How to Disappear

by Duncan Fallowell

  ‘Is there loads of stuff?’

  ‘There are nine large cardboard boxes containing various things.’

  On what turned out to be the wettest and windiest November day in Lord knows how many years, I steamed down to Hampshire in the car and found an hotel not far from the city. It was called the Marwell Safari Lodge and they put me in the Gazelle Pavilion. Outside the rain turned to sleet.

  WINCHESTER 1996

  The city of Winchester had greatly changed since last I was there. That had been over thirty years previously, while still at school, when during the summer holidays I was touring cathedral cities with a friend. In those days Winchester was still coherent architecturally but, like so many historic towns, it has since been broken up. Its City Council offices for example must be quite the nastiest in the whole of England, modernism degraded to a big dead lump. Fortunately Bapsy Pavry’s archive was not housed there but in a group of old houses called the Historic Resources Centre. Yesterday’s downpour had cleared to a sunny sky, with a bitter wind driving down from the north, and crows brayed from the gables as I entered this quaintly huddled facility.

  The first shock came when Mrs Brisbane asked ‘Do you know about her Will?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘She left the City of Winchester quite a lot of money.’

  ‘Really? How much?’

  ‘Something in the nature of a million pounds.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘It was agreed before she died. It’s supposed to be used for the creation of a memorial hall with her name on it. But we’ve got enough halls.’

  ‘You should have told her that before agreeing to take the money.’

  ‘It’s certainly a knotty problem. The photocopier’s over there if you want to copy anything.’

  The problem of the bequest was compounded by the fact that Bapsy’s precise conditions on the gift had been determined many years before, during her one and only visit to Winchester in 1955. Subsequently a fire in the Guildhall destroyed the relevant records and the Mayor was too embarrassed to ask her to repeat the conditions. The Council still hoped to get the money without having its hands tied, just as it also accepted the gift of her portrait by Frank Salisbury but hid it away. Bapsy was right to place conditions on her gift. As the destruction of much of Winchester proves, the Council has a distressing record of philistinism. Not long ago, in order to create a car park, the Council intended to demolish the graceful Peninsula Barracks at the top of the town, designed in part by Christopher Wren, until a high-profile campaign by the pressure group SAVE blocked the bulldozers. The Barracks have since been converted into flats which are highly sought after and the whole compound become a great adornment to the city.

  Mrs Brisbane took me through several low vestibules to a long oak table. The nine cardboard cartons of Bapsy’s archive were waiting beside it on the cold floor and Mrs Brisbane explained what they variously contained. I thanked her, sat down at the table, took a deep breath, and leaned into the first big box. With source documents it’s no good being hasty. You have to slow right down, sift in a systematic yet leisurely manner, allow yourself to be absorbed by another world. I’d brought along a stack of ham & mustard sandwiches for the duration.

  The material was divided broadly into documents and objects. The documents had been subdivided into large envelopes by year and began chronologically with an invitation to a Buckingham Palace garden party on June 25th 1924. Most of the letters were on coroneted paper with red, blue or green borders, sometimes black for mourning, and were nearly all replies from notables to initiatives from Bapsy. Many were thank-you’s for being sent either her own book or her brother’s book or both; among the fortunate recipients were Tagore, G. B. Shaw, several Archbishops of Canterbury, the Maharajah of Kapurthala, the Maharajah of Jaipur, the Aga Khan, Queen Mary, the Duchess of York, the President of France, Neville Chamberlain, the Viceroy of India, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

  The charity ball committee, then as now, was a route for female social advancement (men on such committees are ‘suspect’) and here one discovered Bapsy helping out the British Empire Cancer Campaign at the Dorchester Hotel, or the National Children Adoption Association ‘do’ at the Grosvenor House Hotel. Edwina Mount-batten, Loelia Westminster and the Countess of Athlone could always rely on Bapsy and her brother to sell tickets for these heart-rending fundraisers. One saw too copious evidence of another of Bapsy’s ploys for penetrating the monde: whenever she read in the paper of anyone important suffering a bereavement, she would fire off a letter of condolence and would thereafter sweep into the memorial service like an old friend of someone who was usually a complete stranger to her. Royal film premieres start to feature in the nineteen-thirties but her attempts to claw her way further into royal circles were adroitly blocked:

  Letter from the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cromer, 6th June 1937

  Dear Miss Pavry,

  In answer to your letter of Dec 11th which reached me recently I am writing to say that as you were presented at Court in 1928 this presentation stands, and no re-presentations are made on the occasion of a new Sovereign; while Summonses to court are restricted to married ladies desirous of making presentations.

  Yours sincerely,

  Cromer

  By 1930 Bapsy was living at the May Fair Hotel in Berkeley Square and paying visits to the USA (usually to Washington) or to India. Officially the family still lived at Sunama House in Bombay’s posh residential district of Malabar Hill where most of the grand villas have since been destroyed.

  Here is an example of the best sort of invitation which would arrive at Sunama House: ‘The Aide de Camp in waiting is commanded by His Excellency the Viceroy to invite Miss Bapsy Pavry and Dr Jal Pavry to an Investiture to be held at “The Viceroy’s House” New Delhi on Saturday the 27 th of February 1937 at 9.20 pm. Full dress.’ What a funny time of day. 9.20 pm. The Empire abounded with such apparent eccentricities but there was always a seed of logic behind them. Obviously after dinner.

  On April 9th 1939 a great anniversary would come to pass. Her father who was, you recall, a Parsi High Priest of some arcane description, was going to reach eighty years of age. Rulers across an unsuspecting globe were informed of this in advance by a large mail-out from brother and sister, and the secretaries of many heads of state duly responded with letters of congratulation, all carefully filed here. In a world of good manners it is amazing what pushy people can achieve.

  There’s a bit of a gap in the archive 1940-46. She was staying for the Second World War mostly at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, where Sarah Moffett and I stayed (though the floor manager disapproved of us and our hippy attire and showed great ill-temper if ever we asked him anything, once even shouting insults at us across the main foyer). Not long ago the hotel was subjected to a murderous assault by Islamic terrorists and I noticed on the television pictures that the hotel’s once airy interior spaces have been clogged up with little shops.

  Singapore fell but India held, and Bapsy’s box reveals that, though other invitations were thin on the ground, the viceregal garden parties continued ceremoniously throughout the war – ‘Morning dress or Lounge suits’. But the social round doesn’t gear up properly again until the Aga Khan’s Weighing Against Diamonds ceremony in March 1946 at the Bombay Cricket Club. This was taken to be the social event which signalled back-to-normal and soon the old routine is in full swing.

  And on and on it goes. The universe may change but not the pattern of Bapsy’s life. The May Fair Hotel’s beautiful premises in Berkeley Square had been demolished before the war (on the eastern side where Horace Walpole’s house stood – that came down too) to be replaced by plain brick showrooms. The hotel moved to a new, characterless building in Stratton Street, and Bapsy moved with it; followed by winter at the Washington Hilton or in Bombay. I looked up the year I thought I read the phantom obituary – 1977. Empty envelope. Nothing in the archive. Very appropriat
e.

  On turning to the boxes of objects, I had to cope with a vast trove of gimcrack rubbish: medallions, pins, salvers, tickets to Ascot, scrolls recording her and her brother’s degrees from Columbia University in New York, delegate-badges to vainglorious international conferences, keys to cities which she’d purchased at souvenir counters, signed photographs from the Kings of Arabia and Morocco, of Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece and Italy, from sundry Popes and astronauts, from Mary Pickford, President Nehru, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Emperor of Ethiopia, the Crown Princess of Japan, Eamon de Valera, Stanley Baldwin, the Windsors, Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Dan Quayle…Dan Quayle? Remember him? I don’t.

  It was queasily fascinating – no – more than that – it was horrible and nauseating, this discrepancy between the pitch of her ambition and the banality of the result. Bapsy must have been so personal and ingratiating in her approach; the secretarial responses are so pleasantly impersonal. Yet what more could she expect? It was not that she merely wanted to associate with the great, it was that her whole life was a campaign to become one of the great figures of the age, and doomed on that account, because she never really did anything except social-climb. You can’t be great by association. And what, I wondered, had happened to the truly personal correspondence and photographs? Letters to and from real friends. Photographs of family members or kindred events. Did she destroy them or did she never have any? Living in hotels, did she have no private circle, no domestic world? Her brother died in 1985 but there is nothing of him here, not a snap, not a note, nothing. And no bank records for her, no medical or hotel or shopping bills. Nothing intimate. And nothing of Bapsy herself. Nothing in her voice. Not a single letter of Bapsy’s own anywhere, not even carbon copies. Just a stack of replies to what must have been received by public figures with embarrassment. The whole thing was pathetic really.

  The only personal letters retained in the archive are a small number she received from Monty Winchester, the husband, who signs himself ‘Henry’. In October 1952 he is writing from the Metropole Hotel to Bapsy at the May Fair – Monty wants a simple funeral when the time comes, he wants to be cremated, and the ashes are to be placed in the family vault at Amport. In January 1953 he’s writing ‘My darling Bapsy…I am the luckiest man in the world to have the most wonderful wife in the world. Your devotion, loyalty and love and affection have made my life the happiest ever.’ And that’s it. No mention of Mrs Fleming or law suits or divorces.

  But Monty’s abrupt and above all unexplained switch to the other woman, unexplained to Bapsy, that is, was to destroy her peace of mind for ever. When the other party has a change of heart but will not tell you why they have, or indeed that they have – this is the cruellest mystery of all, for the mind cannot rest but cogitates ceaselessly. What happened to turn warm to cold and yes to no? Why am I suddenly repulsive? Is it something I am or was it something I did? Who whispered what into your ear? Were there other circumstances I don’t know about and which could enable me to forgive you, or you to forgive me? People who lead others up the garden path and then vanish and offer no reason, they are, well, it’s difficult for callousness to get any lower. Where there was contact they create an abyss. In place of meaning they offer darkness, in place of understanding only an anxious and corrosive questioning of the empty air. In court she would say later that she felt as though her husband had ‘murdered’ her. The Marquess did this, as so many do, by hiding behind good manners and feebleness, assuring her against all the evidence of his actions that he was still devotedly hers. In this instance, for all her vulgarity, absurdity, and naivety, I am entirely on Bapsy’s side against that withered old shit Monty.

  Nonetheless Bapsy had been quick to exploit her apotheosis as the Premier Marchioness of England. Given the tenor of the replies, it is not difficult to divine the gist of what her own letters must have contained. Only days after her marriage, she is pestering the Chester Herald at the College of Arms over what she should wear for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The reply is a polite be-patient. Knowing what we know, subsequent letters on the same subject from the Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms at the Earl Marshal’s office in Belgrave Square are poignant indeed:

  10th December 1952

  Dear Lady Winchester,

  I have to inform you that it would be quite in order for you to wear a Sari underneath your Kirtle and train if you attend the Coronation. I must, however, add that in the event of your wearing a Sari it should be of white or cream coloured material with silver or gold but no colour.

  But she wanted more.

  1st January 1953

  Dear Lady Winchester,

  Thank you for your letter to me in reply to mine…The wearing of a tiara is optional although it is hoped that most Peeresses will wear one. I must point out, however, that the wearing of the Coronet will be obligatory and that it should be borne in mind that it can be put on only after the Queen has been crowned, and must therefore be done without the aid of a looking-glass. I hope you will not mind my pointing this out to you but you might find some difficulty in doing this if the Sari is draped over your head;

  I must leave this to your own ingenuity.

  Those Bluemantle Pursuivants of Arms think of everything – though it’s rather creepy to find one of them so assiduously at work on New Year’s Day. With estrangement from the Marquess on her mind, Bapsy’s attempts to avoid being marginalised turned to panic. Repeatedly she badgered the Earl Marshall’s office to be included in Royal or State occasions or indeed in any occasions whatsoever. The Earl Marshall’s secretary from 1954 was Richard Graham-Vivian, who had been Bluemantle Pursuivant of Arms in the nineteen-thirties. He was the cousin of Evelyn Waugh’s boyfriend Alastair Graham (of whom much more in chapter four) and Graham-Vivian showed great skill in neutralising her appeals without either giving offence or giving an inch. If protocol or her harassment of them allowed no way out, courtiers would resort to the time-honoured snub of sticking Bapsy behind a pillar at the occasion into which she’d forced her way. Barbara Cartland too was sometimes on the receiving end of that one, for example at the marriage of her step-granddaughter Diana Spencer to the Prince of Wales.

  It is remarkable to relate but the last Bapsy box – the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties – shows virtually no difference from the first box in the nineteen-twenties, except that in the absence of an Indian Viceroy, the Royal factor proper has gone up. Letters to all members of the British Royal Family on their birthdays are politely and affably answered by courtiers (who are well trained in this tedious task and have been accustomed to huge quantities of unsolicited communication throughout history). And the poor darling is still sending out copies of her one and only book; for that singular gift, thank-yous arrive from the Library of Congress, the Royal Geographical Society, Harvard University. One only wonders why these august bodies had not received their copies donkey’s years before. Perhaps they had.

  Bapsy’s breathtaking resilience, her social crudeness, her absolute refusal ever to pick up a dropped hint, also keep her up to snuff on the London-Bombay-Washington round. She has already for many, many years been writing to the children or grandchildren of the people she used to write to, expressing sorrow and sympathy over their parents’ or grandparents’ demise. By now Bapsy was surreal, monstrous, an ineradicable constant and risible hanger-on in a rapidly changing world. In this final box the replies from persons-in-waiting or secretaries to members of the British Royal Family outnumber all the other letters in it: she’d become a crank who, judging from the unfailingly courteous apologies often contained in these letters, frequently wrote again if the answers were insufficiently prompt or grovelling. And all the while, as I squirrel through the cardboard cartons at the oak table, there hangs on the wall at my back an aerial photograph of Winchester city before the terrible demolitions began, to remind one of the glorious streets which have been ravaged or altogether lost.

  For the year 1992 there is recorded a d
onation by Bapsy of £24,000 to Oxford University, founding two awards in inter-national peace and understanding, in memory of her and of her brother. What happened to the awards? I’ve never heard of any such award. I must write to whomever you write to about such things. Perhaps I could snaffle one for this piece you’re reading. Not that twenty-four grand would generate much. A thousand quid per annum max? That’s all right, even to-day. I could have great fun with a thousand quid. Oh dear, I hope Bapsy’s not contagious – her heckling for responses, answers, resolutions. In life one can’t have all the answers. There are always more questions. If you push it, everything peters out in questions in the end. And all this ‘in memory of’; she had no children of course or serious reputation or other form of perpetuity.

  On December 26th 1992 Bapsy was ninety years old; the letters of congratulation from the Royal Family downwards are all in reply to those from her informing them of this triumphant anniversary. And the one unsolicited person in the whole world who was trying to find her – me – couldn’t! If only I had a handle to my name, her nose would’ve tipped up in the air and by infallible instinct she would have been on to me within the hour. This birthday also means that The Times obit had it wrong; she was not 93 but still only 92 when she died. Unless she’d decided to give herself an official birthday as well as a real one, choosing in the former case to follow Jesus by twenty-four hours. Bapsy is last registered at the Washington Hilton in 1993, and she received correspondence at the May Fair Hotel up to 1994. This is incredible really, that she kept it up for so long, even with two passports. She was obviously one of those double-passport people, which I’ve never been. They’re getting more and more common, aren’t they, the double-passport people. I’ve never knowingly met a triple-passport person but having three passports, that’s probably a rapidly increasing genus too. Like so many misfits, Bapsy was a pioneer. As for her madcap social behaviour, it was tailor-made for the internet: lots of clicks, little substance, and all smeared into a personal fantasy of self.