How to Disappear

by Duncan Fallowell

  Booze chits became essential after all and Rita and I invested many hours in pursuit of the Liquor Permit for Temporary Residents and the various signatures and stamps it required. At last the final stamp and signature came down upon it and we were able to proceed. The only place where alcohol could be bought was Uttam’s, the local department store. Excitedly clutching our permits, we passed through its menswear department – Suitings. A Gay Selection in Terylene, Terycot, Terywool, and Nylon Bell-Bots. Modern Novelties of Woollen and All Kinds of Hosiery - and upstairs through the women’s department – Sarees Exciting Wide and Fascinating Variety of Fabrics from All Over Indian Parts - to where in the distance a glass altar supported a pyramid of coloured bottles scintillant in the blood-red shafts of sunset. It was ten to six. We’d made it with only moments to spare. Rita and I collapsed into laughter at the relief and absurdity of it all, breaking at the knees, howling into walls, holding each other. The assistant was not in the leastly disconcerted – obviously this is a common reaction – and waited patiently with his head on one side, looking at us with shining eyes, smiling.

  ‘What was that stuff you mentioned? Madras brandy, was it?’

  ‘Yes, but it had a special name. I might recognise the bottle.’

  She turned to the assistant. ‘How much can we have?’

  ‘One month’s supply. Six bottles of spirits. Each.’

  They were all Indian cognacs, whiskies, gins, etc. but turned out to be very tasty. As we left the counter bent by four carrier bags of alcohol, the assistant said ‘Enjoy the party’ with a modest wave. On the way back we diverted to St Stephen’s churchyard, opened a bottle of plum brandy and had a slug beneath Indian oaks. Rita rapidly grew sentimental. ‘Oh, darling, we should’ve invited that assistant to our party.’

  ‘We’re not having a party.’

  ‘We should’ve invited him anyway,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he wanted to come.’

  ‘I think he was just being nice.’

  ‘Did you fancy him?’

  ‘Yes, I did actually.’

  ‘Oh lover of the Nile.’ And she pulled my head into her comforting breasts, which was quite a habit of hers.

  When we arrived back, Sarah said ‘You’re late’ but we fixed her a brandy & soda and she softened up.

  Dolores made good her intention and on our last night we did dine with the Maclaine-Clarkes at the Club, bequeathing them our remaining bottles. Consequently we all got very drunk. But I do retain some faded notes and can piece it together.

  The rendezvous was in Colonel Jago’s Room, technically out of bounds to women but rules tumbled before the wild and sooty laughter of Dolores and the gentle chuckles of her husband – yes, Richard was almost lively. My toreador jacket and yellow bell-bots, which had gone down well at the Delhi Film Festival, went down well here too. Dolores introduced us to Brigadier Abkar (‘an Armenian of the Calcutta shipping family’ she explained sotto voce; I wondered later if the name was ‘Akbar’ but was told ‘Definitely it’s Abkar’) whose own get-up was also quite snazzy. His bowtie bobbed, monocle flashed, and pale-blue eyes sparkled – he gave off such a terrific air of pleasure and screwed up his nose relishing our piquant use of language which was very modern to his ears. ‘Order a dry martini. They’re the best outside the Tollygunge,’ he advised with a touch of self-mockery. His wife was adorable too – her gutturals rolled into laughter as she said ‘We don’t know Bapsy Pavry but we know about her!’

  ‘You do? She looked very beautiful in her photograph.’

  The Brigadier asked ‘Would she choose an ugly photograph for The Indian Yearbook?’ and he burst into laughter like a puppy.

  I mentioned that my father had given me the address of a business contact of his who was a Parsi in Bombay and Richard said yes, that’s where they were based and generally they were successful middle-class types. ‘Originally the Parsis came from Persia,’ he said, ‘and had preserved their religion, Zoroastrianism, in pure form for three and a half thousand years. They worship fire and do not bury their dead but expose them on platforms for vultures to eat in a special place known as the Towers of Silence.’ Richard could be very informative when encouraged.

  ‘This special place is on Malabar Hill,’ added the Brigadier, ‘and quite near a small reservoir. After a while people got fed up with the vultures as they flew away dropping putrid human meat into the reservoir. Complaints were made and now I believe some sort of chicken wire has been placed over the reservoir to catch the bits.’

  ‘But some would still fall through,’ commented Sarah.

  ‘Yes, I expect it would,’ twinkled the Brigadier, ‘but not so much.’

  The Abkars couldn’t stay for dinner – we tried to persuade them but they said the hour was too late. The dining-room was vaulted with black beams and set for a hundred. Fresh flowers were hopeful on every table but we were the only diners. Dolores said this was normal. We talked of language and I said ‘When the Indians call me Master I feel marvellous. I haven’t been Master since I was a boy.’

  It was true, that being called Master gave one a really pleasant feeling – not of racial or class or gender superiority, but of superiority full stop, the sweetest simplest kind of uplift, as though a quiet blush were suffusing one’s ego. It was flattery combined with a wish to be helpful. It’s so important to receive compliments and therefore no less important to pay them. Many people are embarrassed by the idea of paying compliments – which is dreadful. We all need these boosts along the way. I remember once calling an old tramp ‘sir’ and he went into a transformation under my very eyes. Some chemical was released in him which hadn’t been released maybe for years. And at a cocktail party in Mexico City the host said to me ‘The trouble with the English is that they are suspicious of compliments.’ He was right. The English tend to associate flattery with corruption, insincerity, and the lower forms of sexual seduction. They prefer charm. The trouble with charm is that only some people have it, whereas everyone can pay a compliment.

  Of other forms of address, Sarah recalled that a gang of hooligans driving along in a banger had shouted to us ‘Halloooo, my dears!’ and Dolores said that ‘my dear’ was a widespread term of familiarity in the Nilgiris, even among hooligans. Inkie’s adorable little son, in his school cap and satchel and grey socks, called his father ‘sir’ and me ‘uncle’. I loved it when he called me ‘uncle’.

  Can’t remember what food we ate that last night at the club but for some reason I got far more smashed than the others and lost it all in the gentlemen’s washroom. Rita told me afterwards that one of the boys came to the table and said ‘Excuse me, Madam, the Master is lying on the lawn,’ and she’d replied ‘Don’t worry, he often does that.’ A servant brought pudding out to me and laughed as he tried to persuade me to enjoy it. There were smears of stars and a brilliant moon but I don’t recollect seeing the greenish mechanical object in the sky or even caring about it, though Rita later told me that she’d looked for it and it had gone. The lilies, masses of them cascading down the hillside, shone a fierce white. I do remember very well the astounding luminosity of those lilies, floodlit by the moon in the black Nilgiri night. Taking off my clothes and extending my full length I rolled from the top of the hill all the way down, crushing lilies as I went, wetting my naked body with cool lily juice.

  DELUXE

  About eighteen months after my return from India the strangest thing happened. Though I’d say I was a sensitive man, I’m not a great one for supernatural experiences. Anything odd I’ve usually been able to account for in relatively comprehensible terms. What now took place, however, I have never been able to explain away.

  It began when I read in The Times newspaper an obituary under the headline ‘The Dowager Marchioness of Winchester’. To my astonishment this woman turned out to be Bapsy Pavry. Well, well, well, along the way Bapsy had hooked a marquess – and not any old marquess either but the Premier Marquess of England. Well done, Baps. All of which was quite new to me. But I was v
ery sorry she’d died. I’d missed the chance of meeting an unusual personality and listening to her colourful stories. I bet she was beautiful to the very end; she looked the type who would be.

  At the time I was involved as a free-lance editor with a punk glossy magazine called Deluxe and I thought a piece on Bapsy would hit the spot. But when I came to research it I couldn’t locate the Bapsy Pavry obituary. I thought I’d torn it out and kept it but, searching high and low without success, God knows what I’d done with it, so I thought I’d ask The Times to forward me a copy. After examining their records they reported back – to my great surprise – that no such obituary had been published by them. How odd. Maybe I’d befuddled the source? The nineteen-seventies were a befuddling period. Perhaps it had been in the Telegraph. When I contacted the Telegraph however, they said the same. Hadn’t published an obit of Bapsy Pavry. I rang all the relevant papers and drew blank, blank, blank. No obits anywhere. This was perturbing and – well – had she in fact died? None of them had the foggiest idea. They didn’t even know who she was.

  This unnerved me. So I backtracked and tried to work it out. I’d read an obituary in the newspaper – but no obituary had been published – and it was of someone who would certainly have rated an obituary had she died – but editors seemed not to know of her existence – so maybe she hadn’t died – so what had I read? Quite apart from the possibility of a phantom obituary, you’d think it a simple matter to ascertain whether or not a woman who’d been married to the Premier Marquess of England had died. Not a bit of it. I rang all possible authorities. No one knew whether she were alive or dead – and many didn’t know of her at all.

  Soon after this puzzle arose, I had lunch with John Betjeman. Which I did write up for Deluxe. The article incorporates the Reverend Gerard Irvine and his sister Rosemary who joined us at John’s house before we left for the restaurant. The relevant portion of the article ran as follows:

  DUNCAN: I had a very odd experience the other day. I read an obituary of Bapsy Pavry. Do you know her? I discovered her in The Indian Yearbook for 1942. Well, in this obituary I learned a lot more about her – that she had since become the Marchioness of Winchester, then the Dowager, how she’d made a full-scale assault on high society, got into trouble, and so on.

  GERRY: She had a battle for the Marquess with Mrs Fleming.

  SIR JOHN: Peter’s mother.

  ROSEMARY: And Ian’s.

  DUNCAN: Apparently Mrs Fleming sued her for alienation of her husband’s affection. But the funny thing was that when I telephoned The Times for a copy of the obituary, they said they hadn’t published one. No one else has either. So I phoned Nigel Dempster, the gossip columnist, and he said he’d last seen her alive and well at Ascot a few years ago. So where did that obituary come from which revealed to me new and accurate information about her?

  GERRY: You should put it down now while you remember. We might be able to use it as an example of precognition. Her husband was the oldest marquess ever. He died at the age of a hundred or something.

  SIR JOHN: Shall we go and eat?

  I don’t think Rosemary ever forgave me for calling her brother Gerry. She insisted that he was always called Gerard. But I know that before they arrived, John had referred to him as Gerry and it stuck. The second thing I’d got wrong in the above was about Mrs Fleming sueing Bapsy – it was the other way round. The enormous row between Bapsy and Ian Fleming’s mother was another whole limb of Pavriana I’d barely grasped. (Eve Fleming, widowed and very well-provided for when Valentine Fleming was killed in action in 1917, was subsequently one of the many mistresses of Augustus John and had a daughter by him.) Dempster also suggested I try the May Fair Hotel where sometimes Bapsy had lived. The May Fair made a search and said a woman of that name, either name, wasn’t staying there and – inexplicably in the light of subsequent events – claimed to know nothing about her. Debrett’s didn’t know anything and the more thoroughgoing Burke’s had ceased publication. I looked her up in my Burke’s 1959 under ‘Winchester’. That didn’t say much except that her husband was born in 1862 and had married Bapsy in 1952, he aged almost ninety. I did later discover that the Marquess died at the Metropole Hotel in Monte Carlo in 1962, just short of his hundredth birthday. Nowhere could I discover her birthdate and couldn’t recall it from the phantom obituary. I chanced across a second photograph of Bapsy, still the beauty, in Andrew Barrow’s book Gossip. I think the photo was taken in the 1950s. But when I asked Andrew he couldn’t add anything to that. It seemed an idea to write to the current Marquess of Winchester to ask the whereabouts of his ‘kinswoman’ – if that’s the term. Reference books gave his address as 6a Main Road, Irene, Transvaal, South Africa. Oh God, another one who jumped ship. There was no reply.

  Although the Bapsy story was getting more and more peculiar, my life was getting more and more complicated, and after several further shots at trying to discover whether or not she were alive, I gave it up as hopeless. The woman had vanished without trace.

  SUCCESS

  Nearly twenty years went by. Many things happened, including Rita’s death. She died in her fifties from a stroke. It hit her in church while she was discussing the details of her mother’s funeral with a priest. She keeled over in the aisle. And days later, in Stoke Mandeville Hospital where she’d been a much-loved hospital visitor, it was all over. This is not the place to write at length about her, except to mention that, after Ootacamund, Sarah and I accompanied Rita back to Sri Lanka; she returned to stay with the de Mels and we two took a room at a small hotel in Cinnamon Gardens and pursued our antics and intoxications.

  The point about getting out of one’s head on substances, especially in youth, is that things happen which otherwise wouldn’t. One minute we were spending a night with Greek sailors on their ship Hyperion in Colombo harbour – all I remember is skidding across water and climbing up the side of a metal cliff; must’ve passed out because I came to in a small cabin roused by a big soft cock tapping gently against my cheek. The next moment we were on our way to the Oliphant Estate house at Newara Eliya where Rita was installed in a four-poster bed by the owner. Somewhere along the way we acquired a tall and handsome American called John who worked for the Peace Corps and rowed for Yale. When he joined us he was in straight clothes but by the time he left us he was talking to the birds in Kandy’s Royal Botanical Gardens and wearing a sarong – so we did some good there I suppose.

  But on other occasions Sarah and I must’ve been a pain in the neck, falling about like boneless banshees. Exorbitant behaviour was interposed with periods sitting, waiting, lying on beds, looking at ceilings, stranded, trying to organise money. Re-reading the letters to my parents (which they preserved), I’m horrified at how much of the content is about wheedling money out of them. The seductive trap was that one could live for months in these Third World places on a few hundred pounds. I supplemented this with reviews for an amused Frank Granville Barker at Books & Bookmen who loved the idea of posting a hardback volume to an Asian outback and eventually receiving a review some months later in fluorescent ink with twirly cartoons round the edge. Such material as the Spectator was able to publish supplied a little more cash – however my letter of introduction from the editor was more valuable for giving entree. Officials at the British Embassy in Bangkok were so astonished that I should be a roving foreign correspondent for such a magazine that they rang the Spectator office in Gower Street. Gill Pyrah, who was editorial secretary at the time, picked up the phone and asked them ‘Have you seen him wearing tight, bright-yellow flared trousers?’ ‘Yes, we have as a matter of fact.’ ‘Then that’s Duncan.’

  At the Fisherman’s Inn in Galle, Sarah and I discovered that Robin Maugham, whom we were to meet, had moved on the day before. Galle was one of the hottest places I’ve ever been. The tropical gardens of the hotel were sticky with exuded juices and never caught even the slightest breeze. The sea itself was hot; at least that part of it was which we were able to access. We sat in the slurpi
ng, shallow wavelets of a cove wondering why we were there, but after a while even that question-with-many-answers was too precise. Lethargy flattened us.

  Sarah and I took turns at reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which I’d purchased at the Hotel Taprobane in Colombo. Its pages stored a vitality which had been entirely sucked out of our surroundings by the heat and we fought limply for possession of it. There were a couple of evening visits to the New Oriental Hotel in Galle Fort, where we sought solace beneath the fans and sat side by side staring into space with iced drinks in front of us. I can see now the condensation from those tall glasses soaking the tablecloth. Attempts to link up with Rita and her hosts were not successful. The de Mels were part of the political establishment and she was torn between looning with us and keeping us at arm’s length. Rita was ‘apart’ in other ways. Where possible without offending the locals, Sarah liked to sunbathe topless, or naked in secret spots; I loved sunbathing too but, after burning my balls in Goa, usually dropped a little scarf over my bits. Rita however couldn’t go into the sun at all. There was a generational difference too, not so much in years as in epochs. Sarah and I were in our mid-twenties but Rita was an older woman who’d had a straight married life before she knew us. We were 1960 s kids, she’d been a 1950 s girl. In the end a tough telegram from April Ashley told Rita to return to England and look after her four children. ‘She’s envious,’ said Rita, which was doubtless true, but that didn’t alter the facts – Rita had to go back.