Time to Be in Earnest (13 page)

I spent most of today until evening watching the funeral on television. It was an extraordinary, indeed unique, event. Apart from a brief preliminary wailing when the gun-carriage first appeared, the crowd was very quiet and the half-feared demonstrations of anger never occurred. For me the most poignant moment was when the young princes, with their father, Prince Philip and Earl Spencer, took their places behind the coffin at St. James’s Palace. The fact that the boys could manage this walk before thousands of onlookers was a tribute to their fortitude and self-control—qualities which are not much in fashion.

I was glad that it was so sunny. London—the parks, the trees, the buildings—looked very beautiful. It was extraordinary that the whole funeral could be so well organized and so perfectly carried out in just a week. The Abbey service was a successful compromise. I thought that I would find the Elton John song obtrusive but it seemed appropriate; this, after all, was the world in which the Princess was most at home. There was applause both outside and inside the Abbey for Earl Spencer,
but I thought his attack on the Royal Family was unnecessary and misguided; the wrong words at the wrong time in the wrong place. I wonder if those sad, mascara-laden eyes will droop in reproach for ever over the House of Windsor, or whether this media-fuelled emotion will burn itself out as quickly as it has arisen.

The American Ambassador, Admiral Crowe, and his wife held one of their goodbye parties at the Residence in Regent’s Park. There was room in the marquee even for the large number of guests, but as the evening was fine I strolled into the garden. Unusually for a party at Winfield House, I saw few people I knew. The Ambassador gave a short and amusing speech and I particularly liked one story. He said this was his second retirement. The morning after he left the Navy he dashed out of his house and settled himself comfortably with his newspaper in the back of his car. A few minutes later his wife came out to point out gently that, if he wanted the car to go anywhere, he would have to sit in the front and drive! He can’t be the only one to tell this story.

The Residency is now to be closed for about two years for necessary repairs, including the removal of asbestos. I shall miss the parties there which, under different ambassadors, I have known always to have a welcoming spontaneity and informality even on more formal occasions.

To the National Portrait Gallery, one of my favourite London galleries, for the first viewing of a portrait of John Major by John Wonnacott and one of Tony Benn by Humphrey Ocean, both commissioned by the Trustees. The two portraits are very different.

The John Major, considerably larger, shows him sitting in the white room at Number Ten with Norma on a window seat and a view through the open door into the adjoining green room. I like portraits in a domestic
setting, particularly with an interesting vista, but I found the perspective somewhat disturbing. The carpet seems to be hung rather than laid, and John’s hand and foot look out of proportion. No doubt all this is intended and the picture certainly has a dramatic impact. In front of John is a white glistening object resembling crumpled foil, but which I was told is a piece of modern silver from his collection. I know about his fondness for silver; he showed me with obvious pleasure some pieces from the dinner service when I dined at Number Ten. But I am not sure that the piece included in the portrait is a successful addition. Tony Benn’s portrait is much smaller, an amorphous egg-shaped visage but one which did convey something of the sitter’s essential character.

Portrait painting seems to be in a state of flux. Perhaps because of the development of photography and its power both to fix and interpret personality with powerful immediacy, artists seem to have lost confidence in representational painting. Few do it well and others, in their desperate search for new ways of looking at life, have sacrificed a recognizable likeness to experimental technique. But a photographic image, however brilliant, can never challenge the best of painting. For me, a painting provides a more intense, more personal and more enduring insight into human personality. A photograph, however brilliant, says all it has to say at once. To return to it is only to reinforce that first immediate response. I can return to a painted portrait again and again, learning more each time about the artist as well as the sitter.

Tony Benn’s son came up to me while I was looking at my own portrait by Michael Taylor, and wanted to talk about my use of St.-Peter-on-the-Wall at Bradwell in
Original Sin
. We spoke about setting in the crime novel and I told him that I had wanted to erect a house for one of my characters on a desolate stretch of East Anglian coast and thought Bradwell would suit my purposes admirably. He took a photograph of me in front of my portrait. I read that there is an audio cassette about the portrait giving Michael Taylor’s views as artist on me as sitter. I didn’t buy it, although I was tempted to hear Michael’s views.

When the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery decided that they wanted to commission a portrait of me, I was invited to meet the Director, Dr. Charles Saumarez Smith, and the keeper of the twentieth century collection, to discuss which artist should be chosen. I was asked whether I would prefer a well-known, well-established figure or a brilliant up-and-coming painter, although I don’t think the choice was presented
in precisely those terms. I was shown postcards of the work of Michael Taylor and I liked the strength and originality of his compositions and the authority with which he used colour.

He came to my house for the sittings, himself chose the room and the pose, and when I showed him the dress I had in mind, liked it, although in the portrait it certainly appears more shapeless than it does when I am wearing it. I enjoyed the thirteen sittings and liked Michael very much. There was no problem in sitting still—there never is for me—but I wanted to use the time and silence to think about my new novel and every time I retreated into that imaginary world, Michael would say, “You’re not looking at me.” He worked with great intensity, seeming to widen and shoot out his eyes as he painted and using copious amounts of toilet paper from a roll to clean his brushes.

We spoke hardly at all during the sittings. There is much I would like to have asked him. What did he think of the commercial art world today and of such iconoclastic artists as Damien Hirst? How far did private patrons influence what people feel is important and are prepared to pay for? How difficult was it for a newcomer to find a gallery willing to take him on? Did galleries have too much influence? Did artists feel themselves under pressure to produce quickly or in a certain style? How easy was it to make a living? Were art colleges good or bad for an aspiring artist? But I totally sympathized with Michael’s wish not to chat. He was as much in his private world while painting as I am in mine while writing, and at those times interruptions are intolerable.

I did ask him during a break if he was intending to make me look sinister or mysterious, to which he replied, “I have enough problems putting down what I see without trying to see something else.” He has put down precisely what he saw: an elderly, much-lined woman with, I suppose, a certain authority. It is the painting of a seventy-five-year-old by someone still young, and is literally wart and all. It is a powerful painting which I much admire and, like all powerful paintings, provokes controversy. Some of my friends complain that it verges on caricature, but no one says it isn’t like me.

The children’s writer and artist Shirley Hughes is seventy, and four of her publishers joined to give her a party held at the Royal College of Art. Shirley and her husband John are two friends whom I never meet without a lifting of the heart, and see only too rarely. She has had a profound influence on writing for children, particularly young children, through her stories and the vigour of her superb illustrations. Here are real parents, real children, never sentimentalized but drawn with tenderness, humour and humanity. The party was crowded, but not unpleasantly so because of the number of rooms and the fact that the windows could be opened to a generally warm night. There were speeches by Margaret Meek, the educationalist who, like me, occasionally attends All Saints, Margaret Street, by one of Shirley’s editors, by Posy Simmons, and by Shirley herself. She blew out seventy candles to general acclamation, after which I left.

There were flowers, teddy bears, other toys, balloons and messages tied to the railings of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, although the heaps of dead flowers inside the railings show that the work of clearing has begun.

To Southwold on Friday with an Oxford friend, the novelist Ann Pilling. She didn’t have the car so came up very early by bus and we took a taxi to Liverpool Street. It was the first time Ann had seen the rebuilt station, which I think architecturally one of the most successful in London. I love the meticulous brickwork and the way in which the great iron arches have been retained and repaired. I can remember the Liverpool Street of my childhood: smoke-filled, mysterious, exciting. To me it represented London and all that word implied of romance, history, pleasure, and a whiff of danger. I came to London very rarely when a schoolgirl, but was once taken by my father to a Promenade Concert at
the old Queen’s Hall outside the BBC. I remember Sir Henry Wood turning, baton in hand, to scowl at us as if we were a potentially unruly mob. The scowl seemed to be directed personally at me, as if he had detected that, musically, I was unqualified to be there. The music meant little, but I can remember walking down to Oxford Street, by then deserted, and being told by my father that this was the longest street in the world. He was given to confident assertions, most of which I believed.