by Monica Ali
Well, if he wanted to hear about legends, Grabowski could tell him a few.
“You heard of Jacques Lange? No, never mind. He wanted to get a shot of Princess Caroline of Monaco taking her exams when she was a schoolgirl. He got into the classroom somehow. And he had a Minox hidden in his packet of cigarettes. Creativity,” said Grabowski. “There were no PalmPilots in those days.”
“That’s awesome,” said the kid. “I never even heard of a Minox.”
“You ever hear the story about how I got friendly with your boss?” said Grabber. He sounded like an old-timer, and he knew it, but he guessed that’s what he was. “I’ll tell you. It was Necker Island. You know where that is? British Virgin Islands. Right. It’s privately owned so all the press were staying on other islands nearby and going out on boats to try and get shots. Yes, it was her. Bang on, you’re smarter than you look. She did a ten-minute photo call and then we were all supposed to leave her alone. There was an American television and photo crew. They were the flashiest guys in town and they hired a submarine for sixteen thousand dollars a day. Thought they’d got us all beat. When they got down by Necker they told the captain to put up the periscope. The captain just looks at them. There’s no periscope. It’s a submarine for watching fish, not an effing U-boat. Me and Tinny, we laughed ourselves stupid in the bar over that.”
“Tinny wants you in LA, man. Said if it turned out you just had your head up your ass, try and bring you back with me.”
“I’ll tell Tinny you tried your best.”
“So what you really doing here?” said the kid.
He told the same story he’d given Mrs. Jackson. He was working on a Robert Frank–type project—exhibition and book, small towns in the United States and England. Photographs and text by John Grabowski. She was going to clock all the camera equipment at some point, so he’d found a way to work it into his résumé.
The kid had never heard of Robert Frank. Probably he had never heard of Brassaï or Cartier-Bresson. There was no room for art in this business anymore. Grabber had sold plenty of out-of-focus shots in his time and was glad of the money, but he’d come up the old way. He could compose a frame.
Grabowski sighed and ordered another round. “If you take people’s photos without their permission, what does that make you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Paparazzi.”
“Maybe,” said Grabowski, “but remember, the people in those Robert Frank pictures didn’t agree to be in them either. They didn’t sign model release forms.”
The kid dabbled in the bowl of peanuts and rained a few into his mouth. “People are snotty sometimes,” he said, chewing, “when I tell them what I do. Then I say, hey, I got a photo of that actress making out on a beach, and they say, oh, let’s have a look.”
“Of course they do,” said Grabowski. “By the way, what did you say to my landlady? Did you say you were looking for me?”
The kid narrowed his eyes, offended, apparently. “Wasn’t born yesterday. I didn’t go in. I don’t go in unless I know what I’m going to find and I’m ready for it.”
“Good lad,” said Grabowski. It was after five o’clock and the bar was starting to fill up with construction workers. You could see where the hard hats had left a red band across their foreheads.
He had to work out what to do about this Lydia. Was there a move he could make without scaring her off ? That’s if he wasn’t entirely deluded. At least the photographer who’d stalked Jackie Onassis hadn’t been obsessed with a ghost. But there was no way Grabowski could leave. If he didn’t pursue it, he would always be haunted by the opportunity he might have missed. A pair of blue eyes, a ring of green around the right pupil, a familiar walk, a laugh that set him tingling. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to stop him walking away.
“I’m not intrusive,” said Hud. His cow tongue explored his bottom lip. “I’m not one of those guys. I never rammed anyone with my car. I never broke into anyone’s house. I’m just doing my job. Live and let live, you know.”
It was evening and Grabowski didn’t know what to do with himself. He ran his fingers around the rosary, sitting on the edge of the bed. He paced the room. What he needed was a way of deciding. Was it worth pursuing or was it too ridiculous to contemplate?
It was possible. Anything was possible. But how could he prove it? What could he do to find out? If he was right and he started asking too many questions around town she’d take off as soon as she heard.
Patience, he told himself. Think of it as a stakeout. It may be the longest of your life, but if it pays off . . . He almost felt sick with excitement. Maybe Cathy would have him back.
He was running ahead of himself now.
He couldn’t ask questions around town just yet, but he could start asking questions back home. He made a call.
“Nick,” he said, “I know it’s late but I’ve got something I need you to do.”
Nick worked in police records and, unofficially, for Grabowski. He was good at turning things up, knew where to look and how. Of all the people that Grabowski had on his “payroll”—doormen, waiters, nannies, PRs, drivers—Nick was the most useful.
“It’ll cost you,” said Nick, his standard response. He sounded wide awake. Although Grabowski had, over the years, called him at all hours of day and night he had never once caught him asleep.
“Lydia Snaresbrook,” he said. “Mid-to-late forties. Find out anything you can.”
“That’s it?” said Nick. “Just a name, no DOB, nothing else? What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. It’s a pretty unusual name. Find out how many people we could be talking about first.”
“So I check out the General Registry Office, all the Lydia Snaresbrooks born between, say, 1955 and 1965. What do I do then?”
“I don’t know,” said Grabowski. “Just call me as soon as it’s done.”
Chapter Fifteen
20 February 1998
A good mother, yes, she was. She is. (More and more I find myself tempted to write of her in the past tense.) As strange as it sounds, it was one of her reasons for leaving. It bears its peculiarities and complications.
She believed she would be “bumped off,” as she quaintly put it, thus depriving her sons of a mother in any case. That wouldn’t have been sufficient. She’d have been willing to live with that risk if that had been best for them.
But she had a growing conviction that her presence was destabilizing to her boys, had convinced herself that the circus that surrounded her would be increasingly detrimental to them. And, of course, she was determined that once the dust had settled, she would be able to see them again.
21 February 1998
I lay down for a few minutes yesterday thinking I would come back to the diary, but I fell asleep and when I woke up I remained in something of a daze until it was time for bed.
I was still there when Gloria came this morning and she rang on the bell three times (she’d forgotten her key) because I didn’t want to answer until I had my dressing gown, which proved a little difficult to locate, and a struggle to get on.
“Right, we’ve got my visits planned for next week,” she said, after we’d completed our rituals. “Let’s get the schedule organized for the week after.”
I mumbled something about possibly not being here.
“Course you will,” she said.
She thought I was predicting my own demise.
I told her that I was planning to go to Washington to complete my researches in the Library of Congress.
“Well, that’s lovely,” she said, as if I had announced a trip to Disneyland. Then she put down her pen and placed her hands on the planner that was still open on her lap. Her hands were almost as large and square as the pages. “What does Dr. Patel have to say about that?”
My vagueness on the point made her purse her lips. Finally she said, “You’ve got someone traveling with you, I take it.”
I said it wouldn’t be wise to go on my own, thus avoiding t
he direct lie.
“Your sister . . . Patricia, is it?”
She’s on the phone to me every day, I said. And call she does. I’ve been putting her off coming down again but I may have to give way before I fly off to the States.
22 February 1998
Have I examined my own motivations? Perhaps not sufficiently. Compared to living out my final days entombed in libraries, was it not thrilling to execute a covert operation, my first since I was seconded from the FCO to the secret intelligence services back in my youth?
I adopted a modest disguise (the old standby of beard and glasses) of my own in Recife, when I was waiting for the assignation. There were paparazzi in town and it was just about possible that one of them would recognize me as her old private secretary.
When I hired the rowing boat, I came face-to-face with one at the jetty. If I hadn’t already been covered in sweat (the weather was baking) I would have perspired profusely at that point. I knew him and therefore he knew me, that was my first instinct, like the inverse of the small child who is convinced that he has disappeared from view simply by covering his face.
My training, thank goodness, kicked in. I knew not to walk away without ascertaining whether there was any possibility he had seen through the disguise.
I walked up to him and gestured at his camera equipment. “There’s a pelican feeding frenzy the next cove round. Thought you might be interested—you a wildlife photographer?”
He looked me up and down briefly, my Hawaiian shirt and bald knees, a bearded and bespectacled ornithologist, of no interest to mankind. “No, mate,” he said. “Stick around. You’ll see a different kind of feeding frenzy soon.”
I told Lydia about this little adventure. She’s quick on the uptake. The way she held that magazine up to her plastic surgeon in Rio was quite brilliant. I think she will be okay.
23 February 1998
The book recedes. I read through the first three chapters yesterday and winced at all those dusty phrases.
I do not care. My legacy is not one that resides between the covers of a book. She resides in this world. I can be satisfied with that. I did right. I think I did.
What will she do? We discussed possible lines of employment. She said, “I’m not qualified for anything.”
I disagreed strenuously, and asked her to think of all the experience she’s had, all the skills that she’s gained, all of her natural talents. It is a conversation we will continue. Financially speaking (I worked out budgets and she actually paid attention as I talked them through) she won’t need to work for a long time, but I think work will be helpful in many other ways. Without it she may fall into festering, develop new obsessions, or simply die of boredom.
The boys, I was going to write about them, and found myself waylaid. They were the reason in the end.
Two weeks until I see her. I already have my bag packed.
24 February 1998
The day has passed while I looked out of the window in reverie. I was turning over in my mind times long gone. Scenes from my childhood, from the classroom, walking on the broads, Christmas gatherings, the blue-tiled walls of the Ankara consulate, a meal of pâté and bread in Provence with Gail on our first holiday. Funny what stays with you. It doesn’t add up to anything, it doesn’t have any shape, and yet it is a life.
The boys. How could any mother leave her children? And she is as devoted as they come. No, it wasn’t for the cameras, although at times she played off “the other side” (her husband) by public displays of fun-loving, affectionate mothering. In comparison he looked so stiff.
She was terrified of losing them. She said to me, “Don’t you understand what’s happening, Lawrence, they’re trying to cut me out.” The first Christmas after the formal separation she had to leave the boys at Sandringham. She spent Christmas Day alone at KP. “They let me know when I can have the boys and when I can’t. It’s as if they’re not my children, they’re properties of the crown.” And, in a way, she was right. She went on. “First they took my title, now they’re trying to take the boys.”
25 February 1998
The problem was certain to grow. The boys’ loyalties were divided. I believe they felt guilty about how much they loved being with their father and grandmother at Balmoral (a place that their mother hated), away from the glamour and glitz and clicking cameras. They adored her, but they had already begun to grow uncomfortable about her behavior, especially the eldest.
When she drove up to his school to warn him that the television interview that she’d secretly recorded (what a sensation that caused!) was about to be aired, he gave her the cold shoulder. She called me and said, “He looked absolute daggers. I thought, my own son hates me. I can’t cope with this.” An hour later she called back and they’d been talking on the phone, everything was sunny again. But the episodes piled up like a multiple-car crash. There’d been “The Book of Revelations,” as she referred to it, that infernal biography with which she had covertly cooperated. There’d been scandal after scandal, affairs with married men, phone pest allegations, screaming at photographers, wacky therapies, more unsuitable men, briefings to tabloid reporters—denied and then exposed, rumors and photographs and allegations plastered all over the world. He was old enough (and his brother was getting that way) that it embarrassed him to the roots of his molars.
She wanted to stop but she couldn’t. The cycle was speeding up. And she feared that it was harming him in a way she couldn’t prevent. Ashamed, as well, that she was slipping into an unhealthy dependency on her sons, her eldest in particular, whom she had started to call five or six times a day.
It was an echo of the desperation to possess them completely with which she drove her lovers away. They would receive, at her own conservative estimation, around twenty calls from her in any twenty-four-hour period. There was no proof of love that was proof enough in her mind.
The time when I came closest to falling out with her was when I suggested that she stop visiting her son at Eton so frequently. It was stifling to have your mother turn up three or four times in one week, and the other boys would delight in teasing him. She was furious.
She threw me out of KP by getting up and ringing for the butler. “Dr. Standing would like to be shown out,” she said. That was vicious. Calling me Dr. Standing, and suggesting I didn’t come and go by myself all the time at the palace, or would no longer be doing so.
Two hours later she was on the phone and sobbing. She said, “You’re right. But I can’t help myself. Poor child. What a dud mother he’s got.” She was desperate not to suffocate him, not to burden him with divided loyalties or her woes. But her patterns of behavior—she knew it—were so compulsive that it seemed like an impossibility.
My heart bled. Dr. Patel is most welcome to cut up my brain after I am gone and examine the cells beneath a microscope. But if she is looking for this particular part of my personal history, she will have the wrong organ under examination.
A dud mother. I don’t think so. For them she would have done anything that lay within her capabilities, and to leave them, I firmly believe, was her greatest act of selflessness.
Was it misguided? That has yet to be seen, and I won’t be around to find out. For my part, I cannot pretend that is what compelled me to help her. Her reasons were not my own. I feared for her sanity. I postulated that her increasingly spectacular recklessness would lead to her early and spectacular demise. And I wanted to be close to her. Even the most loyal of courtiers fails to leave his own interests entirely aside.
I have never agreed with her that there might be a time, in the future, when she might make contact with them. She has all sorts of unworkable schemes for doing so. It certainly cannot be done without risking her secrecy, and it would inflict terrible psychological damage on them, her resurrection much more so than her death. I have always tried to make that clear to her. I do have faith that it is a conclusion she will reach in time. Deep down, I suspect, she already knows it, but in order to leave them it
was necessary for her to convince herself otherwise.
26 February 1998
Not long now. Ten days. I think I will need a driver. I will take one part of the way and then a taxi or two. I am a careful man.
27 February 1998
The excitement has made my left eye blind. That’s the way I like to think of it. Quite suddenly overnight. The vision has been blurry from time to time, but this morning I tested it, as has become my habit, and it doesn’t see anything. No choice but to use a driver from Washington now.
28 February 1998
Patricia arrives later today. She’s bringing a casserole down with her on the train. Lamb and flageolet beans. The thought of it rouses my appetite.
Lydia, oh, Lydia. I hope my appearance will not distress her. I am not an appealing sight. My left, blind, eye wanders around in its socket—it makes me look a little mad.
She has frequently been viewed as such. “The firm” was strictly of that opinion, except when they had her down as a manipulative little schemer who knew exactly what she was doing. The public had other ideas. What seemed like madness to her in-laws was viewed as courage by the public, more often than not.
It was far from a simple relationship, though. Photographs of her in distress sold newspapers. As did salacious gossip and columns. Then—“Why does everyone hate me?” she would say.
Her decision to leave has been her most selfless act. But she is a complex woman. Perhaps it was also her greatest act of narcissism. No more swings in the barometer of public approval. She has ascended the firmament now, her worth beyond measuring; beyond dispute she is loved.
1 March 1998
Patricia has gone to bed. The casserole has taken up residence in the freezer—my appetite lagging somewhat behind expectation. I have forced down a shake, but my stomach is not keen to hold on to it and I think it may come up again.