The following March Cara organized a Memorial Gathering (not a service, she insisted, and not a meeting, something Mark had had quite enough of in his long life). She asked me if I would read a poem, and we texted ideas back and forth for a week before agreeing on Yeats – grand, grim and rather discomfiting, I felt, to many who were likely to be there. ‘Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns . . .’ Mark, like me, had his inner anthology, I remembered him reciting these lines to me thirty years earlier – we had chanted along together, nearly in step, and holding each other’s eye.
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?
The Gathering took place in the Cadogan Hall, where I was part of a huge crowd of people almost all unknown to me. I recognized the directors of the Tate, of the British Museum, Glyndebourne . . . The speakers sat in the reserved front row, some with their spouses and partners; Richard alas was interlocuting in King’s Lynn. I was next to John Constable, the famous painter; as we waited we talked in a surprisingly heartfelt way about Lydia, whom he’d seen a lot of when he lived in New York in the 1980s. We agreed that Cara must be missing her especially today. Behind us row on row of people were talking too, at an uncertain pitch brought on by that room, somewhere between theatre and chapel. The printed order was headed ‘Mark André Hadlow 1922—2016, A Celebration’, but it had something of the funeral we’d all missed.
Everyone must have wondered if Giles would be speaking, but he’d got an unavoidable meeting in Brussels at the exact same time. He was very involved now, as we knew all too well, in insulting pretences at negotiation with heads of the EU. Charles Pearson, who emceed the event, allowed himself a quiet joke about this, which drew a rather bitter and impressively unanimous laugh in the echoing space. Giles had, however, written a short greeting, as he called it, which Pearson read to us – I drummed up a loud masking rumble in my head and blocked it out. And Laura Hadlow had come, bringing their son and daughter, whom I’d only seen before on television, as anxious-looking adolescents whirled along behind their father at Brighton or Blackpool; now they were in their late twenties, the girl fair like Laura, the boy hauntingly like Mark. They sat with Cara, in the front on the right, and made up a little for the obvious absence of her own two children.
I learned quite a lot from the first two speakers, one a colleague of Mark’s from early on, who described the family background, the businessman father and the glamorous and difficult French mother with her own career on the stage: not a happy marriage, or a long-lived one, but filling Mark with his lifelong conviction of belonging to both cultures. Eric Hadlow had set up the Hadlow Exhibition at his son’s public school – for a moment to my own surprise I coloured up, as if everyone were aware of me. Next was a woman I’d sometimes seen on TV, demolishing the government’s economic arguments with laconic severity. Today she was more expansive, evoked Mark’s business genius, and his ever-growing work as a philanthropist, which alone had justified, to his mind, the making of such large amounts of money. The impression of something close to sainthood felt more credible coming from so fierce a source. After her a young string quartet Mark had sponsored played some Haydn, which in its vigour and inventiveness and sanity seemed to confirm what the previous two speakers had said about Mark himself. I think we all saw how impossible it would have been for Giles to be here.
When it came to my turn I saw people checking the order of service and blinking at me, some of them, in a disoriented way, turning their heads as if I might be hard to hear. (I have never been hard to hear.) And no doubt there was also recognition, and a sense of some of them knowing a bit about my part in the story, and even being pleased at hearing and accepting this racially distinct person. I had memorized the poem, to make it more immediate, but to some people this is always confusing, it makes them self-conscious and they barely take in what you say. So I held my Collected Yeats open in my hand to anchor and formalize their experience. The book itself when I glanced at it seemed to me a gathering of memorials, of the shadowy years beyond years through which I’d owned it and read it and slipped dog-eared markers between its pages.
Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills . . .
I looked up and out at the raked rows of faces, blots of red plush here and there in the pattern of dark suits and dresses, with a question in my mind as to what part I had played in a life that had been full of these hundreds of other people. I felt I was an intimate, as well as being way out on the periphery – I was a special case, for Mark and Cara, with privileges others who knew them much better and saw them all the time never had. And I had the old feeling, from fifty years back, that Mark himself was caring and just but aloof, and Cara the one with available and changeable emotions.
But when the master’s buried, mice can play,
And may be the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.
Well, they took it, the grandees, as they had to, and in honour of Mark and of art.
Afterwards we went into a bleak hospitality room with white iron pillars and fire doors, but it was well-staffed and quickly filled up with our noise and activity. I slid a glass of champagne from its slot in the tray, and looked around, unsure where I’d find my level. I wished very much that Richard was with me. Various people congratulated me as they passed by, various others didn’t. A nice enough old couple who’d seen me in Bajazet came past, and we talked for a couple of minutes. ‘Well, we mustn’t keep you from your admirers!’ they said, and went off to the buffet, leaving me all alone. I noticed Giles’s son, as he glanced over his shoulder, and a moment later he broke away from the group he was with. ‘Hello, Mr Win!’ he said. ‘Thank you so much for your words today.’
‘Not really my words,’ I said.
‘But you read them so beautifully.’
‘Well, thank you,’ I said, as he kept looking and smiling at me. I felt I had the interest for him of someone who has just performed, and might with a bit of luck do so again. ‘And you must be . . . Mark’s grandson – you’re so like him.’ He was really the same as Mark in the eyes and brow, but with a fuller mouth, and something flinching mixed in with the charm, reflex perhaps of having Giles as a father.
We shook hands and he said, ‘I am, I’m David Hadlow.’ For a topsy-turvy second or two I imagined Giles had paid me the most touching compliment – very shyly, and shamingly, somehow.
‘I didn’t know you were David . . .’
‘Oh, after my godfather, David Harris . . . you know?’
‘Well, of course, I know who you mean,’ I said. It still seemed preposterous to me that Fash had not only a Christian name, but my own.
‘We saw you in Space at the Almeida last summer, you were brilliant.’
‘Oh, thank you – it was great fun to do.’
‘We thought it was bound to transfer to the West End.’
‘We hoped so too,’ I said discreetly, ‘but Annick wasn’t able to commit to it.’
‘Ah, yes, of course . . .’
‘Do you see much theatre?’ I sounded for a moment like the Queen Mother, cut off from the behaviours of the young.
‘Yes, quite a lot. Actually my partner’s a designer—’ and he looked round and laid his hand on the arm of a young man with dyed blond hair who was talking to the group behind him. ‘Babes,’ he said, ‘this is David Win.’
Babes gasped as he joined us. ‘Hello, I’m Jonny,’ he said, ‘so thrilled to meet you!’ and he dodged my extended hand and flung an arm round me and kissed me on the neck. Perhaps he was already drunk. ‘David says you were at school with his dad!’
‘I know . . .’ I said. ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it.’ He still had his hand on my waist. I was trying to picture Giles’s relations with his son, and his son’s boyfriend: perhaps cordial, though just as possibly brutal. I knew he had abstained in the vote on gay marriage under Cameron – ‘Not my place,’ he had said on Question Time, ‘to decide on such a private matter’: his pompous shifty way of saying no.
‘What was he like?’ said Jonny, bright-eyed.
I looked at David, who seemed tensely curious about my answer. ‘I’ll tell you some other time, perhaps,’ I said, which was tactful and carried after all the idea of some future fun with these young people, dinner after a show. There was a dim sense of justice to it, or revenge.
‘Ooh, all right, then,’ said Jonny.
‘I don’t know how much you saw of your grandfather,’ I said to David.
‘Well . . .’ he said, and now he was hovering himself at the threshold of a large subject. ‘Well, quite a lot, in fact. We used to go and stay with them in the holidays – my Mum took us.’
‘Oh, I’m so glad.’
‘Yes, they were wonderful – obviously! It was just – you know . . .’
‘Yes, I know,’ I said.
‘Aah, sweetheart!’ said Jonny, and kissed him on the cheek. It occurred to me that Jonny might be on something a bit stronger than champagne.
‘Anyway, we mustn’t keep you,’ said David, happy but a little embarrassed by this affection. ‘We’d love to have you round some time – you and your husband. If you’d like that.’
For a second I was back in the long red-tiled hallway at Woolpeck, shaking Mark’s hand for the very first time, when the words that his grandson had just spoken were as unimaginable as walking on the Moon. ‘I know we’d both be delighted,’ I said. They smiled and nodded and went back through the crowd of much older people they barely knew.
I stood by the buffet and coaxed the cautious waitress into piling a decent-sized meal on a plate. The seats were taken by the many who needed them, so I tucked into my potato salad standing up. After ten seconds an old boy, very old, but pink-faced and handsome, was wheeled up in his chair by his haggard but enthusiastic wife. ‘Hello, hello,’ he said. I felt he was a man who liked a party. ‘I liked what you read.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Very good. Very clearly read.’ He smiled up at me. ‘Keats,’ he said.
‘I think in fact . . . wasn’t it Yeats?’ said his wife.
‘Yes, it was Yeats,’ I said.
‘It was Yeats, Mike’ – and she gave his wheelchair a shake.
‘It was a favourite poem of Mark’s,’ I said.
‘You’re an actor, aren’t you, I’m sure we’ve seen you in things.’
‘I am,’ I said, ‘David Win,’ with a quick drop of the head, having both hands full.
‘What was it you were in?’
‘Well . . . I was in Wingate’s War?’
‘That must be it. Terrific. Well, how exciting!’
‘And you are?’ I said apologetically.
‘Oh . . .’ – he shook his head, as if his name were so unimportant he could barely remember it himself, then muttered, ‘I’m . . . I’m Mike . . . Mike Kidstow.’
‘Aha!’ I said, smiling over the quick large adjustment, the revealed importance of this groomed and self-consciously charming old man, with his napkin and plate and his accumulated power – accumulated but now perhaps largely formal and on the wane. ‘I know you were an old friend of Mark’s.’
‘I was at school with Mark,’ he said, smiling again now, at the inner prospect of a hoard of stories which at last might find their moment.
‘Do you mean at Bampton?’
‘That’s right . . .’
‘Oh, I was there too.’
Now he beamed through his own surprise. ‘So we’re all of us BOBs,’ he said, ‘what fun. Well, I’m ninety-one, so I was two or three years younger than Mark, but we became great pals – really very close.’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ I said.
His wife jogged his chair again. ‘Don’t go on about all that, Mike,’ she said.
‘Now you’ve really got me interested!’ I said.
‘Can’t I say . . .?’ said Mike Kidstow, bemusedly. ‘It was, what was it? seventy-eight years ago . . .’
‘No, you say what you like, dear. I’m getting another drink.’ And she set off towards the buffet, draining her glass as she went.
‘Well . . .’ said Mike, and I squatted down with my plate beside his chair to keep whatever it was between ourselves; we were the closest of friends. ‘You probably wouldn’t know this, but dear old Mark – ah, Cara, Cara . . .!’
I looked round to see Cara, with her stick, and a glass of champagne in her other hand. ‘Oh, you’re having a drink,’ I said half-guiltily, ‘good!’
‘I bloody well am,’ she said.
‘I was telling him how well he read that poem,’ said Mike.
‘You couldn’t help me for a minute, Dave, could you?’ Cara said.
I straightened up. ‘Of course I could. I’m so sorry,’ I said, and I went off after her, leaving Lord Kidstow smiling and alone in his chair at the end of the room. I still wonder what it was that he wanted to tell me.