in. There is just enough easy camaraderie and just enough sense of space for the seasoned regular to say as much or as little as he likes.

  That winter we could both inevitably be found after dinner in the window of Wolseys watching the world go by. Ralph was the first person I met who simply liked to sit and look. He was endlessly diverted by the comings and goings in the street; I learnt from him how to sit still. Sometimes we would go on to Up All Night, a late-night burger joint, or to Françoise’s, a nightclub in the King’s Road. Everything was paid for on the never-never of our flapping chequebooks. Ralph’s was a huge one, music-hall size, big enough to see from the upper circle of a theatre. We bo
th got heavily into debt.

  For all that, I gained a sense of security from Ralph and his family. He lived with his sister, Bizza, in Upper Cheyne Row opposite the Holy Redeemer. Their parents lived in a little alley further down the street, and they were all looked after by Amelia, a grumpy old Portuguese lady in slippers. I claimed them as my own, proving myself, yet again, to be one of those birds that jump into a neighbour’s nest when nobody is looking. They must have known I was being incredibly pushy, but they never made me feel bad. They probably thought that I needed looking after, and in a sense I did. I loved being with them. Bizza would play Joni Mitchell songs on her guitar, and I would stay for dinner without being asked. The parents would arrive from over the road and we all sat in the dining room as the mysterious corner cupboard shook and there was a rumbling from below as Amelia’s soup rose through the floor like a magic trick, steaming and victorious (having been suitably thinned to accommodate the extra guest).

  Some nights at Wolseys, Alastair’s flatmate would arrive. He was called Danny and was dressed from head to toe in shiny black leather, his gaunt unshaven face hidden in the shadow of a peaked leather cap. He wore high boots with spurs, and was a strange and troubling sight. The leather squeaked as he sat down at a table and the chains that adorned him clanked like Marley’s ghost. I was electrified, but took good care not to show Ralph or Alastair. One night in spring I was walking Samson (Biscuit was safely in the country, otherwise she might have dragged me home) and I saw Danny in the distance, turning up Redcliffe Gardens towards Earl’s Court. His sharp black silhouette was an urban panther stalking through the dancing lights and shadows of the trees. He stopped gracefully to light a cigarette. I was mesmerised. Without knowing it, I had stumbled into the essential hungry gay image of those times. An empty street, a lone predator, and something about to happen. Samson and I followed at a safe distance. After about five minutes Danny went through the side door of a pub. When we caught up I stood on my toes to look through the half-frosted window inside while Samson had a long piss against the wall. The room was packed: in the smoky haze stood construction workers, cowboys, skinheads and other clanking, squeaking leather-clad men. One was dressed entirely in bin liners. (Nicky Haslam, as it happened.)