Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Grand Guignol

  NEWPORT SUITED ALAN. His house on John Street was in the old and attractive part of the town. The porch, clapboarded walls and miniature garden had an air of simplicity. In contrast, he had crammed this bijou residence with furniture, pictures, bits and pieces that he had shipped from England. A few feet to one side stood another period house that he turned into a library. And a few feet to the other side was yet another house in the same style, bought in the first place as a home for Mary Jean’s son Dan.

  Here Alan’s social gifts were at full stretch. In the summer season it was exhilarating but exhausting to stay with him and to drive along Bellevue Avenue for lunches, dinners and cocktail parties in one or another of the great stone mansions that testify to better, richer, times. Alan seemed to know all the families who gathered at Bailey’s Beach, an exclusive club with cabins along the sandy shore and a pool in which to swim lengths. Food and gossip were of the highest standards. The dolce far niente atmosphere evaporated once when Alan had to write and mail a theatre review. The deadline came and went. I couldn’t lock him into his room as Poppy had done. That evening we went to a black tie dance. Around midnight I made him drive me home on the assumption that he would be bound to sit down at his typewriter. Before I feel asleep I heard him driving back to the dance. At breakfast next morning, he hammered out the review in about twenty minutes.

  Many who lived in Newport had nothing to do with the Social Register, never set foot in Bailey’s Beach and kept themselves to themselves. Alan was one of the few who managed to overlap two very different sets. Clarissa had accompanied her mother to buy clothes from Hardy Amies, but I met him only when he came to the house with something to confide. One weekend, he had been the guest of Oatsie Charles, a formidable and idiosyncratic lady whose opinion mattered very greatly in Newport. “Oatsie was away but she’d given me the run of her house,” as Hardy told it, “and Alan had recommended a gay bar in the town.” When he was there, someone came up and asked him to dance. This was Larry Hudson. “Larry liked the older man,” Hardy went on regretfully. “Our affair lasted the weekend. Squalid, really, the sort of thing you straights don’t know about.”

  Larry was in his late twenties when Hardy introduced him to Alan. Originally he came from Boston, and his sister and her husband, a master sergeant in the air force, still lived there. Quite tall, trim, he was handsome but his face was expressionless, the gaze hard, his smile an unsmiling brief grimace. His movements were careful, slow, as if something might be wrong. Education after schooling had been out of the question. Literature, classical music, the Newport festival, the arts that had been Alan’s lifelong pursuit, were of no interest to him. He sat for hours by himself soaking up television soaps. In an equally solitary pursuit, he spent afternoons going out in one of the kayaks that Alan had been persuaded to buy for him. Ambition began and ended in the search for the older man who could keep him in style and provide a credit card.

  To all and sundry, Alan spoke of Larry as his chauffeur, and Larry indeed did drive their expensive Buick. The outward and visible signal that Larry was not a chauffeur was an enamel ring, turquoise in colour. Alan wore this present from Larry on the fourth finger of his left hand between Poppy’s thin gold wedding ring and Mary Jean’s thick gold wedding ring. You couldn’t fail to goggle at it. Alan had a way of looking at Larry with devotion, but in his eyes was an element of fear. I thought I could detect in Larry a fury that he could neither repress nor express. Staying with Alan, Stephen Spender, a kindred spirit, had come to the same conclusion. Acting on impulse, I asked him if Larry might murder Alan. Yes, Stephen answered after a lengthy pause, he very well might.

  The ill-assorted couple arranged to spend their time together in Newport or in Alan’s tiny apartment in New York, with trips and river cruises in Europe. What they appeared to have most in common was lunching and dining out in the full range of restaurants and hotels from Dunkin’ Donuts to the Ritz. Alan introduced Larry to friends and acquaintances including Midnight Mollie. At Christmas, Larry took Alan to Boston, and described deadpan how Alan regaled his sister and her master sergeant husband with anecdotes about Harold Nicolson at Sissinghurst and Osbert Sitwell at Montegufoni.

  One winter, Alan invited Clarissa and me to Barbados. From our hotel room we could look across a loggia to the room whose door Alan and Larry left open so they could be seen in bed together. Working regularly as a tour manager, Clarissa was due to take a group to China. I was going as well and for an eightieth birthday present we invited Alan to travel with us. When he refused, I gave a celebratory dinner for him at the Black Pearl restaurant in Newport. The only woman present among a dozen of Larry’s older men, Oatsie was sitting next to me when suddenly she growled, “What the hell are we doing here?” I used to stay in the house bought for Dan. The kitchen was not really used, and Alan’s will was left lying openly on the sideboard just as once Mr Howden’s psychoanalysis had been left for me to read.

  This was his way of communicating that I had been disinherited in favour of Larry.

  My diary has accounts of Larry’s reaction to my arrival in John Street from London. “Moments later, Larry comes down the stairs, goes out of the door, bangs it to and is gone. No goodbyes. Alan is surprised too. Apparently he’s driven off to Florida. This gives Alan some chance to discuss Larry’s character. He presents him as moody, no friends, truly content to watch Top Gun but also complain of the absence of social life, bored, harassing Alan on the subject.” Alan’s housekeeper, Mrs Busche, had emigrated after the war from Germany. In staccato English she would reminisce about happy times long ago on parade in her tidy Deutsche Mädchen uniform. She had witnessed Larry building a bonfire in the little yard between the houses, and burning two books I’d written and given to Alan, Paris in the Third Reich and The War That Never Was. From her and her daughter-in-law Mimi I learnt that Larry was HIV-positive. The doctor had prescribed sixteen pills daily but he had become so unstable that he swallowed them down with vodka.

  As he aged, Alan developed diabetes so extreme that he had to take a blood-sugar reading every mealtime. In pain, he began to need nursing. My diary notes a trans-Atlantic call from the head of the nursing agency. “She says that her nurses no longer have access daily to Alan. Larry won’t let them in. He is determined to have control. If he were to double the dose of insulin, he could kill Alan and nobody would know … the nurses hear verbal abuse – ‘Get out of bed, you lazy sonofabitch’ – and Alan has bruises on or about his face. So she is wondering whether to inform the social services, hesitating only because of Larry’s volatility.” Alan, she concluded, was showing “the battered wife syndrome.”

  A distressed Alan discussed coming to live with us in London. That would have meant abandoning Larry, which ultimately he could not bring himself to do. Larry’s immune system had failed – Alan was never able to utter the word AIDS. Confiding, and so to speak making his peace, Larry allowed me to have my one and only glimpse into the real person he buried so carefully within himself. Alone in New York over a period of three weeks, he had been tempted, he told me in detail, he had gone absolutely wild in gay clubs, and was paying the price for it.

  At the end of January 1998, Charles Weishar, a friendly and concerned neighbour on the opposite side of the street, rang me. Larry had been ill for about a fortnight, so weak that he could hardly raise his arms. Mimi had brought him some soup but he claimed it was slops and threw it down the sink. Alan seemingly was in bed, waiting for Larry and his insulin injection. Noticing that no lights were on, Charles came over and let himself in with the key he had. Alan was incoherent, almost hallucinating as he verged on the edge of a diabetic coma. Charles arranged for him to be rushed into intensive care in Newport General Hospital. Next morning, Alan’s house was again in darkness. Larry had been sleeping in the adjoining house, and Mimi found him dead on the threshold of the ground floor bedroom there. He was wearing nothing but a sweater. Larry’s doctor was to say
that AIDS ravaged him but the cause of death was hepatitis and a respiratory infection. In the doctor’s opinion, “Larry cared for your dad, but no doubt your dad now has better chances of good management care.” I couldn’t help wondering whether in final despair Larry had kept back Alan’s insulin in order to set up a Grand Guignol scene when both of them would be discovered dead.

  The best part of a day had passed by the time Clarissa and I had flown in and reached the hospital. Alan lay in the fœtal position. My diary entry reads, “Alan cried as we entered, a sort of sobbing without tears. ‘These are very miserable times,’ he said and hoped that he would die. He had expected Larry to die, and so wasn’t surprised in the least. Larry had changed so greatly. Lately he had taken to shouting at him, ‘I wish you’d die.’ Then five minutes later he became his usual charming self…. I told Alan that it was horrible for him that the three people he’d loved, Poppy, Mary Jean and Larry, had all died young. ‘It’s no use repining,’ a very characteristic word. In another mood he says of Larry, ‘There was no emotional attachment but I miss him as a companion. I was with him so constantly.’” Alan’s lawyers were to discover the coincidence that Tex Barker had died a few weeks before Larry. The man Tex had been living with had concealed the death in order to continue claiming the $950 Alan had been paying every month.

  Thanks to Dan, Alan escaped the East Coast winter as a guest in the Kempner family house in Galveston. Then Dan rang us in London to say that Alan had gone out to dinner in spite of a cold, and returned with pneumonia. It seemed random, disconnected from everything to do with Alan, to find him in the University of Texas Medical Branch. He smiled when we came into his room. Clarissa said that we had talked to the doctors, and he still had the strength to ask, “What are they saying?” And after a pause: “What happens next?” Those were his last words. Eleven days into the new millennium Alan died.

  Sloth, he always claimed, was the reason why he had not become the great writer he expected to be. Not in the least slothful, he was tirelessly energetic, always busy. He had real powers of observation, facility, and an individual aptitude for the right word. These gifts were fatally compromised by the fear of giving offense, and this was to be seen in his manner, heard in his voice, and read into his prose. On his deathbed with nobody to please, his face had set in firm and noble lines. He never passed an opinion on my writing, and so I have no idea whether he took pride in it, as some maintain, or felt challenged, as others tell me. We buried him next to Poppy in the cemetery at Viarmes, a forbidding provincial place for someone so cosmopolitan, but that is what he said he wanted, and it too closes a circle.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Last Throw

  MITZI HAD ARRANGED the three foundation stones of fiscal freedom: British nationality, Italian domicile and Swiss bank accounts. The rhythm of her life was safe and did not vary. You could predict almost to the exact day when she would be at San Martino, Royaumont and Montreuil, and the Connaught Hotel in London. Supervising, Mr Hickman, Georg the son of Dr Pokorny, Giuseppe Badini her administrator in Florence, Paulette and Robert and a dozen more retainers were permanently at action stations. Fuss was exceptional. A Romanian employed in the office turned out to work for the KGB. Somewhere on the journey by sleeper from Florence to Paris her fur coat vanished. She’d had printed a sketch Alan had written of Frank in a few hundred carefully guarded words; he’d promised to do the same for Eugène and for her, but shirked it.

  The world in the 1970s nevertheless disobediently refused to fit her directives. After her death, she comforted herself, the heritage of Frank and Mary Wooster would be acknowledged. Time and energy were spent sorting out into carefully inscribed envelopes additional materials for Lambeth Palace, Tantur and Canterbury. “Unite The Impossible” would come into its own. Sure that she was touching on immortality, she looked for a response, for evidence of understanding and submission. No dialogue was possible. It was like being in a courtroom with a judge whose verdict has been reached in advance, and a defendant silent for fear of self-incrimination.

  A good deal of her time was spent arranging for her properties to be perpetual museums to the passage through this world of Frank and Mary Wooster. Reluctantly breaking the century-old link to her father, she had at last made the shares in the factory over to her heirs. Technical and financial skills of a high order were required to manage Maisons-Alfort, and no one in the family had the capability or the wish to do so. Given his career, Elie was the person to negotiate its sale. Mitzi and Max were joint owners of Royaumont. Once the family could no longer count on the factory, it was clear that only the Rothschild branch could afford to live in the château. Mitzi and Max were joint owners. With estate duty in mind, Elie persuaded her to pass her half-share over to his son Natty. From every point of view, this made sense. In return, she made Natty, then in his early thirties, promise that her bedroom on the top floor would be preserved and that he’d never sell the place. Under French law, the Rothschilds were obliged to compensate the other heirs for this gift. How many times did I hear my grandmother telling me that Royaumont had become a white elephant and to receive cash for the share that came to me through Poppy was the better part. “Toi, tu ne seras pas sur la paille,” was how she put it, You won’t have to sleep on straw.

  The Proppers had been due to inherit San Martino. Bubbles and Eduardo had retired to London. For no discernable reason, Mitzi cut them out of her life. Bubbles would send flowers to greet her mother at the Connaught, drop affectionate notes and leave telephone messages, but Mitzi would have nothing to do with her. She forbade me to be present at her arrivals or departures, but burst into tears when I nevertheless turned up. Just in case the worst happened, she travelled with a shroud. Acting as her lady’s maid, Doris mistook it for a nightdress and laid it out on the bed.

  Montreuil was supposed to come to me. Clarissa and I had spent holidays in the so-called dream house that had attracted Eugène and Frank. Jessica and Candida and Sonia had swam and played on Paris-Plage at Le Touquet as I once had. Now this house was set to become the Museum of Hope, Le Musée de l’Espoir, the very name suggestive of illusion. The twenty volumes of Proust’s correspondence edited by Philip Kolb is the sole putative exhibit that I can identify. She made the house over to the town, and at a reception in the presence of Max and Lily she handed a grateful Mayor a cheque for millions of francs, thirty five million according to Paulette who was also present.

  In her late eighties, Mitzi had a heart attack in Paris and was rushed unconscious to the Salpetrière hospital. The fitted pacemaker disturbed her. She complained that she had been robbed of her death. She’d lived in the Rue de Surène for over half a century but never bought the freehold of her apartment. When the landlords began rebuilding, she moved into the Ritz. Almost the last time I was with her, she had become paranoid. Enemies were poisoning her. They had served her with ham prepared to kill her, and she made me flush it down the lavatory.

  A matter of days after her death in December 1978, Mr Bill, the librarian at Lambeth Palace, telephoned to arrange a meeting. In an ancient courtyard of that extraordinary building, he helped me load into my car the photocopied volumes of her diary that had been consigned to his library. The material was unsuitable. Shamefaced, he apologised for Bishop Stopford who should never have put us all into this position. A canon from Peterborough Cathedral returned microfiches. The Ecumenical Centre at Tantur could not locate its set, presumed missing. They had had to throw out innumerable folders of press cuttings that ostensibly documented the progress of Unite The Impossible because Mitzi and the servants with scissors had not thought to note their sources and therefore they could not serve for quotation or reference. Formerly incumbent at St George’s in Paris but now retired in Biarritz, Father John Livingstone writes that he has appropriated in his house half the volumes deposited in that church, and proposes to destroy them. A disc that he sent me reveals his pre-occupation over the years with Montreuil. He mentions a surreptitious visit to the house, p
resumably to check out if there was anything in it for the church. Like us, he will have seen encroaching decay, broken shutters, a collapsing door into a yard overgrown with weeds, water stains on crumbling facades. Philip, Elly and I took the municipality to court for failing to spend Mitzi’s endowment as intended on the upkeep of the museum. The case was heard in Boulogne. The verdict was that we were right in principle but not in practice. The lawyer who had drawn up Mitzi’s deed of gift had omitted to specify that the endowment must be spent on maintaining the museum and its fabric. The mayor was entitled to spend the money on whatever he chose.

  The deed of gift for San Martino had not been signed. After all the jostling, the various churchmen and their lawyers came to the conclusion that Mitzi was not giving them enough money to run the place, and they threw in their hand. This tragi-comic sequence of events is the basis of my novel Inheritance. One sunny afternoon we sat outside at San Martino with the intention of agreeing to a sale, only to decide to make a go of keeping on a house with so much character. It is better that we and our children and grandchildren own the house rather than church folk, I hear from the locals, “tutti lo dicono,” everyone says so.