I met Penny by the Eurostar check-in. As usual she was sowing chaos around her, pushing where she should be pulling, gesticulating at strangers, and snapping at Hugh, who’d come along to see her off - with, I don’t doubt, a heavy sigh of relief.
As ever, her look hovered somewhere between magnificence and absurdity, generally keeping just on the right side of the border. This time she was doing her film star travelling incognito number, in dark glasses and a mad Pucci scarf, which helped to draw the eye away from the truly magnificent full-length sable coat. She had somehow inherited or otherwise acquired the coat from Hugh’s side of the family, and such was its luxuriance that nobody ever suspected that it was real. The overall effect was very Sophia Loren.
Hugh kissed me hello, and then quickly again for goodbye. Penny managed a condescending peck on the cheek, acknowledging that our Paris trips were not quite work, and not quite play.
The drama reached something of a peak on the way up to the platform. There was the usual choice between squishy lift, and jostly escalator. As the lift queue seemed to be full of Belgians, Penny decided to go for the escalator, a device she habitually shunned. Big mistake. She clung to the rail as though the escalator were a tiny ship caught in a tempest.
‘My feet, Katie,’ she cried, ‘my feet! What do I do with them? Where do they go?’
‘Just close your eyes and pretend it’s a normal stair,’ I said, colouring at the attention we were attracting. ‘O God, let me … hang on … just put that … and that one there.’
People were looking round. The Belgians in the lift queue pulled Magritte faces, and pointed with umbrellas.
And then it stopped.
Stuttered.
And then stopped.
‘We’ll asphyxiate!’ yelled Penny, illogically. ‘Come on, we must go back.’
By this stage we were halfway up, and there must have been fifty people crammed in behind.
‘Penny, we can’t!’ I tried feebly.
But Penny had switched from helpless panic mode, to all-action hero. She swept around, through, or over the hapless travellers, who were all waiting patiently for the wretched machine to get going again. She was like one of those ships that smash through the arctic pack ice on the way to pointless expeditions. First Woman to reach the North Pole without Sanitary Protection sort of thing. I followed shamefaced but, as so often with the indefatigable Penny, not a little admiring.
The lift doors opened just as we reached the foot of the escalator. Penny hesitated not one second, but barged straight in, past the bemused Belgians, waving an arm, and saying, in a tone that forbade any argument, ‘Excuse me, this is an emergency. We are designers. I am Penny Moss.’
A Eurostar lackey bowed. Honestly, he did. He may, of course, have been drunk.
Things settled down a little once we found our seats, and within twenty minutes Penny was relaxing into her second glass of champagne, as Kent or Sussex, or whatever it is, slid by in a happy green and brown blur.
I was facing the wrong way, of course. Penny always liked to see where she was going. But I didn’t really mind. I’ve always thought - and pay attention here, because this is about the only profound thought I’ve ever had - I’ve always thought that life is like facing the wrong way on the train. Because, you see, the present, the bit of countryside that’s exactly equal to where you are, is over before you know it’s there, and then all you have is the dwindling afterwards of it. And though you can guess what sorts of things are going to come rushing over your shoulder, because you can see roughly what sort of terrain you’re in, there’s always the chance of something really unexpected or scary, like a tunnel, or a field with horses, or Leeds.
Oh. I always thought it would look better when I wrote it down. Perhaps I just can’t do profound.
‘Interesting young man, that Milo,’ said Penny, between sips. In the rush I’d forgotten about her dramatic appearance at the party. ‘He said that he would also be in Paris, which was an amusing coincidence. He seemed so sensitive, so … attentive.’
‘That’s the way of the PR, Penny. He probably had you down as a potential client.’
‘Oh no, I really don’t think his interest was professional. I really am rather afraid I may have made another of my tragic conquests.’
I choked on a complimentary peanut.
‘But, Penny, you must realise that Milo …’ And then I stopped. This was really too delicious. Milo was going to love it. ‘You must know that Milo is terribly, um, confused … shy … vulnerable.’
‘Yes, I sensed it. And you feel I would be simply too much woman for him in his present state? Of course, of course. Not that I would ever stray; it’s been so long now. But there’s no law against dreaming,’ she said wistfully, her fingers pulling at the hem of her skirt. ‘And I do so feel for the poor boy, torn between the fatal intensity of possession and the emptiness of loss.’
Already the journey was living up to expectations.
Champagne for Penny was a time machine and eventually Milo was left behind and we found ourselves back in the sixties. Exactly which bit of the sixties was hard to work out, and Penny never specified, as that would have given away too much. I suspect it was a largely imaginary place, a sixties of the mind, a distillation of different times, combining late fifties debutante innocence with the lollipopcoloured, country-house drug scene of ’69.
First, of course, there were the RADA years. She seemed to have been worshipped by Albert Finney, adored by Richard Harris, and fondled by Peter O’Toole (or as I’m sure I heard it, tooled by Peter O’Fondle). In between her white-gloved carousing she flitted from voice production, to mime, to fencing (‘my sabre cuts once reduced Roy Kinnear to tears, poor lamb’), to ballet, to make-up, and back to voice. Her long-dead tutors Ernest Milton, Hugh Millar, Edward Burrage, joined us in the carriage, still graceful, fruity and fey.
She talked of nights in the Gay Hussar or the White Elephant, followed by dancing to Dudley Moore in The Basement. Satire at the Establishment always seemed to go with bizarre passes by comedians: Lenny Bruce offered to share his syringe, Frankie Howerd performed some act of dark obscenity (‘well darling, I was in drag …’).
Most of all, there were the clothes.
‘Darling, I was divine in my white piquet Mary Quant, top-stitched in black, and over it a black piquet coat with a stand away collar … and Ossie Clarke gave me a bias cream crépe with a keyhole neck … and I wore my ribbed yellow wool A-line Courrèges, with the sweetest little pair of silver-buckled Guccis.’
I sat back in my seat, drifting in and out of Penny’s monologue. Every now and then I’d snap into focus to hear her say something like, ‘… and then I looked down and Princess Margaret’s hand was on my knee …’ or ‘… I’d never seen anything like it before or since; I swear it was purple …’.
Who knows how much of it was true? Penny had a way of believing in her own creations, and that gave them a reality, a truth beyond any humdrum business of fact. But there’s something more to it with Penny. It’s as if things only ever exist when they’ve been externalised: talked about, or paraded before you. Nothing happens on the inside with Penny. What she thinks, she says, or rather she only thinks them once she’s said them. And, for all her extravagant displays of affection and loathing, I’m sure she’d have no feelings at all if there weren’t people around to observe them. I suppose that this is just another way of saying that she’s a drama queen. But drama queen is too ordinary and plebeian a concept for Penny. Perhaps drama empress comes closer. And how she loves a drama! I promise, more than once, I’ve seen her place the back of