Open Writing

The last time I saw Peter he had made the most delicious little sandwiches.

They were cut into triangles, fresh white bread with the crusts taken off, all piled up on a green plate, egg and cress and salmon and cucumber. No-one had ever offered me such dainty sandwiches, and they were only for the two of us. He made tea in a teapot and there was a plate of fairy cakes, and I felt it was one of the nicest welcomes I had ever had. My husband and I had known Peter for over twenty years., but now nothing was the same in either life. Peter worked for the Min of Ag and Fish, and I visited him from time to time on my own, ever since he had returned from America and lived with us for a while, before finding this small flat in Guildford.

He was in excellent spirits that evening, and told me with great excitement that he had at last secured a publishing deal for his latest book. He wrote long, fanciful epics about wizardry and all things mystical, and with this news he seemed to have put all his misfortunes behind him, and unseated, at last, the black dog from his shoulders. We had a lovely evening, full of hope and positive thinking, and I left quite late to drive home. “I’ll see you again soon,” I said, and I congratulated him again on securing the book deal.

It was just before Christmas when I decided to go again. I didn’t tell him I was coming, I thought it would be a nice surprise, and I wanted to find out if he would be alone at the end of the year. As I parked the car a door opened on the opposite side of the road. A young woman looked out.

“Have you come to see Peter?” she said. I said I had. I wondered how she guessed, for I hadn’t seen her before. Then she told me what had happened a week ago. The week before that Peter had begun a week’s holiday. He had ordered a chicken and a sliced loaf from the milkman, and the two packages had lain outside his door all weekend along with two pints of milk. By the Tuesday the chicken was attracting the attention of the local dogs, and on the Wednesday a neighbour decided to tell the police that they ought to come and check up on the single man who lived there. Nobody had seen him, and his light had not been on in the evenings.

Everything in the flat was neat and tidy, and Peter was lying in his bed. There was no note, no reason given; the empty bottles beside his bed would have held more than enough to ensure his departure from this world.

*

By the time the police had made their enquiries and done all their investigating, it became clear that there was no book deal, there was no money in the bank. The council had to pay for his funeral, and there weren’t many friends there. Apart from me and another friend from the past, quite a few with long, sad faces said that Peter owed them money, and I couldn’t begin to wonder why he had been so poor. This was a man who had made money, inherited money, spent it and lost it, but even so, he should have been able to survive on a clerk’s salary from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in a council flat. Should he not?

Perhaps the odds cast against Peter were too bizarre right from the beginning. His mother (not yet his mother) was a medium. We only had Peter’s word for that, but I don’t feel inclined to be sceptical. She separated from her husband, but after a brief and impermanent reconciliation, Peter was born and lived out his young life with his mother and an old crone called Peggy, and with no other male interference he was adored and doted on by both women. He was working as cabin crew for an airline when he first crossed my path, but it was as a member of an amateur dramatic group that my husband and I got to know him. He acted, he produced, he could sulk with the best, but he could certainly get results. He had been a window dresser, he was a genius with paper sculpture, and he was a set designer with great flair. After his mother died, he kept Peggy as his housekeeper, and she continued to dote on him until the day she died.

As the years passed, the paths less trodden always seemed to be the ones taken by Peter.

An old aunt left him money, so he left the airline and bought a restaurant! He knew nothing about running a whelk stall, let alone a restaurant, and after a while the place had to be closed down because it didn’t meet the standards of health and safety. We lost touch after that, for quite a while, because Peter returned to the Channel Islands, where he had lived before. Marriage to a widow with three daughters was the next leap of faith, and at that time of his life he began to write his ‘epic’ novels. After the marriage ended, he left for America: there was no particular reason, and once there he married a woman of a different persuasion for five thousand dollars. She then promptly walked away and left him free to find employment because he was then an American husband.

This, you have to remember, was back in the late 1960s, when things were not so difficult in the States. Valet to a Greek shipping tycoon, manservant to Charles Bronson - how did he do it? How did he find these jobs with people in the public eye? I only learnt about these missing chapters in his life later on, when he returned to England, and they are far too numerous to tell you about here.

One person, and one person alone, always came to the surface in conversations with Peter. It was a lady called Shelagh whom he loved from the beginning to the end of his life. I knew little about her except that she belonged to someone else. They had been childhood sweethearts but Shelagh had married another man. Peter had become godfather to her two daughters.

With Shelagh lies the explanation for whatever hidden malaise afflicted Peter at the end. They had always remained friends, always stayed in touch, and he never failed to talk about her. In his eyes she was perfect, without fault. Even though they hadn’t seen each other for years she was always the same to him: his childhood sweetheart, and when he heard one day that she was coming to see him in his council flat, he was over the moon. He prepared the spare room, everything was clean and tidy, and he himself was well prepared with a good wardrobe. She would be able to stay for the weekend, and they would talk and laugh and reminisce, and everything was going to be wonderful.

It was only a week or two later that he made the lovely plate of sandwiches and seemed so glad to see me: it was then that he told me about the book deal and seemed in such good spirits. Was it all another dramatic performance? I waited for him to tell me about Shelagh’s visit, but when he didn’t I decided to ask him.

“How was it with Shelagh?” I said. “Did you have a wonderful time?”

There was a pause. Then:

“No,” he said. “It was a disaster.”

He told me how she had spoken to him, how she had sneered at him and criticised his clothes and scorned his flat. She wasn’t going to sleep in that room, she said, and he must find her a hotel and call her a taxi. Worst of all, he said, something within her seemed to have become unhinged, and she was dressed like a clown: a purple coat, stained and worn, walking boots and a woolly hat, red and blue, good for a tea cosy. Worst, worst of all, he said, was the lipstick, and that was just like a clown. It was red and thick, sticky like jam: an old artiste from music hall days would never have looked like that, not in the direst straits.

His distress and disappointment were so great that he didn’t protest. She hadn’t even wanted to stay beyond a cup of tea, so he called a taxi and watched her go, through his net curtains. When he came to the end of this heartbreaking story, he said:

“I shall never speak to her again. No, I never want to hear her name again.”

I tried afterwards to remember what I had said. Did I try to comfort him, or did I think it was a bit of a performance? I had known him long enough to know that as an actor he was a man of many parts. But no, that was no performance.

What I did suddenly remember after his funeral was this: it was something he had said long ago.

“We’re like little children, you know. We just want to play together and share our toys. I want her to come and play with me.”

And he had laughed just like a child.

Well, that’s the answer then. Shelagh didn’t want to play with him any more, and he simply couldn’t bear it.