How far the events of this period (January to March 1975) were mentalised by Loughlin is hard to decide. To some extent all the factors surrounding Judith Loughlin’s death — even the identity of her husband — may be said to be fictions of an over-worked imagination, as meaningless and as meaningful as the elaborate footnotes in BP Codex. Was Judith Loughlin suffering from cancer of the pancreas? What was the role of the young lexicographer and icedance champion, Richard Northrop, whom Loughlin treated at the London Clinic for migraine? The unmistakable elements of some kind of homo-erotic involvement hover in the background of their relationship. It may be that the apparent physical closeness of the two men masks the fact that they were one and the same man. Their holiday together, the three distressing weeks spent at the Gatwick hotel, and the shot fired at the airport security guard, inevitably recall Rimbaud and Verlaine, but Loughlin may well have passed the time there on his own waiting for his wife to appear with her lover, devising the identity of the lexicographer as a psychic ‘detonator’. It is known that he spent much of his spare time stumbling around the airport ice rink.
A vital role seems to have been played during these last days by the series of paintings by Max Ernst entitled Garden Airplane Traps, pictures of low walls, like the brick-courses of an uncompleted maze, across which long wings have crashed, from whose joints visceral growths are blossoming. In the last entry of his diary, the day before his wife’s death, 27 March 1975, Loughlin wrote with deceptive calm: ‘Ernst said it all in his comment on these paintings, the model for everything I’ve tried to do…
“Voracious gardens in turn devoured by a vegetation which springs from the debris of trapped airplanes… Everything is astonishing, beart-breaking and possible… with my eyes I see the nymph Echo…”
Shortly before writing out these lines he had returned to his Hendon apartment to find that his wife had set off for Gatwick Airport with Dr Douglas, intending to catch the 3.15 p.m. flight to Geneva the following day. After calling Richard Northrop, Loughlin drove straight to Elstree Flying Club.
The extent to which Loughlin retains any real ‘recall’ of the events leading to his wife’s death is doubtful. On occasions his memory is lucid and unbroken, but it soon becomes evident that he has re-mythologised the entire episode at Gatwick, as revealed in the following taped conversation between himself and Dr Grumman.
GRUMMAN: You say that you then drove to Elstree. Why?
LOUGHLIN: I had rented an aircraft there — a Piper Twin Comanche.
GRUMMAN: I see. Anyway, you then flew across London and on down to Gatwick, where you paralysed the airport for an hour by buzzing all the BEA jets parked on the ground.
LOUGHLIN: I knew that if I could find Judith’s plane I could somehow fuse my aircraft with hers, in a kind of transfiguring
GRUMMAN: …crash? But why?
LOUGHLIN: I was convinced that I could fly her to safety. It was the only way she would survive her cancer.
GRUMMAN: What actually happened?
LOUGHLIN: I landed and skidded into the nose-wheel of a VC1O. Richard Northrop pulled me out. We had some sort of disagreement — he resented my dependence on him, and my involvement with Judith — and then the security guard was accidentally shot.
Although there is no doubt that Judith Loughlin had been married to her husband for three years, their relationship was never close, and she in no way could be regarded as ‘his’. Before her marriage she had been involved in a longstanding liaison with Dr Douglas, whom she continued to see even after the latter’s engagement and marriage in 1974. A successful barrister, self-willed and ambitious, she found herself increasingly unsympathetic towards Loughlin’s erratic mental behaviour and incipient alcoholism. It is almost certain that but for her death she would have divorced Loughlin the following year. Viewing her charitably, one may say that her actions that fatal afternoon in the bathroom of her Gatwick hotel had been provoked by years of marital unhappiness.
