Vanished Years (31 page)

‘All you can see is shiny hair and eyeballs! I love it!’ But she couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes, so we left Kentaro watching the film and sat in the foyer smoking and chatting.

The strange thing was that for someone who was suicidal, she was constantly dazzled by life and the world was equally dazzled by her. I came back from the loo to find her holding forth in her frankly rude Indian accent to a group of giggling usherettes, handing out cigarettes and trying to persuade the girls that I was a big star.

‘You must have seen
Another Country
? No? Well, you’ve got to see it!’

Of course all they could see was her, a veiled black widow belching smoke from a red gash. She may have loved the glittering salons of the rich and the gowns of her monstrous protégées, but she was just as happy, or unhappy, in the crumbling Victorian railway station that afternoon where we rested on a bench, listening to the announcements and watching thousands of Indians late for their trains. But then she looked at her feet, which was always a bad sign, a prelude to the fugues of despair.

‘The doctors say I’m never going to walk again. They’ve never seen anything like it,’ she announced dramatically for the thousandth time.

‘But Issie,’ I replied, ‘we’ve just pretended we were local girls running for a train to the suburbs!’

‘Yes, but that was acting!’

‘No, darling, this is acting!’

She looked at me and took my hands. She knew I would never understand. There is an unbridgeable gap between the depressed and the rest of the world. There was no explaining although Isabella had a brilliant turn of phrase to describe her state.

‘Look, Rupey, there’s all this movement around us but I’m just a mouth on a seat.’

I laughed and groaned inwardly. ‘Issie, you’re not just a mouth on a seat! We’re having a good time. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what to do with you.’

‘Nobody does. I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to survive the next five minutes. I feel like a ghost. A pancake in a wheelchair.’

‘But you’re not in a wheelchair!’ I reasoned.

She ignored me. ‘I’m a broken record.’

‘Well, that’s true.’

She had a Kleenex in her hands. I knew what was coming next.

‘Rupey, see this Kleenex. That’s me.’ She threw it to the ground and it bounced off in the breeze. ‘See? Nothing! Just a Kleenex!’

She surveyed me, sombre, face to one side, big eyes, a parrot again. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and she enjoyed the confusion.

That evening was the last night of the freebie. I was leaving at midnight and the next day she would be back on the high seas, sailing on to the next port, a friend’s family in Gujerat, and then who knew. She was driving herself towards the homelessness she feared so much. We sat in the hotel, looking out of a huge window at the new India under construction in front of us. Skyscrapers bathed in tungsten were being built late into the night by half-naked untouchables. The old India was gone. Soon it would be a giant shopping mall.

For some reason I had a book of war poems with me. Issie loved them. She identified with their stories of doomed youth and death in the trenches. I read one called ‘The Deserter’ by Gilbert Frankau:

We were silent for a while as the full impact of the poem fell on us like a thick fog. Isabella was shell-shocked from a life in the trenches of fashion. She had tried to desert, but for her the firing squad was the rest of us trying to keep her alive. And I was deserting her. Somewhere I knew that I couldn’t face her for much longer. It was too depressing to watch her doggedly elbow her way towards her doom.

So there we were in the taxi to the airport.

‘I hate saying goodbye. I always feel I’m being abandoned,’ she said.

‘You’ve got Kentaro,’ I reasoned. He stood beside her, bearded in a miniskirt.

We hugged, and I watched her waving through the back window of the cab until they had disappeared into the Indian night.

I
sabella’s funeral took place in Gloucester Cathedral where she had been married only a few years earlier. Outside the cathedral André Leon Talley stood in a gigantic billowing cape that flapped as the wind got underneath it and soared into the air, almost lifting poor André from the ground as he perused himself in the wing mirror of his people carrier.

The coffin arrived in a horse-drawn hearse. The black horses wore black plumes between their ears and were encrusted with diamonds fixed on at the very last minute by Philip Treacy and a team of mourners. The coffin itself was made of wicker and looked like a giant picnic basket. On top of it lay Isabella’s favourite hat, a death ship with black sails and feather flags attached to the tops of its masts. In the choir of the cathedral, the coffin was placed on a velvet dais. These feathers blew in some imperceptible draught, giving the boat a ghostly feeling of movement, as though it was actually crashing through the foam of lilies upon which it sat, with Isabella aboard, towards the other shore, the undiscovered bourne where hopefully God wouldn’t give her such a hard time as the
Sunday Times
and the rest of us had.

Isabella’s girlfriends, dressed to the nines for the send-off, veiled, corseted and gloved in black, marvellously framed by the ancient pews of the choir, were like medieval princesses or the phantom ladies of the barge that appeared on Windermere to transport King Arthur to Avalon. A boy sang Purcell’s ‘When I Am Laid In Earth’, accompanied by the organ. His voice echoed through the church. ‘Remember me,’ he implored as the coffin was carried out and it sounded as if she was calling us from space.

The effect of it all, the sadness, the faded grandeur, the society beauties, the death boat and the music, turned the funeral into one of the great moments. It was the end of something. For a brief spellbinding moment, Isabella’s aesthetic came alive and was complete. Someone should have shot it for
Vogue
.

I
sabella’s ghost is like the image that an electric bulb – too closely scrutinised – brands across the optic nerve. One closes one’s eyes or turns out the light and it appears multiplied. For a while it is inescapable, but tonight – quite suddenly – she has gone.

It is a snowy night in Berlin. I am sitting in the dark, looking out as a gathering storm flutters then swirls and finally tumbles in silence across the large window. A rented room, a cheap hotel, a foreign tongue (or two) – and the past simply falls away.

My room is large and high, with moulded ceilings and old lumpy wallpaper, calcified by endless coats of paint – the latest one being a kind of half-hearted emerald green. Carved rudely into the side of this quite handsome room is a tiny bathroom with walls of cracked white tiles, a hipbath and an ashtray fixed to the wall by the loo. Sitting on that loo smoking a cigarette is one of life’s guilty pleasures, watching the dust particles float past the open door, through which can be seen, dominating the bedroom, an ugly old bed like a gigantic wooden tomb. At its head the curved walnut gravestone lacks only the name of its dead occupant (me) engraved across the middle. At its foot
the wooden board is high as a garden fence. Attached to either side are matching night tables, small towers with cupboards, shelves and tiny drawers (for storing false teeth and curlers) and a little swivelling mirror on the top.

Of the same overweight family as this bed are an ungainly armoire and a clumpy chest of drawers, all vast and ugly, in two tones of walnut – in short, an early twentieth-century suite of luxury bedroom furniture and the last will and testament of some solid, dowdy, middle-class couple who died on it years ago. One can imagine seeing it in the windows of Landauer’s department store – described by Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin novels, or winking in the background of all those baffling bits of film leading up to the war where jerky sped-up shoppers are stopped by Hitler Youth with leaflets from entering the soot-caked doors of shops owned by Jews. Somehow, miraculously, these relics are still here. They have withstood all the clean-outs, the conversions, the direct hits and the derelict decades endured by this room. The proprietor of this wonky place has shown me pictures of these barges and their moorings – taken here – dated 1927.

Double sets of windows run along one side of the entire room. There’s a dusty no man’s land in between them, a cemetery for bluebottles. They lie flat on their backs, legs in the air, knocked senseless and then dead from endlessly crashing against the panes. I watch them in my daydreams (my time in this hotel room has a different rhythm from the rest of my chaotic life; I can sit here for hours, watching the dust, listening to the various creaks and contractions, the gurgles of the old pipes, the shrill banter of the chambermaids hoovering next door), and it occurs to me that we have more in common than I had hitherto imagined – me and the dead bluebottles, and even the ghosts of the ugly bed for that matter – because in our way we have all been knocked senseless, banging our heads against life’s invisible and incomprehensible walls. But
remarque
– as the French say: at least the flies have a magnificent glass casket worthy of Lenin or Snow White. Their winding sheets are the smog-stained net curtains that hang from the old metal rails in the ceiling and sound like
toy trains when they are drawn. They billow theatrically when the windows are open and convert the daylight into a chalky gloom, a big white mist before which we are all – the living and the dead – fleeting black shadows passing for the night, check-out time negotiable in some cases.

On summer evenings – those pale German nights – with the windows open and the curtains waving gently in the breeze, you don’t have to close your eyes to be transported through time. Who slept in this bed as the bombs rained down? Some tiny old couple, baffled by the times, woken suddenly by the sirens howling on the Kurfürstendamm. Like them, the whole house shivers and gasps as the bombs scream and explode, nearer and nearer, and they grope their way through the pitch black to the cellar. All this terror has been ingested somehow, held within the walls of the room, in the doors of the armoire and the dusty corners of the clunky chest of drawers.

On summer nights and even more in winter (now), as snow falls silently outside the dark room, I find myself in that semi-conscious state veering towards sleep, the hard edges of reality softening and bending towards the jumbled vista of dreamscape, my hopes and fears leaping to the stage to take on their dramatic roles. I hear the terrible sound of running feet, of raised voices suddenly silenced, of banging doors and overturned tables, of whispers in the corridor and the stifled scream of someone being dragged past the door.

In the house where I grew up there was a small piece from the floor of Hitler’s bunker. Just a nugget of concrete, really, studded with a few pieces of brown and gold mosaic, it sat in a display cabinet in our drawing room, incongruously surrounded by little glasses, china dogs and figurines. When the conversation drifted towards war, as it inevitably did, I would sit in front of that nugget and wonder what it all meant. Hitler didn’t particularly interest me, he was too ugly, but the idea of a bunker, an underground maze of tunnels and secret chambers, accessible only through a hatch in the ground, was tremendously exciting, and the word Berlin stuck in my little brain, a trip
switch that transported me into a secret fantasy world of explosions, darkness and uniforms. I didn’t have to consult a clairvoyant to know the future. It was already written as I crawled around those forests of polished shoes and stockinged ankles in my romper suit, looking up through the clouds of cigar smoke, at the squawking heads of the grown-ups waving in the branches high above, during that sepiatinted English country childhood long ago.

‘Tony pulled it off the floor of Hitler’s bunker with his bare hands – were you in Berlin after the war?’

Shortly after the wall came down, I was in Berlin with Pink Floyd, acting in a few filmed sections for their mammoth production of
The Wall
. While we were rehearsing one afternoon on what was then No Man’s Land, but is now the Sony Building (same difference), the ground suddenly gave way under the weight of our stage and we discovered a maze of underground passages. We had fallen into a bunker. After the initial excitement died down, I set off to explore with a flashlight and a very camp Jewish princess in teetering heels who was working on the concert and whom I knew from London. Inside the darkness was so thick it was almost solid. The gloomy shaft of daylight through which we had fallen disappeared as we delved further and further into the past. The beam of the flashlight and the princess’s shrieks bounced against walls that still contained all the desperation and fear of war, and upon which soldiers waiting to die had painted murals of victory. The cliffs of Dover under a forest of flapping swastikas. English peasants with their arms raised in surrender. Their ghostly faces squinted at us – they hadn’t seen light for fifty years – and we stared back, speechless. It was the strangest feeling, like diving through a submarine cave into a bottomless underground sea of sorrow.

‘Girlfriend, let’s get out of here!’ said the princess, and we ran stumbling towards the light as if our lives depended on it.

Berlin lives under a vast unshed tear. There is a statue in the Tiergarten of a girl on tiptoes looking towards the Brandenburg Gate,
through which ran the wall that divided East from West. She is straining to see someone on the other side, her lover perhaps, whom she will never meet again. She stands near the memorial to the Russian dead. (There is no memorial to dead Germans.)