Although I could amuse myself well enough, I was lonely a lot of the time. Hours spread out endlessly before me like an edgeless glassy pool, especially during holidays. I spent a lot of time looking out of the window of my playroom on to the street below, sometimes waving at strangers if they happened to look up, or listening out for the rag-and-bone man who came past on his horsedrawn cart shouting ‘Any old iron’, or the Breton with the weatherbeaten face who sold ropes of garlic from the pannier on his bicycle, having come across on the Channel ferry. It became a habit to curl up next to the radiator in my room and listen to the water running through the pipes, pretending that its warm-blooded gurglings were the sounds of a friend talking to me. But the radiant heat was no substitute for human playmates.
Until I went to school I don’t think it occurred to me that most other children had siblings. If they did, I had failed to notice them. But suddenly they were impossible to ignore; there were brothers and sisters everywhere. In most books I read growing up, same thing. Siblings to look up to, copy, play with and annoy. To teach you about teasing and sharing and all those other life skills you take for granted when you are one of many. Fitting in, group dynamics, tag teams, relay-style cooperation. Singularity suggested a handicap to be overcome.
When a Belgian aristocratic brood moved in next door with five children, the message was clear: a real family was bigger, louder, messier. They were pale and plain, big-boned and heavy. When they came over to play, it was like an invasion from a cloned Teutonic platoon. You could see their DNA replicated in each family member: the prominent nose, frowning brow and straight thick hair, the ungainly gait and thick ankles. Slightly diluted in each iteration but unmistakable nonetheless. Their consistent guttural accents were abrasive and ugly, as if they were permanently choking. The volume of their exchanges bewildered me: they seemed always to be shouting at each other. Their tribal tone was one of aggression. Two of them had spectacular tantrums, turning puce, as if they had been boiled, while they wailed at some perceived injustice. I was fascinated by their hair-pulling rough and tumble, but often could not wait for them to go home.
They only had to look at each other to know who they were. As a child, I could not identify with anyone or recognise myself anywhere—my own features too wobbly like unset custard to draw any obvious comparisons. Once the flesh had settled on my bones in my teens, friends and acquaintances commented on my resemblance to my mother—her olive skin, deep-set eyes, long neck and high brow. It took me much longer to see that I had also inherited my father’s crooked smile along with invisible, less appealing traits.
I found the whole concept of games and play baffling or tedious. With no regular experience of catching a ball, I was splay-fingered, clumsy and uncoordinated. Board games were unfamiliar, meaning I usually lost, lacking the competitive edge of my rivals. I even threw the dice badly and found shuffling cards embarrassingly awkward: others knew how to keep the deck tightly held, while in my inexpert hands, the cards slipped and spilled. Marbles, which enjoyed huge popularity in the playground of my French school, seemed just an excuse to collect pretty shiny spheres. My mother encouraged me, prompted by her own nostalgia. I swapped the glassy beads for more precious agates, but had no interest in the rules of the game.
Shaky when it came to balance, I was slow to learn to ride a bicycle, preferring instead to wheel sedately along the leafy streets to Wimbledon Common on my tricycle. Long after other children had graduated to two wheels, I chose stability over speed. I was careful with myself, sensing the burden of being what the French call un enfant unique.
When I visited friends at home, I generally preferred to talk to their parents, developing a precocious appreciation for conversation.
Up close, the personal habits of other families were often shocking. They shared things I had never shared. At about the age of eleven I was finally allowed to go for a sleepover at my best friend Antonia’s house. After dinner, she and her sister popped into the same bath and invited me to join them. I am not sure I had seen anyone naked before. Alarmed and disgusted at the murky soapy water, I politely asked if I could use the telephone. Unaware of social niceties, my message was crisp and to the point: ‘Please come and get me, they’re dirty.’
When I repeated the sleepover experiment in other homes, I was not used to sharing a bed and found the kicks and snufflings intolerable. My parents were so fastidious about bodily functions that I only learned what a fart was when we got a dog.
Since games, whether physical or mental, required partners, reading and crafts were the alternatives, and I grasped at them enthusiastically. I pressed leaves, cut out figures from felt, lost myself in the hypnotic symmetry of Spirograph drawing and the sensual feel of Play Doh and clay. The pleasing click of a Lego window fitting into the bricks I was assembling to build a house was sometimes the only sound in my playroom.
But I was agonisingly lacking in social confidence, so hesitant about inviting friends to play that I wrote out a script with a list of all the possible responses I might get to be prepared for all eventualities. If they said no, I quickly scanned my follow-up options (What about tomorrow? Or can I come to you?). I was totally unused to rejection.
Aware that I needed to keep myself active and amused, my parents installed an impressively professional gymnastic set of rings, trapeze, rope ladder and swing on a large steel frame in the garden. Professionally assembled and concreted into the lawn, it looked forbiddingly like the equipment at a penitential bootcamp rather than a place to play. After attending that year’s Royal Tournament at Earl’s Court, I was very taken with the military obstacle course and tried to recreate it single-handedly with my version of commando rolls. But the effect was not the same. A general needs troops.
One summer, when I was about six or seven, without warning or explanation, a French boy came to stay. Bruno was the son of my mother’s friends. Five years older than me, he was of a somewhat sullen disposition and no doubt furious at having been sent away from copains (mates) his own age to a quiet English suburb. Totally unprepared for the presence of this instant brother, instead of welcoming his company, I saw him as a threat. It was the first time anyone had attempted to annexe my territory. I refused to share my toys. When Bruno helped himself, I retaliated with wild scenes until my exasperated mother had to separate us like warring nations with a quickly drawn-up frontier: me in the front garden, Bruno in the back. Grudgingly, we shared an inflatable pool. Surprisingly, in water, we were able to submerge our hostilities and our splashings were relatively cordial. Eventually, poor Bruno was introduced to the brainy boy next door, who took him off my hands. The experiment in sharing had been a dismal failure.
A few years later my father bought a ping-pong table. Little did I know that he had been something of a champion player at university. It was a natural outlet for his aggression and lightning reflexes. When we played, I spent most of my time dodging the ball as if it were an oncoming bullet, such was the velocity of his strokes.
The same was true when we had snowball fights. My father packed his projectiles so hard they were like cannon balls, knocking me backwards. Also keen at fencing as a student, he loved to lunge, parry and thrust with sabre-like icicles picked from the gutters of chalets when we holidayed in the Alps. Fortunately, the point of his frozen rapiers would snap on impact, preventing serious injury. But if my ski jacket had not been padded, I would have had bruises from his jabs and stabs. He was always dangerous, forgetting his own strength and unable to rein in his natural competitive aggression.
My chief pleasures were watching television and ice skating. In the afternoons after school I watched my favourite children’s shows (Animal Magic with Johnny Morris, Crackerjack and Blue Peter), but on Sunday evenings I graduated to more adult fare. We lined up our armchairs like the three bears: Papa Bear in the large velour recliner where he would work his way through a box of chocolates without sharing them and smoke himself into a cloud of cigarettes until he was barely visible; Mama Bear
in the wing chair with footrest, knitting elaborate Aran and Fair Isle patterns without any visible signs of counting stitches, never dropping one, her eyes on the screen; and Baby Bear in the small bucket seat, positioned halfway between them. Together we watched Upstairs Downstairs, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In (one of the few things that injected unanimous mirth into our otherwise serious household) and the BBC’s latest literary adaptation—in my pre-teen years it was The Forsyte Saga, which fascinated me with its formal dialogue and heaving bosoms. To keep track of the plot twists, I wrote a synopsis of each episode in my diary:
January 5: Soames finds out about Elderson, Victorine sits for Greer in the nude.
January 12: Fleur (my favourite character, played by Susan Hampshire) has a baby boy.
January 19: Irene and John come back. Soames resigns.
On our weekly sports days I went to the Richmond ice rink. The journey on a specially hired coach was a treat because it was my only experience of travelling with friends. To my endless frustration and despite weekly pleading, I was not allowed to use public transport to get to school until my mid-teens, and even then, an au pair had to wait with me on the platform and see me safely on. At the rink I enjoyed the ritual of tightening up the laces on my boots and slipping into my blue skating dress with its flared skirt and matching knickers. A pair of white gloves completed the outfit.
The rink offered a magical opportunity to slide with balletic grace, however fleetingly. I learned basic moves and spins from a patient ex-Olympian, Mr Nixie, duly noting weekly progress in my diary:
February 12: did a twizzle
February 19: another twizzle
February 25: skating backwards and crossovers
Graduating to the rudiments of ice dancing, beginning with the foxtrot, meant whirling round the rink at speed facing forwards, holding hands with a friend, feeling the wind in my hair. This exhilaration culminated in the interval, during which we adjourned to the cafeteria to buy egg mayonnaise sandwiches, possibly the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. No one anywhere has ever got the proportion of egg to mayonnaise as right as the caterer at the Richmond ice rink.
But mostly, I played in my head. I imagined myself as a spy or a secret agent, and kept my parents under close observation. I listened behind doors or stealthily picked up the phone in another room while they were talking. I riffled through the papers on my mother’s spindly-legged bureau and my father’s more solid home-office desk.
Or else I devised new ways to torment our good-humoured, gap-toothed Cockney housekeeper, Mrs Barns. My favourite tricks were to switch off the power point for the vacuum cleaner or floor polisher while she was rooms away or to creep up behind her and tie her apron strings to the door while she was ironing. Nothing rattled her: she chuckled at this mischief, though I was a proper pest.
Mrs Barns was far more than a housekeeper in our lives. She didn’t just clean: she kept my mother company. Every weekday at eleven, they shared a coffee break (Nescafé was considered sophisticated in those days, especially when it switched from powder to granules), during which they dissected the day’s headlines and any local gossip that Mrs Barns felt it necessary to impart. Her husband, Bob, who was considerably smaller than his hefty spouse, worked ‘on the buses’ so there was also much talk of public transport and its many vexations. Delays on the route to her favourite shopping destination in Clapham were a frequent topic: ‘I could only take the 74 up the junction but then I had to wait for the 93 and it never come, Mrs Bawm, it never come,’ her mournful repetition turning her account into an almost poetic lamentation of disappointment.
She also had the habit of repeating the last syllable of every single word my mother said, as if to demonstrate her attention, creating an echo chamber that could become so hypnotic my mother never spoke to her for too long, fearing the effect would put her in a trance.
Mrs Barns was also a champion malapropist, with my mother trying to keep a straight face before rushing off to a notebook hidden in the pocket of her corduroy gardening jacket to jot down her latest turns of phrase. The only one I can remember is when describing the process of getting a perm she said her head had been covered in swastikas. This sounded alarming until we worked out she meant Schwarzkopf hair products.
At Christmas she gave us hideous gifts we were obliged to display: multicoloured crocheted skirts attached to luridly pink naked plastic doll torsos, meant to hide loo rolls. Every summer she took a coach holiday with her family to the British seaside, from which she sent us a postcard of crowded beaches covered in large uncomfortable-looking stones and where the weather was almost unfailingly foul. My mother commented wistfully that the Barnses seemed to enjoy each other’s company no matter where they were or how much it rained. Mrs Barns always returned with a stick of Brighton Rock for me. After she retired, my mother made several efforts to stay in touch, all of which were met with silence. It was puzzling and hurtful. Her big-hearted loyalty was missed and mourned.
Thinking that a pet might teach me responsibility and to care for something other than myself, my parents bought me a puppy, a pedigreed West Highland terrier that made up for his short-legged stature with a defiantly outsize personality. He had the hunting instinct of his genes and would regularly return from garden skirmishes involving hedgehogs with his handsome muzzle as stuck with spines as a pincushion. Sasha became immediately devoted to my mother, who was the only one to take regular care of him. He followed at her heels from room to room, sitting on her feet while she watched television, emitting a low rumbling growl if anyone came too close.
I was ambivalent about him: I loved grooming his long silky coat with a steel comb, but had no interest in the daily chores of walking or feeding him. Though undoubtedly a companion, he also stole some of my limelight with his antics: he chewed a neat fringe in every coat in the cloakroom, from my father’s cashmere to my mother’s camelhair, to indicate his displeasure at being left on his own.
My solution was to see him as a surrogate brother to tease and torment. (As with a brother, his was the first penis I ever saw. Unlike a brother’s, I found the way it would pop out and retract like a glossy pink lipstick when he humped a visitor’s leg fascinating.) I occupied his bed so he was forced to lie elsewhere and even ate his Good Boy choc drops when there was no other chocolate in the house. Best of all was his Pavlovian reaction to the word shampoo: to say it was to trigger an inexplicable but cartoonish, lunatic run through the house, with him bumping into furniture, knocking obstacles in his path flying, like a frenzied greyhound at the track. Poor creature: he hated water as much as a cat. We took him to the beach once, encouraging him to follow us into the sea. No sooner had he done so than we discovered he was the only canine that did not know how to dog paddle, as he promptly started to sink.
Not surprisingly, he viewed me with distrust. But if we were alone in the house for too long he would often seek me out. I was always touched when he pushed my door open, even if I was a companion of last resort.
Sasha lived for fifteen years. The day he died was the one time I ever saw my parents in the same bed together, sitting up like the effigies of couples on Etruscan coffins, his tartan collar between them on the covers. They had slept in separate rooms since I could remember, supposedly because of my father’s snoring. I don’t know what was more shocking: to realise I would never see Sasha again or to see them in this unprecedented intimacy.
CHAPTER 2
Papa et Maman
In her late twenties, my Parisian mother Jacqueline Legout was at the height of her striking and considerable beauty. In photographs taken then she looks like a cross between Frida Kahlo and Picasso’s lover, Françoise Gilot. With sculptural cheekbones, strong arched brows framing liquid dark eyes, hair pulled back dramatically like a ballerina to accentuate her long neck, she had the severe look of a Spanish flamenco dancer, which she accentuated with flaring full skirts and necklines that showed off her handsome décolleté. Blessed with a naturally perfect set of teeth, she
dazzled admirers with a smile of film-star wattage. From the moment he saw her, my father was, to use one of his favourite words, smitten.
Maman has always been coy about her romantic life and was never someone I felt I could confide in about crushes or advice on how to handle boys. I was an adult before she told me that before she’d met my father, she’d had a casual romance with a high-profile married man.
Roger Thérond was a film critic at the time who went on to become the flamboyant founding editor of Paris Match. Dark-haired, horse-faced, with a long misshapen nose, Thérond took Maman to jazz clubs to see Juliette Gréco. He showed her off at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Jeux Interdits, a film that left her devastated. I would only understand why much later.
‘I think his wife died while he was with me, but I was too amoral at the time to care,’ my mother once admitted. I wondered about the choice of that word, ‘amoral’, particularly since my mother has always had an unerring and pretty inflexible moral compass. It would be many years before I would understand the reasons why she might describe herself that way.
When I looked Thérond up on Google I saw that he had subsequently remarried, to a model who had been a muse for both Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. Photographs of her gave me a shock: she could have been my mother’s identical twin.
Jacqueline had met Thérond through her best friend at the time, Arlette (later Agnès, when she began her career) Varda, a high-spirited tomboyish gadabout. Their friendship began at the Girl Guides during the Nazi occupation, when the organisation was banned. Disregarding its illegal status, guides met in secret locations, favouring mysterious places including rooftops and abandoned buildings. Petite, bossy and fearless, Arlette wore her coal-black hair in a long thick plait. Together with three sisters from her home town of Sète, she dreamed up rock-climbing adventures and organised camping trips in the forest of Fontainebleau, despite there being German snipers on the city’s outskirts. Disregarding danger, the gang roamed every inch of Paris on foot, choosing a different suburb to explore for a day. A wild child given free rein, Arlette scandalised her parents in late adolescence by going off to Corsica to live with a community of fishermen before returning to France, changing her name, and becoming the only female member of cinema’s nouvelle vague and one of the country’s most celebrated film directors.
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