More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  He was back home within half an hour, long before the end of the set.

  ‘Any good?’ I asked, though I could tell from his early return and morose expression that this was unlikely.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘They’ll never get anywhere.’ He went to the fridge for a can of beer. ‘In fact, the best I can say is that they’re very aptly named.’

  The band was called Dire Straits.

  One evening I was sitting with Mark in a local pub, trying my hardest to lift his spirits and persuade him not to give up. ‘You’ve got a record deal, contacts, talent—don’t waste it all. Just keep going and you’ll make a breakthrough eventually.’ I was beginning to sound like my father.

  Mark wasn’t impressed. ‘If you think it’s so easy,’ he said, ‘you try.’ Over a few more drinks an idea came to us.

  A few months later, in spite of being unable to sing, I had recorded a single, produced by Mark, which he had somehow managed to sell to Epic, a subsidiary of CBS. I had added lyrics to a hand-clapping tune sung by kids in playgrounds, entitled it ‘The Schoolgirl Song’ and performed it under the pseudonym Lola Payola.

  The head of A&R said he had never heard anything quite like it. I didn’t doubt him for a minute. But he took the tape home and played it to his kids, who instantly recognised the tune and loved the record. That got him thinking it might just prove to be a ‘bullet’. On the strength of that instinct he offered us a three-album production deal.

  There was just one tiny snag. My alter-ego, Lola Payola, was supposed to be a schoolgirl whereas I was a twenty-eight-year-old office worker. Well, two snags: I wasn’t a teenager and I couldn’t sing. If it did turn out to be a hit, we were going to have a problem appearing on Top of the Pops, something all British bands with a single in the charts would be required by their record companies to do. Mark insisted on an opt-out clause in the contract. CBS were shocked. Apparently, only one other band had ever refused to do Top of the Pops—the politically aware Clash, and their decision had been ideologically credible—but in the end CBS agreed to this stipulation and Lola’s single was released.

  Although the late, lamented DJ John Peel, famous for promoting new artists, regularly played ‘The Schoolgirl Song’ on his highly respected Radio One show, it soon became clear that I had absolutely no reason to fear being exposed as requests for public appearances were not exactly pouring into the CBS office. The record, described by one local-radio DJ as ‘weird but pointless’, soon sank without trace. Apart from a few royalties that continued to trickle in from (of all places) Finland, it made very little money. Mark and I failed to produce a follow-up single, thus breaking our contract with the record company.

  When I told my mother about the record she didn’t seem to believe me. I had to show her the carefully posed photograph of me on the record sleeve to convince her. Then she simply stared at me, slightly bemused, as though I was playing a practical joke on her.

  I was still visiting her every weekend, still trying to get her interested in life beyond Gullane House and the coffee shop. I offered to take her to an ice-dancing show. She liked to watch ice-skating on television and knew the names of all the stars—Robin Cousins, John Curry, Torvill and Dean. But she declined. The theatre was bound to be cold with all that ice, she said. Much better to view it in comfort at home.

  One night we were sitting in front of the television, watching an old film we had enjoyed together many times, Hitchcock’s Rebecca. It was coming to its conclusion as the naïve and unconfident young wife, played by Joan Fontaine, plucks up the courage to tackle the difficult subject of her husband’s ex, Rebecca—the woman to whom Fontaine’s character felt she never matched up.

  I looked across at my mother, cigarette poised between her trembling fingers, a tall glass of Guinness beside her on the coffee table I had chosen all those years before. I braced myself and decided to tackle a difficult subject of my own that had dogged me since childhood.

  ‘The certificate…’ I began.

  My mum glanced over at me but her attention was still on the film.

  ‘The wedding certificate, for you and Dad. Who was “the divorced wife of George Townsend”?’

  She concentrated on the television for a moment and then looked back at me again. I knew she was wondering why I was asking this now.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I prompted.

  Eventually, she nodded.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She gave a small shrug. ‘It didn’t seem important. Just something that happened a long time ago. When I was young.’

  Could it be that we were at long last managing to talk to one another? Not about food or shopping or the neighbours or an article in a magazine, but really talking, about something important? She took another sip of her drink. A mystery began to unravel. As a girl, she had met a man and fallen in love. First love. Just like Martin and me. She and George Townsend had married and moved to a big house in Essex. They even had their own piano. She’d had everything she ever wanted, including George’s love, until she realised her own feelings were not love but infatuation. She knew she had made a mistake so she had run home to her mother in Cable Street, Stepney, and become the divorced wife of George Townsend.

  Essex. Perhaps that’s why my father had hated it so much: my mother had once belonged to someone else there. All those years we had struggled in two poky rooms beneath a rain-sodden roof, she and my father had lived with the knowledge of what she had given up for true love.

  ‘I always knew it was you,’ I said.

  ‘I know. But what’s done is done.’

  What’s done is done. For one evening, my mother and I were able to dismantle the wall between us and have the beginnings of a proper conversation, but soon she was retreating into herself once more. Nothing in the real world seemed to live up to the one she inhabited in her imagination. Sometimes, when she’d had a little too much to drink, she would say, ‘I wonder what happened to your baby?’ She never said it without a drink inside her and I resented the fact that it took alcohol to loosen her emotions. ‘I don’t know,’ I would reply, building up that wall all over again.

  I knew that she was living with great loneliness. She began to sleep on the sofa, just as I had done as a child. It was as though the bed, and the flat itself, were now too large for her.

  One night she cried and I tried to comfort her, telling her things would get better, like a mother reassuring a child.

  ‘It doesn’t get better,’ she said, looking at me despairingly. ‘It gets worse.’

  These days when I went home, I found myself sitting in the way my father had, sprawled on the sofa to watch the television, hands linked behind my head. I ate from a plate on my lap and took off my shoes, throwing them into the same corner where my dad had thrown his. I was occupying the very space he had occupied, literally trying to take his place. I knew so very well how an absence could grow to be stronger than a presence.

  As I passed the milestone of my thirtieth birthday, I remained single but my life was full. I had plenty of friends, a lot of them gay men. I felt safe with them, perhaps because, unlike my straight friends, they put no pressure on me to ‘settle down’. We were all perpetual adolescents, many of us in denial. With the spectre of AIDS beginning to cast its shadow, there was a growing, often unspoken, sense in the gay community that everyone might as well enjoy life while they could. Those hedonistic days of laughter and parties suited me right down to the ground as I was making up for lost time, as well as over-compensating for the long, depressing weekends in the East End. However, if I had a great social life, I had to manage it on very little money. Ten years after buying my Wimbledon flat, the mortgage remained a burden.

  Mark was by this time living in Brussels, playing jazz guitar and running a music bar, but I now had another buddy—a guy called Seb, a student at the National Film School in Beaconsfield. I’d met him briefly ten years earlier, but he’d then moved to San Francisco for a while. When he came back to Lo
ndon we became good friends, and through him I’d developed an interest in filmmaking and writing scripts and plays. I acted in one of Seb’s student films, playing the part of a girl who is hired to burst out of a cake at a fancy-dress party but is delivered, in the cake, to the wrong address.

  Seb was living at 178b Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill which, before the advent of the yuppies, was a far cry from the fashionable area it is today. Its population was a mix of hippies, West Indians and bedsit-dwellers left over from the era of the notorious racketeering landlord Peter Rachman in the 1950s and 1960s. The property—a three-storey house on the corner of Ledbury Road, with a shop unit at the front on the ground floor—belonged to Annie, an English hippy who had long since disappeared to California. She never asked for rent from anyone who lived there, only for the house to be maintained and respected. Seb had taken it over from a previous ‘caretaker’ on his return from the States.

  A year after graduating from film school, Seb suggested I sold my flat and moved into his rent-free pad in Notting Hill. It was ridiculous, he reasoned, for me to be scrimping and saving to pay my mortgage in Wimbledon when there was a room going begging in the heart of London at ‘the Westy’, as it was known by all who visited. I’d struggled to hang on to my investment in bricks and mortar as some kind of security for the future, but what the hell—I was thirty years old, tired of being constantly skint and his offer was just too tempting. I took the plunge.

  When I arrived at the Westy, there was already another lodger in situ: our friend Adam, a handsome, six-foot-four builder more than qualified to manage any household repairs. However, after Adam married and moved to the south of France, Seb’s habit of knocking down supporting walls was to cause a few problems. In my room on the lower floor, a cavernous crack suddenly opened up from floor to ceiling, to add to my existing woes. A pair of elegant French windows near my bed failed to close properly and someone had bodged the job of creating a cat flap in one of the panels. In spite of all my attempts to block the opening, wintry mornings would often start with an Arctic wind blowing a small snowdrift on to my bedside rug. There was no central heating, just an archaic Ascot water-heater on the kitchen wall which spewed forth a scalding hot stream like an Italian coffee machine.

  In a sense, the Westy was a much bigger version of the house in which I’d grown up. The difference was that Seb managed to fill it with wonderful things: a beautiful old bevelled mirror, a large 1950s American refrigerator, a pale-blue wartime gas cooker. When I’d arrived, the only way to get out on to the roof terrace was by climbing clumsily through the living-room window. Seb hired a friend to punch a hole through the wall and install a set of doors. Then he added a sound system and voilà—the scene was set for the Westy to become the best social venue in town.

  The unit at the front of the building on the street level was occupied by an estate agency, and after their office closed for the day there was nobody to complain about loud music. Then the Westy would be transformed into a party house and informal ‘knock and drop in centre’, attracting a diverse mix of characters. The roof terrace was an ideal vantage point from which to view the Notting Hill carnival, so at August Bank Holiday weekends upwards of fifty people might stop by for the day, bearing bottles of wine and carnival whistles. Other days proved only slightly less busy.

  After graduating from film school, Seb’s ambition had been to direct drama but this was the 1980s, the age of MTV, and there was a big demand for people to direct pop promos, the hot new way to sell records. Soon he was making videos for Prince, Madness, Kirsty MacColl and a band called Five Star who, at the time, were the English Jackson Five. He also directed a rock series for Italian TV, presented by Ronnie Wood of the Stones.

  Seb was not just a great director but a true ‘social animal’. Funny and lovable, he made friends with everyone. The only trouble was, I was still trying to hold down my nine-to-five job. I’d come home from work to find members of Status Quo in the living room, or the dance troupe Hot Gossip. In the evenings, we’d go to concerts or parties, mixing with the likes of Kid Creole and his Coconuts. It was all slightly surreal, and I was finding it increasingly tough to get to work on time, especially when our landlady sent eccentric friends over from the States. They would sometimes arrive at a moment’s notice to spend a few days or weeks in London partying or sightseeing, and several of them never managed to adjust to British time.

  The most memorable of all our house guests was the Hollywood actress Elizabeth Ashley. Elizabeth was the ex-wife of George Peppard, whose finest hour had been co-starring with Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 classic movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. By the 1980s, however, he was better known—to younger audiences, at least—as the cigar-chomping leader of a renegade commando squad in the TV series The A-Team.

  Why Elizabeth preferred to stay at the Westy rather than somewhere like the Dorchester hotel was anyone’s guess. When we heard that she was coming Seb and I surmised that, as a friend of Annie, she must be a Boho rebel. If we were excited or amused at the prospect of having a star in our home, a visit from Barbara, her PA, soon brought us back down to earth. Barbara had a ‘Hills’ accent, an improbable bosom and an inexhaustible checklist. She was here to ‘prepare the way’ for her boss and to ensure that the facilities were fully up to standard. She turned up on a hot summer’s day and top of her list was air-conditioning. Seb and I pointed to a dodgy window propped open by a single chopstick.

  Outside the house, Barbara smiled a nervous goodbye and stepped hastily into a waiting cab. A few days later, Elizabeth Ashley appeared on our doorstep. In spite of all our shortcomings, she fitted into the Westy perfectly.

  Elizabeth was in her early forties but had the low, rasping voice of an older woman. Her conversation was copious and peppered with Peppard, which was how she always referred to her ex-husband. The second of his five wives—he was still on number four at the time—she had met him on the set of The Carpetbaggers in the early 1960s, and though she went on to make several more movies, she said she always felt more at home on the stage. She had been fêted as a young theatre actress, earning Tony nominations for her Broadway performance as Corie in Barefoot in the Park and Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Her next role was to be Babette Van Degan in The Two Mrs Grenvilles, an American mini-series that would go on to win a number of Emmy Awards, one, bizarrely, for Outstanding Achievement in Hairstyling.

  Having a Hollywood actress in the house served only to heighten the sense of unreality that already existed at the Westy. It became clear from her conversation that Elizabeth had plenty of professional integrity and no wish, as she put it, to become the kind of actress who fed lines such as ‘Gee, how did you do that?’ to the likes of Lee Majors. She also had no desire for anyone to stand on ceremony for her. Nevertheless, as I trotted off to work in the mornings I would pass Seb heading up the rickety stairs carrying a breakfast tray for our guest consisting of a boiled egg in a cracked cup. After a hard day at the office I would come home to sink at least a bottle of wine as I listened, fascinated but exhausted, to Elizabeth’s tales.

  She didn’t exactly play the Hollywood game, which was why she preferred not to stay at swanky hotels. She told us about the sailboat she owned and how she used it as a refuge from the madness of the celebrity merry-go-round. In the mornings she would often appear in the kitchen looking frail and fragile, stick-thin in an old, oversized T-shirt. But then the doorbell would ring, signalling the arrival of extravagant bouquets from the likes of Rex Harrison. When she had an invitation to lunch, she would go upstairs to get ready and descend at the appointed hour looking every inch the star, an amazing outfit clinging to her clothes-horse body, completed by a wide-brimmed hat shielding a beautifully made-up face.

  The summer days rolled by. Eventually Barbara appeared on our doorstep once more, this time to supervise the exodus of Elizabeth’s luggage. Our house guest was returning to the States.

  Seb and I waved goodbye as a car whisked Elizabeth off to the airport. It turned
a corner and disappeared from view, leaving us standing on the pavement, just looking at each other.

  ‘Did that really happen?’ asked Seb.

  We wondered for a moment whether perhaps we had dreamed the visit. It was like a story in a magazine. I was learning that life could be stranger than fiction.

  Chapter Ten

  A Clock Stops Ticking

  On the eve of one hot August Bank Holiday weekend, I headed for Gullane House straight from a meeting about the BBC’s Children in Need appeal, having volunteered to man the phones during the forthcoming telethon. My own child, Sarah Louise, was now fourteen years old and, I sincerely hoped, in need of nothing. In four years’ time she would have the right to acquire her original birth certificate. Would she try to find me?

  I was baffled to find my mother’s maisonette empty. As I put the kettle on, wondering where she could have got to, the telephone rang. An aunt in Kent with whom we were rarely in contact was on the other end of the line, telling me that my mum had been taken ill.

  At St Thomas’ Hospital in Westminster, I found her perched on the edge of a bed, wearing a strange nightgown. When she turned to look at me I saw fear in her eyes.

  A doctor explained that she’d had some kind of fit at work the day before. The only telephone number in her bag was my aunt’s, which was why the hospital hadn’t been able to notify me. My mother was confused and disorientated. Unsure of what to do, I called her older sister Bett, who arrived from Becontree with my cousin Danny. We hadn’t seen one another for years but I was grateful to have family to lean on in this crisis.

  The doctors gave my mum an MRI scan and eventually decided that the fit might have been an isolated incident. She was discharged into my care and sent home with drugs usually prescribed for epilepsy to prevent further fits.

  My mother never recovered. Within three months she had developed a kind of dementia. Her body became weak on one side and she took terrifying tumbles down the stairs but she refused point blank to go back to the hospital. She wouldn’t even see the doctor.