by Gully Wells
In the end the stag-hunting Adonis won. A large only slightly flawed sapphire was dislodged from his father’s tiepin back in Brewster, New York, and taken to Cartier’s to be transformed into a ring, and the wedding invitations were sent out.
Their friends in Paris couldn’t understand what had possessed them to get married. My mother, a self-described “wild savage” with a tendency to view life through her own darkly ironic prism, took any chance she could to épater la bourgeoisie and anybody else who happened to be within firing range. Fools were not tolerated, authority had to be questioned, “nice” people were dull, and the worst crime—up there with cruelty to animals—was to be a bore. She liked to stay up too late and smoke too much, and her martini glass was invariably half empty, not because she was a drinker but because that is how she saw the world. My father, whose own family could not have been more bourgeois, saw no point in shocking anybody, had no problem with “nice” people, and tended to give those in power the benefit of the doubt. His mind was more practical than intellectual, his inclination was to see the best in any situation, and he had an enviable talent for extracting a huge amount of pleasure from every moment in the day—and therefore from life. He liked to go to bed early, eat too much chocolate ice cream, and his champagne glass always overflowed. I suspect they both fell in love with those qualities in the other that they themselves didn’t possess. He adored her spirit, strength, and wit, and she loved his uncomplicated cheerfulness and the reassuring solidity of his large, conventional, and seemingly prosperous family. Why not get married? It must have seemed like an incredibly good idea at the time.
When I was about seventeen and old enough to understand such things, my mother told me that she knew the night before her wedding that it was never going to work. But how could she have backed out then? The guests, the presents, the flowers, the champagne, the petits fours, the cake. Not to mention the fact that she was being given away by my father’s formidable patrician boss, Ambassador David Bruce, whom even she hesitated to embarrass. (Since the wedding took place just a month after the engagement, her parents had decided that there wasn’t enough time, or probably money, for them to get from Boston to Paris.)
As it turned out, the friends and my mother were right, and my parents were divorced, quite happily, within four years. She left my father—surprised, quite possibly relieved, but not, I think, too distraught—in Burma, where he was first secretary at the American Embassy. And instead of going home to New York or Boston, she moved with me to London. Not an easy decision, but she was an adventuress. In Rangoon she had made friends with their neighbors, Sue and Basil Boothby, who were with the British Embassy, and they offered to lend her their house in London, which at least solved the problem of where we would live. It was one of those tall terraced houses built around 1830 with two rooms on each floor and lots of stairs in between. The kitchen was in the basement with a window that let in a bit of daylight, if there was any to spare—this still being the era of Bleak House pea-soup smog—and an Aga that needed to be fed on demand, like some monstrous, ravenous baby, with constant buckets of coal. After we had settled into the house she somehow persuaded the New York Times that she was the person they needed to report on fashion and “London life,” and her salary, combined with her alimony, was just enough to live on. Slowly she built up quite a glittery social life, something she was always inordinately good at, while I set off for school each morning, in my gray flannel uniform (pleated skirt, blazer, and hat: straw in the summer, felt in the winter) and came home at teatime to play with my dolls and hamster.
After my mother and father divorced, there were always gentlemen—and lady—callers around. But in my cozy little solipsistic bubble this didn’t faze me, which must have had as much to do with the tact and charm of the callers as it did with my unshakable confidence in my parents’ love. I knew that I was the most important person in both their lives, and that none of the callers could ever change that. My great good luck was that I had no memory of them married or fighting (they both claimed they never had) or separating, and so was able to accept the situation without any of the angst and suffering that most children of divorced parents go through. Even though my mother tended to skip over the more sentimental aspects of motherhood, like smothering me in kisses and actually saying out loud how much she loved me, I never doubted for a single moment that she did. And it was only when I fell crazily in love for the first time, at nineteen, that I experienced again that all-consuming passion that I had felt for her as a child.
She was always interested in whatever I thought and was doing, and kept in close touch with my father, writing him long, chatty letters about me. (“Yesterday, when she was driving me completely crazy, I told her quite sternly to behave, to which she replied, looking aggrieved, ‘But I am have.’ What could I say?”) He would then painstakingly stick them into leather-bound albums—one for each year of my life, with the date embossed in gold on the spine—along with my report cards (“Singing: distressing”) and endless color photographs of our travels together. There I am at six, in an inky blue velvet dress, with a white lace collar, standing in front of an elaborate four-poster bed, at some gloomy Schloss we had stayed at in Austria. The enormous eiderdown rises up behind me like a bank of snow, and I look into the camera with an expression of secret satisfaction. My surroundings, my dress, and my traveling companion were all exactly as I wanted them to be. And there we are in the Piazza San Marco, dressed in matching lederhosen (what could he have been thinking?), surrounded by squabbling pigeons.
Later on the same trip we stayed at a hotel on a beach, where we somehow acquired a creature in a polka-dot bikini and gold hoop earrings, who talked way too much and showed no sign at all of leaving us alone, however much I scowled at her. The photograph in the album shows the three of us in a pedalo, her generous bosom bursting out of two pointy cones, her head thrown back in a paroxysm of laughter, with my father inexplicably smiling at her. I remember whispering to him that we should all pedal way out to sea, make her jump overboard for a refreshing dip, and then the two of us could race back to the shore. It seemed like a flawless plan, and it worked for a while, but as we sat down to dinner she reappeared, this time in a strapless dress with a huge pouffy skirt, her dark, curly hair held back by a twisted silk scarf. And, again quite inexplicably, my father stood up and pulled out her chair so she could join us. But when we left a few days later there was no sign of her, and we set off in our little white convertible with the red leather dashboard, bound for Portofino.
Now, fifty years later, I see that her totally understandable crime had been to focus all her charms on the object of her desire, and who can blame her? But the other, more permanent callers—both my mother’s and my father’s—were much cleverer and understood that if you want to win the heart of somebody attached to a small, overindulged daughter, you actually need to seduce two people. Since my father lived the life of a bachelor diplomat, first in Vienna and then in Bonn, at a time when there was actually a certain amount of spurious glamour attached to that profession, he had many ladies to entertain. But with me away in London, he didn’t have to juggle them too much. For my mother things were a bit trickier. I must have been a little like the complacent, hoodwinked husband whose wife is having a series of affairs. I sailed along, oblivious of the fact that her dinner guests were anything more than friends of the family, and in the end I was aware of only two contenders, although she later told me there had of course, been a few more. And why not? Looking back, I realize that I picked up, by osmosis, from both my mother and father (and from my future stepparents, who were also gifted teachers of this subject) the useful and life-enhancing idea that love affairs, and therefore men, should be associated with excitement and happiness, and never with guilt and angst.
The first contender I became aware of was a man named Robert Neild, who lived in Cambridge, where he was an economist at Trinity College, which can’t have taken up a great deal of his time, because he seemed to be
mostly at our house in London. Robert had the most convoluted eyebrows I’d ever seen. They formed a wild ginger thatch above his crinkly blue eyes, and I unblinkingly accepted his arrival on the scene, rather as if he’d been a nice new sofa that had just been delivered by Harrods and taken up residence in our drawing room. I must have been about three or four years old when the sofa arrived, and over the next year or so, became very attached to it—so attached that I remember going to school and announcing to nobody in particular that my mother was going to marry Robert. And maybe she was. It seemed like a reasonable idea, and I was an extremely reasonable child, or so she always told me. But then one day the Harrods van turned up again on our doorstep and took the sofa away. The curious thing is that I don’t remember being in the least bit surprised or upset, because no sooner had he gone back to the Trinity warehouse in Cambridge than another, equally delightful gentleman caller appeared to take his place. God knows there must have been a bit of Sturm und Drang associated with this rearrangement of the furniture, but to everybody’s credit, it took place offstage and was so skillfully executed that it left no impression on me at all.
The new Robert was called Freddie Ayer, and my mother met him at a dance at St. Antony’s College in Oxford in the summer of 1956. This is how she described it in a letter to her old friend in Rangoon, Sue Boothby:
I have fallen madly, madly, I tell you madly, in love for the first time in my whole misshapen ill-spent life—and with an impossibly hopeless man. It all fell on me … in the drafty fan-vaulted sewer of a basement at that goddamn dance in Oxford that Philip dragged me to. I knew I shouldn’t have gone. But they all seemed so harmless, so egg headed, not to mention egg on the chin that my flaring nostril guard was down utterly. Then—I didn’t look at him and didn’t listen to his name—but what seemed to be a particularly egg headed, scruffy middle-aged professor asked me to dance. And being a well brought up girl I didn’t say for him to fuck off. And then there I was—in about twenty seconds flat my head began to reel and I felt like being sick out the window and it hasn’t stopped since. Stayed at that eightsome reel til 4 bloody thirty in the morning. Absolutely green with angst that this maniac wouldn’t be on the 6pm train to London as we had exchanged blood illuminated promises to be. But he was. And since then, I meet this menace for five minutes at the Ritz bar and I lie to Robert to go see him at 10.30 or midnight and we have what I believe are called in novels, Stolen Moments. I’m still sick regularly every other day or so, and it gets worse and worse—added to which, it is, of course, impossible. He’s had a wife, his children are grown up and he’s had every woman in London and keeps a tidy six-year old (?) mistress in the Maginot line background. He’s about 100 years old and is everything I’ve ever wanted. His name is Ayer, or Eyre or Air or Ere, I don’t really know how he spells it and he’s a philosopher. So far as I can gather from his books etc he’s the big deal in logical positivism etc. I am utterly miserable and quite unable to do anything.
Well, she got most of it right. He actually spelled his name “Ayer,” and he was a big deal in logical positivism, and he did have two children, Valerie and Julian, and he had had love affairs with an awful lot of women—and not just in London. The mistress turned out to be an Australian painter named Jocelyn Rickards, who’d been around for six years or so, but he also had a possessive ex-wife, Renée, who was his real Maginot Line against ladies who might get any fancy ideas of moving in too close on him. It seems to have been an arrangement that suited him extremely well. He lived in a tiny flat in Shepherds Market in Mayfair, which Renée had found and decorated for him in an Elsie de Wolfe meets Kierkegaard minimalist style. According to his autobiography:
Renée’s taste in decoration had been formed in the 1930’s, when there was a fashion for white walls, off-white furniture and a scarcity of ornamentation. In fact the white walls suited my small rooms, and although I only had one picture, a portrait of myself by e. e. cummings, and little or no bric-a-brac, I had comfortable chairs and a sufficient stock of books with which to furnish both my sitting room and study. That others might view it differently was brought home to me one evening when I was entertaining some pupils to drinks. They all left at a fairly late hour, and as I was closing the door, I heard a voice reaching me from the stairs, “Poor old bugger, all alone thinking in those cold, cold rooms.”
Which only goes to show how little we know about our teachers’ private lives. As it turned out, the “poor old bugger,” pace his students’ description, was only forty-six when he and my mother met, and soon after that, the Harrods van turned up again, and the moving men came wheezing up the stairs and installed the new sofa in the drawing room in Holland Park Avenue. To my six-year-old self, Freddie didn’t seem terribly different from Robert, except that his eyebrows were under some kind of control, and it looked as though he might be staying a bit longer than his predecessor. My mother may have fallen madly, dangerously, hopelessly in love for the first time in her “misshapen ill-spent life,” but for Freddie the affair was just that—an affair. He was never a man of action, and for someone whose life was seemingly caught up in a series of passionate love affairs, he was curiously passive. His view of the beginning of their liaison could not have been more different from hers:
Dee had been having an affair with a Cambridge economist but gave him up on my account. I was not yet sufficiently committed to her to renounce all other attachments, or even to profess to do so. Jocelyn, with whom I had arrived at a friendly modus vivendi, disapproved of my taking up with Dee, not out of jealousy but because she did not like her or think us suited to one another. Renée tended rather to approve of her as a counterweight to Jocelyn. I enjoyed her company, spent a fair amount of time in Holland Park Avenue and let events take their course.
Letting “events take their course” had never been my mother’s style. If it had been, she would never have run away from her god-awful family and joined the Canadian army at seventeen (where she, unsurprisingly, rose to the rank of sergeant major), would never have bought that one-way ticket to Paris, would never have married my father, and would never have left him in Rangoon and moved to London. And then she would never have fallen for the “menace” at that dance in Oxford. But now that she had done all those things, she was determined to have him. It was not going to be easy.
Poor Freddie. All he wanted was for his well-ordered, carefully compartmentalized life to go on as it always had. During the day his beautiful mind was busy grappling with issues such as proving that the major domains of empirical knowledge could be reconstructed in terms of the data of direct experience and the single relation of remembered similarity between them, but once that was out of the way, it was time for a whiskey and soda, dinner at the Café Royal, either with a group of friends or one of the lucky ladies, followed by dancing at the Gargoyle Club. There were so many things to love about Freddie, but maybe the most seductive of all was his combination of intellectual brilliance (which extended way beyond the wilder shores of logical positivism) with a delight in all the pleasures life had to offer. His old friend e. e. cummings once wrote him a birthday poem, which captured this charming duality in his nature rather nicely:
Considering the gravity of your language
And the levity of your nature
(or, at times, the levity of your language
and the gravity of your nature)
it is clear that keeping your balance
comes easier than it does to teetering us.
You walk on the tightropes as if they lay on the ground,
And always, bird eyed, notice more than we notice you notice; and the
observation follows always with the clarity
of a wire slicing cheese.
And many years later, in the midseventies, Leon Wieseltier, who was then his pupil, described Freddie as “an eighteenth-century rationalist voluptuary—he could have been one of Diderot’s friends. I remember asking him about Camus, ‘I don’t know his work well, but he and I were friends: we we
re making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war.’ ”
Clever my mother certainly was—Freddie told me that she was the most intelligent woman he had ever known—but his philosophical work was way beyond her and although in the first rush of love she did go out and buy all his books, she later confessed to a friend that she couldn’t read them “without Dr. Johnson’s dictionary close by and a finger tracing laboriously under every printed line.” I’m not too sure that even then she could make much sense of them, and yet what did it matter? Freddie talked about his work with other philosophers, not with his friends, and being by nature promiscuous, intellectually and otherwise, his conversation skipped happily and entertainingly all over the place. As with his dancing, he enjoyed a partner who could follow his lightning lead, and as with his tennis, he needed an opponent who could slam the ball back just as hard as he served it. He had found both in my mother.
At the beginning she was careful not to rock his carefully balanced boat. Understanding the danger of putting any pressure on him, she presumably didn’t allow him to see or hear just how hard her heart was beating. At the sizzling, red-hot start of their liaison, when Freddie had to go to Poland to give some lectures, she waited impatiently for his first letter, snatching it from the bewildered postman’s hand before he had even had a chance to stuff it through the letter box. Although Freddie was a great letter writer—he had absolutely no patience with the telephone—there were a couple of problems. The first was his handwriting, which looked like an army of embryonic ants marching across the paper in strict parallel lines and was therefore totally indecipherable. But with a magnifying glass and practice, it was usually possible to figure out the vague contours of his message. And that was the second problem. The first two words of the letter my mother had grabbed from the postman were “Dear Dee.” Wrong: Things did not improve as she read on. A brisk description of Professor Glowczewski’s shortcomings as an interpreter of Wittgenstein was followed by Freddie’s impressions of Warsaw—“chilly, but the vodka is plentiful”—his lack of appreciation of the charms of a lady philosopher, who was “large, and by no means attractive”—ending up with this measured critique of his hotel bedroom: “My bed, though hard, is not lumpy.” The letter ended with two more illegible words, one of which she thought might be “Love,” the other, presumably, being “Freddie.”