For The Death Of Me

51

They gave me the full diplomatic treatment on both sides of the Atlantic. I never saw Customs or Immigration at JFK or ’Eefrow and, better still, I never saw any journalists.

The evil hour was only postponed, though: there was no protection in Nice, and I have never been happier to be met by a minder. Conrad, ever efficient, had hired extra security; just as well, because the airport staff couldn’t have come close to coping. This was the Cannes Film Festival and Grand Prix week rolled into one and trebled. And all for poor, poor, pitiful me.

It was easier in Monaco: the Prince had ordered the police to guard my privacy while I recovered from the terrible shock I’d had.

I had another thing to recover from too. I had to tell Susie exactly why I’d missed the plane. I may be pretty good at manipulating the truth, but not when she’s around. She didn’t take it well. For a while I thought that the curse of being married to Oz had struck again, but eventually she told me that she’d rather have me, in her words, ‘with a stain on your record and by my side than sat spotless up on a cloud playing a fucking harp’.

She went on to add that there can be very few people in history who could claim that their dick saved their life. Even so, I don’t think that she’s quite forgiven me; maybe she never will.

The kids didn’t understand any of what had happened, thank JC, and won’t for a while. Tom knows his mother won’t be coming back, and he’s making of that what a four-year-old can. Being brutal about it, he hadn’t seen much of her for a year, so it would have been worse for him if it had been Susie or me who’d been put out to the pasture in the sky.

A week later, I was back in New York, with Susie. Benedict Luker’s cremation was private; there were only five of us there, the two of us, his publisher, his editor and her secretary. The lovely editor was heartbroken. I reckon old Benny had been right: he might well have been on there.

The memorial service we held for Prim in Auchterarder, ten days after that, was an altogether different matter. David and Dawn Phillips were the chief mourners, of course, but Tom Blackstone was there too, with his dad, and Bruce Grayson, Prim’s nephew, with his. They tell me that there were four hundred people outside the jam-packed church, listening as the service was relayed on speakers.

David asked me to do a eulogy for his daughter. I was touched, and agreed, of course. When I considered what I would say, I found myself remembering the last time Prim and I had really talked to each other, in the Algonquin, our favourite hotel in New York. And this is how it turned out.

‘If you’re the sort of person who looks at life through rose-coloured spectacles, you’d have seen Primavera Phillips as a conventional angel, clad in white. But if you were to take them off, then paradoxically, you’d have seen her still angelic, but maybe clad in a different colour, for Prim had some of the fallen one in her too, or at least she tried to make it appear so.

‘She’s touched my life in more ways than I can explain. I know this: from the moment I met her, I became a different person, a deeper person, a stronger person. A better person? Others can decide that. But without Primavera, I wouldn’t have become what I am, whatever that might be, however you people see me as I stand here, unable to read my carefully drafted script for the tears in my eyes.

‘She’s touched your lives too, with the sheer excitement of being around her, with her mischief, with her devilment, but never with her badness, for despite all the things she saw and did. . and there have been a few which I could not possibly recount to you, not here in this place, nor in any other. . there was none of that in her. In spite of herself, in reality she was a wholly good person, and if she’d have liked to have been bad, well, she never quite made it, however hard she tried.

‘We’re not having a funeral today, because we have no body to commit, although we retain the hope that one day we might be able to do her that final honour. Still, where Prim rests right now, she shares that place with the likes of the fictional Luca Brasi, and maybe the real Jimmy Hoffa, and a few more similar characters. I find comfort in the knowledge that, in her wholeheartedly perverse way, she might like that idea.

‘Yes, she played the game of life with all her great heart, and usually she won. She and I may not have played it too well together, not all the time, but when we were good we were great and when we were less than good, what the hell? We still managed to make Tom. He’ll go down as her crowning achievement, and I promise you and her, I’ll make damn sure that her spirit burns on in him.

‘It was Kitty Wells who sang that it wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels. I reckon that in at least one case old Kitty was wrong. So long, Primavera, from me, from our boy and from all of us who love you and who will never forget you.’

I heard them applaud in the church, and outside, but by that time I couldn’t see a single fucking thing.