The House in France

by Gully Wells

  Fortunately for Freddie she soon turned to the gentleman on her other side and almost immediately got into an argument with him about the Ott family. The Domaine Ott was, and still is, the largest and fanciest wine producer for miles around, and it seemed that Sylvia’s neighbor was in the habit of selling them quite a lot of his grapes, and even occasionally had dinner with old Monsieur Ott. This, for some inexplicable reason, drove her nuts. She lit another cheroot and waved it about wildly until, in desperation, he swiveled around and focused his attention on the lady to his right—who turned out to be me.

  “Hello, my name is Roger, and what, may I ask, is yours?”

  When I said, “Gully,” he reeled back as though I’d smacked him in the face and replied in his slow, upper-class English drawl: “Good God, what an extraordinary name. Surely you weren’t christened that?”

  So I rattled off the high-speed explanation for my distressing nickname: “Born in Paris—christened Alexandra—took a ship to Burma when I was one—on the way we went through the Suez Canal and met a magician in Port Said who said he was a ‘Gully-Gully’ man—he put his hand up my mother’s skirt and produced some fluffy yellow chicks—after that whenever I cried my mother called me ‘Gully-Gully,’ which shut me up.”

  Roger considered this bizarre sequence of events for a long time in silence, his eyes fixing me with a slightly manic stare, and finally said:

  “I am assuming that when you refer to the Gully-Gully men, you actually mean the Fuzzy-Wuzzy men. In Alexandria one used to chuck coins into the sea, which was incredibly deep, but the Fuzzy-Wuzzies would dive right in and stay under water for ages and ages. One always thought they might quite possibly drown—who knows, maybe some did—but then they’d bob up to the surface, happy as sand boys, clutching their prizes. I don’t believe they ever did a stroke of work, but then again, they didn’t need to because they made an absolute fortune from all those coins.”

  He drifted off into a gauzy reverie at the memory of this idyllic scene, and I realized that our conversation was over.

  I looked around the table and wondered which of the luckless ladies was married to this Edwardian Neanderthal. Couldn’t be the Gypsy, couldn’t be the French academic’s wife, couldn’t be Pussy’s sister-in-law, so that left the American with the albino complexion, the tightly curled blond hair, and the even more tightly coiled nerves. My mother always gravitated toward fellow Americans, and especially toward American women who, like herself, were married to Englishmen. Sleeping with the enemy engendered a special, cozy kind of camaraderie that allowed them to reflect, with secret satisfaction, on how far they had traveled from New Bedford/Baltimore/Chicago, while complaining endlessly, but not unhappily, about their husbands’ peculiar backgrounds and habits.

  Imagine sending your sons to boarding school at six: No wonder they were clueless about women. Imagine beating young boys at school: No wonder they became lifetime clients of Mamzelle de Sade later on. Imagine blowing your nose on phlegm-encrusted handkerchiefs instead of Kleenex: No wonder they had colds all the time. Imagine putting up with freezing bathrooms and bedrooms: No wonder they were filthy but not nearly filthy enough in bed. And they didn’t even allow themselves to get started on English dentists and teeth. There was never any shortage of fresh outrages to be amazed at.

  Lorna St. Aubyn, my mother’s new American friend, was indeed married to Roger, and they had recently bought a house in Le Plan du Castellet, a tiny village in the valley below. Roger had been a doctor in England, but once they married he had stopped practicing, and now that they had moved to France, he was able to devote all his time to playing the piano and making Lorna’s life as unpleasant as possible. It seemed that he was unusually gifted at both tasks. Lorna’s mother had been an American heiress—ball bearings, mouthwash, coal mines, furniture wax—who knew where the money came from?—who had, in predictable Jamesian fashion, first married an Englishman, and after that some obscure French aristocrat. Lorna inherited her fortune, her eighteenth-century French furniture, her Tiepolos and Guardis, her doll-size shoes, handmade in Rome, and her aversion to American husbands. Roger’s family, it was always understood, “had come over with the Conqueror” in 1066 and ended up in Cornwall, where they had lived, unadventurously and impecuniously, ever since. How these star-crossed lovers found each other I was never told, but by the time we met them that night, they had two small children, a terrifying English nanny, and a marriage handmade in hell.

  When dinner was over Pussy, Lorna, and the Gypsy huddled together with my mother to fill her in on builders, plumbers, and a menuisier named Marius who, while full of irresistible Provençal charm, was a drunken thief and must be avoided at all costs. Bill and Freddie retreated, whiskeys in hand, to lurch down Rockefeller Center’s tangled memory lanes, and I found myself sitting with a man who, in the thirty years I knew him, never once uttered a single serious word. He told me he was called Azamat. Sounded to me suspiciously like Mazout, but then again, when you are named after a lecherous Egyptian magician, there’s not much point in being surprised at what other people choose to call their children. Azamat reminded me of an unbelievably attractive jester at a medieval court. He was quite small, with ghost-white skin, curly brown hair, and, unlike most men I had met, he actually enjoyed the company of children—maybe because he never seemed wholly grown up himself. I loved his enthusiasm for sudden, insane expeditions to places like the “OK Corral,” a seedy amusement park on the way to Marseille, full of mangy horses and syphilitic old “cowboys,” that no other adult would dream of going to. Unable to sit still and unwilling to concentrate on anything dull—work was never his thing—his not-inconsiderable talent and ineffable charm lay in simply making life more enjoyable—something that is not as easy as he always made it look.

  Azamat was married to Sylvia, the Gypsy, and they had two children whose names—Selima and Kadir—were as strange and magical as his own. The reason, my mother later told me, that they all sounded like characters from one of Scheherazade’s more fanciful tales was that Azamat was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. Seriously. His family name was Guirey, and like the St. Aubyns, they too had “come over with the Conqueror” except that their conqueror had killed a few more people and they had ended up in the Crimea instead of Cornwall. When Russia swallowed up the Crimea in the eighteenth century, the Guirey khans became Russian princes and moved north to St. Petersburg, where their lives calmed down considerably and revolved entirely around the czar and his court. But all that changed quite abruptly in 1917, when there was what a boyfriend of mine once called “a bit of a rumble and a rethink” in Russia, and the Guireys fled, Azamat’s branch of the family ending up in America. His father had been a brilliant horseman, commanding one of the czar’s more glamorous cavalry regiments, so when he arrived in New York he quite naturally started a riding school in Central Park.

  Curiously—or maybe not—Sylvia’s father had also been a White Russian prince, called Serge Obolensky, who had also lived in St. Petersburg, where he had, quite enterprisingly, married Princess Catherine, the daughter of Czar Alexander II. After the “rumble and the rethink,” they too became New Yorkers, and in the American fashion soon divorced, Serge going on to marry Sylvia’s mother, Alice Astor, in 1924. Alice sounded like lots of fun. She was something of a free spirit; quite unlike her charmless stuffy father, John Jacob IV (known as “Jack Ass” behind his back), who had gone down on the Titanic, or her deeply unappealing brother, Vincent (whose last wife was the legendary Brooke). Alice was fascinated by Egyptian magic and bonded with Aldous Huxley over their shared interest, and she also claimed to have been one of the first people to enter King Tutankhamen’s tomb. Mean-spirited gossips back home always said that Alice had confused the tomb with the Cairo branch of Van Cleef and Arpels and had emerged from it with a dazzling gold necklace in her bag. But then again nobody ever claimed to have seen the trophy, so who knows?

  In 1913 she played the lead in The Nosed Princess, which the New York Times
described as “a fairy comedy”; Cecil Beaton painted her portrait dressed in a silk kimono; and along the way she acquired four husbands. While married to Serge, it seems that Alice had an affair with Raimund von Hofmannsthal, who was Sylvia’s real father. (Alice and Raimund eventually married, then divorced, and his next wife was the beautiful Liz, Freddie’s great love and my mother’s bête noire. Prince Obolensky went on to become the vice chairman of the Hilton Hotel Corporation.) So even if Sylvia wasn’t a DNA-certified Russian princess by birth, she became one when she married Azamat, always assuming you care about such things, which I’m not so sure she ever did.

  Some of this my mother and Freddie told me the next morning at breakfast; the rest I pieced together over the years, and to this day the people sitting around the table that night are chattering away inside my head. Forty-six years later they are all dead, but I can still smell the cigarette smoke, hear Sylvia’s bracelets clanking, taste Pussy’s daube, feel Roger’s scorn—and Lorna’s fear—see Freddie’s smile, giggle at Azamat’s jokes, and hear my mother muttering “Jesus H. Christ” under her breath.

  La Migoua

  PUSSY SAID THERE WAS ONLY ONE estate agent in Le Beausset you could trust, and his name was Loulou Richelmi. The rest were all criminals who should have been put in jail years ago. It was our first morning at the Deakins’, and my mother was preparing her battle plan. Bill was hiding behind a two-day-old copy of The Times, which Freddie had thoughtfully brought him from London, except that he’d already done the crossword in ink on the plane—his thoughtfulness toward an old friend, stuck in the wilds of Provence, certainly didn’t extend to depriving himself of that daily pleasure.

  “Bill, I am right, no?” Pussy wasn’t going to allow her husband to escape so easily. “They are all thieves except for Loulou, aren’t they?” Still shielded by The Times, Bill winked at me, smiling, and replied, “Thieves and criminals. And probably collaborators as well.” Memories of the war were still fresh in 1962, and espèce de collaborateur was the insult of last resort.

  Le Castellet was far too picturesque to have anything so useful as a bank, pharmacy, or any real shops, since its shrewd inhabitants had long ago figured out that it was much more profitable to sell postcards, cigarettes, crêpes, and grubby little bags of stale lavender to the tourists, who stumbled up the hill to gawk at the village médiéval. It had a tiny boulangerie, a fruit-and-vegetable stand, and an old lady with a makeshift post office in her front parlor—open only on Tuesday and Friday mornings—but any serious business or shopping had to be done in Le Beausset.

  The medieval gateway had not expanded during the night, so Freddie was back on traffic cop duty as we squeezed through and headed down into the valley. Our road followed the gentle contours of the hill, its borders a pointillist jumble of scarlet poppies, Queen Anne’s lace, and tiny yellow and blue flowers, and beyond, rows of blurry green vines—their new spring leaves just starting to unfurl—stretched across the plain. The mistral’s fury had blasted every last scrap of cloud out of the sky, leaving behind an ocean of deep, assertive Matisse blue, and the spring sun was just beginning to breathe some warmth into the early morning air. A few men in work clothes trudged through the vineyards, and in the distance I saw another village, the mirror image of Le Castellet, clinging precariously to the top of an even-steeper hill. “That must be La Cadière,” said Freddie, who, unfazed by yesterday’s fiasco, had unfolded the map again, blocking my mother’s view through the windshield—“Jesus, what are you doing now? I can’t see a goddamn thing!”—and flapped his hand out the window in the vague direction of the village. The people in the car behind naturally assumed we were turning right, and when we didn’t, roared past us screaming abuse at the half-witted “foreigners” from Marseille.

  Pussy had set up an appointment with Loulou and scribbled his address on a bit of paper, but after parking the car, we still had enough time for Freddie to go in search of Le Monde, for me to buy a chocolate éclair, and for my mother to inhale her usual breakfast of coffee and cigarettes. As in all Provençal villages, life in Le Beausset revolved around the place at its center. In a roughly triangular space, shaded by plane trees, the mairie occupied one end, and an ancient stone fountain, overgrown with moss, its basin full of rotting leaves and the odd goldfish, stood at the other, while shops and cafés lined the two longer sides. In the summer, tables, chairs, and umbrellas were set up in the middle, but in April it was still too cold to sit outside, so we went in search of a café. The one we chose was called the Café Jean Jaurès, which didn’t mean a great deal to my mother or to me, but when Freddie joined us, with his newspaper neatly folded under his arm, he was beaming.

  “You clever girls,” he complimented us. “Jean Jaurès has always been a particular hero of mine. As I’m sure you both know”—we didn’t—“Jaurès was a great socialist president, and a defender of Dreyfus, who tried to prevent the outbreak of the First World War. Of course he failed, and for his pains was assassinated in 1914 by a man named, appropriately enough, Villain. And even worse, Villain was acquitted of the murder, in a frenzy of nationalism after the war. A total disgrace.”

  Freddie looked momentarily indignant at this travesty of justice but calmed down as soon as his café crème and croissant arrived. Since I was only eleven, and my mother had skipped huge chunks of school, copied what little work she did from other kids, and had fled to the Canadian army as soon as she could, we were both in need of some remedial tutoring in nineteenth-century French history. And who better than Freddie Ayer to have as your own private in-house teacher? As I got older he helped me even more, suggesting books in his library I might want to read, and patiently talking me through the “rumble and the rethink” of the Russian Revolution or Voltaire’s contribution to the Enlightenment—and his penchant for pretty ladies—whenever I had some terrifying exam looming. He led me to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (I think I managed one volume), Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex (passion, power, death—what’s not to like?), P. G. Wodehouse (not so much), Evelyn Waugh (wonderful, except for the crazy Catholicism), and he launched me on my lifelong love affair with history, which took me to Oxford and has lasted ever since. But that morning we had no time to dwell on the sad fate of Jean Jaurès, because we were already late for our meeting with the only uncrooked real estate broker in the entire village of Le Beausset.

  Loulou Richelmi’s office was hidden away down a side street, its doorway, windows, and facade almost obscured by an out-of-control wisteria vine, whose boa constrictor trunk seemed to be strangling the life out of the rickety building. A few malnourished cats loitered about in the patio out front. The door, painted the same dusty lavender blue as a Gauloise pack, was ajar so we walked in, and were greeted by a small man with pitch-black hair, who leapt up like a jack-in-the-box from behind his desk, “Ah, les amis de Madame Deakin!” After handshakes and more coffee, they settled down to business, which consisted of my mother’s explaining, quite cheerfully, “Nous n’avons pas beaucoup d’argent,” and then naming the actual number of francs in her new French bank account while Loulou rummaged about in the index file inside his head, until he came up with “deux possibilités.” The first was in La Cadière and had been a chapel, which was appealing if only as a Freddie tease (imagine the famous atheist living in a church …), but there was the problem of the windows. Loulou had to admit that they were perhaps placed a little too high on the walls, making it impossible to see out and allowing very little light to penetrate the gloomy interior. He seriously doubted that planning permission could ever be obtained to enlarge them. The second possibility was an old farmhouse without water or electricity, on the road to Le Beausset-Vieux, and after a quick call, Loulou announced that the man who had the key would meet us there in half an hour.

  We drove out of the village on a road lined with pollarded trees—their branches had been attacked with such Gallic savagery that they resembled maimed veterans of the trenches—and then headed up the hill
toward Notre-Dame du Beausset-Vieux. Like Le Castellet and La Cadière, Le Beausset had started out as a tiny settlement clinging to the top of a treacherous hill. The endless invasions, starting with the Phoenicians around 600 BC, followed by the Celts and then the Romans, who made these hilltops the only semisafe places to live. The Romans imposed their own laws and military discipline and, as long as the Pax Romana held, they were able to keep things under some kind of control, but with the fall of the empire and the barbarian invasions, all hell truly broke loose, and the settlements became fortified villages surrounded by massive stone walls. After the barbarians came the Moors from Spain, followed by a period of generalized chaos, violence, and banditry, lasting until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when everything calmed down enough for the “new” Le Beausset to be built in the valley below.

  Five centuries later all that was left of the original village was an ancient chapel, the remains of the ramparts, and a narrow, vaulted room whose walls were covered with a patchwork of lurid ex-votos. Painted in the style of a Grand-mère Moses who favored scenes of thrilling mayhem rather than dreary New England farms, they depicted a series of disasters: shipwrecks, near-amputations, horrendous train crashes, and fires. And in each case the miraculous intervention of Our Lady of Le Beausset-Vieux had saved the day—and the lives of the victims. Some of the paintings were surprisingly recent, and every year, on the night of September 7, the Virgin’s birthday was celebrated with a procession, followed by Midnight Mass in the chapel.