We drove to one of those new and, it must be said, unlovely blocks that have recently been built by the side of Vauxhall Bridge. Never having entered any of them, I rather wondered at his choice of dwelling. I think I must have expected him to live in a ravishing manor house in Chelsea, built originally for a cheery gentleman farmer in the 1730s and now on the market for enough to refinance Madrid. But on stepping out of the lift at the top-floor landing, then into Kieran’s flat – I always resist the word ‘apartment,’ but I suspect it would be a more accurate term – I understood at once. At the end of a long, wide hall the whole of one side of the building, about thirty feet deep and who knows how long, was a single, vast drawing room. There were tall windows in three walls, giving a view of London second only to the Millennium Wheel. I looked down at the curling, night-time Thames, with its busy, toy boats, twinkling with coloured lights, at the dinky cars whizzing along the ribbon-roads, at the tiny pedestrian dots, hurrying down the pavements under the lamp posts. It was like flying.
Nor was there less to wonder at inside. The whole place was filled with the loveliest things I have ever seen in a private dwelling. Normally in a family house, even a very grand one, the exquisite pieces are occasionally interlarded with a pair of chairs covered by Aunt Joan and something Daddy brought back from the Sudan. But there was none of that here. Two matching Savonnerie carpets covered the gleaming floor and on it sat furniture so beautiful that it looked as if it had all been removed from one of Europe’s major palaces. The paintings were mainly landscapes rather than portraits and, while I usually find them a trifle dull, I could not say that about these spectacular jewels of the genre. These were landscapes by Canaletto and Claude Lorraine and Gainsborough and Constable and other names I can only guess at. There was one ravishing painting of La Princesse de Monaco, by Angelica Kauffmann, which caught my eye. Kieran saw where I was looking. ‘I don’t like portraits as a rule. I find them sentimental. But I bought that because it reminded me of Joanna.’ He was right. It was very like her. Joanna wearing a wide, flower-trimmed hat and the looser casual fashions of the 1790s, which seemed so carefree until you remembered that the sitter was less than three years from her hideous death. The unfortunate princess had ridden in the last tumbrel of the Reign of Terror. The officers heard the rioting of the Thermidor coup d’etat break out as they drove towards the guillotine but, unfortunately for their passengers, they decided to complete the grisly journey, reasoning that no one would blame them if the regime was overthrown, but if Robespierre survived in power, they would all die for sparing the victims. They were probably right.
The picture was above an elaborate chimneypiece, which I admired. He told me it was from the scattered trove of a great house that had been demolished in my time, releasing a flood of doorcases and fireplaces and balustrades and other plunder when it bit the dust during the hopeless years of the 1950s. The family are still there, happily ensconced, these days, in a charming converted orangery.
‘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 bergere, 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
