(Transcript of April Mear interview session 19 October)
He was my dad. I didn’t see him every day and won’t pretend I did, though I wish I had. He was famous, obviously, and the band was something of a treadmill. They toured and the tours were lengthy and often in far-away places. Pre-internet and MTV you toured to promote every new album. No promo videos. No YouTube. The Legion didn’t even release singles. That was just the way the industry worked back then. The top bands were very industrious. The tours were arduous and the gigs were marathons.
So I didn’t see my dad sometimes for weeks on end. But when I did, he was wholly there. Nothing intervened or interfered or competed. There were no distractions or interruptions. He gave me 100 per cent of his attention. And he was wonderfully normal. No ego. No black moods. No mystique. All the bullshit associated with his legend was totally absent.
We’d go on camping trips he always called our expeditions. Or he’d rent a cottage in rural Wales or the Highlands of Scotland. That was at the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but we still went to the South, to County Clare for a week in a fisherman’s or crofter’s cottage. To the Wexford coast. The more remote the better. He was quite courteous when Ghost Legion fans recognized and approached him, but he didn’t like it. Or at least, he didn’t like it happening when he was with me.
I asked him about it once, when we were in a bothy halfway up a Scottish mountain. We’d sheltered there after our tent became waterlogged and collapsed. My dad had lit a fire and heated us broth and it was quite cosy really, watching the lightning through the window, listening to the rumble of thunder above us. My dad had placed a plaid rug around my shoulders and had made a sort of turban for my wet hair with our one dry towel. I asked him why he was so attracted to the wilderness, though I might not then have been aware it was called that.
He replied by quoting some lines from Shelley. My dad loved poetry, everyone from Dryden to Philip Larkin. Shelley and Tennyson were his favourites. And Eliot, they were his top three. He said: I love all waste/ And solitary places; where we taste/ The pleasure of believing what we see/ Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.
It’s from Julian and Maddalo, which is really about Byron and Shelley and their friendship during their self-imposed exile together in Italy. I wouldn’t have known that then either, but the words stayed with me. It was the one occasion in my entire life when I got a glimpse of my dad’s power as a performer. He quoted four lines. I could have sat there with the soundtrack of that thunderstorm and listened to him recite another thousand. He always had the charisma, the presence. And the looks and the physique, obviously. But just for a moment I’d seen and heard him perform and the power of it matched the elemental stuff booming above us and giving us strobed flashes of the wet crags around us. It was an immense gift he possessed. Truly immense. It was almost scary.
He saw the look of nervousness or trepidation or maybe just of awe on my face and remorse and something close I think to self-disgust flickered over his features because he never, ever wanted to be anything other than authentic with me. He wanted me to get the part of him no one else did, the piece of him reserved solely for his daughter. He really didn’t want to waste time with me trotting out the act. He just hugged me then and untied the towel turban and began to dry my hair with it very gently. He was always gentle. He never physically chastised me. He never even raised his voice.
Some people will tell you that my dad was enigmatic. Some people will tell you he was basically shy. I think that’s Carter Melville’s take on him, and Carter knew him pretty well and also in fairness for a lot longer than I did. But I think the truth is more paradoxical and less obvious than that. I think my dad was basically a very private person. He was thoughtful and articulate and unbelievably well read. If he had an interest in the esoteric, he never discussed it with the child I was and I never saw a shred of evidence.
Like I’ve said, he never shouted. He laughed at silly things, banana-skin moments. He really liked old Laurel and Hardy films. The silent, slapstick ones. He thought Garbo the most beautiful woman ever to appear on celluloid. May was his favourite month. He liked that line from Chaucer about the squire, ‘He was as fresh as is the month of May.’ He said if he ever wrote a single line of a song with that gleaming clarity of that one, he’d die a happy man.
But he didn’t really talk about death. At least, not to me. He was knowledgeable enough and interested enough to answer most questions posed by the slightly precocious child his daughter was and on the rare occasions he didn’t know the answer, he’d find it out and report it back.
I never saw him smoke or pop a pill. I never saw him drink anything more potent than Diet Coke. If he was critical of my mother for putting me in an orphanage, he never let it show in my presence. What else can I tell you? I didn’t know him for anything like long enough. And he was everything to me.
April Mear reached for the glass of water on the table between them and Ruthie observed that her hand shook slightly lifting it, the surface tremoring. She didn’t turn off her tape machine. She’d noticed the wristwatch straight away. She liked watches and April’s heirloom was conspicuous. It was an Omega Speedmaster Professional, the moon watch bought by NASA for their Apollo astronauts on their voyages into space. It was too big really for April’s wrist, but still looked very cool to Ruthie on its vintage bracelet.
She gestured at the watch. ‘That was your father’s, wasn’t it?’
‘Someone gave it to him. Someone from Omega, or maybe one of the NASA people or maybe even an astronaut. He met lots of different people.’
‘It must be very precious to you.’
‘Carter Melville wants me to loan it for the exhibition. I’m frightened it could get lost.’
‘More likely stolen,’ Ruthie said.
‘I’m not materialistic. I don’t drive a fancy car or bedeck myself with diamonds.’
‘Which presumably you could.’
April held out her wrist. ‘This is priceless to me.’
‘Do you listen to the records?’
‘Only the acoustic numbers. They’re sung in something closest to his speaking voice.’
‘You make him sound misunderstood.’
‘He’s deliberately misunderstood. It’s like the old newspaper guys used to say. If it’s a choice between the truth and the legend, print the legend.’
‘Today’s the first time you’ve spoken about this stuff?’
‘On the record, to a stranger, yes.’
‘But you and Paula have talked?’
April smiled. ‘Paula has the reputation in the fashion industry for being a real ball-breaker. She’s another misnomer victim.’
‘You and she have a lot in common.’
‘How did you find her?’
‘I liked her, April. No vanity. No bullshit.’
‘And she liked you. And so do I.’
‘I’m being well remunerated.’
April smiled again, this one more complex than the last. ‘Not really why you’re doing it. Paula thinks you’ve had your heart recently broken.’
‘As I told her to her face, she’s perceptive. But my heart’s on the mend.’
‘You needed a distraction.’
‘I needed an escape. But I intend to do a good job. I intend to earn what Carter Melville pays me.’
‘He’ll see to it that you do,’ April said. She looked around. They were in a quiet corner of a coffee shop in the Kingston branch of John Lewis. They had a view of the river below them. Or April Mear did. Facing her, Ruthie Gillespie had her back to the water.
‘We’ll do the next one at my home,’ April said. ‘We won’t have to murmur there like spies.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You can switch the recorder off now. No more revelations for today.’
‘Do you find the process tiring?’
‘What’s tiring, Ruthie, is processing the grief. No one gets over losing their father as young as I did.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘No, you can’t. Have you heard of Otto von Bismarck?’
‘Prussian aristocrat, became Chancellor, unified Germany.’
‘Very good.’
‘I took my degree in history,’ Ruthie said.
‘Bismarck said that the only true immortality is posthumous fame. And he was right. His fame keeps my father alive for everyone but the people who loved him. It doesn’t remotely work for us.’
Ginger McCabe spent the early part of Thursday afternoon mulling over the death of Malcolm Stuart. He was over eighty and his womanizing days were a warm and misty recollection somewhat distorted both by nostalgia and exaggeration. But he thought Malcolm had been right on the money with the picturesque researcher. She was a looker who behaved as though she didn’t know she was. She was a stunner, but she was very approachable. It was a winning combination in a woman. And it was rare.
He couldn’t work out what it was he might have said to Malcolm to send the lad back to Proctor Court. He’d told his Martens and Degrue story to Malcolm and then he’d repeated it verbatim to Ruthie Gillespie and he still couldn’t determine what the trigger had been or when he’d unknowingly pulled it. Ginger woke from his post-lunch nap mulling over the whole mysterious business and then decided he’d go and take a look at Proctor Court for himself. Just from the outside, though he knew a bit about by-passing locks from his own largely misspent East End youth.
He arrived outside the block at a quarter to five. It was still light and the sunsets that close to the river could be spectacular in late October. But it was a grey sort of day, one of those autumnal London days that never really seems to get going in terms of light; bland, undistinguished, damp and pewter-tinted. He climbed the steps up the stone stairwell to Max Askew’s front door remembering the man. He’d been blond, blue-eyed, unremarkable. He’d been as undistinguished as the day was, quite difficult to describe. He’d been a liar, because his pledge to attend that long-ago union AGM had been deliberately insincere. And he’d disappeared after his retirement, slipped into obscurity in the same vague way his employer had gone, just vanishing, without fanfare or even any sort of notice.
Ginger knew that most men of his vintage struggled with more than one or two flights of steps. But he was a vigorous man for his age. He was still fairly agile and his wind was good. He thought of himself as similar really to a cared-for vintage car, old, but regularly serviced. He still attended his old gym three times a week. His days of skipping over a heavy leather rope were behind him, but he still did a bit of round-shadow and he was still capable of three or four rounds on the heavy bag. So he got to Max Askew’s door breathing normally, his heart thudding away at a respectable sixty beats a minute.
The upper third of the door was paned glazing, nine little square lozenges of frosted glass above an over-large Green Man knocker, bronze and truly greened over time and grinning evilly. It seemed melodramatic to Ginger McCabe to think that way but think it he did, standing there as a light rain began to fall from a sky turned gunmetal now and the raindrops hitting the brittle leaves of the pavement trees lining the block with a sound like a ghost ordering the world to hush.
Ginger shivered. It wasn’t cold. He was wearing a Crombie overcoat over a three-piece suit and there was a woollen scarf around his neck and he had just climbed three flights of stairs. But he shivered anyway. Proctor Court was entirely still and but for that whisper of rain, all was silent. The Green Man grinned and glared, the knocker redundant, for of course, no one was home. For a mad moment, Ginger thought about using it anyway, as a sort of dare with himself, just to see what doing so would summon, or conjure. But he didn’t, because at that moment something caught his eye, entering his peripheral vision from the right, from the street.
Where a grey Morris Minor had come to a halt at the kerb. Which prompted Ginger to think that you didn’t see those too often these days. Not in that condition you didn’t, because this example was weirdly pristine, the coachwork and split windscreen gleaming as though with a factory finish. Ginger had time to wonder how the car lustred so in the falling rain before the driver wound his window down and the bland features of Max Askew arranged themselves into a smile and Askew waved at him before driving serenely on. Max Askew, aged not a day.
Ginger McCabe collected himself. He was not a man easily spooked. He could not remember enduring the feeling he felt now since an afternoon more than fifty years earlier, catching a glimpse of a painting in a building on the Shadwell docks.
He went for a much needed drink. He got to the Prospect of Whitby at six-thirty. The Prospect was a historic pub and rightly famed for its perfectly preserved decor. It was also a horrible tourist trap usually full of German and Japanese coach parties taking endless selfies sipping token pints; but Ginger remained badly shaken even after the twenty-minute walk to the pub and he needed a stiff one and beggars couldn’t really be choosers, could they?
After two large White & Mackay whiskies and a pint of Guinness he felt much better. Not quite yet his old self, but getting there. Ginger McCabe had ridden a lot of hurtful punches in his time and he’d taken a fair few right on the chin, but he’d never been off his feet and he’d never taken a standing count either.
Three doubles in, he began to rationalize what he’d seen.
He’d been suggestible, was all. He’d had to revisit his Martens and Degrue story not once but twice, after an interval of half a century. Malcolm Stuart’s death had been grisly, sad, shocking and suspicious. The Green Man door knocker had been right out of a Hammer Horror movie. And Ginger had featured briefly in a couple of those. He’d played a grave robber in one, a phantom horseman in another. The Morris Minor had been real. It was a collectable car but hardly unique, you could bid for them on eBay. It hadn’t been Max Askew at the wheel. It had just been a blond young chap, a car enthusiast, waving from the wheel, full of neighbourly joys on a dismal day.
Ginger liked this version of events. They emboldened him. Or maybe the drink did that, or a combination of alcohol and positive thinking. He’d got his swagger back, or at least he’d get his swagger back when he got up from the table he sat at near the pub’s picture window overlooking the river. He’d go and look at whatever now occupied the spot where Martens and Degrue’s baleful old building had been before someone public spirited – probably the Port Authority – had had it blown to smithereens at the start of the 1970s. He’d lorded it, had Ginger, back in the day on the docks. He’d go back there. It was no distance. He’d do a bit of gloating.
Getting to his feet and weaving through the throng was trickier than he thought it would be and Ginger realized that he was actually a bit pissed. He’d always had a strong head for drink, but you had to make allowances for age and he’d eaten nothing since a light lunch prior to his afternoon siesta. Then he’d had a shock, hadn’t he?
It was fully dark when he got outside. Breathing fresh air wobbled him a bit further, but then his oxygenated lungs cleared his head and he set off at a determined lick, a big, dapper, distinguished-looking man with a prosperous air and a purposeful stride.
The river’s edge was even more sobering, when he got there. The commerce was gone, the bustle absent, the sights and importantly the smells of the docks nothing more than a cherished memory soon not to be even that. Wharves and warehouse buildings were now luxury flats. Ginger breathed in the dank Thames odour remembering when the spot he stood on had smelled of hemp rope and fruit cases and baled tobacco. It was almost completely quiet. All he was aware of hearing above distant traffic noise was the gentle lapping of water. He went to look.
As he toppled down, before he hit, Ginger McCabe had time to think the job expertly done. Two simultaneous knees buckling his, the single, firm, flat-handed push to coincide with it between his shoulder blades. A generous target. He had a broad back. Two men? One, if he really knew what he was doing. Ginger surfaced gasping at the cold, thinking he did.
He mumbled a useless prayer he was in slack water as the current took him and the weight of what he wore dragged him under to travel its length unseen.