Free How to Disappear by Duncan Fallowell Page A

school cap and satchel and grey socks, called his father ‘sir’ and me ‘uncle’. I loved it when he called me ‘uncle’.
    Can’t remember what food we ate that last night at the club but for some reason I got far more smashed than the others and lost it all in the gentlemen’s washroom. Rita told me afterwards that one of the boys came to the table and said ‘Excuse me, Madam, the Master is lying on the lawn,’ and she’d replied ‘Don’t worry, he often does that.’ A servant brought pudding out to me and laughed as he tried to persuade me to enjoy it. There were smears of stars and a brilliant moon but I don’t recollect seeing the greenish mechanical object in the sky or even caring about it, though Rita later told me that she’d looked for it and it had gone. The lilies, masses of them cascading down the hillside, shone a fierce white. I do remember very well the astounding luminosity of those lilies, floodlit by the moon in the black Nilgiri night. Taking off my clothes and extending my full length I rolled from the top of the hill all the way down, crushing lilies as I went, wetting my naked body with cool lily juice.
DELUXE
    About eighteen months after my return from India the strangest thing happened. Though I’d say I was a sensitive man, I’m not a great one for supernatural experiences. Anything odd I’ve usually been able to account for in relatively comprehensible terms. What now took place, however, I have never been able to explain away.
    It began when I read in The Times newspaper an obituary under the headline ‘The Dowager Marchioness of Winchester’. To my astonishment this woman turned out to be Bapsy Pavry. Well, well, well, along the way Bapsy had hooked a marquess – and not any old marquess either but the Premier Marquess of England. Well done, Baps. All of which was quite new to me. But I was very sorry she’d died. I’d missed the chance of meeting an unusual personality and listening to her colourful stories. I bet she was beautiful to the very end; she looked the type who would be.
    At the time I was involved as a free-lance editor with a punk glossy magazine called Deluxe and I thought a piece on Bapsy would hit the spot. But when I came to research it I couldn’t locate the Bapsy Pavry obituary. I thought I’d torn it out and kept it but, searching high and low without success, God knows what I’d done with it, so I thought I’d ask The Times to forward me a copy. After examining their records they reported back – to my great surprise – that no such obituary had been published by them. How odd. Maybe I’d befuddled the source? The nineteen-seventies were a befuddling period. Perhaps it had been in the Telegraph. When I contacted the Telegraph however, they said the same. Hadn’t published an obit of Bapsy Pavry. I rang all the relevant papers and drew blank, blank, blank. No obits anywhere. This was perturbing and – well – had she in fact died? None of them had the foggiest idea. They didn’t even know who she was.
    This unnerved me. So I backtracked and tried to work it out. I’d read an obituary in the newspaper – but no obituary had been published – and it was of someone who would certainly have rated an obituary had she died – but editors seemed not to know of her existence – so maybe she hadn’t died – so what had I read? Quite apart from the possibility of a phantom obituary, you’d think it a simple matter to ascertain whether or not a woman who’d been married to the Premier Marquess of England had died. Not a bit of it. I rang all possible authorities. No one knew whether she were alive or dead – and many didn’t know of her at all.
    Soon after this puzzle arose, I had lunch with John Betjeman. Which I did write up for Deluxe. The article incorporates the Reverend Gerard Irvine and his sister