How to Disappear (25 page)

Nobody wants a mere saint these days. Like a goddess of Greek mythology, Diana was loved for her failings as well as for her gifts. And she was often hated for the same reasons. Her quest for love was everyone's quest, but her rejection, like all rejections, was hers alone to cope with. After many difficulties, it seemed she was killed on a trajectory that was once again rising. But who knows. Who can say what would've happened to her in life. As it was, her sudden death became a sharp reminder of the temporary state of affairs in which we all live, of the ruthlessness of ultimate truths.

My father, an airman during the Second World War (and who was stationed at Northolt for a while), said ‘There's been nothing like this before.' One may ask: would it have been worse if she'd survived the crash as a vegetable? Yes, that would have been much worse. What about survived it but disfigured, would that have been worse too? I don't know. I couldn't say. A disfigured princess can be noble, but can she be magical?

At 8 o'clock on the evening before the funeral, her body was to be brought to Kensington Palace where there would be a vigil with two priests sitting beside the coffin through the night. As the hearse left St James's to drive to Kensington the silence was disturbed only by the flashbulbs of onlookers which made a wondrous flicker in the twilight. It was the ghostliest thing I've ever seen on the BBC ten o'clock news, for all London was transfigured, bathed in an uncanny light. The Promenade Concerts at the Albert Hall continued in full swing of course. My brother and his wife were going to one the next evening. The organisers had changed the first half to Faure's Requiem but the second half, Rachmaninov's First Symphony, was left unchanged. The premiere of this symphony, in St Petersburg in 1897, had been a fiasco and its ridicule by the musical establishment triggered a nervous breakdown in Rachmaninov. He destroyed the score and wrote nothing for three years. However the orchestral parts were discovered in the St Petersburg Conservatoire after Rachmaninov's death and the music was reconstructed. It is a masterpiece of sadness, with one flaw. I think there has been a mistake in the reconstruction of the last movement in which the soaring main theme, like something from a Hollywood romance of the nineteen-thirties, does not return properly and as a result the work, integrated until this point, ends uncertainly. It is as though a page were missing. Someone should think about restoring that missing page. I tried to join my brother for the performance but there were no tickets left.

My friend Von, the one I'd gone to the Tina Turner concert with, rang and said ‘Do you know why people loved her? I can give you one of the reasons. She was the first royal to wear heeled shoes without tights. Gradually she shed her hats and coats and by the time she died she was practically Newcastle upon Tyne on a Friday night. Fabulous.'

London had slowed right down. People were impassioned but slowed right down. Which are the two best conditions for sex. On September 29th several weeks after all these events, I noted in my journal that I'd had forty sexual partners in the month following Diana's death, including a group of women in a naturist Jacuzzi in Brighton where I'd found myself by chance. Most of the encounters had something accidental about them, and were not coarse or contrived. I'm not bragging. And I'm not going into lots of details. But I've known nothing like it since and it wasn't only me. By definition I was being met halfway. One could hardly venture out of the front door without some interaction taking place in which strangers became friends. It reached an airy culmination off the Portobello Road around 10.30 one morning. I was on my way to buy fruit from Nellie's barrow when a pair of eyes crossed my path, there was the look, I followed him down an alleyway and hey presto, it was all happening screened by packing cases in a little warehouse behind Woolworth's; the whole thing took place in a furtive delirium of, at most, five minutes. Gradually of course everyone relearned the word ‘no' after that transcendental, unexpected burst of ‘yes'. What remains is that the people who liked Diana were a lot nicer than those who didn't.

On the day of the funeral, September 6th, I awoke spontaneously at 6.15 am. It was a Saturday but didn't feel like one, or like any other day. I had a bath and breakfasted and put on a black suit and my funeral tie. It's the one I always wear for funerals, Yves Saint Laurent from the early .970s, black with white squares scattered across it. At about half past seven I set out. The streets of Notting Hill were empty. On a Saturday morning Notting Hill's most commercial day, the principle day of the Portobello Road market, every shop was closed. There was no traffic either – well, occasionally there was a car. Several people, also wearing black, were walking in the same direction as myself. The sky, as it had been every day since the previous Sunday, was blue and filled with sunshine. What an exceptional week it had been simply from the weather point of view. And everywhere the eeriest calm. The Greeks saw death as blue. Homer writes somewhere about Blue Death. How right they were in so much, those Greeks. The moment you see death as blue its tranquillising wonder is restored.

In Kensington Gardens the activity thickened. If you walk southwards down the Broad Walk from the Bayswater Road – and I now saw that large, quiet crowds were doing so – you can see on your right the backs of the great houses along Kensington Palace Gardens. The noblest mansions of Piccadilly and Park Lane, of Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square, were pulled down, tragically, only a generation or two ago, but the atmosphere of traditional wealth can still be found in this one road, Kensington Palace Gardens, sublimely redolent of London's imperturbable splendour.

Between the Broad Walk and this romantic vision of richesse is a large fenced paddock where another timeless spectacle could to-day be observed. Horses were being groomed by cavalrymen whose jackets were off and white sleeves rolled up. A dark-green gun carriage, with big spoked wheels, stood on the far side. The flowers, tons and tons of wilting blooms, celebrated across the globe as the greatest ever amount of offered flowers in one place, they were easier to take in now with a sweep of the eyes, since there were no crowds near them, only several figures on the paths gouged through the waist-high mounds, figures who paused every so often to read the messages. I bumped into an old friend, David Jenkins, with his family. We exchanged greetings and observations before walking on independently.

More and more people were crossing the grass towards the Kensington Road and here it was that they crowded, packed either side of the highway, along with officials in uniforms, and the press and television corps. This funeral was to be the biggest media event in history, broadcast live throughout the world. I halted on a damp bank on the park-side of the railings not far from the Kensington Palace exit on to the main highway. Hardly anyone spoke. Such a huge number of people, over a million along the route, each settled into a kind of alert tenderness, created a mood of great nobility, and of something more than that. The previous week had been remarkable but nothing in it had attained to quite this level of…of what? Is it possible to identify what it was? Let me say something like this: I've never before or since felt such a public sense of wonder. What was particularly strange was the peace. It was so peaceful. And safe. In the crowded heart of London town. The one grating sensation was a police helicopter puttering overhead. Its noise faded and returned, faded and returned.

At around 9 am the helicopter began to fade again. But on this occasion it did not return. It continued to fade. With diminishing bursts of propeller noise, brought to us on a slight breeze, it faded away altogether. Putter-putter-putter-put…A few people looked to left and right. The last scraps of murmured conversation, bereft of any cover, died out. And quite noticeably the silence deepened. It was difficult to imagine that it could, but there was a definite moment when a further, sinking gear-shift took place. Some remaining infraction had been focused and the silence became a vast lake, all-embracing, rippled with apprehension. The birds and dogs of Kensington, being sensitive creatures, picked up on this and were altogether stilled.

The moments passed. We waited. The world waited. Everything waited. Then somewhere behind me and over to the right, a military command was barked out. It was distant but very distinct. After it one expected to hear perhaps the salute of cannon fire, or the jingle of faraway harnesses approaching in a gathering roar. But there was nothing. Except, well, an obscure nervous sense that something somewhere had been set in motion by that single command. The silence became a vortex. Everything was sucked into it. It was peaceful no longer but rigid. It held you and you couldn't move. What was happening? Nothing. Nothing.

Then a wild shriek cut the air. Diana! It was a woman's cry. The whole enormous crowd was electrified and a shudder ran through it. It was ghastly. Primitive. The shudder hit me like a wave and my whole being fizzed up, heart rushed, legs trembled, I was disorientated, frightened, and for a moment thought I might pass out. And there was a second shriek. Women. They were women. A third screamed Diana! And several more. They were like lightning strikes against that profound, terrible silence whose reverence nonetheless held.

What had happened was that the world had had its first glimpse of the object of lamentation prepared for burial as it emerged on to the streets of London. That image would within seconds be familiar everywhere. But for a few moments it was utterly new and very upsetting. Nothing in the comings and goings of the previous week could have prepared one for it, but the women close by had seen it and reacted.

Yet I couldn't see it myself. Everywhere immediately round me was still somehow frozen, tense… Now – yes – something was happening – something moving -a few red plumes and caps jogging in a little group above the heads of the crowd. The frogged jackets and serious faces of mounted hussars. And now, finally, yes, I did see it. That rolling thing.

Such a huge build-up through the week, but when it came, it was so small, and accompanied by so few. But its appearance, flitting between heads in front of me, was mesmerising after those terrible shrieks. The coffin draped in the royal standard, with white wreaths upon it, was being drawn along by the King's Troop on the green gun carriage, the one with the big wheels. It was flanked by twelve Welsh Guardsmen in red who were the pallbearers and on foot. Moving in the lowest of keys and very slowly, this compact group was so weirdly unobtrusive and yet so shockingly beautiful that it became the conduit to something inexplicable. The fingers of my right hand were stuck to my chin. My mouth hung open – yes, this is how it was. In time one loses the intensity of a remarkable experience. One may indeed be embarrassed by exceptional feelings and seek to erase them. So I made notes to counteract that, to adhere to the truth of how it was. Maybe this is what writing is for. So that we can't disown ourselves.

As it passed by, the gentle riffing of harnesses and horses' hooves filled the ears. I began to walk through the park with masses of others, hypnotised by the gun carriage and its burden which sometimes seemed to slide along the tops of people's heads. Those at the roadside could not keep abreast of it because they were jammed to the spot, but those of us in the park could, and I reached the rising ground near the Albert Hall where the view was better. The small cavalcade passed on towards Westminster, jingling quietly through the sea of silence. I walked a little further, paused, and let it go.

It had set off at 9.08 am. This was so that, after a snail's pace march of three and a half miles, the pallbearers would carry the coffin through the west door of the Abbey as Big Ben struck am. Which is precisely what happened. They were perhaps guided too by the deep tolling of the Abbey's muffled passing-bell, struck once a minute up to the beginning of the service. The effect of this bell, which marked a very large rhythm, was of the greatest solemnity. But as the coffin moved towards the Abbey through the streets of London, past ranks of rapt figures, later on joined by male members of Diana's family, I don't think that the first electrifying moment could be repeated. Bystanders would see it approach and were readied. But when we at Kensington saw it first emerge it was for that instant a dreadful revelation of Death in all its majesty. And those isolated screams from the women enhanced something for us all, something which went to the marrow.

Kensington Gardens had adopted a meadowland policy that year and looking down I saw that my shoes and trousers were soaking wet from dew held by the long grass. So I returned home to change and watch the rest of Di's funeral on television. But at tea-time as I brewed my umpteenth cuppa I could begin to give way to more lateral reflections, and thought to myself, well, I wonder if that is how Cleopatra went two thousand years ago, not to low murmurings of prayer but to occasional hair-raising shrieks from the riverbanks out of a stunned silence, as her funeral barge floated slowly down the Nile from Upper to Lower Egypt, past the already crumbling temples of Luxor and Karnak and Memphis, locations which fell like guillotines behind the precious cargo, slicing away all possibility of return, for there was only now a moving ahead into something else, something unknown and new, as the barge proceeded over the sluggish waves of the delta and floated onward, onward, out to sea…

Among the living and the dead, special thanks are due to Bruno Bayley, Rusi Dalal, James Loader, Dolores Maclaine-Clarke, Maruma, Steven Runciman, and Lincoln Townsend; to Jane Davidson for her encouragement and for permission to quote from her and Alastair Graham's letters; to Auberon Waugh for his encouragement and for permission to quote from the work of his father, Evelyn Waugh; to Bishop Crispian Hollis for permission to quote from
Oxford in the Twenties
by his father, Christopher Hollis; to Mrs Brisbane, archivist of Winchester City Council, for assistance with the Bapsy Pavry material; to Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Estate of Mervyn Peake for permission to quote briefly from
Titus Groan;
and to David Higham Ltd. and New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to quote briefly from
Under Milk Wood
by Dylan Thomas.