‘Can you burn a fire in a building as new as this? Is it real?’
‘Certainly. I wanted the penthouse, so I could construct a chimney. I hate a drawing room without a fire, don’t you? They weren’t too difficult about it.’ He talked as if he’d installed an extra bathroom.
Not for the first time I wondered what it must be like to be astonishingly rich. Of course, we’re all astonishingly rich when compared to the inhabitants of enormous parts of the globe and I do not mean to sound ungrateful. But what is it like when the only reason not to do something, or buy something, or eat something, or drink something is because you do not want to? ‘It would be so boring!’ one hears people say. But would it? It’s not boring to have hot water every morning, or a delicious dinner every night, to sleep in good sheets or live in pretty rooms or collect a few nice pictures, so why would it be boring to be able to treble all these blessings at a touch? I am fairly sure that I would love it. ‘Have you got a house in the country?’ I asked.
‘No.’ He spoke with a slightly tolerant air, as if I should know better. ‘Not now. I’ve done all that.’ He chuckled. ‘At one point I had an estate in Gloucestershire, another in Scotland, a flat in New York, a villa in Italy quite near Florence, and a London house in Cheyne Row. I’d arrive at each of them, fret about everything that had been done wrongly since I was last there and leave. I never seemed to stay in anywhere for more than three days at a stretch, so I never got beyond the complaining stage. Although I do quite miss the house in the Cotswolds.’ A pink cloud of nostalgia hovered over him for a moment. ‘The library was one of the prettiest rooms I’ve ever seen, never mind lived in. But no.’ He shook his head to loosen these disturbing, self-indulgent images. ‘I’m finished with all that. There’s no point.’
This was an odd phrase, but I let it go. Kieran had ordered some coffee while we were in the car and now a discreet manservant brought it in. Once again, I was on the set of a Lonsdale comedy. I wonder now whether I fully realised what I would see of the modern world when I took Damian’s shilling. Was it a shock that all this way of life, which we were told so firmly in the Sixties was most definitely dying, was instead alive and well, and not even very unusual any more? I consider myself able to move about pretty freely and I have spent a good deal of my time in enviable houses of one sort or another, but I was beginning to grasp that it wasn’t, as it used to be, that there was the odd person still living in an Edwardian way, the occasional millionaire who invented electricity and we should all be grateful to him, dear. Nowadays there is a whole new class of rich people leading rich lives, as numerous as under the Georgians. The only difference is that now it goes on behind closed doors facilitating the dishonest representation of these things that the media go in for. As a result, the vast majority is largely unaware that there is a new and affluent group who live in this way but do not, unlike their predecessors a century ago, take much responsibility for those less blessed. This new breed feel no need to lead the public in public, but only from the shadows behind the Throne.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat in a tapestry-covered bergère, fashioned, I would guess, during the middle years of the eighteenth century. I felt we might as well get things started. ‘So, how is Joanna?’ I said, since that was where we had broken off.
Kieran looked at me quite steadily for a moment. Even he must have realised this was why we were here. ‘Joanna is dead,’ he replied.
‘What?’
‘And dead, I’m afraid, in a sad way. She was found in a public lavatory, not far from Swindon, with an empty hypodermic needle beside her. She had overdosed on heroin. When the police got there, they thought she’d been locked in the cubicle for about five days. They were alerted by the smell which, in that setting, as you can imagine, had to be pretty strong before it was noticed.’ It was at this precise moment that I realised Kieran de Yong was a man cursed. This horrible, sordid, tragic image was always with him, of a woman I would guess he had loved much more than he believed he would at the start. It was a picture that hovered an inch or two behind his thoughts unless he was asleep, and then I am quite sure it visited his dreams. I saw that he had agreed to meet me because all he ever really wanted to talk about, or think about, was Joanna and I had known her. But when we did meet, he had found he couldn’t begin the conversation without this account, and, whatever he may have originally planned, he couldn’t give it in a crowded, noisy restaurant. Having acquitted this task, he almost relaxed.
Sometimes one hears or witnesses a thing so shocking that the brain cannot programme it for a second. I remember I was once in an earthquake in South America, and as I watched the ornaments and books jump and leap about, it took a second or two before my brain would tell me what was happening. This was just such a moment. Joanna Langley, enchanting, ravishing Joanna, was dead and in a way more suited to the forgotten, the abandoned and the lost; not to a darling of the gods.
‘Christ.’ For one tiny instant I thought I was going to burst into tears and when I looked over at Kieran it seemed that he might too, but then he recovered. At last he nodded slowly, as if my exclamation had been a comment. The fact is there are some deaths that have a gentle aspect, that bring a kind of comfort of their own to help the survivors bear their grief. This was not one of them. ‘When did it happen?’
‘October 1985. The fifteenth. We’d split up a couple of years before, as you probably know, and we didn’t speak for a bit, except about Malcolm, because we were having…’ he hesitated. What were they having? ‘An argument. A disagreement.’ He was gathering momentum. ‘A fight. But then we got the judgement, which was at least a decision, and I felt we could move on, that we were both getting through it.’ He gave a gesture of hopelessness with his hands.
‘But you weren’t.’
‘Obviously not.’
‘What was the disagreement about?’ Again, on paper this seems intrusive, but we had, as they say now, ‘bonded’ during the evening, or I felt we had, and it didn’t seem to be prying when I said it.
‘Joanna was having a lot of problems. Well,’ he ran his fingers through his enviable hair, ‘you can tell that from the way she died. And I wanted to be Malcolm’s principal carer. I don’t mean I didn’t want her to see him, or anything like that.’ It was clear that guilt for his first wife’s death coursed through his veins so hotly he could still feel it twenty-three years later. ‘I just thought he would be better off living with me, rather than trailing round after his mother. I had more money than she did by then-’
‘Jeepers.’
He shook his head. ‘Alfred went down in a property crash a few years earlier, so there was nothing much left in that quarter. Their whole life had changed from when you knew them. They were really quite broke, living in a flat on the edge of Streatham.’ I had a sudden, vivid vision of Mrs Langley, sparkling with gems and watching from the edge of a ballroom like a shifty ferret to spy any interest in her daughter from Viscount Summersby. I never liked her much but I was sorry all the same. At that time nobody would have imagined the future waiting for her. ‘It wasn’t only the money. Joanna was very disappointed in the way the world had turned out. She thought by then we’d all be living in some kind of spiritual Nepal, smoking dope and mouthing the lyrics from Hair. Not taking out pensions in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.’
‘A lot of our generation thought that. Some of them are in government.’
But I couldn’t staunch the flow. Kieran had to tell his story. As the television quiz show has it: He’d started, so he’d finish. ‘And of course, looking at it from her point of view I was at the peak of my madness, screaming if there was a crease on my collar, sacking staff because the knives and forks weren’t tidy enough in the kitchen drawer… None of that side of it was her fault.’ His effort to be fair to his late wife was more than commendable, it was heartbreaking. He sighed again. ‘Anyway, we fought about the boy like a couple of cats. She said I’d poison his mind and make him a fascist. I said she’d poison his body and make him an addict. On and on we went, tearing at each other’s throats. Until finally she dropped the bombshell. We were having breakfast one morning in that weird, angry way of two people who are still living together but know they won’t be for long. We were sitting there in silence, until she looked up, preparing to speak. I knew some insult was on its way, so I deliberately made no enquiries. After a bit she got bored and just said it.’