Then to Bombay for the fade-out. It is in that great Victorian city of her birth that she receives the final letter in the archive. It is from Clarence House and is dated 3i st of January 1995, the year of Bapsy’s death, and after all that exasperated and exasperating correspondence, something a little more personal, a little more real:
Dear Lady Winchester,
I am writing in reply to your letter to the Lady-in-waiting and to Queen Elizabeth. [Can I interrupt a second? Buckingham Palace told me that this refers to the Queen Mother, since in official correspondence Queen Elizabeth II is always just ‘the Queen’. Bapsy forms a valiant triumvirate with the Queen Mother and Barbara Cartland as women who lived the century.] I have had the opportunity of giving your letter to Her Majesty and I am to say that she was very distressed to hear of your long illness and to know that you are unable to leave your room. Queen Elizabeth remembers with pleasure the letters you have sent her over the last 62 years, and has asked me, on her behalf, to send you her very best wishes and her hopes and prayers that the future will bring you peace. May I add my own wishes too, as I remember you well at my wedding in i950, when my maiden name was Elphinstone.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Rhodes.
How happy this letter must have made Bapsy, the personal wave at last from the great world she had never really entered, coming as it did from the fount of all feminine nobility and belonging and influence, from none other than Elizabeth the Queen-Empress herself, wife of George VI, the last King-Emperor of India. With impenetrable Indian ink, Bapsy has obliterated the Bombay address it was posted to. Her final abode must have been insufficiently glamorous for posterity’s eyes. But that last letter reminds us how by taking a little trouble now and again, by thinking a little about the other without any great inconvenience to oneself, by daring to be simple and truthful and well-mannered, one can cancel a void, and bring ease and delight where there was uncertainty and pain. Margaret Rhodes had accomplished more than she knew with that friendly, humane touch; or perhaps she did know, which is why she had the job.
Mrs Brisbane, the Winchester archivist, poked her head round the door. ‘Finished?’
‘Yes, thank-you.’
‘Do you want to see the portrait?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s a big gaudy thing. We don’t know what to do with it.’
‘I think I’ve finished.’
But not quite. The Indian Yearbook entry on her father – I’m looking at it now – said that he had three sons and three daughters. Bapsy must have had family back in Bombay, plenty of family, even though not a jot in the archive makes any mention of them. I rang Mr Dalal. He said ‘She took everything back to Bombay except the material she donated to Winchester.’
‘You don’t know if any other papers exist?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘And what about her family – cousins, nieces, nephews?’
‘I’m not sure of the family set-up. But I’m going to Bombay soon and can ask for you. She was going to donate money to us for a library but placed so many conditions on it that we couldn’t accept. The main stumbling block was that she said the room had to be named after her. I explained that at Zoroastrian House we don’t name things after people. It was a principle we felt we couldn’t break and so we lost the donation – but created the library anyway with money from another source.’
‘I see. Can I ask you another question?’
‘Please do.’
‘How do you bury your dead in England?’
‘We don’t have a Tower of Silence here unfortunately.’
‘Well, we don’t have vultures here either.’
‘You don’t need vultures – you have crows. But in 1861 we bought a burial plot in Brookwood – it’s near Woking – where we have either cremation or interment available, according to wishes. Jal and Bapsy Pavry had hollow graves at Brookwood, in case they died in England. They didn’t need them in the end, but we put inscriptions on them anyway.’
‘What do the inscriptions say?’
‘Oh nothing. Very simple.’
‘But can you tell me what?’
‘Yes, of course. Just so-and-so, the name – with the dates.’
POSTSCRIPT
The problem of Bapsy’s Will was resolved when Winchester City Council at long last refurbished a reception room in the Guildhall and named it after her. It was opened in June 2009 and is dominated by Frank Salisbury’s ‘big gaudy’ portrait. And Keith McVeigh tells me that the Augustus John portrait of Bapsy, which hung in the Royal Academy, was sold at Christie’s in 2000 for £7637, a little over half its estimate.
CHAPTER THREE Waiting for Maruma
Scotland is not a place I’d normally wish to visit, but Luca was persuasive. ‘I want you to do the story,’ he said. It was sunny and surprisingly warm in the late summer of 1995 when he flew to London from Zurich. We met at King’s Cross Station, 11.30 am on a Friday, and took the express up to Edinburgh. I still had my doubts and felt displaced; I’d done the Scottish capital some years before and had no reason to hang about there. Neither fortunately did Luca who found our connection and chivvied me on to the Highland railway which transported us before sundown to Mallaig on Scotland’s west coast.
We spent the night in a B&B with pink plastic curtains and the following morning boarded a ferry to the Hebrides. This was more like it. I remember as a young boy, three or four years old – this is one of my earliest memories from when my family lived in Harrow – being deeply affected by the song ‘The Skye Boat Song’. Not that I knew where Skye was, but the song was a popular radio request and some-thing sweetly strange and yearning touched me even at that age, not only in the beauty of the tune but also through the sound effects of waves and seagulls on the recording. Is this early evidence of a vagabond soul? And now fifty years later the Hebrides were happening to me for the very first time. The interpenetration of sea, sky and land, in which no one element dominated the others or was indeed readily discernible from them, struck an exalted note which lifted our spirits. Well, Luca’s didn’t need lifting but mine did (it had been a rotten year).
But we were sailing not to Skye but to its small, secretive neighbour, the Isle of Eigg. At our advance it rose from the sea like a fortress of pewter and was distinguished by a dramatic natural feature at its centre, a tower of rock, which at our present distance resembled a shark’s fin, giving the prospect an air of menace out of Rider Haggard or Steven Spielberg. On deck I buttoned up my Levi’s jacket and was grateful for its quilted lining because there was a chilly edge to the wind. The ferry bumped and foamed through fluttering waters and as it came closer, Eigg’s forbidding outline inflated into three dimensions. Detail emerged in bright colours – green, purple, brown, splashes of red and white – and Luca started to bob about with his camera. The island is only twenty-four square miles in extent but has a great variety of landscape due to the distortions brought about by the cooling and erosion of volcanic rock. Among its craggy elevations, dominated always by that massive, threatening plug of stone, we would discover flowery meadows, pocket woods and lakes, and little lush valleys. I’d never seen anything like it. Joseph Brodsky, in his poem Odysseus to Telemachus, claims that to a wanderer, all islands look more or less the same. But this is untrue. A wanderer is not a blind man and every island has its particulars. At first glance it was already clear why an artist had bought this one.
Nothing else was clear about that arrangement. Who was this artist from somewhere in Germany who had paid four million marks to become the new Laird of Eigg? Why did he call himself Maruma when his real name, according to newspaper clippings, was Marlin Eckhard? If that was his real name. Maybe it was Martin or Merlin or Mertin. These things do get garbled. And where had the money come from and what were Marlin’s plans? The sixty-five or so inhabitants of the island were especially keen to have a response to the last question, since their personal futures depended on it: they were his tenants.
Reportedly he had purchased the island – and them – after flying over it in a helicopter, a case of love at first sight. Whereupon Maruma came down to earth and introduced himself and his girlfriend to the locals and conducted himself, apparently, in a charming manner, before getting back into the helicopter, rising into the air, and vanishing over the horizon. Since when – nothing. The islanders had heard and seen absolutely nothing more. Total silence. Utter paralysis. On the other hand the previous laird had been hated. His name was Keith Schellenberg, an Englishman of Liechtenstein descent, and his period of sway had made the islanders welcome any change of ownership whatsoever. They were trying hard to be optimistic.
According to the press reports, Maruma described himself as an artist of fire energy. Well – perhaps he was a Zoroastrian. It would be a good thing if he were, since the Parsis, as we know, are an enterprising bunch. But somehow I doubted he would be. The man operated from an establishment called the Maruma Centre in Stuttgart. I have a number of friends dotted about Germany. None of them knew anything about a Maruma Centre. One tried to contact it and discovered that the Centre was not open to the public. Maruma himself, until the Eigg purchase, was unknown in the art world, and the purchase of Eigg had been his only notable act to date – but was it art? When in doubt, call it an installation. Or a performance. The original and perhaps dangerous aspect of this installation was that it was inhabited by real people of non-submissive character who might well have performance ideas of their own.
It was Luca who first heard about the purchase. I’d met Luca through the editor of Tages-Anzeiger who told me to root him out in the East End of London where Luca was living on a photography scholarship. He wore spectacles with heavy frames like Peter Sellers’s and I took to him immediately when he said he was learning English from Blackadder on television (he was fluent in a couple of months but would sometimes address others as ‘My liege’). He told me that the Swiss had loads of scholarships – and that I too could probably get one if I put in the right proposal. His financing was always very glossy, rather mysterious, and quite plentiful. He also asked me if I’d try to get Maruma on the phone and chat him up for a rendezvous on his island.
So I’d rung the Maruma Centre in Stuttgart. Every day Maruma was not there, and I never in fact worked out who was there. Or Maruma was in a meeting. Or Maruma was abroad. Or he couldn’t be disturbed – meditating on fire presumably, or even in front of a fire (which is something I very much like doing myself). Then one day the girl said ‘Who’s calling?’ and I, yet again, said who I was, and to my astonishment she said ‘Hold on a second’ and trans-ferred the call.
‘Oh…this is a surprise.’ I was wrong-footed and my thoughts were elsewhere.
‘Yes.’
‘Is that Maruma?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah – so – right – well, can you tell me what the Maruma Centre is?’
‘It is the place where we are.’
‘And your art. Can you tell me about your art?’
‘My art?’
‘Yes.’
‘It is better not on the telephone.’
‘What is this fire energy you talk of?’
‘You don’t know what fire is?’
‘Well, can you mail me something about your art?’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Some printed stuff perhaps. I haven’t the faintest idea what you do.’
‘There is no mystery.’
‘Oh good. Do you set things on fire?’
‘Perhaps there is a mystery. It is better you visit us on Eigg and we discuss it face to face. I am fed up with journalists writing stupid things.’
‘I’m a writer. I write books.’
‘That is better. Maybe we could write a book about Eigg. Something together. Something poetic.’
Maruma’s tone wasn’t in the least unfriendly and there was a touch of sadness in his voice which was very appealing. I liked him immediately and cast one eye at the photo of him cut from a German newspaper: chubby gentle face with untidy black hair hanging in long swatches from beneath a black beret worn on one side, and a fluffy black jumper of indecipherable design. Only German artists ever look like this. Which is proof – of sorts – that something was authentic somewhere.
‘I could visit you in Stuttgart,’ I said, ‘but I don’t want to.’
‘No – I understand – you understand – the fire energy is on Eigg,’ he replied.
I was thankful for that. Looking for fire energy in Stuttgart was probably doomed to failure. ‘When are you next
going to Eigg?’
‘I think soon,’ he replied.
‘Soon? Seriously soon?’
‘Yes. We have plans to go there maybe end of the month. Or beginning next month.’
‘So we could meet there?’
‘Of course.’
He did sound genuine. Therefore Luca and I, on the strength of this, had decided to travel up to Eigg, find somewhere to stay, tuck ourselves in, and wait for him to arrive.
And wait we certainly did.
The island’s only hostelry was at Kildonan, a farm belonging to a family called the Carrs. It has a fine stone house facing the broad channel which separates Eigg from the mainland, and entry to it is reached along a gulley filled with ferns and rowan trees. In England the rowan is considered a protection against witchcraft – up here, I’m not so sure. But laden with orange berries at this time of year, the rowans warmed us as we approached Kildonan’s front door.
Luca and I spent the first couple of days exploring the island by mountain-bike and eating Mrs Carr’s delicious dinners. There were two churches to be visited, one Protestant and the other Catholic, and people – if they went to church at all – usually went to both. There was in addition a grey corrugated iron hut which served the community as a shop and a post-office. It was open on most days and Luca told me that when he first went to the post office he found two women in there, drunk on the floor gurgling like babies. Drinking is the most visible of the island’s recreations. Outside the post office a giant litter bin made from wire was piled to the brim and overflowing around its base with the empty scarlet tins of McEwen’s Export Beer. The bin stood out like a sentinel among the greens and browns of its setting. But empty scarlet beer tins and empty whisky bottles might be encountered anywhere – in caves, in fields, in the churchyards. Quite a popular idea was to place an empty whisky bottle defiantly upright on an exposed rock.
There was generally a fair number of things lying about. One field in particular had become a cemetery for rusting artefacts. Abandoned cars, ploughs and tractors, ovens and fridges were cast about on the turf as though objects in a sculpture park, and through them a herd of rusty brown cows would usually be shuffling and grazing. Perhaps the sculptor Anthony Gormley had contrived it, since he specialises in violating wild empty spaces. On enquiry however we learned that the islanders had often requested help in carting this stuff away, but the local authority always said that without a deep-water pier it would be too expensive a task. The construction of a deep-water pier had been under discussion for more than thirty years. When more urgent conversation slackened on Eigg, this topic was a regular stand-by.
Of Eigg’s seven thousand farmed acres, about half belonged to the Laird’s farm; another two thousand acres, mostly sheep and cattle, were managed by the Carrs of Kildonan; the remainder belonged to various crofters centred on the straggling village of Cleadale which hunkers beneath a spectacular ridge of rock several miles long. The first sight of Cleadale reminded me of the opening of Peake’s Titus Groan wherein is described the village beneath the huge walls of Gormenghast Castle, its mean dwellings granted, by ancient law, a ‘chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them’. Peake goes on to describe the black tower at the centre of the castle ‘which arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven,’ and one cannot help being reminded of the natural rock tower which does someth
ing very like that at the centre of Eigg.
The Cleadale crofters did have security according to ancient rights. But the Carrs perversely did not. Their farm was subject to a different, murkier arrangement. Such are the knotted anomalies of old, lonely places. And what of Maruma who had stumbled into this faraway bog of hope and tradition? Rumours had started to hot up. The end of the month was in sight and Maruma the Deliverer was said to be arriving at the week-end. That evening at Kildonan I asked Colin Carr if he’d heard anything more specific concerning the Laird’s visit. He was nervous and said he’d heard nothing. Dinner was quiet – there was one other couple staying and they were tired from a day’s hike-about.
After dinner Luca and I sat either side of the dying fire in the sitting-room, sinking into cushioned easy chairs, and we gradually finished the remains of the claret. The rest of the house fell silent. Strong winds moaned beyond the walls, and the cold and sullen seas heaved blackly all round the island. For the first time we felt far away, on this exposed, northern tip of Europe. Luca lit another cigarette and said ‘I’ve had an offer of a job in Venice after this. Would you like to come too?’
‘Thanks. But I don’t think I would.’
How to Disappear Page 9