Alma Cogan (22 page)

‘“This Ole House”. HMV B-series catalogue number 10717. Alma accompanied by Felix King, his piano and orchestra,’ he says in the mechanistic manner of the fact-fattened tour guide, as he fishes in his pocket for the key. ‘Released 8th of October, 1954, and squeezed out of the chart action by Rosemary Clooney of course, and also, surprisingly, by Billie Anthony, who chalked up her only ever hit with it, I believe.’

The cottage smells of cold and damp and paraffin from the heater whose blue flame putters weakly in a corner. He leaves me by the door, which opens straight into the room, and goes to put a match to a gas log fire which lights with a small boomy blowback explosion.

He has to edge through the gap between two massive pieces of furniture. Flush with the wall directly opposite the fire and close to where I am standing is a Chinese cherrywood table with a lapis and mother-of-pearl inlay top. It is perhaps four feet wide and rises to chest-level – a desk, perhaps, rather than a table, and designed for leaning on rather than sitting at (your eyes would be parallel with the surface).

The equation it makes with the surrounding bowed walls and low false ceiling is reminiscent of that between the new and old station buildings.

The wallpaper on this side of the room is of bamboo poles. But any oriental ‘theme’ element is almost certainly accidental. There is a feeling of things having drifted together. The carpet, for example – oatmeal, with a lumpy three-dimensional pattern; and the skimped curtains, drooping from their rail – have the unmistakable air of inherited fixtures and fittings.

Occupying the area between the Chinese table and the fire is a
sofa of pseudo-Hollywood dimensions. It makes a three-quarters circle which can only be entered from the fireplace side.

To the left of it is a television with a video machine, and a stack of stereo equipment. To the right, a drop-leaf table set for two and on it a Christmas log with a spiral red candle and a half-pint mug with snowman-and-holly paper napkins fanned out in it.

On each wall are brackets containing what I have seen advertised as ‘Pickwick’ bulbs: unshaded pink phalluses that are supposed to recreate the Dickensian candle glow of poorhouse, debtors’ prison and tavern.

An overhead dish light spills a harsher pool of light that shows up the dark stains and grease-spots on the carpet and the mossy fine-wale velour of the sofa. I sit as much out of it as possible, among the fake-fur cushions.

‘It won’t take long to get a fug up,’ McLaren says and disappears into the kitchen. A couple of seconds later he’s back with a plate covered in discs of processed meat. ‘There’s a shop I go to does wonderful cut-offs. There’s, let’s see … spam; pressed tongue; brisket; turkey. We’ll eat again later on, but I thought I’d make us some sandwiches to have with our tea. That fire can go up a bit if you want.’

The gas logs are in a sealed stone surround, and above and to either side of that is wallpaper with a grey stone pattern. A reproduction of swans on a lake hangs in a frame above the fireplace. On the mantelpiece there’s a large ceramic swan with a hollowed-out body containing a spider plant whose satellites fall within inches of the back-lit logs and pale humming fire.

‘I’m sorry. It’s only just occurred to me. If you’d like to use the facilities, you’ll find them upstairs.’

He has stepped out of the kitchen into the white light like somebody stepping into a baby spot. And it’s true, with a captive audience, there’s now something theatrical in his performance – the two growing spots of colour like blusher behind the eyes; the tea-towel tucked into the waistband of his trousers; the white cuffs of his rose shirt folded precisely back; the hair disposed on his head just-so.

But if I stepped into a crowded lift with Francis McLaren in it this time next week I’m not sure I would recognise him.

‘People who had worked with X found it hard to believe that he was guilty of the crimes, and described him as mild-mannered and intelligent.’

‘X had lived in the street for fifteen years, hardly known to his neighbours, who regarded him as a loner.’

‘You can’t put them together. It’s just incomprehensible that he could have done the things he’s done, when you know him as we’ve known him. He was merriment from the word go.’

Dennis Nilsen, the Muswell Hill goulasher, had long conversations with the corpses of his victims. He bathed them, talced them, put them to bed, sat them at the table before laying them under the floorboards in his living-room. Brady and Hindley made frequent trips back to the graves of the children they murdered. They picnicked on them, got drunk, wrestled with the dog, took happy snaps.

Francis McLaren lives alone in this house. With me. With my carcass. My corpse. My earthly remains. With his memory of what I was. I am waiting to have tea brought to me in a museum of myself.

But I can’t see the evidence. It has to be behind the sliding doors of the small bookcase which stands next to the cherrywood table, or in the cupboard built into the same wall, which has a keyhole but no key.

Somewhere upstairs, either in his own room or the room where I am going to be sleeping (these arrangements have been finalised on the telephone), there is not only my stagewear, a heavy wardrobe packed full of damask, silk chiffon, gold spatters, crackle nylon and dyed cold spiny feathers; but also my street clothes – suits, skirts, sweaters, underwear, for all I know; stockings. Bun bases; hairpieces; wigs in plastic bags and on biroed-over polystyrene heads.

Under the TV remote I see there is an opened letter addressed to ‘Colin Darren’ at this address.

‘At last,’ McLaren says, setting a tray down between us on the
sofa. ‘You must be half-starved … You look a bit out of the kirk over there. Shall I come to you, or do you want to come to me?’

‘It’s very good of you to go to all this trouble,’ I tell him, not moving. He has taken off the tea-towel and buttoned up his cuffs again. He hands me a plate with a Christmas napkin on it. The sandwiches have been made with unsoftened butter. Small hard lumps of it show through the tears in the bread. ‘Do you like any mustard or sauce or anything on your sandwiches? I’ve got cranberry, if you like cranberry on your turkey… No, I
enjoy
it. I love talking about Alma. Apart from when they rob me, of course. I’m very bitter about it …’

A saga in his most recent letters (which, in their long history, have never, or at least rarely, received replies) has concerned the lifting of some pieces from his collection by a rival at a recent convention or bazaar, Magical Memories swap-shop or nostalgia mart. Solicitor’s letters have been fired off. Sotheby’s expert in the field has been alerted to the theft and advised not to accept the item(s) for auction.

Networks have been formed to move this stuff around which are as low-key and vendetta-prone in their way as those trafficking in snuff movies, kiddie porn, video nasties.

There are catalogues, contact books, subscription clubs, coded small ads in privately circulated magazines. Audio tapes, videos, rare pressings, private negatives and transparencies, flimsy cyclostyled discographies, filmographies, bibliographies, personal letters and items of clothing pass from hand to hand at small gatherings of like-minded people.

Francis McLaren has secured a monopoly, cornered the market in his own specialised area. By hunting down and gathering together the debris, he has made himself the clearing-house for the minutiae of my life and career: studios, engineers, band personnel, takes accepted and rejected, numbers of records pressed and sold, highest chart position achieved, radio/TV appearances supporting the promotion, theatres visited, dresses worn, fees received, holidays taken … He’s a statistics gobbler. A relics sniffer. An information junkie.

And now it is time to see the material evidence of his adoration.

‘Are you not going to have your sandwich? Or a piece of –’

‘I really think it’s time to see what I’ve travelled all this way to see. It’s already well after seven.’

With a paper napkin he cleans the tips of his fingers and then the spaces in between them with a piece of the napkin wrapped round a single finger, the way people in public places sometimes pick their nose.

There are keys on the end of a chain attached to a belt loop on his trousers. The key he selects is the old-fashioned kind, with a piece of stepped metal soldered to a hollow core – the key for the cupboard let into the wall behind me.

The booty is stashed in various carrier bags and cardboard boxes and in half a dozen picture albums which couldn’t be any fatter if they had spent a month in the rain.

He tips one of the albums towards him with his forefinger and brings it across to where I’m sitting. As I open it a flash explodes in the room so the photographs on the first page, which must be among the first of me ever taken (I’m aged about fifteen months and wearing ankle-socks and a big bow in my just-brushed hair), appear to be mottled with rust spots or discoloured by damp. Another one for the collection.

Turning the pages I find my parents’ wedding pictures; my father’s death certificate; Jewish aunts, uncles and cousins shot against tall houses in narrow back gardens; school reports, Christmas cards, holiday postcards, good luck telegrams, birthday-party invitations, receipts, invoices, forty-year-old producers’ audition reports from the BBC, still in their internal-delivery envelopes. The tangible fragments of a certain kind of lived life.

I am more interested in how far McLaren has gone with this than in taking a trip down memory lane. There’s a lot to see and I want to get through it (this part of it) quickly.

Any slackening of pace is his cue to pounce. Even from the kitchen, where he is trying to give the impression of busying himself, he can sense a shift in the level of concentration, hear a
change in the rhythm of the browsing. From the doorway, he is able to identify each item from its degree of discoloration, surface foxing, fold-marks, page position or typography, and can’t help himself coming in with a verbal caption or commentary.

‘Ah yes. BBC audition, 16th July 1947 at the Paris Cinema. The audition went well and she was noted as “Fifteen year old, deep-voiced crooner showing
great
possibilities”.’

Or: ‘Very interesting that. First appearance on
Gently,
Bently
on the radio, at a fee if I’ve got it right of twelve guineas, rising through the series to fifteen … That’s “La Dolce Vita” in Newcastle. Oh, just a minute. Do they look Japanese? Oh sorry, that’s in Japan. That’s the famous tour of Japan. I’ll tell you where the “Dolce Vita” is, it isn’t that dress at all. There – that’s “La Dolce Vita”.’

Flash photography is forbidden in galleries because every picture taken apparently jolts loose a particle of pigment. And that’s how I have always felt about being on the wrong end of a camera – that some small part of me is flaking off; becoming detached and appropriated.

I was told to think of a photograph being a message from myself in the present to my future self, saying ‘I was happy’. But is that the message of these pictures?

They basically divide down the middle: into photographs of private gregariousness (controlled encounters in dressing-rooms, restaurants, my own and other people’s parties), and public solitude (PAs, picture-calls, performance shots).

After the age of about ten, there is little or nothing in between. By then I have already acquired a practised air. I have learned to project an outlook for the camera which is unchallenging, passively flirtatious, indirect; an attitude based only on the photographs of other professionals and unconnected to anything in my own life.

‘One might think how difficult it is to get a true smile in a single picture of a person we know,’ somebody once said. I’ve found very few here.

‘I’ve got her on video, if you’re interested,’ McLaren says. ‘But
I’m taping
Coronation
Street
at the minute, so you can’t see anything until
Brookside’
s over.
Brookside’
s next.’

He would have to be a soap dope as well. It’s another way of living by proxy; under the skin of other people’s lives. He probably writes gossipy letters to the actors, calling them by their series’ names. He’s the sort who sends Valentines and Christmas presents, and wreaths to the ‘funerals’ of characters who have been killed off.

‘I’ve got her doing dialects and impressions on a demo disc she cut around 1950 time to show the powers that be at the BBC that she was more than just a singer,’ he says, peeling a pair of rubber gloves off his milky-pink fingers. ‘I’ve got it on tape for security reasons. It’s a one-off. I know probably half a dozen people who would be prepared to kill to get their hands on this.’

It was a direct-to-disc recording made at one of the many small commercial studios above the HMV shop in Oxford Street. I had worked the script up over many weeks with my parents, whose hopeful fearful faces (I had to get it right first time; there was no overdubbing; any foul-up was going to cost them money) I could see staring at me through a square window set into a wall soundproofed with egg-boxes.

Afterwards, the three of us had lunch at Ross’s Kosher Restaurant in Tottenham Court Road, where my mother set the acetate in its plain brown sleeve in full view on the table. There was a small scene when one of the waiters spilled soup on the otherwise pristine white label. ‘You spill soup down Sophie Tucker? Bud Flanagan? When my daughter’s a star with her face up on the wall here among all these gorgeous people,’ she told him, ‘
then
perhaps you’ll be more careful.’

The tension in my voice is evident. My dry mouth and the quaveriness in my breathing are clearer, more pronounced than I remember them. It’s like having a third, enlarged organic presence in the room.

‘I had it cleaned up by a friend,’ McLaren says. ‘He took out the background noise, toned down the surface interference,
brought the voice forward … Her last appearance at the Palladium was on the famous Beatles bill when there was a riot outside the theatre. The 13th of October, 1963. I’ve got that on audio if you want to hear it.’

‘What I would really like,’ I tell him, ‘is to go for a drink. We passed a lot of pubs on the way here.’