Rod: The Autobiography (43 page)

On those nervous early dates, however, I was constantly reassuring her that it was OK if she talked. Quite early in the relationship we spent an evening at Ronnie Wood’s house in Wimbledon. Woody is very friendly with Jimmy White, the snooker player, who was a big deal in the sport in his day, and a bit of a lad. Somewhere in the evening, White said, ‘I need a volunteer for a trick shot.’ Penny, thinking perhaps that this would be a good moment to come out of her shell and show herself to be game, said, ‘I’ll do it.’

For this trick, she had to lie on her back across Woody’s
snooker table, with the back of her head on the baize and a golf tee between her teeth. White put a red ball on the golf tee and declared that, from the other end of the table, he would hit a jump-shot with the white ball which would take the red ball off the tee and put it in the left-hand pocket beyond Penny’s head.

I was looking at this and thinking, ‘You’d better get this right, pal.’

Crack! The white ball leapt away from White’s cue, missed the red ball and smacked against Penny’s jaw. From the sound of it, I was imagining broken teeth, though actually she was only bruised. White was profusely apologetic but I was furious. I said, ‘We’re leaving.’ And we did, amid much frostiness.

Our devotion to each other grew over a series of romantic voyages abroad. Very early on, I whisked Penny away to the Bahamas for a holiday with a group of eight old friends of mine – potentially intimidating and alienating for her, but she fitted right in. To surprise her on her arrival, I had a whole new wardrobe of Dolce & Gabbana clothes and shoes waiting for her in the guest room. Getting the right size shoes presented me with a problem, but I solved it brilliantly: by trying them on myself. If they were slightly too tight on me, I knew they would be perfect for Penny. And I was right.

We also went driving through Provence in the south of France in my convertible Lamborghini, just the two of us – a trip we would repeat several times over the years and which eventually inspired us to seek a place down there that we could constantly go back to. It was Penny who flew to France several times on what turned into a four-year property-hunting mission and who eventually found us the perfect house in the hills above Nice, which we own and love to this day.

I went back to America in due course and invited Penny over, periodically, for short breaks together. In between, we shared endless long distance phone calls, sharing our inner thoughts and talking about anything and everything. She was finishing her photography course at Barking College. I would tell people, ‘My girlfriend’s got her school holidays, so she’s
coming out.’ I loved the appalled reaction that this got. It must have been strange for Penny, though. One minute she was at college in Barking and the next she was flying down to Miami and getting driven across the tarmac to the Lear jet where her pouting, posing boyfriend was waiting for the fifteen-minute flight up to his house in Palm Beach.

Our emerging relationship was difficult for both our families. My brothers and sisters were initially suspicious and worried about a repetition of my relationship with Rachel. Meanwhile, Penny’s brother Oliver was clearly anxious about his sister consorting with a rock star. He would eventually come to know me as the fine, upstanding gentleman that I am, of course. But in the meantime, we decided the best way to remove some of these understandable familial tensions was to arrange for me to meet her dad, Graham. Graham is the same age as me, and a lawyer. Neither of us was quite sure what to wear for our dinner date. In the end, Graham came dressed like a rock star – denim and leather – and I came dressed like a lawyer in a dark suit with a perfectly pressed shirt and a well-knotted tie. We hit it off straight away, though, and ended up back at my house in Epping, drinking whisky and listening to Sam Cooke records.

I knew of Penny’s desire to have children. She was honest with me over how she felt about children and how much she hoped to have them. And I was honest with her about how, at this time, I felt I really couldn’t have any more kids, or get married or move forward with anyone in a serious way. We both said we were having fun and it didn’t matter; that we would just let this relationship take its course. But I knew I couldn’t make her 100 per cent happy for that reason.

Also, Penny had to make up her mind to leave a person she had been with for a long time – a person with whom, perhaps, she could have stayed and started a family. She was once crying in my arms because she was in anguish about this decision, and I suggested that she go and sit down by the lake for a while and just try to clear her head. As she sat there, a swan rose up off the water and flew away, and, after it had passed, a solitary white
feather floated down and landed beside her. Is it too fanciful to think that this was a sign? It was certainly a happy coincidence and an inspiring sight. Penny came back to me in the house, resolved and holding the feather. She still has it.

After Penny separated from her boyfriend, it would have been so easy for me to say ‘Move in with me.’ Again, though, with great restraint, we went slowly. Penny went home to live with her dad, not far from the house in Essex. The bed she was sleeping in there was the one she had had when she was eight. Her feet were hanging over the edge and the springs were gone. So I bought her a new bed, causing a small commotion in the neighbourhood when the van from Harrod’s turned up to deliver it. On reflection, this may have been the least romantic gift I have ever given a woman: a new single bed, to enable her to carry on living at her dad’s house.

Eventually, I suggested that she move into the little guest cottage at the end of the drive in Epping – bringing her closer, but still not bringing her right in. But then there was a wonderful period of three weeks when Renee and Liam were staying over and the Wood House was being redecorated. So Penny, the kids and I all lived in the guest cottage together for a while, sharing the two bedrooms very snugly. Renee and Liam would come into our bedroom in the morning and do trampolining on the bed. Penny took them down to Southend on the Essex coast, sugared them up good and proper and let them see how Essex does the seaside: the beach, the deck chairs, Peter Pan’s Playground. This clearly brought her enormous pleasure, but it made me ache to think she would never do things like that with her own children. Why couldn’t this relationship have happened sooner?

But, of course, there was this overriding need to be sure – for both of us. We would be out on tour, walking hand in hand around towns and cities, and we’d find ourselves wanting to go into a church. There wouldn’t be a service on, but something kept drawing us into churches and we both felt compelled to sit there quietly for a little while and to pray. And it wasn’t something we questioned one another on; it was just an urge.
Something just drew us in. We’d be in New York, and on a mission to do something or go somewhere, but then we would pass a church and find ourselves saying, ‘Let’s go in.’ And we’d sit at the back and bow our heads for a bit. We only opened up to each other about this after we had got married, but it turned out that, as we sat side by side at those times, we were both praying for us to find a way to be together in the future. Still, at this time we didn’t discuss it. We would pray and then hold hands and leave.

In 2003, we went to Tanzania for New Year’s. We had seen an advert on the television in which a couple wished each other a happy new year in the middle of the African bush and we thought, ‘That looks like the most romantic thing.’ And on that trip, I picked up a stone and scored into the trunk of a tree ‘RS loves PL’. It was something I had never said to her and even then she didn’t know whether I was fooling around or being sincere, and I didn’t clarify it for her.

And then came 11 September 2004, the third anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. We were at Wood House, sitting by the lake on one of those bright, clear, English autumn afternoons. We were talking about what had happened those years ago and about the families destroyed that day and the children left behind. And after a while I said, ‘Let’s make a baby.’

She was overcome because she hadn’t been expecting to hear it from me. But the realisation that that was what I wanted for us both had been a long time coming, and I knew I meant it, as well as I knew anything. We tried immediately and, in fact, Penny got pregnant that Christmas, but she miscarried very quickly. Still, we resolved to keep trying.

In the meantime, I had another idea. In March 2005, Penny was nearing her thirty-third birthday. I told her, ‘I’m going to take you on a surprise trip – you, and your mum and dad. It’s just for the day, but you’ll need your passport. And dress smartly.’

That morning, Penny and I met her parents at Stansted Airport. Peter Mackay, my tour manager, was along to look after us, and I had entrusted a small but important box to him for
safe keeping, but not even he was told the purpose of the day. Penny wore a black pencil skirt and a white shirt, the teacherly/secretarial look of which I’m unashamedly fond. I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t read my purpose – and maybe secretly she had. She was obviously nervous, and sensing that something was up.

As we were crossing the tarmac to the plane, I hung back slightly with Penny’s dad, and above the whine of the engine I leaned into his ear and said, ‘Do I have your permission to ask your daughter to marry me?’

Graham’s a tough man, but his legs almost went from under him. I had to hold him up for a moment. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes, you do!’

Good job, because the rest of the day would have come off a bit damply if he had said no.

Graham somehow managed to sit on the secret all the way to our destination: Paris. He and Sally, Penny’s mum, had never been there. We went to Le Fouquet’s in the Champs-Elysées for coffee, but I couldn’t relax at all. I kept looking at my watch. ‘Twelve-thirty. Drink up. We need to be going.’ Chivvied along by me, we left Le Fouquet’s and drove across to the Eiffel Tower. There we ascended in the lift to the Jules Verne restaurant on the Tower’s second platform, where Pete escorted us to the bar and left us.

I was in the middle of hastily ordering a round of vodka cocktails when a surge of panic rushed through me. The package in Pete’s pocket! I chased out after him and just managed to head him off out by the lifts, before he disappeared into Paris for an hour, which really would have cocked up everything. I tucked the box into the inside pocket of my jacket and headed back to the restaurant bar, where I proceeded to soak my jangling nerves in a vodka cocktail, followed immediately afterwards by another one.

And then, right there at the bar, I went down on one knee, held out the ring in its box and asked Penny to marry me.

Penny had a minute of disbelief. Her hands went to her face and her eyes welled. In the background was the sound of Sally
sobbing hysterically. This seemed to go on for some time. I had a dodgy right knee – an old footballing injury – and I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be able to take this. Eventually I said, ‘Please say something, Penny, because me knee is killing me.’

She gave me a sobbing ‘yes’. And at last I was able to stand up, relieve my knee and become Penny’s partner for life.

After lunch we drove back to the airport and flew home. Paris was our special place from that day on, a city we return to when we can to remind ourselves of that day. I couldn’t believe how very much in love we were and how lucky this ageing rock star had become. And that night we conceived Alastair, our beautiful son.

* * *

The baby came on 27 November 2005. Penny had loved being pregnant, and I loved it too. On our way into the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in St John’s Wood in London, we paused at the chapel beside the maternity ward to say our prayers. And then, after a long and emotional labour, with Penny sometimes in and sometimes out of the birthing pool (we had chosen to have a water birth), Alastair finally arrived – delivered onto the lino in the end, which, I couldn’t help noticing, amid the euphoria of the moment, bore a very similar pattern to the floor at 507 Archway Road. As Penny recovered, I held Alastair and sang him ‘Flower of Scotland’. And as we left the next morning, I told the nurses, ‘See you next year.’

In June 2007, Penny and I were married in front of a hundred guests at a chapel decorated with white roses in the town of Santa Margherita on the Italian Riviera. There had to be some smoke and mirrors to prevent the press from inviting themselves. We set out for Italy from the south coast of France by boat, getting dropped off in two separate bays. It was like the D-Day landings. The sense of subterfuge only added to the excitement.

And what an incredibly joyous weekend we had. The night before the ceremony, we threw a white-themed party in our hotel and, as ever, on countless key occasions in my life, it devolved into a sing-song. Out came the old numbers: ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home,’ ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’ and, of course, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’. And my sister Mary was there, and my brothers, Bob and Don, with whom I have shared those songs all my life, and the party conga-danced its way out of the hotel doors and onto the street – the way that parties conga-danced out of the front door of 507 Archway Road all those years before, some things never changing.

At the service, unbeknown to me, Penny had arranged for her procession down the aisle to be accompanied by an Italian boys’ choir singing ‘Fields of Athenry’, the great Irish folk ballad, adopted by Celtic supporters. I welled up and almost lost control completely. In honour of the Epping swan that rose up from the lake while Penny watched that day, there were swans’ feathers in the flower displays, on the invitations, in the hanging decorations above the ballroom. And when, in the traditional order of things, the bride and groom led the way onto the dance floor, their choice of song was Etta James’ ‘At Last’.

And, yes, as a 67-year-old man now, I can regret that this relationship, this marriage, this family, didn’t come sooner. But I know that’s just greed talking and that the blessing, the relief and the ever-renewing amazement of it for me is that those things came at all; that I am happier and more in love than I have ever been, that the journey ever reached this place, when I had given up hope that it would or could.