An Audience with an Elephant (12 page)

After breakfast I met a man with his bags packed outside the Porter’s Lodge. ‘I can’t take anymore of this,’ he said. ‘I was sitting in Hall just now and for a moment I felt the familiarity of everything. I knew that panelling, those pictures. Then I looked around me and saw faces I didn’t know at all. It was like a horror story.’

And what Philip Larkin called ‘this frail travelling coincidence’ was almost over. I walked down the high street and met the head of Scotland Yard’s Forensic Science Lab squirting oil on to the leads of a car which had failed to start. ‘We must have lunch,’ he said vaguely.

Singles Weekend

O BEGIN WITH IT
was like starting a new school. We inspected each other at a distance, did not speak, looked away when eyes just as full of curiosity, speculation, suspicion met our own. There is great wariness at the start of a Singles Weekend.

Playwrights from that lost age when plays had plots would have boggled at the good fortune of it: there we were, 25 strangers come together in a Cotswolds hotel. It was not the reading of a will that had brought us there, nor a snowstorm that detained us, but the outside world dropped away as remorselessly as a shoreline. For a weekend we were left with each other, and our dreams.

All we had in common was loneliness and the ability to cough up the sum required, for the organisers, like the writers of romantic fiction, believed in putting obstacles in the way of True Love. The first was cost. The second was inconvenience, for they did not believe in romantic locations. The Singlers must struggle in Nottingham and Darlington and, even, in the inspired lunacy of An All-Night Party In The English Channel In October, and not all the wicked uncles and mistaken identities in the world can compete with that one. If, in a Dover dawn, draped over the rails like old towels, your eyes still meet, then True Happiness must be yours.

All weekends were advertised in the monthly
Select
magazine, weekends, magazine and a computer dating agency being part of the same company. The magazine was amiable enough, though given to denunciations of masturbation as severe as in any Victorian handbook on youth. It was only afterwards you appreciated the commercial logic of this: a booming industry needs to knock out competition.

Anyway there we were, newly arrived in the lounge bar, wondering which were ordinary hotel guests and which Singles. Spy rings meeting for the first time are probably like this. But in addition there was embarrassment: was it social failure that led to this confrontation in the hills? There was also a small fluttering even in the most threadbare soul. What if she did turn up, the blonde with the long legs who could fill in tax forms and fix car engines? Help!

I had read with mounting awe the five pages of lonely hearts advertisements which concluded the
Select
magazine. At no time, unless it was the Hollywood of the 1930s, could more eligible people have assembled in one place. There were merchant bankers and film producers, men with Bentleys, men with country houses. There were men who knew their hearts’ desire so precisely they even knew its poundage, ‘under 140 pounds, laconic, lovable and lusty’. There was what might have been a misprint, ‘a slightly older man, educated, king’. Some were boastful, some were smug; some hid their feelings under bravado (‘I dare you. . .’). But one was urgent, ‘for any female, any age’. Another said, simply, ‘I am 21 and tired of being on my own.’ One showed the accents of experience: ‘No philanderers or fusspots, please.’

The weekend did not begin well. My roommate, a young solicitor from the North, lay glumly on his bed with his golf clubs around him. The hotel course, so beautifully photographed in the brochure, had been closed. He was cross, he said, because he had allowed this to surprise him. From his first Singles Weekend he remembered the lack of organisation and the fact that the Singlers, like Victorian domestics, had been obliged to eat from a different menu to the rest of the guests. Defiantly he had arranged his aftershave lotions and deodorants under the bathroom mirror: bored he might have to be, but smell like a human being he would not. It was the same organiser this time as last, came a mournful voice from the bedroom.

We met, as arranged, in the bar downstairs just before dinner. We were given one free glass of wine each. Now I had always thought I could drink anything, but the red wine I was given at the Hotel de la Bere near Cheltenham was off all gastronomic maps. Yet the Singlers drank it. The men stood silently by the bar, and the women, in long dresses, sat together. We had the nervousness of teenagers, though few of us would ever see 40 again (and even fewer would want to, with wine like that in the world). We were 25 in number, teachers, accountants, farmers, lab technicians. There were just three under 30, and at least one over 60, and we were as uncomfortable as anyone at a school dance. Perhaps that was why we were there. Certainly nothing but nerves could account for the fact that we were actually drinking the wine.

The organiser (or host, as the programme called him) was a very thin young man who came and went during the weekend like the White Rabbit. He made no introductions, and spoke to very few of us. Most of the time he hovered on the fringes as though trying to pluck up courage to ask somebody the time. ‘Last time he claimed to have jet-lag,’ said my roommate, who now smelt like a herbal border. ‘Wonder what it’ll be this time?’

He told us the programme for the weekend. On the Saturday morning we were to be taken on a bus tour of the Cotswolds. In the afternoon (and it was a really warm day, remember) we were to be split into two teams, one of men, the other of women, who would then play each other at darts. On Sunday there was to be more darts. At night there would be discos. Oh yes, and we should be allowed to pick any item from the
á la carte
menu.

The irony was that this little speech broke the ice among the Singlers. Most grumbled. A few looked at each other with incredulity. One looked pop-eyed with rage. But Singlers are gentle people. At dinner we earnestly chose the most expensive items from a menu crackling with French.
La Galantine á Canard Truffée. Pintadeau á la Vigneronne
. And one amazing dish which I translated as being kidneys in their petticoats. We conferred with each other. We sought each other’s advice. We listened, entranced, as each in turn ordered some meaningless overpriced item. It was suddenly Singlers versus the rest of the world.

But dinner, after the French and the ordering, was stiff. There was a lot of shyness. Topics were stumbled on, or frantically unearthed, only to be buried again: the price of fish; bicycling in London. But then a girl arrived late and said she had come by motorcycle. We quivered with excitement. Did she. . . did she always travel by motorcycle?

‘Yeah. Off North next weekend for a show.’

Was she. . . was she a dancer? Some of us had stopped breathing.

‘Oh no. I play bagpipes. Dagenham Girl Pipers.’

We were talking about her two days later: the Singlers had acquired their first character.

We were wary of each other, and of that sense of failure we knew we shared but none of us would mention. A large confident redhead sat at another table, smoking languidly between courses. I said to my neighbour that I didn’t think she could be a Singler, and was asked, sharply, ‘Why?’ Tread softly, tread softly. After dinner I began to drink, very quietly and deliberately — doubles of white port with Carlsberg Specials as chasers. If man ever gets to the stars it will be on something of this kind.

The next day was our bus tour. The driver had a sense of history hazier than that of mediaeval man: ‘’undreds of years old, that,’ he nodded at a castle. A country house showed through the trees. ‘Very old, hmmm,’ he confided to us. He reserved his fascination for matters of finance. He told us about rate increases in villages, of the cost of housing, of the dilatoriness of farmers with bills. ‘Us got surnmin for everyone, round ’ere. Hospitals for the sick, prisons for bad ’uns, schools for illiterates.’ He swung his bus through the lanes like a Panzer commander, awarded us three-quarters of an hour in Bourton on the Water, a genteel tiny Black-pool, half an hour in Stow, and then whisked us home. The Cotswolds were just wallpaper to us Singlers.

We were a group now. There was a dignity to being a Singler. One or two who had met on earlier weekends talked of the Super Singler, a dapper man with an expensive car, who, it was rumoured, came to every weekend. He regarded himself as of too high a rank to talk to most of us, and in public was usually seen with the disappearing host.

On Saturday afternoon we rebelled. Nobody went indoors for the darts match. Instead we lay, white and veined, by the hotel pool and watched the local teenagers basking like little bronze gods. The Super Singler, in some kind of G-string, lay apart from the rest of us. The host was nowhere to be seen.

There was a wedding reception in the hotel that afternoon, and rounding a corner I came on a young married couple quarrelling with that quiet bitterness you only get in marriage. Was it for this we had forked out our cash? But nobody admitted to having come specifically to meet a mate. A young widow said she’d come to get away from the kids, and to be looked after; it also relieved her of the embarrassments of being a woman alone in a hotel. The Dagenham Girl Piper said she’d come because she fancied a weekend in the country. Only one, a woman, after many drinks told me quietly that such a weekend afforded the kindest, most uncomplicated form of sexual release.

That night at the discos the dancers were closer.

It rained in the night and the next morning, and the thin host who had popped up from somewhere muttered something about a darts championship. Alas, nobody in the hotel could find the darts. We tried bar billiards, but the table machinery had broken. So we played bar pool and, oddly enough, it was the best time of the weekend. We were doing Something, we were not just being Singlers. My roommate, smelling like a large boiled sweet, was Pool King, modestly advising the rabbits on their strokes. Then there was the lady-novice-who-was-good, and the lady-novice-who-was-terrible-but-giggled. Suddenly there was no tension and no awkwardness. Yet after lunch we left the way people do when a ship enters harbour. There were lives to be picked up again, and a few polite farewells. I doubt if many addresses were exchanged.

As an organised weekend, it was something of which the Singles industry should be ashamed. But why should they bother? No industry that trades on human loneliness can ever fail. It was so much easier once when we lived generation after generation in small towns of 12,000 people and knew half of them. Now we turn up in cities like survivors of shipwreck.

The irony is that abruptly it would seem to be much better to be homosexual. They are organised. They have clubs. They have newspapers. The London borough of Islington had even helped finance a homosexual introduction agency, to which went the lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites and homosexuals new to London, on different nights of course. But the poor old heterosexuals had to finance themselves to be allowed to play darts in the Cotswolds. Only, of course, the darts couldn’t be found.

The Middle of England

Mixed Emotions

N THE PUB THE
scent was so heavy it was as though I had walked out of an English village and into a tropical rain forest. I looked around me and on every table there were scattered stalks and leaves — so whatever had been there had clearly been gathered up in a rush. Fred Huggins was behind the bar, staring into space.

On 31 August 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a car crash, and a week later was buried at Althorp, her family home in Northamptonshire. At some point between these two dates Di Huggins of Abthorp, also in Northamptonshire, fell into a rabbit hole and broke her ankle. Mrs Huggins, the wife of Fred Huggins, licensee of the New Inn, had been out looking for a lost cat in the dark.

It was two days later, just after 12.00 noon, a quiet time with the pub not long open, and Mr Huggins was doing the
Telegraph
crossword. He looked up when the door opened to see a man standing there.