Free How to Disappear by Duncan Fallowell Page B

Rosemary who joined us at John’s house before we left for the restaurant. The relevant portion of the article ran as follows:
    DUNCAN : I had a very odd experience the other day. I read an obituary of Bapsy Pavry. Do you know her? I discovered her in The Indian Yearbook for 1942. Well, in this obituary I learned a lot more about her – that she had since become the Marchioness of Winchester, then the Dowager, how she’d made a full-scale assault on high society, got into trouble, and so on.
    GERRY : She had a battle for the Marquess with Mrs Fleming.
    SIR JOHN : Peter’s mother.
    ROSEMARY : And Ian’s.
    DUNCAN : Apparently Mrs Fleming sued her for alienation of her husband’s affection. But the funny thing was that when I telephoned The Times for a copy of the obituary, they said they hadn’t published one. No one else has either. So I phoned Nigel Dempster, the gossip columnist, and he said he’d last seen her alive and well at Ascot a few years ago. So where did that obituary come from which revealed to me new and accurate information about her?
    GERRY : You should put it down now while you remember. We might be able to use it as an example of precognition. Her husband was the oldest marquess ever. He died at the age of a hundred or something.
    SIR JOHN : Shall we go and eat?
    I don’t think Rosemary ever forgave me for calling her brother Gerry. She insisted that he was always called Gerard. But I know that before they arrived, John had referred to him as Gerry and it stuck. The second thing I’d got wrong in the above was about Mrs Fleming sueing Bapsy – it was the other way round. The enormous row between Bapsy and Ian Fleming’s mother was another whole limb of Pavriana I’d barely grasped. (Eve Fleming, widowed and very well-provided for when Valentine Fleming was killed in action in 1917, was subsequently one of the many mistresses of Augustus John and had a daughter by him.) Dempster also suggested I try the May Fair Hotel where sometimes Bapsy had lived. The May Fair made a search and said a woman of that name, either name, wasn’t staying there and – inexplicably in the light of subsequent events – claimed to know nothing about her. Debrett’s didn’t know anything and the more thoroughgoing Burke’s had ceased publication. I looked her up in my Burke’s 1959 under ‘Winchester’. That didn’t say much except that her husband was born in 1862 and had married Bapsy in 1952, he aged almost ninety. I did later discover that the Marquess died at the Metropole Hotel in Monte Carlo in 1962, just short of his hundredth birthday. Nowhere could I discover her birthdate and couldn’t recall it from the phantom obituary. I chanced across a second photograph of Bapsy, still the beauty, in Andrew Barrow’s book Gossip. I think the photo was taken in the 1950s. But when I asked Andrew he couldn’t add anything to that. It seemed an idea to write to the current Marquess of Winchester to ask the whereabouts of his ‘kinswoman’ – if that’s the term. Reference books gave his address as 6a Main Road, Irene, Transvaal, South Africa. Oh God, another one who jumped ship. There was no reply.
    Although the Bapsy story was getting more and more peculiar, my life was getting more and more complicated, and after several further shots at trying to discover whether or not she were alive, I gave it up as hopeless. The woman had vanished without trace.
SUCCESS
    Nearly twenty years went by. Many things happened, including Rita’s death. She died in her fifties from a stroke. It hit her in church while she was discussing the details of her mother’s funeral with a priest. She keeled over in the aisle. And days later, in Stoke Mandeville Hospital where she’d been a much-loved hospital visitor, it was all over. This is not the place to write at length about her, except to mention that, after Ootacamund, Sarah and