In a mini-reshuffle in the spring of 2012, Giles was made Minister for the Arts. He was so laughably unsuited to the role that his appointment was itself a grim warning. I remembered his father’s sad comical stare, across the bonnet of his red Citroën DS, ‘It pains me to say it, but my son has no sense of beauty.’ In fact Mark was deployed, in a cynical way, to justify the decision. In The Times it said, ‘Giles Hadlow, as the son of the famous collector and cultural benefactor Mark Hadlow, grew up in an environment where a feeling for art and music was paramount – all of which will stand him in good stead as Minister for the Arts.’
And then, for a while, we kept seeing Giles, on his busy, rather threatening appearances in a world he had hitherto ignored, if not scorned. He had the rueful but undeflectable manner of all hard-line exponents of ‘austerity’. He was there, in effect, to give the Arts a good kicking, while parading in another kind of virtue, that of protecting his sector from a worse kicking yet, ‘seeing what he could do’, ‘putting in very urgent pleas’ to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with whom in fact he fervently agreed. We were in the crowd at the British Museum one evening, when a major exhibition of European goldsmiths’ work was being opened; Richard had co-edited the catalogue, and we smiled and sidled our way through a nice jostling mix of groomed lenders, officials and aficionados – discussions in German, Catalan greetings, a gathering roar of polyglot talk in the echoing concourse. A tentative drawl, very loud, through a microphone brought us all, over five or six seconds, to attention: the speeches . . . accepted, even welcomed, for a minute or two, as a time-honoured ritual, that confirmed the significance of being present. First, briefly and brilliantly, the Director, and then the head of the German museum where the show would be seen next, whose own team were out in force and applauded him warmly. That was it, the talk started up again, and the Director, with a hint of apology as he raised his voice to ask for our attention, called the Right Honourable Giles Hadlow to the microphone. The Brits knew who Giles was well enough, but to the European guests he was a never-heard-of sixty-something in a double-breasted suit, the sort of speaker you barely pretend to put up with as you try to catch the eye of the wine-waiter working through the briefly quietened crowd. I couldn’t tell if he was aware of his own insignificance to these guests – I thought I glimpsed it, the little indurated reflex of defiance in the face of our disdain, which always brought out the sadist in Giles, the more or less subtle reminders that he had the power and we didn’t.
Of course he was happy to take credit for the exhibition, and he put over resolutely, as his own thoughts, what were clearly the main points of a well-researched briefing. The years-long efforts of the curators, the frustrated diplomacy and excited last-minute additions to the catalogue, which I’d learned about from Richard, were quite reasonably unknown to Giles. The show was the thing, with its spotlit vitrines of gold masks, cups and amulets, and the government was ready to bask in its accumulated glow. ‘We’re tightening our belts in the Arts sector,’ said Giles, ‘as every one of us is in all areas of life. But we’re committed to delivering a leaner, better future for our theatres and orchestras and arts organizations.’ I think it was the first time I’d heard the cant use of ‘deliver’ – which over the following years came insidiously to mean its opposite, to mean ‘take away’. The Director stood near him and a little behind, eyes raised as if both listening and looking beyond Giles to better and saner times. Giles’s speech wasn’t long, but the grip of boredom was nearly instantaneous, and murmurs of talk resuming at the back of the crowd in Italian and German were spread by the echo of the space into a larger mutiny, freeing others to start talking too. He had the microphone and we didn’t, he sensed the collective resistance and rode over it, but there was something wounded, and dangerous, in his smile as he was winding up. I blanked out what he said, tipped my head back and gazed at the great glass dome. Beyond it, in the slow transition of dusk, silver planes could be seen escaping, bright in the last sun above the darkening city.
A week or two later in a Newsnight feature on Tory Eurosceptics Giles was interviewed at home: what sort of home, I wondered, would he and Laura have made for themselves and their elusive children? A discreet exterior shot of the house, the Range Rover’s number-plate fogged out, then a long shot of Giles and Laura walking and talking on a wide lawn. In the unmiked distance they might have been locked in a bitter disagreement. It was a big West London house, perhaps not far from his parents’ place and not unlike a smaller version of it – at least until you stepped inside. A shot in a kitchen where everything was panelled in carved oak, like a Bavarian inn, then a minute in a posh sort of Georgian drawing room with paintings out of focus, before we got down to business in Giles’s study, leather armchairs, signed photo of Thatcher, framed prints, and a heavy male atmosphere of a standard kind. Over the fireplace was a portrait of Giles himself, of the sort that dutiful colleagues commission on someone’s retirement – clearly Giles had decided to get in first. I thought how his father, in that same spot in his study, had hung a large Prunella Clough that was like an electric circuit, where the mind travelled happily between the blue flashes of ideas. With a ponderous show of tact, Giles voiced the dissatisfaction on the right of the party with Cameron’s dawdling approach to a referendum on leaving Europe. It was tedious and pointless, it would never happen, and I got up to find the remote, although Richard said he wanted to watch more – we stood there distractedly just in front of the set, so caught up in our grumpiness about whether to watch it or not that again we blanked out what Giles was saying. Was there a slight – a very slight, and perverse and ingrown – jealousy on Richard’s part of my ‘knowing’ the man now filling the screen in disturbing close-up, just eyes and nose and speechifying lips and teeth? A sense that I was once as close to him as that myself? ‘He has been described,’ the voiceover said, above archive footage of Giles speaking at Conference, ‘as one of the party’s leading intellectuals’ – that idea again, a self-perpetuating tag. I started on my madman’s laugh, then squeezed the off button when I saw it was probably true.
At the end of June I was in Aldeburgh, asked at short notice to take over as the Speaker in a strange late piece by Vaughan Williams, An Oxford Elegy, written when he was eighty – it’s rarely performed, and the only time I’d heard it before was in Oxford itself, over forty years earlier. There’s a chorus, but mainly wordless, while a speaker recites chunks out of Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’, some of the same chunks then sung by the chorus, who I remembered feeling had a clear advantage. It threw me into a muddle, of critical squeamishness, unshakable love for old VW, ironies aplenty about Oxford itself, and unironized emotion triggered by the words. I doubt I’d read the poems for fifty years, though lines glimmered forward for me, unforgotten.
On Spotify and YouTube I played five recordings, different actors in each, and a sober feeling growing in me as one followed the other that I would soon be in their shoes, though not, I hoped, sounding like any of them. It was a brief history of declamation, as a form between free acting and notated speech. ‘Heeah till sun-dyne, shepherd, will I lie’ – I saw the glow of the childhood wireless and the imagined announcer in evening dress. Well, I’d had all that beaten out of me, decades ago. And the later performers on record moved with the times, though cornered somehow by the oddness of the piece, and now and then forgivably doing the thing they were famous for on stage or TV. I felt I wanted to make it as intimate and natural as I could, but the orchestra shimmering and surging around me would force me to project. With each listening the piece felt less odd, and the elegiac emotion more gripping. I read that the Speaker at the first performance had wept as he declaimed the words, ‘and he was a Cambridge man’.
We drove out to Suffolk two days before and stayed at a hotel overlooking the front, a five-mile drive from Snape, where the concerts take place. Richard swam from the shingle and had lunch in the town while I went off in the car to rehearsal. There was something very happy and confident in these arrangements, work and holiday plaited together with the third strand of the place, the long coast and the marshes where the festival had happened every summer since the year I was born. Our piece began the second half of the concert, before Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which they ran through in the morning first: I sat halfway back in the empty hall and was fourteen again for a minute or two at a time, airborne as section after section did its thing, then dropped back to earth by each ragged pause for correction.
I’d never rehearsed with a conductor before, but it turned out to be mainly a matter of cues, and all very clear: he perhaps thought it beyond him to advise on how I actually spoke the words. A quietly climactic line early on was ‘And the eye travels down to Oxford’s towers’ – one old thesp I’d heard made a virtual aria out of ‘Oxford’, another reverently breathed it, a new recording by a Bafta-winning star barely noticed the word but pulled all the stops out for ‘towers’. A lot seemed suddenly to ride on this, and I felt when we finished our run-through that when we did it for real I would land on a reading that magically combined what Arnold, Vaughan Williams and David Win all felt about that loaded subject.
When I got to the band-room that evening the normal careless buzz about who was in had a more wary and jaundiced character. The Minister for the Arts had arrived half an hour ago, by helicopter. I went out to verify this. The pilot had landed on the lawn beyond the hall, where normally only a large Hepworth bronze intrudes on the wide view of reedbeds shifting in the wind. An Alouette, I was told, its drooping rotors menacing in their stillness. The audience strolling with pre-concert drinks were curious but kept their distance. ‘Has to be in Brussels later tonight’ was the straight-faced explanation when I went back in – ‘No other way of doing it.’ I thought it ominous that Giles, ‘tone-deaf’ and proud of it, should go to such expensive lengths to catch a concert – flattering, for a second, his not wanting to miss us, but sinister, above all. The chopper underlined his importance and the limited time that we had to impress him. I knew how he would have relished flying in across the sunburnt countryside, the dazzle of the sea beyond as they turned and saw the concert hall and car parks laid out beneath them, the small square of turf waiting – then the hellish roar of the touchdown, the wind-whipped greeters standing by, the military urgency as he leapt out and strode to shake their hands. Backstage among the members of the orchestra milling and fiddling, the whole unfamiliar white-tie world of music, there was a frail sense of safety in numbers; but I couldn’t help finding it sinister, again, that Giles had elected to come to a concert that I was performing in.
I joined Richard in the audience for the first half – they’d put us in the very back row, with a tumbling view down beneath the high timber roof to the far-off stage, where the players were quickly assembling. It was strange to be watching a stage I was due to appear on myself in an hour or so’s time, and I wished they’d put our piece in the first half instead of the world première, Storm Warning, for choir and orchestra, by Fricka Garrett. The woman next to me said, ‘Hello, we’re looking forward to hearing you!’ and introduced her husband, so I introduced mine, it was all very friendly; and we watched Giles come in, with a man on the festival board, an old Aldeburgh hand, whose face was a study in awkward diplomacy. They were sitting on the wide cross-landing, just below us, with expansive legroom and easy access to the exit. Giles was still texting as the lights went down, and slipped his phone into his pocket with a hint of reluctance.
Storm Warning turned out to be quite a racket, and I glanced now and then at Giles, wondering how he was taking it. Perhaps if you’re really tone-deaf it makes no odds if it’s Boulez or Boccherini. His demeanour seemed, from the back of his head and a bit to one side, to be stoical, the quasi-royal stillness of someone trained for boredom. There were aleatory sections, with the choir and then half the orchestra whistling and clapping, and shattering effects of tam-tams and bells, but they made no discernible impression on the Minister. Maybe he thought all concerts were like this. When it ended he got out of doing much clapping by questioning his host, and staring blankly at the bowing performers, the composer as well, bounding onto the stage in red dungarees, as he listened intently to the answers.
A concert hall isn’t as dark as a theatre, but the lights were lowered and the audience appeared from my spotlit place at the side of the stage as a slow climbing wave of glimmering white hair and glasses, fading into deep shadow. Though I couldn’t see him, or allow his presence to distract me, I sensed there was a fine, an invisible, filament of connection between me and a suited figure on the wide cross-landing, a tiny tension of mutual awareness, as I waited to open my mouth and say, ‘Go!’ It seemed to me too, as I held up the open score like a choirboy, that it was in my power to swing this, a degree or two, for the festival and its funding, to give Giles, what he might not have felt he’d been getting so far, a good time.
There’s a lovely orchestral introduction, the chorus, still wordless, blows like a warm breeze over a cornfield, and then, about two minutes into the piece, the small nod from the conductor, and I begin. ‘Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill . . .’ – as if it was a play, I’d learned the words, I held the listeners with my eyes, and felt the curiosity about what I was saying override the immediate embarrassing quality of anything spoken to music, as I went on to evoke the scene and sounds of summer, the ‘bleating of the folded flocks’, the ‘distant cries of reapers in the corn’ and – one of the lines I remembered from school – ‘All the live murmur of a summer’s day’. A very beautiful line, which seemed to open up the view of wheat fields from the Bampton woods, and to speak just as freshly of the day we were all still sharing, amid the reedbeds and the ripening crops. The chorus started to repeat my words, in atmospheric harmonies, the ‘live murmur’ blurred and echoed among the parts, and mingled strangely, to my ear, with a far high note, not quite a string tone, out of tune with all the rest, jarring now with the texture of instruments and voices, and after a minute, as it kept steadily on, very clearly not coming from the stage. The air-conditioning, or feedback, possibly, from the mics that were recording the concert. I shared a glance with the conductor, who like a pro pressed on, focusing the orchestra with his own stoop and stare, but the passage that followed was terribly quiet, and full of floral filigree for me, pale pink convolvulus and air-swept lindens, which I’d meant to read piano, and without quite being rattled I eased up the volume, and pressed on too, doing my best to hold their attention with the colours of my voice, though I soon felt I had to acknowledge that something was wrong. I saw I was the face of the piece for the audience, and I spoke with a faint and I hoped reassuring smile as I closed in on the crucial line – I was sorry as I did so that the performance Giles had chosen to drop in on was being spoiled for us all by this freakish technical occurrence, it would harden him further against the place . . . The hush deepened on the stage and it was just as I uttered the key words ‘the eye travels down to’ that the noise beyond rose abruptly in volume and pitch, a noise, now, like a braking train, the long penetrating screech from the rails, and I understood, perhaps everyone did, I threw ‘Oxford’s towers’ like a javelin to the back of the hall, as the scream rose up into the air with a throbbing roar that shook the roof of the building, hammered and faded and came back even louder as it passed overhead, and the conductor set down his baton and bowed in defeat to his players. A mild hubbub broke out in the hall, and it was pure improv that made me say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the lark ascending!’ The Minister for the Arts had left for Brussels.
We drove back next day a winding route, stopping off at village churches lost down Suffolk lanes. Richard’s drawn to churchyards, he loves both the atmosphere and the detail. Quite often we’ve had our coffee and sandwich on a mildewed bench with a view of leaning headstones, a fenced-off table-tomb, mown grass sweet and sour on the air. The hidden angle where a boiler room or vestry sticks out at the back of the church makes a good place to pee afterwards. This time we found a very good church near the Essex border and spent an hour, strolling and stopping among the graves, Richard taking pictures on his phone of amusing inscriptions and good lettering: he likes the early Victorian ones with every line in a different typeface, like printers’ samples, and any account of an odd life or comically unusual death – mauled by a tiger, killed by a falling rock. There was no one else around, an English mood, sedative as sunshine, the church above a gentle valley, hay ready for harvest in the field below, and last night’s Vaughan Williams still in my system.
On the far side of the churchyard, where half-hearted battle was done with the grass and brambles from the field beyond, there was a fresh grave, wooden interim cross, flowers pretty well dead in their cellophane. A week or so old, but the presence of the mourners still felt in the trampled grass and the message pinned to the flowers. I said, ‘I wonder which of us will go to the other’s funeral?’
‘Oh . . . please,’ said Richard, moving away.
‘Well, it’s going to happen.’
He stopped and looked at me earnestly. ‘Not necessarily. We might both be wiped out at the same time, by a neutron bomb for instance.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Or we might have a suicide pact, I suppose.’
‘Then we could both be at each other’s funeral!’
‘Perfect. Though I hope,’ I said, ‘for obvious reasons, that you will be at my funeral.’
‘Oh, darling, of course I will . . . you know, if I’m free,’ he said.
That evening back home I said, ‘It’s awful, isn’t it, I spent several minutes in the churchyard today imagining I was giving the address at Giles’s funeral.’
‘They’d be bound to ask you,’ Richard said.
I let this sarcasm settle. ‘I was terribly good, because although I pay as little attention to his actions and ludicrous pronouncements as possible, I have known him for fifty years, and I know how he ticks. I’m almost ready to write the thing now.’
‘Does it ever occur to you that it might be him speaking at your funeral?’
I thought for a moment. ‘The trouble with that plan is that Giles never understood me at all, and most of his ideas about my life, and actually about my whole make-up, would be laughably wrong.’
‘That’s a worrying thought, isn’t it,’ Richard said.