LAST SUPPER
Damian Thompson was at the Athenaeum
when, between Latin grace and Wrest crab', his host collapsed and died
MY friend Brian Brindley had spent months planning a dinner party to mark his 70th birthday. He was very clear about its purpose: he was not trying to assemble a collection of the prettiest or most amusing people he knew but, rather, 'those who have played a significant part in my life'. His boyhood was to be represented by a senior civil servant; Stowe by a clergyman and an art historian; Oxford by Ned Shernn. Several of us knew Brian from his days as vicar of Holy Trinity, Reading, a drab Victorian box that he had transformed into a gilded Anglo-Catholic confection of Gothic and baroque. The youngest guest, a fashionable jeweller, had met him only in his final incarnation as a Roman Catholic journalist, a career move forced on him by a skirmish with the News of the World and the Church of England's decision to ordain women priests. Women were no more capable of being priested than donkeys, he once said; it was to be an all-male dinner party. Brian was worried that a guest might drop out, leaving us a sinister 13, so another friend agreed to spend the afternoon by the telephone, ready to don a dinner jacket at a moment's notice.
There was only one possible venue: his beloved Athenaeum. Every week Brian would come up from Brighton to air his High Tory views at the club table, and, after lunch, would ascend in the mahogany-panelled lift (shaped to accommodate a coffin) to tea and a snooze in the drawing-room. His membership of the club was doubly precious because he had nearly lost it: when the tabloid article appeared. Lord Coggan led a nasty campaign to expel him. Brindley always brought out the worst in evangelicals.
A legendary epicurean, he had managed to boil down the menu to just eight courses: prosciutto and figs; avgolemono; `drest crab'; lime sorbet; boeuf en daube; summer pudding; angels on horseback; and fruit for dessert. The crab was to be accompanied by samphire — an endangered species, he told me proudly. (This was a man who refused to wear fur unless it was 'cruel fur'.) The invitations, in the style of William Morris, announced drinks in the South Library at 7.30 p.m., dinner in the North Library at 8 p.m., and instructed guests to wear 'black tie and short coat (smoking or tuxedo)'.
When I first knew Brian he was enormously fat and modelled himself on an 18thcentury monsignor. I once watched him sail into a civic dinner in Reading in a cream tropical cassock with scarlet buttons. 'My auntie's got a frock like that,' sang out one of the Labour councillors. The figure holding court in the South Library last Wednesday was dressed in a white dinner jacket, a waistcoat reproducing the wallpaper of Brighton Pavilion, and a psychedelic bow tie; I told him he looked like the next Doctor Who. He sat there with a stockinged foot resting on a gout stool, barking instructions at a club servant. But ten years of heart disease had shrunk him, and guests who had not seen him recently were shocked by his frailty. Ned Sherrin bounded in and pressed a pot of caviare into his hand with the words, 'I thought I'd get you something perishable, Brian, because neither of us has got long to go.' Everyone laughed.
We trooped down the corridor into a cube-shaped room lined to the ceiling with books and filled by an oval table laid with Athenaeum silverware. Brian sat at the far end next to Ned. The Jesuit architectural historian Fr Anthony Symondson said a Latin grace. During the first two courses I listened with half an ear to our host's conversation. He recommended his favourite fish restaurant to Ned, then moved on to the subject of the state of Israel, which he was convinced (and hoped) would go the way of white South Africa. I also heard him mention his hero Michael Portillo,
whose elimination from the Tory leadership race he regarded as a far greater disaster than the general election defeat.
As the shadows lengthened in Pall Mall, the butler lit the candles. The `drest crab' was magnificent, which pleased me for Brian's sake, but I was worried that he seemed to be pausing between sentences, bowing over the table as if before the sacrament. Then he turned to me and said, 'I need to go outside for a moment. If I'm not back in five minutes, come and get me,' and he tottered out.
The next thing I remember is looking up to see Brian, back from the loci, being helped into a chair by Martin Taylor, the young jeweller. He closed his eyes, then his white head lolled forward. Martin was saying, 'Can you hear me, sweetheart?' There was no response. Fr Symondson made the sign of the cross over Brian's head, whispering absolution. Someone else went out to call an ambulance. We carefully lowered Brian to the floor and put him on his front in the recovery position. Half the diners were still in their places, standing with one hand on the table and the other clutching a napkin, like figures in a Victorian tableau, their faces frozen in a very English mixture of embarrassment and concern.
A doctor who had been dining in the club appeared at the doorway. He knelt down, searched for a pulse, shone a light into Brian's eyes, and told us, apologetically, what we already knew: 'I'm afraid he has passed away.' There was a long silence as we gazed down at our host. A similar thought occurred to several of us. The flickering candles, the rows of leatherbound books, the body on the carpet: all the scene lacked was Hercule Poirot. Fr Symondson recited a beautiful formal prayer in the measured tones in which he had said grace: Brian detested the mateyness of improvised worship.
There was no question of continuing, of course; the only person I knew who might conceivably have carried on eating in these circumstances had himself just died. (The Athenaeum later refused to accept any payment for the dinner.) We wandered sadly into the drawing-room, where we reflected on the tragic appropriateness of what we had just witnessed: Brian had expired surrounded by people from every strand of his life, in front of a feast of his own devising, in the arms of a good-looking young man. A tailcoated waiter approached us and asked Martin, who had removed his dinner jacket while trying to revive our friend, if he would put it on again. Brian would have approved: like Bill Shankly, he felt that some things were more important than life and death.
Only later did I discover that, during the afternoon, he had seen a chiropodist who took one look at his ulcerated foot and told him that if he did not go to hospital immediately he would lose his toes. 'You could even die at your own dinner,' he said. 'Then so be it,' replied Brian. 'I shall go down in flames.'
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