What are the chances?

Coincidence in novels. Are you a fan? As a reader I certainly am, though I’ve been nervous about it as a writer. A whole book of mine, London, Burning (2021), was shot through with chance encounters to the point that I inserted a self-justifying quote from John Buchan as an epigraph: “Coincidence… stretches a hundred long arms hourly across the earth.” Anthony Cummins, reviewing the book in this newspaper, noticed my slight defensiveness on the subject; he was right, and I changed the quote for something else when the paperback came out.

I wouldn’t make so free with coincidences in novel-writing if life didn’t keep serving them up. Let me share this latest. Two things to consider first. My new book, The Millionaire Waltz, set in the 1920s, concerns an actress whose family home is Carlyle Square in Chelsea, when that address was far more rackety and bohemian than it is now. Second, my favourite ever TV show, the BBC’s 26-part adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Pallisers, dates from my childhood (broadcast in 1974) and starred, inter alia, the great Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora Palliser. She it was who adorned the cover of a Radio Times supplement about the series, which magazine, in pristine nick, a friend of mine had recovered in a clear-out and given to me. No finer gift could I imagine.

Ripple-dissolve to a few weeks ago when I bought a painting, very cheaply, at auction. It’s a large pastel and chalk of two young women by Robert Buhler (1916-1989), an associate of Freud and Bacon, whose work I’d admired for some time. It was titled Miss Anne and Miss Jane Hampshire, and was first exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition in 1968. When I got it home I found on the reverse of the picture an additional note – “painted at 15 Carlyle Square, SW3” – the same address the heroine of my book lived at, spookily. So I looked up the Miss Hampshires (on Google) and discovered that they were in fact the older sisters of Susan, the actress, and had both recently died following “significant health challenges” during their final years.

Well, I thought, what are the chances? I took the picture off to be reframed, thinking no more about it. A week later I was with a friend at a members’ club when I happened to glance up and saw a lady walk by; her face seemed familiar… “Was that..?” My friend nodded. “I think it was”. I hurried out to the hall and found her amid a bunch of guests who were assembling (I was told) for the annual Trollope Society dinner. Heart thumping, I said: “Are you Susan Hampshire?” She smiled: none other! I gabbled out a fan’s praise, telling her she would forever be Lady Glen to me. “I wasn’t very good in it,” she laughed, merrily, which I argued was exactly wrong: her mischievous comic manner and willowy presence absolutely lit up every scene she was in. She did remember asking Simon Raven, the Pallisers adapter, to insert bits of Trollope’s dialogue “to make Glencora more interesting”. And yet to me she couldn’t have been more interesting.

And then I recounted the story of my recent purchase of the Buhler double portrait of her sisters. She remembered it, and told me that he also painted her, on her own, the following year, also for the RA show; her mother commissioned both pictures when the artist was living nearby off the Fulham Road. In my excitement I forgot to ask her if he painted her at Carlyle Square. I realised, belatedly, that Susan Hampshire would be in her late 80s, and yet the dark-eyed, unlined, dewy-skinned face before me seemed girlish still. (Google supplies: “She maintains an ageless appearance through healthy, clean eating – raw vegetables and nuts – and a lively spirit.”) The latter was plain to see. What I couldn’t quite convey was the astonishing way the Buhler painting seemed to have conjured her right into my path: of all the rooms in all the clubs, of all the nights the Trollope Society might have chosen for their dinner, this was a coincidence of unfathomable eeriness.

I would have liked to yarn with Lady Glen all evening, but the dinner gong had summoned them. On getting the Hampshires portrait back from the framers I decided to do a little rehang of pictures to make room for it. One pastel portrait of a girl, wispy, almost spectral in its effect, had hung at the side of our bed for ages. It was a picture that Rachel, my late wife, had bought years ago, and I’d never really studied it before, had no idea who it was by – just one of those paintings that “goes to sleep” on the wall, unnoticed. I thought a change of scene might wake it up, and found a new place for it in the hallway. I took it off the bedroom wall, glanced at the back, and read: “Study of a Girl, 1944. By Robert Buhler”.

Illustration by Oscar Ingham/Observer Design