It was the autumn of 1998 and I was standing at the cheese counter of Waitrose supermarket in Chelsea studying the selection. My friend and lawyer Ernest Chapman was about to arrive at my nearby small rented flat. I had a bottle of wine and biscuits there, but nothing to put on them. I chose a piece of Cheddar. The assistant weighed it, wrapped it and slapped a price ticket on the package: 68p. At the check-out I paid with a 50p and 20p piece. I pocketed my change and walked out into the street.
That 2p was all I had left. I had no mill, no assets, no job, no income, no expectations, and I owed over £200,000. I had enjoyed a total reversal of fortune, an experience shared by many in the ’nineties. Property values in the south of France had collapsed. Unable to sell the mill, I’d held on to it as long as I could in the face of mounting debt and mounting anxiety until it was finally repossessed, leaving me with nothing; indeed, less than nothing.
In the course of that eight-year journey from apparent wealth to penury and debt Father had died. He was up an apple tree in the garden angrily sawing off a branch when something broke in him. He was seventy-nine years old. Adriana got him to hospital; I went next day to see him. His bed in a ward on the ground floor was by a picture window which looked out on the snow-covered garden. As I walked in he looked confused, then his face lit up in pleasure. The response was so uncharacteristic I knew something was badly wrong with him. He’d not spoken since his fall, but when I said something he’d react, looking at me with a strangely mild expression I’d never seen before. He was in no pain and I don’t believe it occurred to him for a moment that he was dying. Adriana stayed at his bedside throughout the entire week. It was against hospital regulations; nurses and doctors remonstrated with her, insisting she go home, but she utterly refused to leave her post. She said that if they put her out she’d wait in the snow outside the window, like the old dog Greyfriars Bobby in the film. She remained by Father until he died.
Throughout my youth, meetings with him had taken place in inconvenient, usually wet and windy spots, and the remote country graveyard to a disused church in deepest Hampshire where he chose to be buried was no exception. In light, persistent drizzle he was laid to rest in a grave alongside his mother’s, his estate insufficient to cover the funeral expenses. A few months later Adriana rallied my brothers and myself to put up a stone, and the question of the inscription arose. His mother’s headstone bore two lines he’d chosen for her:
I have warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks and I am ready to depart
I suggested Father’s gravestone should be engraved with the same epitaph, but below the couplet we should add a further line: PS. Please pay coal merchant.
The Grim Reaper had called on Father, but shortly before that cheese purchase in Waitrose the same hooded figure had also given me a sharp nudge in the ribs to remind me he was there and waiting. Since my coronary I’d kept up an active life, walking for a couple of hours or swimming every afternoon, but occasionally I experienced bouts of chest pain. One evening this became so fierce I realised I’d better get to hospital. A week later I was still there, having had the full range of tests measuring the state and function of the heart. ‘Your arteries are congested,’ a doctor told me, ‘You should consider having the operation redone.’
‘And if I don’t?’ I asked. He told me: they would continue to fur up until either a piece of the accumulated gunk broke off to plug and stop the heart, or one of the arterial grafts split – and I would die. When this might occur he would not guess.
Promising – falsely as it turned out – to stay in touch, I packed my toothbrush and went home.
I’d have liked to have eaten alone that evening in a first-class restaurant to ponder the implication of his words. I was too broke for that, but I did plunder my living allowance for days to come by buying a half-lobster and a bottle of champagne. I bathed, changed, lit the candles and took my place at table. I drank Perrier-Jouët from one of the two unbroken crystal glasses surviving from Gilston Road, and had dinner with Marcus Aurelius.
The Meditations of that second-century Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher had been part of my life for some time; I turned to him quite often. The fundamental lesson of stoicism is that events are merely events, in themselves neither good nor bad. It is how we react to them that defines them so – and defines us, our character. When we meet with any mishap or reversal, he suggests we call to mind the example of others to whom the same thing once happened: ‘Well, what did they do, how did they behave? They sulked, they bitched, they blamed. Will you be like unto them and snivel in the selfsame fashion? Let your only care be to make a right use of such accidents, for they will prove fit matter for you to work upon …’
I drank some more champagne and thought about my own life. Or, rather, what remained of it. I did not want to go through another operation. It had been a hideous experience, I couldn’t afford it privately now and, because of my age, I’d be low in the NHS waiting list. And why clutch at life, trying to extend it? How was I to fund my life, even if I did manage to extend it? The only possible way I had of making money was to write a book, but I’d lost the knack of writing fiction. I had no idea why, but the ability had left me. A life is, in a way, like owning a yacht, I thought. Accompanied by money it can provide enormous fun for yourself and your friends; without funds to maintain the vessel it becomes an inconvenience both to yourself and to others.
So I reasoned over dinner. Not depressed but in a sort of odd limpid calm. I sipped some wine and turned again to Marcus Aurelius. ‘What do you desire?’ he asks. ‘To live long? Why? To experience your own decline, lose your wits and become senile? Ask yourself, is this truly a worthy objective to desire?’
No, it wasn’t. But pulling me in a contrary direction back into life was a counter-force. The problem was that, most inappropriately at this untimely moment, I had fallen in love.
One afternoon I’d run into Kim Waterfield in the King’s Road. ‘I thought you were breeding horses in Ireland,’ I said.
He told me he came to London rarely, but later I went for a drink with him and his ex-wife Penny, whom I’d always admired. It was over twenty five years since I’d first met her and thought she had the best legs I’d ever seen; now I realised that was still the case. At the end of the evening she gave me a lift home in her beat-up station wagon.
Following which we’d started seeing each other; she was almost the only person I did see. Dismayed by the notoriety attached to ‘Penny Brahms,’ she now went by the modelling name of Jamais, or Jamie as I called her, and her life had changed considerably. After the breakdown of her marriage to Kim she’d relocated herself in Paris to resume her modelling career. This went well until she had the misfortune to fall in love with, then marry, David Lyons, an American oil entrepreneur. Based in the USA, the two enjoyed a reckless lifestyle. Lyons fell foul of the SEC, an arrest warrant was issued for fraud. Living on the run, they were hunted, shot at, and finally caught by the police. Lyons was jailed. Wired on amphetamine, Jamie had by now lost the ability to sleep, finally cracking up in the transit lounge between flights at Kennedy and ending up in hospital. Following which she had known bad times but come through them.
Jamie was a loner, addicted to solitude as myself. She was as broke as I was – another bond. In his essay ‘On the Want of Money’, Hazlitt says that, of all people, actors bear the condition best for it sits light upon them. ‘Their life is theatrical … rags and finery, tears and laughter, a mock-dinner or a real one, a crown of jewels or of straw, are to them nearly the same.’ Jamie showed a fine indifference to money I admired. We could never afford to eat out, but occasionally my old friend Mark Ramage – who’d sold his agency to become ‘richer than I’d ever believed possible’ – would invite us to lunch, always somewhere splendid. There was a childish thrill in dressing up to adventure into the beau monde. Neither of us had the least problem in looking rich, and there was real pleasure in such good company and superb food costing – I glimpsed Marco Pierre White’s bill – over £400 for the three of us; and an ironic savour to enjoying it in the knowledge I had just enough in my pocket for two bus fares back to Chelsea.
Soon Jamie and I were strangely close, coming together with the eerie sense of encountering a twin. Though we were in touch each day we did not meet regularly, but on Sundays often she accompanied me to Westminster Abbey. She was my love and connected me to life … but how without money to maintain that life was the problem occupying my mind that misty autumn evening as I walked out of Waitrose with a remaining capital of 2p and strolled back to my apartment to meet my friend and lawyer Ernest Chapman …
I already owed Ernest and others a lot of money. Over a bottle of Waitrose red in my run-down flat I borrowed a further £1,500 on the understanding this was the last time I would ask.
The money bought a little time. All my life seemed to have been governed by chance and accidental encounter, something might turn up as it had in the past. I’d never been in quite such desperate straits as these, but thanks to Ernest I had a final stake. Once I would have gambled with it, now I wanted not to challenge chance but give her the maximum opportunity to smile upon me. I determined to live on a budget of £3 per day while I awaited her wilful glance to slant in my direction.
George Orwell, an expert on restricted means, says that ‘between an income of £500 a year and £5,000 there is very little difference; between an income of zero pounds and £500 there is all the difference in the world.’ He was writing in 1934, one has to scale it up, but I came to realise that, above today’s £500 equivalent, poverty and wealth are largely an attitude of mind. What, after all, does one need? Shelter, food, warmth, light, fresh air, occupation for the brain … more than that is wealth. So throw in a couple of suits, half-a-dozen shirts, a pair of re-soled Guccis and consider the lilies of the field, I thought with assumed bravado as I leafed through the pages of Marcus Aurelius.
I’d been short of funds for quite a while and was coming near to broke, but I did not consider myself poor. I did, though, occasionally wonder what my lifestyle would have been if I’d succeeded in selling the mill and had the million or so dollars in the bank I’d been anticipating. I would now be travelling more and eating out when I felt like it, but I did not believe I’d be living much differently from how I was. I’d changed since my coronary; the change was progressive and, in a way I didn’t entirely understand, seemed still to be continuing. Before it I’d always sensed an edge of restlessness and boredom behind everything I did; now, though all I did was read, listen to music and take walks, I was never bored.
Most precious in that list of things I possessed was privacy. And I had books. Books had made me. Father and Mother were readers, as were their parents and grandparents. The manse had been crammed with books, some mildewed, some chewed by mice, not all legible. As a child all I had ever wanted was to be left alone to read. Books formed a larger, infinitely more noble universe than the world adults wanted me to inhabit. Then I’d grown up, adventured into the ‘real’ world of people and events, entered advertising and become so distracted and manic I’d almost lost the ability to read. But now I could: Emerson, Tolstoy’s essays, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis. I craved substance, not diversion, and my small room became my library and cell.
The pages of my address book, photocopied, Tippexed, amended and added to over the years, took up an A4 display binder; the earliest entries dated back to 1956. I’d given my own number only to a handful of those listed in it. Now my telephone remained permanently on answerphone. Not always did I ring back, and over the months my recorded messages grew fewer.
I’d stopped going out. It was not just that I could not repay people’s hospitality, but the things they mostly talked about at a dinner party – job, children, politics, exotic vacations – formed no part in my own life. And conversation on any of these subjects soon related to money. It was impossible to discuss anyone’s house without learning its current value; people talked about money the whole time. Money is an interesting topic but, as with flogging, religious mania etc., one can hear too much.
My regimen was frugal but entirely adequate. To my surprise I discovered you can eat well and drink wine with dinner on £3 a day. Apart from Jamie I saw perhaps one person a month. She and I exchanged faxes or spoke every day, met sometimes for dinner in my flat and attended the Abbey most Sundays. She was bruised from too much living in the world, so quiet had appeal to her but even then – and more so now – I was astonished and grateful she could accept so meagre a life-menu as I offered.
I’d given up television because I could not afford the licence; now I stopped reading newspapers and listening to the radio. To be free of these distractions – for that is how I had come to think of them – created a wide spread of time but strangely no sense of emptiness or tedium. Without purpose I would have been lost, but I was kept human by the love of a good woman and for purpose I had Marcus Aurelius and the path he and others I was reading lay out.
Stoicism is not anti-possessions, but it recommends you hold them lightly, avoid attachment, and put no faith in them. Thomas à Kempis takes it further: ‘Seek to be found naked in all things’ … It wasn’t so hard, the work of dispossession had largely been done for me already. The mill was no longer mine, I had no car, my entire wardrobe fitted into two shelves and 15” of hanging space. The only ‘things’ I owned were a Cartier watch and a few pieces of silver from Gilston Road, and these I now gave away to Sasha, my brothers, friends. All that remained were books, and these too I got rid of sparingly and appropriately, except for a few I could not live without.
There’s pleasure in giving things to people, but there was an animated sense of lightness at being back to possessing nothing except a few clothes. I realised it was curiously reminiscent of how I’d felt as an immigrant in Connecticut when I was twenty.
‘Forsake all and thou shalt find all,’ says Thomas à Kempis, and holds out the promise of ‘the truth that sets you free’.
Well that all was what I’d look for, I determined. Though there was little merit in my decision – for renouncing the world becomes much easier if the world first renounces you – I felt a swell of exhilaration and excitement at having made it. Ahead lay an adventure into the unknown.
‘Live lightly in the world, don’t put down roots,’ Buddha advises. ‘Keep thyself as a stranger and pilgrim upon the earth, for here thou hast no abiding city,’ says Thomas à Kempis. Nanny had put it another way: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ she’d told me, aged six and afterwards. I’d never known whether moss was supposed to be good or bad.