by Gully Wells
It was a battle of the wills between the leader of the Labour Party and the Canadian sergeant major, with Freddie in the middle, pulling his underpants up and down. Amazingly the politician won. “I was very much impressed by this glimpse of Hugh Gaitskell in action. Dee is an exceptionally strong-minded woman but her will was no match for his.” In the end good old Tito came through with an airplane and a promise that the Orient Express would be held up, if necessary, and they arrived back in London, tired but happy, ready to embark on married life together.
Le Dîner
AS SOON AS MY MOTHER MARRIED FREDDIE, I started nagging her to have a baby. In fact, I had started nagging her years before, when she had been living with Robert. I yearned for a living, breathing creature that I could play with and dress up and add to my already enormous collection of dolls. But babies were not her thing, and she never pretended they were. And I think she was probably only half kidding when she wrote this letter to her mother about me as a newborn:
She’s still surviving but I can scarcely say the same about me—drives me nuts with the yacking and complete lack of logic and/or reason and/or gratitude that I’ve always associated with babies.… Must go now and throw the monster into its bath. I can’t tell who hates it more—her or me. She gets orange juice now to keep her krapping which is a necessary function she forgets about from time to time and lies there screaming trying to remember what it was she forgot to do.
When I was born in Paris, she had an old Swiss crone waiting for her at the house (presumably the letter described one of those days when the crone had had the temerity to take some time off) when she brought me home from the hospital. In Burma I had an ayah, who taught me the Burmese names for all my clothes, so that, on the rare occasions when my mother dressed me, I would demand my lungi or my ganjis, and grow increasingly impatient when she couldn’t produce them. And in London I had Cele, an Italian au pair, whom I adored, except when she told me about the time she had chopped a chicken’s head off on her family’s farm in Puglia.
In my mother’s family there had been no kindly crones or gentle ayahs or pretty Italian au pairs. In fact, there had been nothing remotely kind, gentle, or pretty about her childhood. Her own mother, she always told me, was a monster. Depressed, violent, highly intelligent, capable of “mesmerizing charm,” vicious, and nuts: She should probably never have had children at all. But of course she married a nice, mild-mannered man whom she could terrorize, and had four. My grandfather had started out working for the Providence Journal, in Rhode Island, but then moved to New Bedford, an old whaling town in Massachusetts, where he became a PR executive in the Bell Telephone Company. There wasn’t a huge amount of money, but far, far worse than that were the toxic fumes belched out by his fire-breathing wife, which infected the entire family.
When my mother was two and a half she ran away from home. Her six-year-old brother was actually the mastermind behind the great escape, and just big enough to push her in the baby carriage, since he judged they wouldn’t get very far if she had to walk. They rattled along a bumpy road and, according to my uncle, had several hours of sunlit peace, lolling about on a grassy hilltop, before they were yanked back, amid much shouting, to their gloomy house. But then again lots of kids play at running away from home, so that story never carried quite the same grisly heft as her next, far more horrific memory.
A few years after the abortive breakout, she brought a friend home from school, and they went in search of the litter of kittens her cat had given birth to a few days before. Where could they possibly be? My mother never forgot the smile on my grandmother’s face when she told her that she had put the kittens, very gently, in the drum of an old washing machine in the basement, with some chloroform soaked rags, and closed the top. Really they hadn’t suffered at all, it was a beautiful, peaceful death and it was all for the best. The Angel of Death had swooped down to save them from “this terrible world.” This was not the first or last time that the Angel had indulged in her penchant for guiding cats along the road to a much, much better place. Years later, V. R. Lang, a wild and brilliant playwright, actress, and poet, whom my mother had met when they were both misbehaving in the Canadian army, wrote a poem about the murderous Mrs. Chapman. The first two verses go like this:
LINES FOR MRS. C.
About to annihilate, in a long succession of cat murders, two old stray cats with ether, in her washing machine, with the cover on.
O you cats, go home to God,
She finds them and locks
Kitties, where the saints have trod,
them in the kitchen.
You go, you two, you too
Like thin flames upwards into
That which, electric and ethereal,
Is going to be your first square deal.
Kitties, go! Unspring those tails!
They are not convinced.
Cease wild scrabbling of those claws!
No longer roll those maddened eyes!
—Trust me kitties!
I who love cats know their problems.
Tonight you will sleep in the arms of Jesus.
Whether all happy families are alike, pace Tolstoy, is debatable, but my mother’s unhappy family was positively Dostoyevskian in its misery. Of course each person copes with trauma in a different way, and my mother’s method was to confront it head-on, fight back, and then get the hell out as fast as she could. None of her three siblings were quite as outspoken in their hostility toward their mother, but interestingly, when she died, aged ninety-eight, not one of them came to her funeral. It is possible that my grandmother took out more of her anger and bitterness on her eldest daughter than on the others, but whatever the origin of her cruelty, the result was that my mother regarded her as “the most untrustworthy, destructive person I have ever known.” A childhood like that leaves scars that never heal, and as I got older I learned to look at my mother’s character and behavior through the prism of this primal reign of horror.
Her attitude toward babies was also, I believe, directly related to her upbringing. When she was eight, she told me, her mother became pregnant with her fourth child, and on the night she went into labor, amid plenty of screaming and hysteria, her husband was not around, so she rushed off to the hospital by herself. My mother was left, terrified and alone, for the next ten days, in charge of her three-year-old sister. Where my grandfather and uncle were in this scenario is a little unclear—maybe they just fled to work and school each morning, leaving her at home—but for my mother this was yet another traumatic memory to add to her growing collection. She grew up during the Depression, and there was not enough money for a nanny, and even if there had been, why waste it when you had a perfectly strong and capable eight-year-old girl at home?
Based on her own in-depth, hands-on, and far-too-extensive experience, babies were irrational creatures who spent most of their time screaming, refusing to sleep, and throwing their food at you. She thought it was just about understandable to have one, but any more was sheer madness. So when her younger sister grew up, got married, and became quite happily pregnant for the second time, she marched her off to the doctor, where they made an appointment for an abortion. And it was only after my mother had safely disappeared to the house in France for the summer that her sister had the unbelievable chutzpah to blow off the date she had never had any intention of keeping.
But when my mother finally married Freddie, her view of babies softened somewhat, and I began to feel that my years of nagging might just pay off. Later that year she wrote to Sue:
I’ve been feeling so blah that I’ve been doing nothing but lurch from one chair to another. In a burst of positively Galileo-like dedication to science we finally called in our comic doctor. He thinks I’m pregnant, and though nothing would please me more than to be able to agree with him, I don’t. It doesn’t feel right. I can smoke etc and I know me; I wouldn’t be able to if I really were. But it’s too awful because it has got Fred’s hopes all up (and mine too, in a way) and h
e is bounding around like Nijinsky, he’s that pleased with himself, but I fear it will all end badly. In about 3 days when they discover I have lung cancer, exploded ovaries and ulcers.
As it turned out she wasn’t pregnant, but neither did she have any other dire condition, and Freddie and I both went on hoping that next time our dreams would come true. His for a “real” son and mine for a new “doll.” But in the meantime she switched her attention from her ovaries to Provence.
IN THE SPRING OF 1962, for some reason or another—it may have been the dregs from her divorce settlement with my father—my mother found herself with more money than she knew what to do with. Or, at least slightly more than she actually needed to live on, so she decided it might be a good idea to buy a house in the south of France. As I recall, it was less than ten thousand dollars, which even in those days wasn’t a huge amount, but it was just enough, she reckoned, for a very small hut at the wrong end of the Côte d’Azur. But where to begin?
One of Freddie’s oldest friends was a man called Bill Deakin, who, as warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, had been the host of that fateful party where my mother had fallen for “the menace.” He also happened to have a house in a village called Le Castellet, not too far from Toulon. Bill was a sweet and gentle man, whom Freddie had met when they were both undergraduates at Oxford, and who went on to become head of his section at Special Executive Operations (SOE), in Rockefeller Center in New York, during the war. But they overlapped for only a few months because shortly after Freddie arrived, Bill was called back to London and then parachuted into Yugoslavia as leader of the first British mission to make contact with good old Tito, who, many years later, was to prove so helpful to Freddie and my mother on their honeymoon. Bill was married to Pussy, a delightfully bossy Romanian lady with the most beautiful skin I have ever seen which was still miraculously smooth and plump and polished when I last saw her a few months before she died in her eighties.
“Darling,” she told me in a whisper, as she lay in bed, “you must clean your face with olive oil; do not allow water to touch it. Ever. And once a week you must cover it with a thick layer of honey and lie for at least one hour, with your head hanging lower than your body, so the blood can rush into your skin and feed it.”
Looking back—and in the mirror—I realize I should have followed her advice.
MY MOTHER, FREDDIE, and I flew from London to Marseille, where they rented a car, which she drove, while he sat beside her attempting to read the map. As we sped along the coast road, just east of the vieux port, Freddie announced triumphantly, “I’ve got it. I’ve found Le Castellet.” We whooped with delight, but as he issued directions, he kept turning the map around, to make it easier to read, until it was finally, and much more conveniently, upside down. When my mother finally realized what he had done—Freddie was, naturally, oblivious of his mistake—she exploded:
“Jesus H. Christ, Freddie, have you ever wondered why it was Bill who was parachuted into Yugoslavia, while they left you in Rockefeller Fucking Center, where all you did was take Sheilah Fucking Graham to the Stork Club every night? And you know what that stork ended up dropping on your plate, don’t you?”
She was, of course, laughing as she said it, and it was funny, and even funnier that night at dinner when her account of Freddie’s incompetence was followed by his mildly indignant reply: “Actually, I was in charge of the maps when we liberated Saint-Tropez, and we managed quite well then.” Which only made her mutter “Jesus H. Christ” all over again.
FROM THE DISTANCE Le Castellet looked like one of those toy villages, perched on a hilltop, glimpsed in the background of an Italian Renaissance portrait. The surrounding plain was covered in a neat patchwork of parallel rows of vines, dotted with ocher-colored farmhouses, olive groves, and the occasional row of neatly tapered inky green cypress trees. Still enclosed by most of its original medieval walls, the village curled itself around the top of the hill like a giant stone snail. The houses clustered about the church—its tower was crowned by an elaborate wrought-iron cage containing a huge bronze bell—and the château next door, with its large place out front, where the Marquis de Quelquechose was gracious enough to allow the locals, usually just a few rickety old men, to play boules in his dust.
The medieval walls had a medieval gateway, about three centimeters wider than our car, which meant that Freddie the map reader became Freddie the traffic cop, as he stood there waving his arms about, trying to guide my mother through the narrow stone passageway. Never having learned to drive, with no visual sense of any kind, and completely unable to gauge distance, he was possibly even worse at his new job than his old one. Luckily for him we got through without scraping the sides of the car and so narrowly avoided, not just the walls, the ire of Hertz, but, far more important, a new barrage of swearing.
The Deakins—although it was actually bossy Pussy who had masterminded the real estate deals—had been clever enough to buy several connected, tumbledown houses in the 1950s, when such things were still quite affordable. The first house they had bought was the old village schoolhouse, whose back door led to the ramparts, and to the ruins of another house, its roof long since gone. The remaining stone walls enclosed a series of garden “rooms,” which in turn led to a terrace with a staggering view of the entire valley, stretching all the way to the Mediterranean about ten miles away.
The night we arrived they had gathered together an assortment of people—mostly a mix of English and American—all of whom had bought houses nearby. The old hands were clearly there to give the neophytes much needed advice, warnings, and encouragement. I remember it was freezing cold and the schoolhouse’s heating system, which probably dated back to the previous century, consisted of a couple of stoves fueled by some mysterious French substance called mazout, which produced a strong and distinctive smell but surprisingly little heat. The mistral howled through the village, and I could hear a rogue shutter banging against a wall upstairs. Fortunately there was also a huge fireplace, which we huddled around while Bill poured stiff drinks and Pussy crashed about in the kitchen tending to her legendary boeuf en daube.
“Darling, you must always marinate the meat for three days in the best bottle of wine you have, with some juniper berries, cloves, thyme, a bay leaf, and four strips of dried orange peel. Bill was furious when I once used a Château Margaux ’53, which he said Churchill had given him, but the English are fools who know nothing of food. They even have something called ‘cooking wine.’ I have no idea what this could possibly be, and hope never to find out. So, next you gently brown the lardons, carrots, garlic, and onions in very-high-quality olive oil—preferably from the Domaine Souviou outside Le Beausset—and then add the meat, ripe plum tomatoes, and the strained marinade. The cooking pot must be covered with a soup plate containing half a cup of red wine, which you have to refill as it evaporates, and then you cook it for six or seven hours in the oven, with just a whisper of heat.”
I may have been dumb enough to ignore her patent olive oil and honey beauty formula, but I have followed—and passed on—her daube recipe with evangelical fanaticism for more than forty years.
It is strange, after all this time, to look back and realize that the people around the table, whom I was to know so well and for so many years, were all strangers to me that night. As an only child I was used to spending most of my time with adults, and I actually enjoyed their company. I didn’t necessarily want to join in their conversation, but I loved watching them, listening to their chatter, like an anthropologist observing the behavior of an odd but endearing tribe of nomads, whose song lines meandered between England, France, and America. To avoid embarrassing them my usual cover was to act as a waitress, which meant I got to roam around while doing my fieldwork, and also earned valuable brownie points with my mother or the harried hostess. I remember standing, on duty, in the kitchen with Pussy as she opened the oven door and brought out the enormous earthenware pot with the soup plate of wine nestled in the indentation on its
lid. At that precise moment the scent of the wood smoke mingled with the rich, almost gamey, wine-infused aroma of the daube and the faintly dieselish mazout smell, to produce my own private Provençal “madeleine.” And don’t think I haven’t tried to re-create it ever since. I know how to make a wood fire, and I can cook a daube, but it is the eau de mazout that always eludes me. Unknown in New York, it may not even exist any longer in France, besides which I have never again seen a stove like the ones in the schoolhouse.
“À table, à table!” Pussy shouted, as I carried the plates into the dining room, piled high with daube and fresh noodles, bought that morning in the market in Toulon from the Italian woman down by the port, who made them in her own kitchen and hung them out to dry on her washing line. Bill did his best to bring some Oxford logic to the seating plan, and may have gotten as far as placing my mother beside him, but in the end everybody sat down, slightly drunk and very hungry, wherever they wanted. Several bottles of the local Domaine Tempier had already been opened, the fire snapped and spat out sparks like firecrackers and, when everyone had finally been served, I settled in to observe the habits of these strange new creatures.
Directly across from me was a woman named Sylvia who looked like a Gypsy, or quite possibly an American Indian. Deeply tanned, she had a nose like a hawk, espresso-colored eyes, and smoked a small, pungent black cheroot, in between occasional bites of food. Big silver hoops dangled from her slightly pendulous earlobes, both her arms were stacked with silver and turquoise bracelets (could they have been a present from her tribal elders in New Mexico?), and I strongly suspected she wasn’t wearing a bra. Apparently she had just bought a house in a place called Ollioules, which had come complete with a man called Monsieur Zancanaro, who was in charge of the vines, the olive trees, and the vegetable garden, and whose wife was incredibly useful around the house. Sylvia was every bit as bossy as my mother and Pussy, and grabbed Freddie’s arm, her tribal bracelets clanking, and made him promise that he would not even consider buying anything that didn’t include a Zancanaro-like couple as part of the deal. Freddie was looking a bit wild eyed at this point, and would probably have promised her anything—even his yet-to-be-conceived son, just to shut her up, get her hand off his arm and her cheroot out of his face.