The House in France

by Gully Wells

  The road up the mountain was so narrow that there was no way for two cars to pass each other without a standoff. These often lasted for quite a while and inevitably ended in a humiliating capitulation by the defeated driver who was forced to back up. Sometimes they involved shouting, sometimes the drivers—if they were men—got out of their cars, egged on by backseat viragos, and threatened each other before one claimed victory, slammed his foot on the accelerator, and roared past his castrated opponent, scowling. Luckily the road was quite empty that morning. Loulou kept reassuring us that we were almost there, and as we approached the crest of the hill, he suddenly swerved off to the left, ground the stick shift down into first, and we started the slow climb up a rocky boulder-strewn, path.

  “Et voilà, on est arrivé!” Loulou jumped out of the car, opened the door for my mother, and pointed at a scraggly collection of houses and sheds. It wasn’t immediately clear which one was “ours.” But just then the front door of the last house in the row opened, and a tubby man with gray hair and an uncertain smile walked toward us: the man with the key. First we took a tour of the “grounds,” which encompassed several jungly terraces on the other side of the road, too overgrown to actually set foot on, as well as a dusty open space out front, shielded from the mistral by a thick stand of cypress trees, just big enough for a couple of cars to park in. There was no sign of a garden. But there was a large lime tree, almost as tall as the house, just outside the front door, which shaded not only the terrace beneath it but all the rooms with windows on that side, too, keeping them nice and cool and dark even at the height of summer. My mother, perversely, always regarded this as a huge advantage. Never big on daylight or the outdoors, she preferred a cozy cave with thick curtains, decorated in a subtle medley-de-merde. How about a dense chocolate mousse for the walls, the detail picked out in a lighter brown, and a mustard carpet for the floor? This was the actual color scheme of her London bedroom, and oddly enough it did have a certain back-to-the-womb allure.

  Loulou, the consummate salesman, kept up his patter, pointing out the useful proximity of our neighbors—they surrounded us—who would keep an eye on the house when we were not here. “Regardez le beau paysage,” he said, sweeping his arm toward the woods and vineyards, and, leading us around the corner, he revealed a kind of vertical shed glued onto the back of “our” house, surrounded by rubble. “Une autre maison,” he said, beaming like some generous greengrocer throwing a free, only slightly bruised extra plum into the bag. The shed was more spacious than it looked, with three levels, connected by wooden ladders, each with one “room.” He suggested we could make a rock garden from the rubble, and the shed would be the perfect place to put “Grand-mère,” when she came to stay. My mother looked appalled. But now, he said, it was time for us to take a look inside la grande maison, and we all followed the man with the key back round the corner.

  He opened the door and we stumbled into a large, pitch-dark space. The ground felt disturbingly uneven, but the key man was also the flashlight man, and he guided us toward an archway and down a couple of steps into an even-danker room, with no windows, no door, no light, and no air. This, Loulou told us, was la cave and would have been used for storing olive oil, sacks of grain, vegetables, and barrels of wine. My mother always claimed it was haunted, and it is true that people who slept there—we put in a window and French doors—often woke up exhausted after being burned at the stake or battling ax murderers all night long. The cave was also Freddie’s study, so when his guests emerged at breakfast, stunned by the events of the night, he would always say, quite innocently, “Well, I can’t say I’ve ever felt anything untoward in there,” and my mother would then point out that he was an Aspergian atheist with the sensitivity of a snail. Ergo: “You wouldn’t, would you?” He would smile and reply good-humoredly, “I won’t deny the first part of your proposition, since I’ve always been proud to be an atheist, but I am not sure I am willing to concede my resemblance to a snail, sensitive or otherwise.”

  We returned to the original dark room, where the animals would have lived, hence the lack of windows, and groped our way up a staircase that led to the altogether more cheerful second floor. “Voilà le salon!” Loulou pointed to a room with a massive fireplace and a terra-cotta-tiled floor, and then showed us a big cupboard—eventually the bathroom—and a square, sunny room that overlooked the vertical shed. One more twisty staircase and we were on the top floor, a wide-open space with two tiny windows and a rough cement floor. Loulou said nothing would be easier than to divide it up into three, even four, bedrooms.

  Curiously, for a peasant’s farmhouse stuck in the middle of the country, several miles from the nearest village, it felt more like a tenement in the backstreets of Marseille. I suppose this had something to do with the house being quite tall and narrow, and the fact that, once inside, you could hear absolutely everything. The interior walls must have been made of papier-mâché, which meant that every single conversation, argument, weeping fit, sigh, fart, whisper, or cough was audible throughout the house. And then, as Loulou had correctly pointed out, there was the cozy proximity of the neighbors. Immediately next door was a defunct olive oil mill, and beyond that a house owned by Monsieur Barry, who drove up regularly on his tractor in order to rumble around inside it, doing what, nobody knew, since he never actually stayed there. Beside that was another structure, where he kept his farming tools, and beyond it the Kingdom of the Tricons began. Marcel Tricon was a traveling salesman specializing in fancy foods—instant flan mixes, jars of Italian olives stuffed with pimentos, tinned pâtés—so he was mostly on the road, leaving his wife, Jeannine, and their three children, in the large house that anchored the other end of the hamlet of La Migoua. The Tricons elevated the entire tone of the neighborhood. Marcel knew how to fix anything and was constantly improving his property—building a fountain, turning one of his outbuildings into a guest suite, varnishing a gnarled vine root and transforming it into a lamp—which only highlighted the Tobacco Road aspect of our house. But Marcel understood that Monsieur Ayer was an intellectual and could not be expected to occupy himself with such things, and God knows a woman wouldn’t know how to, so I think he and Jeannine forgave us our lamentable lack of skills with the hammer and paintbrush. And in any case we were English and had therefore been deprived of the beneficent influence of la civilisation française, so what else could you expect?

  Around the back of La Migoua, along with the vertical shed, were a few other crumbling buildings, all part of the Tricons’ kingdom, as well as a tiny cottage owned by a rather stylish couple from Alsace, who migrated south every summer, hungry for the warmth and sexiness so lacking in their grim Germanic corner of France. Loulou suggested we might want to look inside “our” other house, the one where Grand-mère would be staying, and he led the way, scrambling up the rubble to the entrance on the second level. Freddie was not a climber, so he and the man with the key stayed behind, smoking their cigarettes and speculating on just when the mistral might make up “his” mind to bugger off and leave us in peace. Loulou was just showing us how a très jolie bedroom and an adjoining bath could be conjured up out of the shambles on the top floor, when we suddenly heard a violent scuffling outside, and Freddie crying out, “Oh God!” Could the man with the key have attacked him? Didn’t seem like the best strategy for selling a house. My mother rushed to the window and saw the man writhing on the ground, obviously having some kind of major fit, while Freddie stood there, his hands shaking, trying to light another cigarette, and repeating, “Oh God, oh God, oh God!” Loulou took charge, pinned the poor victim down by sitting on his bouncy stomach, and frantically tried to shove a stick between his snapping-turtle jaws. I remember being fascinated by the flailing limbs, the swiveling eyeballs, the froth spewing out of his mouth (did he perhaps have rabies?), and by the wild hysteria and excitement swirling around the whole episode. Everybody agreed that it was un grand mal and that eventually it would pass and, with any luck, his tongue would still be int
act. What happened next I don’t recall, but I do know that by the end of the day, my mother and Freddie had agreed to buy their dream house.

  AFTER WE RETURNED to London Freddie and I forgot all about La Migoua. I suppose we just assumed that somehow or other the house would be ready for us to move into the following summer. The “somehow or other” was my mother’s job. In a letter to her friend Sue, she described our visit to the Deakins:

  We did really go mad in the south of France. Put a down payment yet on a shed (two sheds actually) that is hitched onto an olive oil press, which is on top of a rock and the only road up is very Dracula-like. It will, I fear, be a long time before House and Garden seeks us out to photograph. In the meantime great wranglings are going on with the local mayor—who Gully calls quite rightly a slimy eel—about the water supply. It seems they don’t have much. On the other hand we don’t have any. I do hope the old French tradition of fair play isn’t today too dormant to be roused, else we will go on having none. Come to think of it, in the desert-like circumstances that surround Notre Rêve, the mayor shouldn’t be called a slimy eel at all, but maybe a sidewinder or a horned toad.

  The rest of the letter is about her efforts to make her younger sister, Beegoonie (the one who had the audacity to wriggle out of her much-needed abortion many years later), decamp from New York to London. My mother had decided that she needed to abandon her (totally unsuitable) boyfriend and (hopeless) job and to move into the Boothbys’ house in Holland Park Avenue, just as she herself had done six years before. The question was when she would arrive, and how much rent she should pay: “I have big sisterly vibrations that she’s having a hard time prying herself out of that exceedingly unattractive man’s bed. Anyway, let’s wait until she actually gets here and I will rip her purse from her hands and see really how much money she has.”

  Needless to say Beegoonie did as she was told and moved to London, where she established herself as one of Harry Evans’s bright young journalists at the Sunday Times, married a delightful man, had two charming sons, and lived happily ever after in a beautiful house on Primrose Hill. Yet more proof—as if any were needed—of the infallibility of her older sister’s judgment.

  That spring and summer my mother was a very busy lady. In addition to organizing Beegoonie’s life, she had her own to consider. The house in France was a wreck and needed to be made habitable by the next summer. Not such an easy thing to accomplish long-distance from London. But Lorna St. Aubyn, who was living there full-time, fixing up her own house, helped out by acting as my mother’s surrogate, bullying the electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and painters into sticking to some kind of plausible schedule. So that took care of Provence, leaving her to juggle her work, her social life, Freddie, me, and her not entirely cooperative—or youthful—ovaries.

  She had moved on from reviewing books and movies at the (reactionary) Sunday Express, and now had a regular column in the (progressive) Daily Herald, which suited her much better. She could write about anything she wanted and her political views, instead of driving the editor to apoplexy, marched in red-flag-waving sync with the socialist outlook of the paper. The Herald supported the Labour Party, which was led by their friend Hugh Gaitskell (who had so memorably defeated my mother in the Battle of Freddie’s Underpants, on their honeymoon in Yugoslavia). And the Labour Party was closely allied to the Trade Union movement, whose most powerful member was the mighty Miners Union, which held a huge and boisterous rally every year at a seaside resort in the north of England. It invariably rained. In 1962 they decided to invite my mother to come and judge their beauty contest. In a letter to Sue she wrote:

  Next week, I go (and am taking Gull and Fred) to the Lancashire Miner’s Gala to pick Miss Coal Mine. We go one night to Wigan, for a pre-Gala dinner, then on to St Helen’s, where Hugh [Gaitskell] makes the speech, I pick the bewty queen and then Lady Robens crowns her. I look forward to it enormously as have just seen a documentary film of the 1961 Gala in Durham. They rip the town to bits, and the after-dark sounds are entirely of breaking glass in the pubs and indignant shrieks from the ladies being mauled in the alleyways.

  I suppose if Tom Wolfe had been around in London in the sixties, he would have dumped my mother and Freddie—and most of their friends—in with Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, and tarred them all with the same Radical Chic/Bollinger/Socialist/Limousine/Liberal brush. And he would have been entirely right. They could not have been more serious about their support of progressive causes, and worked diligently (in Freddie’s case) and vociferously (in my mother’s) for things like the abolition of capital punishment, homosexual-law reform, and abortion rights. But they saw no reason why any of that should stop them from enjoying a restful weekend in the country, staying with friends who lived in large eighteenth-century houses, and were a bit hazy about how to find the road to Wigan Pier. Sometimes their hosts were old friends, like my secret passion, Michael Pitt-Rivers, the gay gentleman farmer in Wiltshire, who was married to Sonia Orwell, whose previous husband had written the book on Wigan Pier, and sometimes they were new friends, like the Duke of Bedford. The Bedfords had come into their lives through Bertrand Russell, whose ninetieth birthday party Freddie had organized. Here’s how he described it in his autobiography:

  It was held at the Café Royal and about seventy people came, personal friends, scientists, philosophers and their wives rather than Russell’s political associates. [Freddie felt that Russell had been hijacked by the nuclear disarmament movement, and disapproved of its leaders. They were way too radical, and not nearly sophisticated enough, for his taste.] Speeches were made by Julian Huxley, E M Forster and myself to which Russell replied.… When I had asked Russell whether there was anyone he would like to add to the guest list, he said he would like to invite the head of his family, the Duke of Bedford. Owing to some longstanding family feud, he had never met him or set foot in Woburn Abbey.

  The dinner was a huge success, and afterward the Bedfords “took Dee and myself to a nightclub where the Duke, a man of about my own age, proved remarkably adept at dancing the Twist.” Soon after, Bertrand Russell was invited to Woburn Abbey for the weekend, and “when the time came for the visit, Ian [the duke] took fright and invited me with Dee to help keep Russell entertained.”

  I was also included, and remember being suitably wowed by the intoxicating combination of grandeur (the dining room was wallpapered in Canalettos, commissioned by the fourth duke on his grand tour in 1731) and intellect (Bertrand Russell sitting with Freddie on the sofa discussing Hume). Not so the duke’s daughter-in-law the Marchioness of Tavistock who looked like a cross-dressing Pekingese—eyes too wide apart, nonexistent nose, body veering toward the masculine—and announced, just before Russell was due to arrive, that she thought she’d go wash her hair and was never seen again.

  After lunch the elegant Twisting duke took the ancient diminutive philosopher on a tour of the house their ancestors had built. I watched them walk slowly down a long corridor lined with family portraits, Russell leaning on the duke’s arm, stopping every now and then in front of one of the paintings to have a conspiratorial gossip about the misbehavior of a particularly wayward relative. Russell’s small, birdlike face was full of animation, and you could hear the excitement in his high-pitched voice as he chattered away about these long-dead people whom he had known so well, as if they had only just left to go upstairs and change for dinner.

  Freddie had given me a minitutorial on the Great Man in the car on the way to Woburn. And what had struck me was how similar they were: intellectually brilliant, skeptical, curious, resolutely rational, radical in their politics, and deeply appreciative of feminine charm. But what I loved hearing about most were Russell’s long, atavistic tentacles that stretched so far back into the past.

  Freddie told me that Russell had been orphaned as a young child and had gone to live with his grandfather, Lord John Russell, who had twice been prime minister, was one of the principal proponents of the great Reform Act of 1832, and had b
een born in the eighteenth century. That was the bit that really mesmerized me. Imagine: I was about to touch a man who had been brought up by somebody who had been alive in London at the same time as Robespierre had been busy with his guillotine in Paris. And the man I was about to meet had sat on Queen Victoria’s well-upholstered lap, and his godfather (except he didn’t believe in God) was John Stuart Mill, for God’s sake. It was all too much, and I couldn’t stop these ghosts from jiggling and nattering about inside my head as I was introduced to Russell and touched his feather-light hand, shaking it as gently as I would a newborn baby’s.

  JUST AFTER WE GOT BACK from France, I noticed that my mother had added a new element to her usual breakfast of cigarettes and Nescafé. There, on the tray with the Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade (coarse cut), the tin of Band-Aids, the sugar bowl, the ashtray, and the Gentleman’s Relish, was a large glass jar containing a mélange of different-colored pills, mixed in with some translucent amber capsules. It turned out she had read a magazine article about the difficulty of conceiving in your late thirties, whose author, a handsome, gray-haired gynecologist from Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, had recommended a cocktail of vitamins and a daily megadose of fish oil as a surefire solution to the problem. Since she had spent her childbearing years wrestling with recalcitrant diaphragms and having abortions, this was a new challenge for her—but one she was more than willing to take on. Every morning she would gulp down a handful of pills, and maybe it worked, because by the early fall she was indeed pregnant.

  Freddie and I were thrilled, and even she seemed secretly pleased. Nothing much changed in her life; she still rushed about, wrote her column, and went to just as many dinners and parties as ever, where she drank and smoked just as much as ever. She told me that her doctor in Paris, when she was pregnant with me, had insisted it was imperative she drink at least one glass of the best possible red wine every day, and she proposed to follow his advice twelve years later in London. Not that her doctor, a charming and garrulous Irishman named Gerry Slattery, who loved making house calls, mostly on account of the whiskey (preferably single malt, though he would graciously accept any substitute) and the conversation (the iniquities of the Tory Party; the necessity of Edna O’Brien’s winning a literary prize), would have disagreed with his French confrère’s prescription for a healthy mother and baby. There must have been a few adjustments to her wardrobe, but only one dress sticks in my memory. It was floor-length, high-waisted, emerald green velvet and festooned in mink—salvaged from an old jacket—at the neck and sleeves. My mother had designed it herself, and when she wore it I was always reminded of the wife in that Jan van Eyck painting of the solemn couple, standing in front of the marital bed, with the chic convex mirror on the wall behind them. Except that she tended not to put a dish towel, draped over two horns, on her head like the lady in the picture.