Vanished Years (27 page)

According to Isabella – on the first day I met her, at a tea party in a stately home one wet Sunday before Easter in 1977 – she was summoned to her headmistress’s study on the last day of school for a final chat before setting off into the world. In contrast to the black tulip ‘McQueen’ she wore to the potting shed where she drank the fatal pint of weedkiller thirty short years later, she was in her school uniform that day, a grey tweed skirt, pleated and below the knee, lace-up shoes, an Aertex shirt and an Alice band in her sensibly cut, ash-blonde hair.

‘Isabella,’ said the head, ‘there’s something you must know!’

Isabella’s heart sank. She felt guilty at the drop of a hat. ‘If anyone came into this room right now and said there’d been a murder, I’d just know I’d done it.’

Our hostess looked slightly uncomfortable. Isabella’s storytelling was mesmerising and had one on the edge of one’s seat.

‘Don’t worry, Lavinia. I haven’t knocked anyone off this weekend,’ she chortled before collecting herself and her audience. She lit a cigarette, inhaled for inspiration, and on a stream of smoke flew the first of countless improbable stories I was to hear over the next twenty-five years.

‘We are extremely proud of you, here at Heathfield,’ said the headmistress. ‘You have been a really super head girl, and a great support to me personally. You may not have excelled at Maths but, by God, you made up for it in the fencing team.’

Another big drag.

‘You have always been there to help in a crisis. The girls look up to you. You are, in short, one of the best pupils it has been my privilege to have here in the school.’ The list went on.

‘How lovely for you,’ cut in our hostess.

‘But now look at me!’ drawled Issie, through a cloud of smoke. ‘Two years later. A charwoman. Can you believe it?’

She was certainly dressed as one, albeit a music-hall version, more Carmen Miranda than Elsie Tanner. She wore a spotted scarf around her head tied in a comical knot and a cleaner’s flowered housecoat. All that was missing was a dustpan and brush.

We were sitting in the drawing room of Cholmondeley Castle, the Gothic seat of the Marquess of Cholmondeley (pronounced Chummly), and, more importantly, his very dishy son, David Rocksavage. It had rained all weekend, and it streamed down the vast cathedral windows that afternoon while we sat snugly around a roaring fire. I had been invited for the weekend with my best friend Vivienne. It had not been the greatest success, as David’s mother, Lady Cholmondeley, or Lavinia to her friends, had taken against me from the moment I set foot in the house. She was a small, neat woman, formal and suspicious.

‘Not very Chummy,’ I remarked to Vivienne the first night in bed. We were sharing a room.

‘There are the chummy Cholmondelyes and the unchummy ones,’ she said.

‘Well, Lady Chummy is definitely one of the uns.’ We had discovered Nancy Mitford that year.

Perhaps it was the knee-length cape I was wearing. She could sense that I was one of ‘those’ and thought that I would undoubtedly have designs on her fabulously wealthy son and heir.

How right she was. Apart from anything else the word Chol mondeley struck an ancient chord for me, not because of David’s willowy beauty or any particular person in that illustrious family, but because of another house they owned, one I had known for as long as I could remember. It was called Houghton Hall, and on the endless
(two-hour) drive from my family’s home in Essex to my grandparents’ house in Norfolk, as I lay in the back of our Hillman, green with carsickness, at a certain point my mother would say, ‘Look, darling, we’ve got to the Houghton wall.’ I would sit up and wait to see the great gates, hoping against hope to spot some of the famous white deer that grazed on the park inside. We hardly ever saw them. You had to be very quick, because the wall stopped only for a moment, and my father would never slow down.

‘Slow down, Daddy!’ we all whined, but the major paid no attention.

Between two gingerbread gatehouses with tall twirling chimneystacks, through the black and gold bars of a gigantic wrought-iron gate, flashed a tree-lined park and in the distance a vast grey house. Occasionally hundreds of deer stood motionless as we shot past, like little clouds hovering over the grass, but then it was over, and the wall came back. But my carsickness was always gone by then, because in five minutes we would be at my favourite place in the world, my grandmother’s house.

Punch-drunk and competitive with Isabella’s success as a raconteur, I launched into this story to a rather underwhelming response. She alone egged me on, eyes wide like saucers, while one by one the rest of the party began to talk among themselves. Her reactions were as large as her own yarns, and quite brilliant, because, as I learnt years later, she was probably thinking about something else altogether. But who cared? Her gasps of ‘God, no!’ and ‘I love it!’ kept me going through Lady Chummy’s clear revulsion.

‘How very Proustian,’ was all that lady said as the story finished.

‘Exactly!’ I replied, wondering who the fuck was Proustian.

There had been a drama that morning because footprints had been found climbing the shiny black stone staircase in the great hall. Some of us were lodged downstairs, and somebody had crept up with bare feet and not come down. As it happened the footprints were not mine, but Lady Chummy was looking daggers, and they were all directed at me. So by teatime conversation had become
strained and minimal, punctuated now by the clinking of china, the pouring of tea, and all the various house-party inanities about delicious cake, terrible weather, Mrs Thatcher, or Vivienne’s neck, which had recently broken.

Then Isabella arrived.

She was one of those people whose energy was so intense that it burst into a room before her. There was a weird movement in the air and a clattering outside followed by screams and a crash. We all sat up. Somebody outside started laughing. It was one of those infectious laughs that cracked a smile even on Lady Chummy’s vice-regal features.

‘That must be Isabella,’ she said with pleasure. ‘She’s a neighbour.’

The door burst open and Issie appeared, dressed, as I have already mentioned, as a music-hall maid.

‘God, everyone! Sorry. I just tripped over that rug in the hall. I fell flat on my face. Thank God Caro was there. Darling, are you all right?’

The laughter gurgled up again as she clutched David’s sister and tumbled into the room.

Lady Chummy made introductions.

‘And this is Rupert Everitt,’ she said finally through gritted teeth.

‘Everett, actually, Lady Cholmondeley,’ I ventured obsequiously.

‘Oh my God. I love that cape. Look at the buckles,’ screamed Isabella.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It was my grandfather’s when he was in the navy.’

‘Should you be wearing it?’ demanded Lady C.

‘Probably not, but I couldn’t resist. It’s so gorgeous.’

‘Really?’ scoffed Chummy.

I caught Isabella’s eye and she began to laugh again.

‘God. You’re naughty!’

‘Isabella,’ asked the Marchioness, when everyone had settled back down, ‘how is your life in London?’

‘Fabulous. I’m a charlady.’

‘Is that satisfactory?’

Issie lit a cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at her hostess through hooded blue eyes for a long dramatic moment.

Then she began the story of her last day of school. She spoke effortlessly but with enormous energy, sprawled on a chair, to the manor born. She was built for humour and when she laughed a set of teeth jumped out that might have come from a Christmas cracker or a joke shop. They protruded almost at right angles to her mouth, perhaps the result of some witch’s spell because the rest of her was quite like a fairy princess. She was petite with beautiful skin, large blue eyes like saucers (as yet unsmashed), an hourglass waist and, as she was the first to point out, she had ‘fabulous tits’. Strangely her teeth were not unattractive, and on the rare occasions her mouth was closed they made her look as though she were about to blow a kiss, but they had directed the whole course of her life. She would have been someone completely different without them. They possessed her. They forced her to perform, to live up to them and to live them down. They had the effect of making her face one of the most memorable and expressive I have ever seen. It could make you laugh and later on it could make you cry.

‘Do you mean that, after all that, you are a cleaning lady?’ asked David, who had listened, silent and beautiful, in the corner.

‘God, yuh! I thought you knew. That’s my job. I’m a charwoman.’ She leapt up and gave a demonstration of hoovering and dusting and knocking things over, all in the course of two minutes, before slumping back in her chair, on the verge of fainting.

‘Vapours!’ she gasped. ‘I shouldn’t really be overdoing it right now.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘It’s my Crohn’s disease.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, it just eats you inside until there’s nothing left.’

‘Sounds ghastly.’

‘Yuh. It’s terminal. Could I have another cup of tea, please, Lavinia?’

Her stories were too good to be true. Two crumpets later we had already learnt that her little brother had drowned in front of her, and that her mother had simply gone down to the edge of the estate at home, where the railway tracks passed a lodge, and waved down the London train, got on and was never seen again. Her delivery was dramatic and witty, punctuated by greedy mouthfuls that overflowed from that curious beak. Her outfit was sheer Vaudeville, and it was hard to imagine this creature had recently been a model pupil in a strict girls’ boarding school. She was enormously vivid and the intensity that would later turn to madness literally sparkled at this point with youth. She was hypnotic, and I immediately adored her, even if I was a little bit jealous because somehow she had managed to take this neurotic tea party and turn it into a platform for her own display of fireworks.

She had a sixth sense when it came to making trouble. After a brief lull in the laughter, she looked around to see if we were ready for the next bit.

‘Caro told me somebody has been creeping about all night,’ she said with great innocence, in a stage whisper. The room stiffened. Lady C pretended not to hear and adjusted her skirt. Isabella scanned our faces with her mascara’d satellite dishes. They got the picture in ten seconds.

‘I bet I can guess who it was,’ she continued, giggling.

Please, not me, I thought.

‘Was it you, Rupert? Were you after that Cock Sausage?’ It was her name for Rock Savage.

‘No, it wasn’t me,’ I said turning red.

‘God, you’re naughty,’ she said again. ‘Come on, let’s see your foot. Get your shoes off. I’m really good at detective work. You have to be as a charwoman.’

There was nothing she loved more than to work a victim’s nerves. (That Easter it was still at the playful stage.) She loved watching me squirm.

‘Oh my God, you’ve got a verruca! I don’t think it is him, Lavinia!’
she said, waving one of my bare feet in her hand, giving me another big lascivious wink at the same time. Before very long she had moved the whole party into the hall to examine the staircase to see if my foot fitted the print. Even Lady Chummy came. Isabella had swept everyone into a state of utter hysteria.

‘God, it’s like
Cinderella
. Were you at the balls last night?’ she screamed.

Now it was my turn to feel guilty for something I hadn’t done. I just knew that the shoe would fit. And then what?

Mercifully, the footprint was a whole three sizes smaller than mine, so we all went back to the drawing room and sat down.

‘God, is that the time?’ said Isabella, like a character from a drawing room comedy. ‘I’ve got to dash.’

In a flash she was gone. The scream and the crash and the laughter and the clattering heels rewound and receded as she left the house, and the void in the room was as remarkable as her presence had been. We all slumped visibly, dreaming of an early night with a good book.

Isabella was quite exhausting.

E
ight years later everything had changed. Isabella was a professional (sort of) divorcee living in New York. She and fashion had found their way to each other and the time bomb was set, because now, little by little, life began to overcome her, imperceptibly at first, but her intense high spirits had a new note of strain woven into the frenetic soundtrack of champagne corks flying, taxi brakes screeching, doors slamming and high heels galloping off into the distance. She found a job working for Anna Wintour, the fashion editor at American
Vogue
.

Life at Condé Nast was still like something out of a Jacqueline Susann novel, and Nuclear Wintour had not yet emerged from Chrysalis Anna. It would soon become
American Psycho
, and everything was about to change, but for the time being New York was poised on the edge of the abyss, enjoying the Indian summer of a memorable season that had stretched long and lazy since the sixties. There were still neighbourhoods. Forty-Second Street was a maze of glory-holes and strip shows where dealers and hookers and bent cops happily rubbed shoulder pads on their various beats through the
delightful swamp. The East Village was to be penetrated at your own risk. Italian Americans spoke their own dialect, and in the summer months everyone sat on the neighbourhood stoops and actually knew each other. The rules of engagement in society were still those of the
belle époque
, a constitution laid down at the Factory and on the dance floor of Studio 54.

But the cracks were showing. Steve Rubell had lost his hair and turned yellow. Thousands of other queens, skin and bone, slunk into the shadows to die. They were terrified to go out because they looked Martian, and people would gather their children to them and shoo the queen away like a rabid dog. The disease was everywhere, contributing to the sinking-ship hysteria of the city. The grim reaper stood above it all, waiting for the moment Andy Warhol’s night nurse went out for a cigarette. Until that precise moment New York was still careering on like a train without brakes, and Isabella was a part of that last hot summer crash.