D I A R y

IT IS NOT often that you meet a woman who has everything: looks, brains, and limitless supplies of money. But I met one at the beginning of the month. Dropping in to Groucho's Club in the early part of the evening, I was seized with curiosity about the upstairs rooms. I have never dared visit them, having heard that when they were not being used for improper purposes by literary agents, they were occupied by a rather terrifying toothy young woman called Kathy Acker. She sits there, apparently, with scissors and paste, compiling some sort of scrap-book. When not so engaged, her hobbies are body-building and weight-lifting. It all sounds b.izarre. In other clubs, such rooms are still full of old men sleeping off luncheon in leather arm-chairs.

Creeping up the stairs, I found not Miss Acker, but another American Damsel in Distress, and this was She. She was doe-eyed, soft complexioned and impeccably dressed, in a little black dress and a few unpretentious diamonds . I immediately recognised her as Miss Gloria Vanderbildt, about whom I had read in the newspapers. She was in London to publicise her book of memoirs , she told me , but she was about to leave it again in disgust at the outrageously rude reviews she had received. I told her that she should try not to mind about the reviews, but they were horrible. I suppose the snivelling stoats who earn their living writing for the book pages of English papers are naturally envious of beauty and wealth. We had a very amiable conversation, Miss Vanderbildt and I, about her past. She felt guilty about spilling so many beans about her frightful mother, but, once more, I assured her that her guilt was misplaced . There are few greater compliments one can pay a mother than writing disloyal memoirs about her.

By now, I felt that I had , in the vulgar phrase, chatted up Miss Vanderbildt sufficiently to embolden me to ask what a nice girl like her was doing in a dump like Groucho's. I t turned out that her pub- ·

lishers had decided to give her a party there! What a place to choose to entertain such an adorable goddess. If only they had asked someone in the know, such as Mr Mark Boxer, he would have explained at once that rich Americans should be entertained at Claridges.

'Where is this party anyway?' wailed M..iss Vanderbildt . I led the pretty creature back up the stairs to a half-empty room full of hacks drinking plonk . It was a woeful sight. The Chatto and Windus staff changes so rapidly these days that I recognised none of the publishers. There were a few minor poets being sick. 'Please,' murmured Miss Vanderbildt, 'please take me away.'

* * * Some days later I left the capital for my rural retreat in Wales, and I have been there ever since . Life is tranquil. Days pass slowly. London feels blissfully far away . It was something of a shock, therefore, to come into the village Post Office (Swyddfa Post to me) one morning and hea r the subject of their conversation. Normally they talk of interesting subjects such as how Mr Edwards is getting on with his new false teeth , or how to get rid of the Vicar. But this morning they were debating who was going to win the Booker Prize for Fiction. Apparently Joan Bakewell (whom I know and like) had been on TV the previous night saying that it was a crying shame that the short list did not contain such names as A N Wilson, Peter Ackroyd, Antonia Byatt, etc etc.

I held my peace in the Post Office, but knowing my literary predilections, the sub-postmistress winkled out of me who would be on my own personal short-list for the prize. I said that Iris Murdoch certainly deserved to win the prize again, because The Good Apprentice was, quite simply, the best novel written this year. Other obvious titles to be considered were John Braine's These Golden Days(Methuen) and Tony Lambton's Elizabeth and Alexandra, published by Quartet Books . But thereby hung a tale too private to air in the Post Office.

* * * Lord Lambton's brilliant re-creation of life in nineteenth-century Russia was, I am now at liberty to disclose, the first choice of one of the judges, and a number of the others definitely wanted it to be on the short list. The Chairman of the Judges, however, the Right Honourable Norman St John Stevas MP exercised his right of veto and said that in no circumstances should the book be considered. The Chairman tearfully told the committee, in the strictest confidence, that he had believed himself to be a family friend of the Lambtons. Had he not once spent a delightful week-end at Chatsworth, when Minister for the Arts, in the company of Lady Lucinda Lambton? Had he not sat in the Cabinet Room with Lord Lambton himself in the happy days of the Heath administration? And then to read this! The book which the rest of us had innocently supposed to be a clever piece of nineteenth-century pastiche was actually a thinly veiled roman a clef 'Elizabeth' and 'Aiexandra' were , in fact, none other than Mr Stevas himself and Ted Heath, and anyone could see that the figure of Rasputin was a cruelly accurate portrait of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. None of the other judges had been clever enough to spot this .

* * * I am having to write this before the announcement of the winner of this year's Booker Prize , but I predict that it will be won by Doris Lessing. This is no idle guess. Like all other professional journalists, Miss Tina Brown, for example, I use only reliable sources for my inside stories. It transpires that meetings of the judges this year have not been nearly so heated as on previous occasions. Everyone smiled very indulgently when, on their first meeting, Jack Lambert asked, 'Isn'tit t ime we gave something to old Willie Maugham?' The power behind the throne

)'JOVEMBER 1985

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