Even as We Speak (31 page)

No doubt they got above themselves, but I would be the last person to say they had no right to. Not that I favour populism as a political creed. I ceased to believe in the credentials of New
Labour when Tony Blair read the lesson at Diana’s funeral. I wish John Prescott had read it instead: we might have heard the tones of sincerity, whereas populism comes down to a calculation
of what will play, and there is no calculation colder than well-rehearsed sentimentality. Diana as the icon of demagogues is a frightening prospect. Julie Burchill is probably an extreme case, but
it was very disturbing to find that someone who had gone on record as positively
liking
the idea that Stalin had killed millions of innocent people should also go potty for the Princess.
Pundits who think of the people as an instrument to be played upon – and of course those who fear such a possibility think the same way – have been hailing Diana as a voodoo talisman.
There will probably be more of that to come: not so rabid, perhaps, but more insidious for seeming reasonable. I wish I could say that I foresaw such things might happen, and wrote my piece as part
of a pre-emptive antidote. But I didn’t need prescience to see the radiance of the icon. What I wanted to celebrate and lament was the radiance of the human being. She might have been less
radiant had she possessed more integrity – she would have been less concerned to project her inner fires – but a human being she was.

Thankfully lost in my work, I spent four days writing about her, and have said nothing else about her until now. What I have offered here is not a defence of what I wrote, but a description of
its circumstances, for anyone who might feel bound to make a serious study of what went on at an extraordinary time. I can’t tell whether I was right to predict that the impact of her death
would change the emotional climate of the country, but I can’t tell if I was wrong either. The good news is that people in real life, as opposed to professional gossips, seem less inclined to
suppose that celebrity status is a bed of roses, and are more likely to give away some of their precious time. I detect her example in that first effect, and her legacy in the second: if it is true
that she was self-obsessed, by just so much she dramatized her selfless acts, and to copy those is no less useful for being fashionable. The bad news is that the press scarcely let up for a year.
The
Daily Mail
, for instance, carried a Diana story almost every day, and often her picture on the front page. Though the pressure eased off a bit after the anniversary, it is not as if
the flood has dried to a trickle: there is still a steady stream. The expenditure of energy that has gone into all this is daunting to think about. Most of it adds up to less than nothing, but for
a generation of journalists to spend the best part of a career hunting the Snark, and then go on hunting it after it is dead and buried – well, it can hardly come to good. But there is money
in it, because people want to read the stuff; and to believe that the stories would vanish if the people really ruled is wishful thinking.

Winding down, I should perhaps say at this point, to block a possible line of reproof, that of the several thousands of pounds the piece earned all over the world, every penny was given directly
to charity. The same will be true, in perpetuity, of the proportion of royalties for this book that is generated by the total pages devoted to the same subject, with an additional percentage to
cover the possibility – slimmer now, thank Heaven, than would have earlier been true – of its sales being artificially increased by the allusion to her name. If a lawyer working for the
Diana Memorial Fund feels justified in taking a salary, there are no doubt business ethics to justify it. But for a writer, on the level of elementary morality, there can be no quibbling: money
made out of Diana’s death is blood money, and that’s final.

Let me conclude this postscript by saying that I am under no illusions. For better or for worse (almost certainly for worse, as far as my reputation goes) my valediction for the Princess will be
identified as the
experimentum crucis
of my career as a journalist, always supposing that anyone cares. I had always wanted – why hide the obvious? – to earn a place, however
small, in the abstract and brief chronicles of the time. Out of the blue, in one sad week, I did. To that extent I too, like so many others, have been touched by her fate, but I have better reasons
than that for wishing her fate had been otherwise. If she were still here, if she had never gone into the tunnel, history would have passed me by. It didn’t, but it is not just for my sake
that I wish it had.

1999

For Ian Hamilton’s 60th birthday

Out near the left corner post, Miller, with characteristic hauteur, beat Ungaretti and launched the cross without even looking inward. Hamilton, moving in at top speed from
right of centre, instantly calculated where he would have to be to intercept it. There were two Italians he would need to outrun, Montale and Quasimodo. Both were fast, but they were facing the
wrong way. With his unrivalled footballing brain, Hamilton knew already that he would get there. The problem would be to strike the ball into a space that the Italian goalkeeper, Pasolini, was
already moving fast to close down. With only thirty seconds left before the whistle, and the score level at five all, this last, slim, desperate chance could decide the World Cup in England’s
favour. It was all down to Hamilton. He had scored all five of England’s goals, three of them from his famous upside-down overhead backward somersault bicycle kick, but if he missed this one
he would not be forgiven. Experience would help. He and Miller had been in the front line of the England squad since Moore, Charlton and the rest had helped them to that first World Cup success
– the prelude to so many others – at Wembley in 1966. On that occasion, too, a typically sly pass by Miller to Hamilton’s unerring right foot had clinched the issue. That had been
a while ago, of course: Hamilton would be the first to admit it. Miller never admitted anything, but even he, if threatened with a cocked automatic, would concede between clenched teeth that he
might no longer be quite capable of the ninety-yard diagonal run that had left Beckenbauer floundering before the back-flick to Hamilton had yielded the decider. Still, that was the great thing
about this game. You might lose the odd tiny fraction of a mile per hour for each decade at the top, but you made up for it in wisdom, guile, grit and craft.

As Hamilton, after feinting to Montale’s left, hurdled over the Italian’s hacking right leg, his mind played its familiar trick of expanding, for a crucial split second, into another
time, another place, another life. For strangely enough, this man, who ranked amongst the nonpareils of football (‘There is another Pele called Maradonna,’ Brian Glanville had once
written, ‘and there is another George Best called Paul Gascoigne, but there is no other Hamilton’) was cursed, or blessed, with an imagination that furnished him with a whole separate
existence. In his dreams, which came upon him most intensely when he was awake, and were at their most luxuriant in moments of professional footballing crisis, he was a poet, critic, editor,
biographer and all-round man of letters. Unlike most imagined lives, his was full of vivid detail. He did not just vaguely dream of being a poet. There were actual poems, composed instantaneously
in his head even as it was still ringing with the impact of the opposing goalkeeper’s drop-kick clearance sent back past that stunned individual into the top corner of the net at seventy
miles an hour. It was happening now.

It was the first stanza of a new poem which he knew would complete itself in the next few seconds of furious physical action. Such compositions – terse, acerbic, pregnant with
angst
, armoured to the core against any probe for sentimentality – lay at the heart of his early and still recurring conjured persona as the hard young literary guru of Soho. The
same scenario would replay itself endlessly in his mind at moments like this. In his imagination, he entered once again the decrepit pub in Greek Street. The grand name he had invented for this
sticky-carpeted dive, the Pillars of Hercules, was designed to create an ironic distance from its squalor. The place fell silent as he strode slowly in, dressed in black like Doc Holliday breasting
the swinging saloon doors of Tombstone. Gripped in his lethal right hand were the galleys of his little magazine, the
Review
, the rarely appearing periodical in which established poetic
reputations were riddled and left for dead. Propped against the bar, his worshipping acolytes tried unsuccessfuly to look casual as they sensed his entrance. Which of them would be next for the
bullet? Which of them would next discover that no amount of loudly professed loyalty was proof against the unswerving integrity of their chosen editor? Once again he bathed in the furtive glance of
fear, even as now, in real life, he saw apprehension in the eyes of the Argentine fullback, Borges, the only man he had left to beat before he faced their legendary goalkeeper Sabato, who was
already on his way out to narrow the angle. Borges was practically sideways in mid-air, launching a tackle designed to cut Hamilton’s lithely muscled legs from under him. He could let it
happen, get the penalty, and finish the match that way. The second stanza flashed into his head.

The poem was already half done. Soon it would finish itself, just as he would finish this goal. A goal it would have to be: a penalty was the coward’s way. It wasn’t his style. His
style was integrity, and that meant what he must do now: beat the tackle with all the skills he had first developed as a youth in those endless hours of kicking a crushed tin can through his
letterbox while being attacked by the family dog, and had gone on honing through hundreds of First Division and international matches in which the opposing backs had dedicated themselves to marking
him out of the game. With a delicacy and precision made doubly incredible by the speed at which he was travelling, he nudged the ball through the space left under the horizontal body of the
Brazilian fullback, de Moraes, and launched himself over it as the crowd’s continuous roar rose to an orgiastic frenzy. Hamil-TON! Hamil-TON! It got boring sometimes, all that adoration.

He was still in mid-air when he began to calculate the options available to the rapidly advancing goalkeeper, Cabral. Here once again, if it were needed, was startling evidence of
Hamilton’s greatest single gift: the ability to compute possible trajectories even while his finely tuned physical capacity was fully committed to the action of the present instant.
(‘If the photon-stream of the Hamiltonesque footballing mode can best be resolved through a lens which owes more to Heidegger than to Heisenberg,’ George Steiner had once written,
‘perhaps the crux of our appreciation lies in the very synchronicity of
spurlos
intellection and breath-bereaving
Affekt
which we, simultaneously deceived and undeceived,
are delightedly aware unites us in belief even at the moment when we are unable to believe our eyes.’) De Moraes was already behind, flailing helpless on the turf, automatically signalling
innocence to the referee for a foul which he had not managed to commit. Hamilton descended to rejoin the ball as Cabral checked his own headlong rush and distributed his weight evenly to both feet,
ready to launch himself in whichever direction the hurtling Hamilton might choose to strike. It was the supreme moment of decision.

Hamilton had nobody left to beat except the Norwegian goalkeeper, Ibsen. It would not be easy. Ibsen stood ready to go either way. But Hamilton the footballer could read an opponent’s
intentions in the same way that, in his imagined role as Hamilton the literary biographer, he could read the complex creative psychology of his chosen subject. Just as, in his reveries, he had
penetrated to the central motivation of Robert Lowell’s paranoia and J. D. Salinger’s strange reluctance to offer himself up for questioning, so now, in reality, he infallibly analysed
the Scandinavian’s notorious coiled-spring poise. The bacchantic tumult of the crowd was not enough to muffle the crack of a heavy-calibre rifle shot as Hamilton struck the ball with all his
force to his opponent’s right while imparting to it, with a long-practised flexing of the foot, the special spin that would curl it to the left. Even as he did so, Hamilton was looking into
the grandstand out of the corner of his eye. Kate was there, taking a day off from filming
Titanic II
. Jennifer and Courteney were on either side of her: production of
Friends
had
been suspended for a day at their insistence. Julia was only just arriving, typically: later on she would probably babble that the private jet from Los Angeles had run short of fuel. He was getting
sick of Julia’s excuses. If she kept that up, her suite in the women’s wing at his chateau on the Loire (
Hello!
had done a special supplement, back in the days when Sigourney
and Michelle were still in residence) might just have to be reassigned to young Gwyneth, who God knows had put in enough requests. Even now, with all the women on their feet cheering, Gwyneth
looked the most ecstatic. Good girl. Hamilton was resolving to reward her with a new Porsche even as Ibsen read the trick, reversed direction in mid-air, and got a hand to the ball.