Charmed life

I always think of my father at this time of year. In particular, I go back to the summer of 1997 – the year he died and the year the England he knew died as well. You went to bed in the confidence that tomorrow could only bring the same happiness as today We always spent July and August at his house in Italy, with gardens that tumbled down to the sea. There was a comforting symmetry to those days. The mornings began with the BBC World Service; the evenings were spent mixing white ladies and arguing over the newspapers I had bought in the port, with its boats bobbing on crystalline waters, and its chattering girls with gazelle-like eyes and flowers in their hair.

One of my exes is trying to get me arrested. I discovered this when I received an email from the Met Police saying that he had accused me of stealing his belongings. As he is not a British citizen, the nice policeman I spoke to said I need do nothing in response. I was puzzled, until I remembered that after we had parted ways my ex had said: ‘I’d like to see you behind bars.’ I hadn’t realised he had meant it literally. The bastard. When we parted ways, my ex had said: ‘I’d like to see you behind bars.’ I hadn’t realised he meant literally I wondered what I had seen in him, apart from his looking like a lovesick Satan. I have consistently willed myself to accommodate men whose teeth I should have knocked out.

Breakfast is my preferred meal, in case you’re interested. I broke my fast this week with my walking laser-light of a friend, William Shawcross, at Fischer’s in Marylebone, which serves an egg rosti to rival that of Café Sacher in Vienna. Fischer’s consists of a small entrance area, a bar to the left, and at the rear a faux Austrian dining room with wall-to-wall antlers (synthetic, but that’s how the strudel crumbles these days). The main room forms a St Helena to which second class patrons are exiled. Preferred clients, selected with unerring snobisme, are placed at the front. Novelising to Mantel was as solemn a business as trimming a beard is to a German barber We, of course, were allotted an impeccable position by the window.

My father met a murderer once; a carrot-topped former chorine called Ann Woodward, who gave her veddy veddy posh husband both barrels after discovering he intended to divorce her for someone more upper-class. She got off after her mother-in-law, Elsie, who preferred a killer in the family to a scandal, bought off the American cops. That was back in 1955, and Ann is now one of the subjects of the new Ryan Murphy FX series, Feud: Capote v the Swans. Murderers generally get what they deserve, which is a relief, as not so long ago I had one in my bedroom These days, murderers generally get what they deserve, which is a relief to me, as not so long ago I had one in my bedroom.

It was the mother of royal scandalabras, as Walt Winchell might have said, and remains one of the greatest historical conundrums of all time. I refer to what became known as the Mayerling Affair: the sensational apparent murder-suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, son and heir of Emperor Franz Josef and the tragic Empress Elizabeth, and his young lover, Baroness Marie Vetsera. Both Elizabeth and Rudolf happen to be collateral ancestors of mine, and I recently visited their gilded and frescoed rooms at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, wondering what really befell the wretched prince, and, armed with new information, including personal letters never before published, I may (scoop alert!) be in a position to solve the Mayerling mystery once and for all.