Pallant Van Raay

Van Raay played a very clever game once he’d been appointed Director of Pallant House Gallery in 1997. It wasn’t long before he was buttering up the great and good – all with the unflinching support of his trusting partner, whose good offices, ironically, had allowed him to take up the appointment in the first place!

He made quick work of the delightful old queen who’d been the driving force behind this very provincial outfit. Phillip Stroud, who had once run a successful local restaurant, had ‘bequeathed’ the Chairmanship of ‘the Friends’ of the gallery (the fund-raising bunch) to Mary Gordon Lennox (see previous blog), purely on snobbish grounds, which was much to his discredit. He could not have chosen a better candidate to milk this relationship than the petit-bourgeois Dutchman who, having queered his pitch in his soggy homeland – and Glasgow for that matter, saw West Sussex, correctly, as a fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of his  charm. Luckily for Van Raay, Stroud was ailing, but, almost on his deathbed, was clear-sighted enough to realize he was being edged out of the picture. There was an uncomfortable interview in the hospital. Water off a duck’s back as far as Van Raay was concerned!

‘The Gordon Lennox’ was omnipresent. Scarcely an evening passed without her giving Van Raay a lift back to his marital home. Occasionally she deigned to come in for a cup of tea. Mostly, she and her protege sat in the car chatting about ‘affairs of state’ (i.e. how to milk the local gentry for mullah for all it was worth). Nicky, her husband, was in the terminal stages of prostate cancer, and, like all ladies ‘of a certain age’  - and/or a certain class she needed a walker. Wow! Did Van Raay fit the bill! He soon usurped the role played in her life by the ageing second-rate actor, Keith Baxter.

There was a lovely moment at a drinks party given by one of Mary’s daughters where I perceived the precise moment when Baxter clocked what was happening. An unmistakable look of peeved amusement on his face! How funny! I thought. Mind you, Mary was painstaking when it came to disguising her social ploy (well, she was the wife of a retired diplomat! ), and never excluded me from social occasions. It was not until I discovered – the first time ever I had checked my partner’s briefcase – an ‘oh-so-sympathetic’ letter from her to Van Raay sympathizing with his problems with ME, that I blew her cover. Van Raay told her about this, and, of course, she immediately dashed off an apologetic note to me. She must have thought me either very stupid or very naïf. By that time I had a pretty good idea of all the self-pitying heart-to-hearts that had been going on behind my back. She was not to know that I had witnessed the same calculated older woman/younger gay man scenario in ‘a previous life’.  It was not difficult to imagine their conversations. And Van Raay, of course, by now convinced that if one hadn’t been to Eton one wasn’t worth bothering about, must have lapped it up! Nice woman, but a bit of a ‘silly’.

Among the other local ‘movers and shakers’ was an elderly couple that had set up a sculpture park nearby. Wilfred and Jeanette Cass, having amassed their squillions in trade (she’d run a sweatshop manufacturing ladies’ lingerie in New York/he’d done his time as a ‘fixer’ for such outfits as Moss Bros.), they’d taken up residence in a rather ugly modern house on the Downs, and installed a motley assortment of ‘sculpture’ among trees and ivy. One had to admire them! Such chutzpah! Mind you, I always suspected the game-plan was to ingratiate themselves with the local Anglo-gentry. And this was confirmed when – doing my best to massage my partner’s fundraising efforts – I suggested to Wilfred he endow a gallery in the new Pallant House. Oh dear! That dreaded word: Money! I reminded him that comparable institutions in the U.S. were full of galleries named after their rich Jewish benefactors. Didn’t seem to cut much ice. I often wondered whether they’d put any cash where their pretensions were. Who knows! They certainly didn’t splurge when it came to entertaining. Having peeled the tatties and gone to no end of trouble to satisfy their odd diets on a number of occasions, the single time we were invited to dinner we were served up micro waved Marks & Sparks. Gosh! The Van Raay of course, smiled and smiled – the fact that his own nation had shoved their race onto trains to the death camps appeared completely forgotten!

Then there were ‘the Hopkinsons’. What nice people! David & Pru. He – the Godfather of M&G Investments, – she, a cultivated person who could not cook but could speak languages. When, having received my go-ahead, Van Raay interviewed for his Pallant House post, he asked me whether he should ‘come clean’ about his sexuality and our relationship. Not being one EVER to tell lies, I told him: ‘Of course he should!’. And, so he did. Having described his relationship with me, the response came back: ‘Two for the price of one!’. David Hopkinson was right there – up to a point! To be fair. At least they were decent and generous. But, on the other hand, when your days are limited, what the hell do you do with all that cash? ? ‘Good works’, as we call it in Scotland.

Well, there were others…. A Scottish couple who lived locally and wanted to be ‘in on the scene’. If only they could have known the disdain with which their paltry contribution to the Pallant House fund-raising efforts was viewed!  A retired submariner and his wife, who had been good friends of mine, and, in their declining years, wanted a piece of ‘modern art’ action, with which my partner was providing them. Oh dear… it’s all so sad and pathetic…

 There was a large family: a divorced mother and four brothers, together with what Stefan referred to as his ‘primary friends’.  It was a rare weekend that the ‘Dutch connection’ didn’t operate in one or other direction. This situation – just like the anal standards of domestic order he insisted upon – was a ‘non-negotiable’.

The large Dutch Catholic family was a constant presence. ‘Mama’ was an interesting person. She read a lot, and was prone to politically incorrect outbursts. Her English was poor, but quite good enough to invite me to her ‘gay salon’ on our first meeting. She made a great fuss of me and told me how much she preferred me to her daughters-in-law.

The three of the brothers I got to know were loud and hearty in the Dutch manner. When they weren’t ranting about money matters they were raving about the family’s other chief obsession: schizophrenia. Sadly, the absent brother was schizophrenic and permanently hospitalized. Often it was suggested we visit this unfortunate, but Stefan forbade this – to the mystification of both myself and his other brothers. Apparently he was worried about what the schizophrenic brother might tell me.  

The deceased father figured as largely in the family rap sessions as the poor brother. A functionary in the Rotterdam shipping industry and accomplished pianist, Papa had deserted the family, and – worse, it appeared – had bequeathed the replacement wife his treasured piano.

No forgiveness was ever to be forthcoming from what seemed to me an unusually unhealthy matriarchy. I was shocked when Stefan boasted of having spurned his father’s deathbed appeals. 

Stefan’s three sets of  ‘primary’ friends were largely survivors from his days at Leyden University. He was adept at playing them off against each other.  He took pains to reassure each set that they were ‘ultra-primary’.

Omnipresent were the Deiters: Patricia, a large Belgian girl, her husband, a kindly Dutchman, and three daughters. I saw so much of them they began to feel like my own family.   Only the occasional, obviously cheaper gift served to remind me I was only on licence as Stefan’s partner. Next in the pecking order were the Geeris’s. Stefan, together with the Deiters, regularly mocked this couple as vulgar ‘nouveaux riches’. Their flaunting of their wealth, it seemed, was at odds with Holland’s famously hypocritical conventions of financial modesty.  Last in Stefan’s pecking order of ‘primary friends’ were his former neighbours on Amsterdam’s Herengracht, a bisexual dentist and his pathetically trusting wife.

Needless to say  – in spite of a decade of birthday and Christmas cards, family weddings, and shared holidays – I never heard another word from Stefan’s Dutch clan once I too had been consigned to the ranks of his ‘ex-s’.