The Judgement of Lut

The last time I saw Rod Hall, he bought me lunch at a Chinese restaurant in a basement just behind Oxford Street in the West End of London. This was early in 2004. He was my film agent and wanted me to write some pitches for him to sell to Hollywood. He was tetchy in the restaurant, although not with me. The service was poor and he apologized to me several times, explaining how much better the place was as a rule.

I can’t recall much about the projects we discussed. I didn’t want to write film pitches anyway. All I can remember about the meal is that when we’d finished patiently waiting for, and then swiftly eating, the stir-fry and silver cod and drinking the champagne, Rod had hurried to get his coat,while I went to the bathroom. He was rushing to make it to yet another of his meetings. He was a busy agent, and a good one: tough, shrewd and charming. He represented successful film writers such as Lee Hall (Billy Elliot), Jeremy Brock (Mrs Brown) and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty).

When I joined him at the desk in the cloakroom I found I had no more conversation, so I resorted to asking him about his socks. I said that I liked them, and asked where they were from. This wasn’t an entirely serious question. I knew style was important to him, and I enjoyed teasing him about it from time to time. I didn’t really like his socks all that much. They were just ordinary socks. I merely wanted to find out how much he was prepared to pay for a pair from Yohji Yamamoto or Margaret Howell or whatever exorbitantly expensive shop he was bound to have bought them from. I shared the popular idea that gay men had inside knowledge about the minutiae of style. I knew nothing else about Rod’s personal life then. The only reason I knew he was gay was because one of the executives producing the film of my first novel, which I was adapting for the BBC, had branded him a ‘hysterical old queen’ after he pursued my interests with his usual determination and brio. In fact, he had never struck me as hysterical, queeny or old.

As his coat arrived, he told me that he’d bought his socks at Marks & Spencer. They had cost £3.99. He waved goodbye and headed towards the steps. He was tall – six foot four – and skinny. Jeremy Brock accurately observed that he resembled someone who had escaped from a Quentin Blake drawing, ‘stalk-thin, with the ears of the Big Friendly Giant’.

I watched Rod leave the basement restaurant, up the green marble steps spectrally lit at ankle level by glowing red panels. I waited for my coat. The service at the cloakroom wasn’t that much better than in the restaurant. The blue fluorescent light made everything look elegant, but unfriendly.

I’d enjoyed the meal, but the conversation with Rod had been stilted. I’d had a dispute with him some months previously about the dating of a particular contract, during which we’d had several terse telephone calls and email exchanges. I had no strong feelings for him. We simply had a professional relationship. My younger brother, Jack, on the other hand,who cut Rod’s hair at his salon in Soho and knew him better, described him as a ‘lovely, kind man’.

It was a description of him I was to hear many times later that year. Something similar is carved on his gravestone at the St Thomas à Becket churchyard in Framfield, East Sussex, a few miles from the sixteenth-century cottage where he grew up. He is buried a few yards away from his father, Tom, who had died ten years previously. Rod’s headstone reads:

RODERICK THOMAS BERRINGER HALL
‘ROD’
27.41.51 - 22.05.04
A KIND AND GENTLE MAN
REMEMBERED WITH LOVE