An Audience with an Elephant

by Byron Rogers

  How did it end? My wife was asking me that the other night, and all I could tell her was that, just as in Hollywood, the phone stopped ringing. I was not sad because the Engineers’ Speech in Switzerland represented a final marker of lunacy for a man who had never met an engineer in his life. But there was no final letter of thanks, not even a row, nothing at all after five years. My own idea, for what it is worth (God, I am even beginning to sound like the Prince in the speeches he was then making) was that an article may have contributed. It had become known that I was doing this work so editors had been keen on getting me to write about royalty. I turned them down but the idea of writing an open letter to the new Princess of Wales in the Telegraph Magazine intrigued me.

  ‘People will talk about you endlessly, about your appearance and your imagined relationships with other members of the Family. In some households you will be like a relative who never calls. . .’. It was kindly meant, and Colborne told me it had been much appreciated. But then I wrote for the Express an open letter to the infant Prince William (and probably would have gone on writing open letters to all of them, down to the corgis), and halfway through this quoted two paragraphs from a ninth-century biography of the Emperor Charlemagne. The writer is describing the lot of the earlier Merovingian kings of France.

  ‘Nothing was left the king except the name of king . . . He sat on his throne and played at government, gave audience to envoys, and dismissed them with answers he had been schooled, or rather commanded, to give. He had nothing to call his own except one estate . . . and a not very numerous retinue. He travelled when occasions required it in a wagon drawn by oxen . . . in this guise he came to the palace or to the annual assembly of his people. The mayor of the palace controlled the administration and decided all issues of policy at home and abroad. . .’. The parallels were remarkable and I helpfully spelt them out at length, even to the State Coach.

  ‘You must have been completely off your rocker if you thought you could go on writing speeches for royalty after that,’ said my wife.

  The last time I saw the Prince was at Highgrove, where he seemed happy. We talked about the DIY he was doing, and Nitromors, and a piece of celebrated modern furniture which he had quietly relegated to his detective’s room. I also met an old Irishman he was fond of, a character Colborne told me would make a funny profile. It is sad to read about what has happened after. The prince gave me a piece of cake to take away, and I never saw him again.

  Nude

  SEE HER NOW as I shall always see her, standing in that long Georgian window in the morning sun. She is not looking out. In fifteen years, I saw her look out only once and then, like the Lady of Shalott, she was startled into doing so. The rest of the time she just stood there, drying her hair. She is, of course, nude. She was always nude.

  It was the athlete’s body of a natural blonde, long of thigh and neat of bust. And at 8.00 every morning it stood there, across gardens the length of two cricket pitches which separated us. My flat in Islington faced west, hers east, and I shall never forget her. You could say we grew old together.

  I moved to the country but kept the flat on, and however long I had been away I would always look out of the window on my return and there she would be at 8.00 a.m., wrapping a towel round her head and flicking the ends over one broad shoulder. It became one of the certainties of my life.

  She must have been about 25 when I first saw her, which would have made her 40 towards the end, but the years were not unkind, though this might have been a tribute to the attention she lavished on her body. As someone said of Robespierre, he was busy every day of his life. And she was busy. That daily half-hour in the window was like landscape gardening to her, with her body the landscape. It couldn’t have been exhibitionism; she was too engrossed in what she was about. She was there at her most vulnerable, before the make-up went on, and make-up meant a lot to her. No astronaut prepared himself for space the way she did for the office.

  When I saw her first it was a June morning and the sun was full on her; I thought it the most erotic sight I had ever seen and felt guilty. Anyone who has lived in London will have seen something like this once or twice, but she was there again the next day, and the next, so obsession replaced guilt. It got to the point where one morning, seeing her about to go out, I rushed outside and we collided in the street. She was very tall, not beautiful — her face had that bleached, expressionless look of some Scandinavian women. I said, ‘Sorry’ and she gave a tight little smile. We never met again.

  The American filmmaker James Hill, producer of The Sweet Smell of Success, was staying with me at that time and the situation intrigued him. He saw it as a short film and kept dreaming up scripts, but each of these, in true Hollywood fashion, had a resolution. They required me to meet her. I wasn’t keen on this. I mean, what would my first words have been? ‘You won’t know me, but I feel I know you very well’? Slam. ‘I live opposite and every morning I see you in your window’? Smack. In the end Hill agreed. ‘Guess we’ll have to work on this one.’ But we never did.

  Besides, the relationship had moved on. Familiarity buried the obsession and the morning came when I realised I was looking at that body with the lack of interest of an old, married man. Yet I was proud of it in a distant way, and it puzzled me that she should always be alone. Then that too changed, for one morning, ten years after I first saw her, there was a man there — a big, fat chap with a moustache. For the few months he was there I was sad, for I felt he was not good enough for her, my Diana in the Georgian window.

  I got married about this time and when my wife stayed in the flat I told her about this lady. As if on cue, she appeared at that moment. My wife, whose eyesight is not good, leaned out, the curtains blowing behind her, and that was the only time the Lady of Shalott looked out. A blind I had never seen before was hastily pulled down, but the next week it was up again.

  I don’t know when she left her flat. All I know is that a week ago I looked across and there was someone else there. A stocky brunette stood shamelessly in the window, naked as a penny piece. And I closed the curtains.

  When a Young Man’s Dreams Expire

  MOMENT OF SOCIAL HISTORY. It was Sunday morning, just after breakfast, in the junior common room of an Oxford college deserted except for two men, both middle-aged and moving with edgy stateliness, for this was the morning after the night before. They had stopped in front of a long metal box fixed at chest-level to the wall; there was no other form of ornament, so the box dominated not only the wall but the whole room.

  ‘Incredible,’ said one of them, a northern GP, shaking his head. ‘I mean, what sort of people are these, for God’s sake? Can you imagine going anywhere near that thing with everyone looking?’

  I should add that this was once a man very active in that particular direction, who never lost his nerve in chemist shops like the rest of us and bought Horlicks tablets. Now, 30 years on and up for a college reunion, we were staring at the contraceptive machine as though we had come on some terrible tribal juju in a jungle clearing.

  ‘So they’ve had it put up at last,’ said the retired don, with weariness in his voice. It was now noon, the sherry hour. ‘Twenty years ago, that was one of the great confrontations of my time. The Dean refused point blank, which was a mistake. The matter went to a committee and then to a meeting of the fellows. They asked the Chaplain for guidance but he talked about the moral responsibility of the undergraduates. We were running scared, they were so militant.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Oh then, there were the holidays,’ he chuckled. ‘By the time they came back the undergraduates had forgotten all about the thing. Of course, this was after your time.’

  My time. . . The 100 men who met that weekend have probably never been so conscious of time. It was a great shock for a man to go back, Dr Johnson said towards the end of his life. He had gone back to Lichfield, where he had met men who were boys when he was a boy and, seeing they were now old, it had occurred to him he was old too. Some of these men were old.

>   We met at tea in the Master’s Lodge on Saturday afternoon, walking round and round each other like strange dogs and talking loudly to dispel the thin wind of mortality we must all have felt. Men who had lived on the same staircase failed to recognise each other, and one man had to introduce himself to his former roommate. The average age must have been around 50, yet one man said he was reminded of a station on one of those days when British Rail offered concessionary fares to pensioners. And then a face appeared with all the woes of the world upon it, these being his stock in trade: the newsreader had arrived.

  There were bankers, lawyers, doctors, academics, men who had lost themselves to careers or tried to find themselves on Scottish islands, who, in the intervening decades had discovered God or homosexuality or wives. And now for this weekend all these were offstage.

  Why had they come? Nostalgia, curiosity, the chance to swank or merely the opportunity of a free meal? Perhaps it was in search of the most mysterious being anyone will encounter, the man he himself once was. He survives in photographs, in suits which no longer fit, in things he wrote. You know everything about your varnished self but in a biographer’s way; if the man you once were came through the door, you might not even recognise him.

  ‘Remember the time you went to see the doctor because you thought your nipples were different sizes?’ I asked a Doctor of Philosophy, trying to break the ice.

  ‘I’ve learnt to keep secrets now,’ he said. ‘This will be a disappointment to you.’

  Some men talked about their children and one about his impending divorce (‘No, don’t sympathise, I’ve been planning this’). He looked so happy and so young I began to suspect there might be a correlation between youth and a bad marital track record.

  The head of Scotland Yard’s Forensic Science Laboratory scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me (‘Now be careful what you do with that’). I reproached a stipendiary who, when I appeared in front of him on a motoring charge (with a discreet little wave), had promptly disqualified himself from hearing the case.

  ‘You could have got me off.’

  ‘You were pleading guilty, you fool.’

  ‘Oh yes, so I was, but you could have done something.’

  ‘And what do you think the Lord Chancellor would have done to my career then?’

  The old Head Porter, treasured by generations for his unblinking range of obscenity, held court, while the Master, who did not recognise anyone, kept materialising uneasily in various parts of his parlour like Doctor Who.

  Many had flown to be there. I shook hands with one of those clear-eyed Americans who look out of place anywhere except on the Great Plains.

  ‘So what do you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I own newspapers.’

  ‘How many do you own?’

  ‘Fifty.’

  ‘Do you really. . . sir?’

  And it was time to change for dinner. I called on an old friend and a head came round the door. ‘Oh it’s you, come in.’ he said. He was in his vest. ‘I don’t mind you seeing my stick-like arms.’ Ah yes, the stick-like arms, once as familiar as a piece of heraldry; he had spent most of our three years together tuning self-deprecation until this was an art form. It was strange. With others it had been like members of some trade delegation meeting, but with him, families and careers were irrelevant and we were again the silly young men we had once been. We walked to the pub.

  As I ordered drinks, I overheard an extraordinary conversation. The two men at the bar, both in dinner jackets, were talking intently. ‘You remember Watkins then, surely he was your year?’ ‘No, but Jim Hill was.’ ‘Never heard of him. What about Highcock?’ ‘Didn’t know anyone by that name. Chris Horne?’ ‘No.’

  The litany went on and on, each man looking more and more bewildered as it became clear they did not have a single acquaintance in common. I was sitting down when there was a sudden roar of laughter from the bar, and after one had left, still laughing, the other joined us.

  ‘God,’ he said. ‘That was terrible. That chap made me feel older than Rip van Winkle. He kept telling me names and I couldn’t remember any of them. But then it turned out he was up for a different reunion; he wasn’t at our College at all.’

  Over dinner in Hall the Master reproached us for not being sufficiently rich and famous. I had forgotten how much worldly success meant to dons. When the present head of the Civil Service returned to college, whispered someone, his testicles were supported on a velvet cushion held by the Head Porter. Reproaches over, the Master got down to the serious business of fundraising. Old members’ contributions, he declared, had so far made possible a Fellowship in English Literature. ‘Stand up.’ And the Eng. Lit. don, a small bearded man, stood. His contribution to the College was enormous, said the Master relentlessly; his lectures on structuralism were guaranteed to put anyone to sleep.

  In my time the College had no female undergraduates, but these were now waiting on us, having spent much of the long vac waiting on various conferences. Some wore black stockings, others no stockings at all, and their skirts were short. One girl was beautiful. ‘They must be wondering who all these old farts are,’ I told my neighbour. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they’re thinking, “It’s all very well, young men with beautiful bodies. Perhaps some of those old boys have real feelings.’”

  I knew he was wrong when the beautiful waitress went by and awarded me the brisk, unfocused smile of a vicar’s wife. Over brandy the stipendiary gave me a cigar (‘Perhaps you’ll shut up now’). Some men grew confidential in drink, one telling me he had thought of committing suicide when we were up, which stunned me, for he had been such a cheerful man and played rugby. In others, the ugliness of an all-male society surfaced.

  One man told another he had subsequently employed his former girlfriend. ‘So I know all about you.’ ‘Do you really?’ ‘Yes, and I bet you had a good time there, didn’t you?’ ‘You do know she’s dead.’ ‘Of course I know she’s dead.’

  After breakfast I met a man with his bags packed outside the Porter’s Lodge. ‘I can’t take anymore of this,’ he said. ‘I was sitting in Hall just now and for a moment I felt the familiarity of everything. I knew that panelling, those pictures. Then I looked around me and saw faces I didn’t know at all. It was like a horror story.’

  And what Philip Larkin called ‘this frail travelling coincidence’ was almost over. I walked down the high street and met the head of Scotland Yard’s Forensic Science Lab squirting oil on to the leads of a car which had failed to start. ‘We must have lunch,’ he said vaguely.

  Singles Weekend

  O BEGIN WITH IT was like starting a new school. We inspected each other at a distance, did not speak, looked away when eyes just as full of curiosity, speculation, suspicion met our own. There is great wariness at the start of a Singles Weekend.

  I have spread my dreams under your feet.

  Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.

  Playwrights from that lost age when plays had plots would have boggled at the good fortune of it: there we were, 25 strangers come together in a Cotswolds hotel. It was not the reading of a will that had brought us there, nor a snowstorm that detained us, but the outside world dropped away as remorselessly as a shoreline. For a weekend we were left with each other, and our dreams.

  All we had in common was loneliness and the ability to cough up the sum required, for the organisers, like the writers of romantic fiction, believed in putting obstacles in the way of True Love. The first was cost. The second was inconvenience, for they did not believe in romantic locations. The Singlers must struggle in Nottingham and Darlington and, even, in the inspired lunacy of An All-Night Party In The English Channel In October, and not all the wicked uncles and mistaken identities in the world can compete with that one. If, in a Dover dawn, draped over the rails like old towels, your eyes still meet, then True Happiness must be yours.

  All weekends were advertised in the monthly Select magazine, weekends, magazine and a co
mputer dating agency being part of the same company. The magazine was amiable enough, though given to denunciations of masturbation as severe as in any Victorian handbook on youth. It was only afterwards you appreciated the commercial logic of this: a booming industry needs to knock out competition.

  Anyway there we were, newly arrived in the lounge bar, wondering which were ordinary hotel guests and which Singles. Spy rings meeting for the first time are probably like this. But in addition there was embarrassment: was it social failure that led to this confrontation in the hills? There was also a small fluttering even in the most threadbare soul. What if she did turn up, the blonde with the long legs who could fill in tax forms and fix car engines? Help!

  I had read with mounting awe the five pages of lonely hearts advertisements which concluded the Select magazine. At no time, unless it was the Hollywood of the 1930s, could more eligible people have assembled in one place. There were merchant bankers and film producers, men with Bentleys, men with country houses. There were men who knew their hearts’ desire so precisely they even knew its poundage, ‘under 140 pounds, laconic, lovable and lusty’. There was what might have been a misprint, ‘a slightly older man, educated, king’. Some were boastful, some were smug; some hid their feelings under bravado (‘I dare you. . .’). But one was urgent, ‘for any female, any age’. Another said, simply, ‘I am 21 and tired of being on my own.’ One showed the accents of experience: ‘No philanderers or fusspots, please.’

  The weekend did not begin well. My roommate, a young solicitor from the North, lay glumly on his bed with his golf clubs around him. The hotel course, so beautifully photographed in the brochure, had been closed. He was cross, he said, because he had allowed this to surprise him. From his first Singles Weekend he remembered the lack of organisation and the fact that the Singlers, like Victorian domestics, had been obliged to eat from a different menu to the rest of the guests. Defiantly he had arranged his aftershave lotions and deodorants under the bathroom mirror: bored he might have to be, but smell like a human being he would not. It was the same organiser this time as last, came a mournful voice from the bedroom.