Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [119]
The first few months after Conor’s death were a waking nightmare, but the condition of shock prevented me from completely breaking down. I also had work commitments to deal with. To begin with, Russ Titleman was sitting in a studio with a pile of tapes from the twenty-four shows I had done at the Royal Albert Hall in February and March. I couldn’t engage with the music at all and didn’t really want to be there, until he played me the version of “Wonderful Tonight.” For some reason, listening to that song had a very calming effect on me, and I went into a deep sleep. I hadn’t slept for weeks until then, so it was a very healing experience. I think it was because the song took me back to a reasonably sane and uncomplicated point in my past, where all I had to worry about was my partner being late getting ready for dinner.
Back in the present, I bought a house in London and built a house in Antigua. I couldn’t stand sitting alone in Hurtwood after what had happened, so I asked one of my oldest friends, Vivien Gibson, to come around every day to check on the mail. Viv and I had been friends for many years, having started out when we had an affair during the eighties, and she was now working full-time as my secretary. She was also one of the only people I wanted to have around me at this time. Somehow she understood my grief and was not afraid of it. It’s amazing how many so-called friends disappear in the face of this kind of tragedy. She is a truly courageous person with tremendous compassion, and a lifelong friend. I also felt I needed a complete change of scenery. So with Roger in tow, I drove around London looking at houses until I found a beautiful house in Chelsea. Set back off the road on a side street, it was perfect. It had a courtyard to park in and a small walled garden.
At the same time, with the help of Leo Hageman, a developer in Antigua, and Colin Peterson, his friend and architect, I set about designing and building a villa within the grounds of a small resort hotel on Galleon Beach in English Harbour, on the south coast of Antigua. What was I doing? I was running, in several directions at once. In fact, until Roger put a raging stop to it, I almost bought another country house, with the intention of selling Hurtwood altogether.
Ostensibly, the London option made sense, the consensus being that I should be around people for a while, as Hurtwood had so many memories. As for Antigua, I had been going on holiday there for years and had brought Lori and Conor there many times. English Harbour had a flourishing community of crazy people, and I felt like I fit right in. The governing factor in all of this, though, was motion—keep moving; under no circumstances stay still and feel the feelings. That would have been unbearable.
I was three years sober, with just enough recovery to stay afloat but no real experience or knowledge to be able to deal with grief on this scale. Many people might have thought it would be dangerous for me to be alone, that I would ultimately drink, but I had the fellowship, and I had my guitar. It was, as it always had been, my salvation. Over the next two or three months, in England and Antigua, I stayed alone, going to meetings and playing the guitar. At first I just played, with no objectives, then songs began to evolve. The first to take shape was “The Circus Left Town,” about the night Conor and I went to the circus, our last night together. Later, in Antigua, I wrote a song linking the loss of Conor with the mystery surrounding the life of my father, called “My Father’s Eyes.” In it I tried to describe the parallel between looking into the eyes of my son, and seeing the eyes of the father that