Women who have been sucked unknowingly into the world of Aids by their men look at us all in a new light. Our animal force is smoke and mirrors to them now, a terrible pantomime that crumbles as the virus takes its grip. This lady is made of sterner stuff than any man, although she is completely feminine. She talks about the difficulties of getting treatment. There is not much help from the health system. You have to bribe your way into hospital and sometimes even bribe your way out. More Kafka. She tells scandalous stories of corruption, particularly concerning the Ministry of Health. Everyone falls in love with her and she laughs it off.
As she is leaving, she asks me the question I have been asking myself. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What can you do?’
‘Not much. Talk about it. Write something.’
She laughs. Her eyes sparkle, slightly mocking, and she leaves to continue the fight while I fly home to New York.
We are all going in opposite directions. It’s a strange airport, Moscow, and it hasn’t changed since the night my dog and I arrived back in 1990. The same brown marble is bathed in the same green light. There are still the same long lines getting in and getting out. It’s difficult to do either. Being a part of a UN delegation, we are swept through on a magic carpet, no check-in, no customs, straight through to the diplomatic lounge, where an African king is already enthroned, surrounded by wives and courtiers, all swathed in shawls and turbans. Together we accept canapés and champagne from government lackeys, while officials look at our tickets and bring us our boarding cards.
Mariangela is going back to Geneva. David is going to Berlin. We will never see Mariangela again, and our goodbye already feels like a memory. We both know this is my last trip.
‘You were great,’ she says.
‘I was a handful,’ I reply.
‘You’re always a handful. Call me when you come to Geneva,’ Mariangela says and walks off, waving.
My flight is late at night and I sit in the airport wondering about the trip. I never want to come back to Russia, but I do write something, a long explanation of what I have seen and what I understand about Aids, for a magazine in Moscow. I send it – translated – but it is never published.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Head Girl
I had locked myself in the loo at Charles Finch’s pre-Bafta party at Annabelle’s the other night, for a bit of a rest, when I overheard the following conversation.
‘Five books, two films and a documentary are being made about the life and times of Isabella Blow,’ said a voice.
‘They’re going to be slim volumes,’ sneered another.
‘But she discovered Alexander McQueen!’
‘Alexander McQueen discovered himself.’
‘I thought the housekeeper did.’ Shrieks. ‘Well, she had an eye. You can’t deny that.’
‘Yes. Like a smashed plate.’
A door swung open with the noise of the party, and the voices trailed off.
I sat there for a few minutes, wondering what Isabella would have made of the conversation. Would she laugh or be hurt, or would she conclude, like Oscar Wilde, that it was better to be talked about than not to be mentioned at all?
It has been nearly three years since Isabella died, and no matter how slim the volumes, how short the films, people are still talking about her and trying to unlock her riddle.
One thing is certain. Despite the energy, the humour and the eye like a smashed plate, she probably didn’t achieve much during her short sentence in earthly shackles. In fact, she managed to fuck up every opportunity she ever had, burn every bridge, test every friendship to its hilt, and perhaps it was for this that she was remarkable. Despite these considerable drawbacks she still managed to inspire unfaltering devotion from all the friends she occasionally needled (rather than stabbed) in the back, and she lit up every room she entered, whether it was the emergency room or the ballroom. Her tragedy was, quite simply, to be born in the right place at the wrong time. During her twenty years as a soldier of fashion, the landscape of that world completely changed. Isabella charged on regardless, dressed as a damsel in distress, Milady de Winter, largely written off by the pretentious rag-trade freaks that so lavishly praised her, post mortem. Fashion was no longer, as Wilde brilliantly put it, what one wore oneself. It was what other people wore. Isabella never grasped this, and for the last few years of her life she was haunted by a terrible feeling of failure.
‘I even managed to fail at suicide,’ she said wryly one day in hospital.
Depression and madness are incomprehensible to the uninflicted. ‘Just snap out of it,’ the rest of us said. We were never forgiven. Suicide was our ultimate punishment.
I came out of the loo and decided to walk home. By now I was allergic to the endless awards ceremonies with their deathless pre-parties and after-parties. There was no glamour left, no fabulous monsters, no Isabellas, actually, in the glare of success. Outside I buried myself in my coat and might have been a ghost as I left the club, unnoticed by the paparazzi, all huddled against the spitting February rain, and walked across Mayfair, past the empty temples of fashion, their faceless mannequins in ridiculous shoes staring blindly out at the glittering streets.
An arctic wind bounced down Regent Street, fanning the rain into pretty rainbows around the street lights and whirlpools around the drains. The whole evening, from the candlelit stars at the awards dinner, through the overheard conversation in the bog, to the dark shuttered cathedral of Abercrombie & Fitch, conjured up winterish thoughts. Many phantoms moaned beside me as I crossed the road into Soho, all forgotten and painted over, refaced and bricked up, from Caroline Lamb to Isabella Blow.
According to Isabella – on the first day I met her, at a tea party in a stately home one wet Sunday before Easter in 1977 – she was summoned to her headmistress’s study on the last day of school for a final chat before setting off into the world. In contrast to the black tulip ‘McQueen’ she wore to the potting shed where she drank the fatal pint of weedkiller thirty short years later, she was in her school uniform that day, a grey tweed skirt, pleated and below the knee, lace-up shoes, an Aertex shirt and an Alice band in her sensibly cut, ash-blonde hair.
‘Isabella,’ said the head, ‘there’s something you must know!’
Isabella’s heart sank. She felt guilty at the drop of a hat. ‘If anyone came into this room right now and said there’d been a murder, I’d just know I’d done it.’
Our hostess looked slightly uncomfortable. Isabella’s storytelling was mesmerising and had one on the edge of one’s seat.
‘Don’t worry, Lavinia. I haven’t knocked anyone off this weekend,’ she chortled before collecting herself and her audience. She lit a cigarette, inhaled for inspiration, and on a stream of smoke flew the first of countless improbable stories I was to hear over the next twenty-five years.
‘We are extremely proud of you, here at Heathfield,’ said the headmistress. ‘You have been a really super head girl, and a great support to me personally. You may not have excelled at Maths but, by God, you made up for it in the fencing team.’
Another big drag.
‘You have always been there to help in a crisis. The girls look up to you. You are, in short, one of the best pupils it has been my privilege to have here in the school.’ The list went on.
‘How lovely for you,’ cut in our hostess.
‘But now look at me!’ drawled Issie, through a cloud of smoke. ‘Two years later. A charwoman. Can you believe it?’
She was certainly dressed as one, albeit a music-hall version, more Carmen Miranda than Elsie Tanner. She wore a spotted scarf around her head tied in a comical knot and a cleaner’s flowered housecoat. All that was missing was a dustpan and brush.
We were sitting in the drawing room of Cholmondeley Castle, the Gothic seat of the Marquess of Cholmondeley (pronounced Chummly), and, more importantly, his very dishy son, David Rocksavage. It had raine
d all weekend, and it streamed down the vast cathedral windows that afternoon while we sat snugly around a roaring fire. I had been invited for the weekend with my best friend Vivienne. It had not been the greatest success, as David’s mother, Lady Cholmondeley, or Lavinia to her friends, had taken against me from the moment I set foot in the house. She was a small, neat woman, formal and suspicious.
‘Not very Chummy,’ I remarked to Vivienne the first night in bed. We were sharing a room.
‘There are the chummy Cholmondelyes and the unchummy ones,’ she said.
‘Well, Lady Chummy is definitely one of the uns.’ We had discovered Nancy Mitford that year.
Perhaps it was the knee-length cape I was wearing. She could sense that I was one of ‘those’ and thought that I would undoubtedly have designs on her fabulously wealthy son and heir.
How right she was. Apart from anything else the word Chol mondeley struck an ancient chord for me, not because of David’s willowy beauty or any particular person in that illustrious family, but because of another house they owned, one I had known for as long as I could remember. It was called Houghton Hall, and on the endless (two-hour) drive from my family’s home in Essex to my grandparents’ house in Norfolk, as I lay in the back of our Hillman, green with carsickness, at a certain point my mother would say, ‘Look, darling, we’ve got to the Houghton wall.’ I would sit up and wait to see the great gates, hoping against hope to spot some of the famous white deer that grazed on the park inside. We hardly ever saw them. You had to be very quick, because the wall stopped only for a moment, and my father would never slow down.
‘Slow down, Daddy!’ we all whined, but the major paid no attention.
Between two gingerbread gatehouses with tall twirling chimneystacks, through the black and gold bars of a gigantic wrought-iron gate, flashed a tree-lined park and in the distance a vast grey house. Occasionally hundreds of deer stood motionless as we shot past, like little clouds hovering over the grass, but then it was over, and the wall came back. But my carsickness was always gone by then, because in five minutes we would be at my favourite place in the world, my grandmother’s house.
Punch-drunk and competitive with Isabella’s success as a raconteur, I launched into this story to a rather underwhelming response. She alone egged me on, eyes wide like saucers, while one by one the rest of the party began to talk among themselves. Her reactions were as large as her own yarns, and quite brilliant, because, as I learnt years later, she was probably thinking about something else altogether. But who cared? Her gasps of ‘God, no!’ and ‘I love it!’ kept me going through Lady Chummy’s clear revulsion.
‘How very Proustian,’ was all that lady said as the story finished.
‘Exactly!’ I replied, wondering who the fuck was Proustian.
There had been a drama that morning because footprints had been found climbing the shiny black stone staircase in the great hall. Some of us were lodged downstairs, and somebody had crept up with bare feet and not come down. As it happened the footprints were not mine, but Lady Chummy was looking daggers, and they were all directed at me. So by teatime conversation had become strained and minimal, punctuated now by the clinking of china, the pouring of tea, and all the various house-party inanities about delicious cake, terrible weather, Mrs Thatcher, or Vivienne’s neck, which had recently broken.
Then Isabella arrived.
She was one of those people whose energy was so intense that it burst into a room before her. There was a weird movement in the air and a clattering outside followed by screams and a crash. We all sat up. Somebody outside started laughing. It was one of those infectious laughs that cracked a smile even on Lady Chummy’s vice-regal features.
‘That must be Isabella,’ she said with pleasure. ‘She’s a neighbour.’
The door burst open and Issie appeared, dressed, as I have already mentioned, as a music-hall maid.
‘God, everyone! Sorry. I just tripped over that rug in the hall. I fell flat on my face. Thank God Caro was there. Darling, are you all right?’
The laughter gurgled up again as she clutched David’s sister and tumbled into the room.
Lady Chummy made introductions.
‘And this is Rupert Everitt,’ she said finally through gritted teeth.
‘Everett, actually, Lady Cholmondeley,’ I ventured obsequiously.
‘Oh my God. I love that cape. Look at the buckles,’ screamed Isabella.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It was my grandfather’s when he was in the navy.’
‘Should you be wearing it?’ demanded Lady C.
‘Probably not, but I couldn’t resist. It’s so gorgeous.’
‘Really?’ scoffed Chummy.
I caught Isabella’s eye and she began to laugh again.
‘God. You’re naughty!’
‘Isabella,’ asked the Marchioness, when everyone had settled back down, ‘how is your life in London?’
‘Fabulous. I’m a charlady.’
‘Is that satisfactory?’
Issie lit a cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at her hostess through hooded blue eyes for a long dramatic moment.
Then she began the story of her last day of school. She spoke effortlessly but with enormous energy, sprawled on a chair, to the manor born. She was built for humour and when she laughed a set of teeth jumped out that might have come from a Christmas cracker or a joke shop. They protruded almost at right angles to her mouth, perhaps the result of some witch’s spell because the rest of her was quite like a fairy princess. She was petite with beautiful skin, large blue eyes like saucers (as yet unsmashed), an hourglass waist and, as she was the first to point out, she had ‘fabulous tits’. Strangely her teeth were not unattractive, and on the rare occasions her mouth was closed they made her look as though she were about to blow a kiss, but they had directed the whole course of her life. She would have been someone completely different without them. They possessed her. They forced her to perform, to live up to them and to live them down. They had the effect of making her face one of the most memorable and expressive I have ever seen. It could make you laugh and later on it could make you cry.
‘Do you mean that, after all that, you are a cleaning lady?’ asked David, who had listened, silent and beautiful, in the corner.
‘God, yuh! I thought you knew. That’s my job. I’m a charwoman.’ She leapt up and gave a demonstration of hoovering and dusting and knocking things over, all in the course of two minutes, before slumping back in her chair, on the verge of fainting.
‘Vapours!’ she gasped. ‘I shouldn’t really be overdoing it right now.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘It’s my Crohn’s disease.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, it just eats you inside until there’s nothing left.’
‘Sounds ghastly.’
‘Yuh. It’s terminal. Could I have another cup of tea, please, Lavinia?’
Her stories were too good to be true. Two crumpets later we had already learnt that her little brother had drowned in front of her, and that her mother had simply gone down to the edge of the estate at home, where the railway tracks passed a lodge, and waved down the London train, got on and was never seen again. Her delivery was dramatic and witty, punctuated by greedy mouthfuls that overflowed from that curious beak. Her outfit was sheer Vaudeville, and it was hard to imagine this creature had recently been a model pupil in a strict girls’ boarding school. She was enormously vivid and the intensity that would later turn to madness literally sparkled at this point with youth. She was hypnotic, and I immediately adored her, even if I was a little bit jealous because somehow she had managed to take this neurotic tea party and turn it into a platform for her own display of fireworks.
She had a sixth sense when it came to making trouble. After a brief lull in the laughter, she looked around to see if we were ready for the next bit.
‘Caro told me somebody has been creeping about all night,’ she said with great innocence, in a stage whi
sper. The room stiffened. Lady C pretended not to hear and adjusted her skirt. Isabella scanned our faces with her mascara’d satellite dishes. They got the picture in ten seconds.
‘I bet I can guess who it was,’ she continued, giggling.
Please, not me, I thought.
‘Was it you, Rupert? Were you after that Cock Sausage?’ It was her name for Rock Savage.
‘No, it wasn’t me,’ I said turning red.
‘God, you’re naughty,’ she said again. ‘Come on, let’s see your foot. Get your shoes off. I’m really good at detective work. You have to be as a charwoman.’
There was nothing she loved more than to work a victim’s nerves. (That Easter it was still at the playful stage.) She loved watching me squirm.
‘Oh my God, you’ve got a verruca! I don’t think it is him, Lavinia!’ she said, waving one of my bare feet in her hand, giving me another big lascivious wink at the same time. Before very long she had moved the whole party into the hall to examine the staircase to see if my foot fitted the print. Even Lady Chummy came. Isabella had swept everyone into a state of utter hysteria.
‘God, it’s like Cinderella. Were you at the balls last night?’ she screamed.
Now it was my turn to feel guilty for something I hadn’t done. I just knew that the shoe would fit. And then what?
Mercifully, the footprint was a whole three sizes smaller than mine, so we all went back to the drawing room and sat down.
‘God, is that the time?’ said Isabella, like a character from a drawing room comedy. ‘I’ve got to dash.’
In a flash she was gone. The scream and the crash and the laughter and the clattering heels rewound and receded as she left the house, and the void in the room was as remarkable as her presence had been. We all slumped visibly, dreaming of an early night with a good book.
Vanished Years Page 21