by Gully Wells
The day my mother went into labor Freddie was lecturing in Copenhagen, which was just as well, because I suspect there could have been a repetition of the “Oh God!” scene, when the man with the key had started foaming at the mouth. But her friend Margie Rees, who knew all about such things, having delivered five children of her own—while her husband had probably been down at the King of Denmark pub having a restorative cocktail or four—was on hand to take her to the hospital. Freddie arrived back a couple of days later, and that evening we went together to see her, and to admire his son, and my baby brother, Nicholas. Peering through the window I remember thinking how different he was from all the other pink and porky English babies in the hospital nursery. There they were, lined up like roly-poly puddings, swaddled in their creamy suet blankets, the rolls of fat on their chubby little arms tied up with invisible string; and there he was, skinny, dark haired, and alert, staring back at us with his deep midnight blue eyes. For Freddie it was love at first sight, and from that day on, as he wrote in the last line of his autobiography, “My love for this child has been the dominating factor in my life.” Nick’s secular godmothers were Dora Gaitskell and Nicole de Bedford (as the duchess signed her name), and Bertrand Russell agreed to be his godfather. Freddie loved the idea that his son would have a direct link back to Jeremy Bentham, since Russell’s own secular godfather had been John Stuart Mill, and Mill’s had been Bentham. The two ladies coughed up regular Christmas and birthday presents, but I think all Nick ever got out of the great man was this thrilling three degrees of separation from his father’s philosophical hero.
As soon as my mother got back from the hospital she began to look for a nanny. Robin, a young nurse who had recently left the Middlesex Hospital, was delivered to our doorstep by an agency called Universal Aunts. I think she was the first and only candidate for the job whom my mother interviewed, and amazingly she agreed to move in and take over the care of Nicholas the very next day. And not a moment too soon. There were no more rants and rages from her new charge, and calm and order prevailed as her reassuring, sane influence permeated the entire household. Not that she was a caricature English nanny; she was much too young and smart for that, and my mother despised that whole shtick anyway. Why bother to have a baby at all if you were just going to hand it over to some dragon in a uniform for the first seven years of its life and then ship it off to boarding school for the next ten? When, she wondered in a magazine piece, “would it dawn on the British that Nanny, Noddy, Frinton and a pony add up to a thin life for a small child. That prep school at seven, followed by Eton, means that a child is being brought up by strangers, is only a sometime visitor in his own home, and love is a holiday treat like going to a Christmas pantomime.” Children should be seen and heard. Except when you didn’t want them around, and then Robin was there to take over.
THE NEWS FROM LA MIGOUA was encouraging. By late spring Lorna reported back that the house was all but finished. Of course it had no furniture, and my mother, convinced that everything in France was wildly overpriced, decided to fill up a van in London, with beds and lamps and sheets and chairs and lightbulbs and detergent and Kotex and mattresses and tables and shampoo and saucepans, and drive it down there herself. Her birth coach, Margie Rees, signed on as codriver, and off they went. Robin was left in charge of Nicholas and me, and Freddie and Goronwy had lunch and dinner at the Garrick Club, since both their cooks had selfishly gone AWOL to sun themselves on the Riviera. (Neither Freddie nor Goronwy ever learned to drive or cook, or to do anything at all in or outside the house, and so were totally dependent on their live-in cooks/handywomen/nannies/gardeners/cleaning ladies/hostesses/chauffeurs. Mistress was the only role that my mother and Margie were not required to play.)
Finally, at the end of July, after my school got out, the day arrived. The car, a dumpy English approximation of an American station wagon, with pointless bits of wood glued onto its exterior, and two doors at the back that opened up like a kitchen cupboard, was outside, and we had a boat to catch in Dover that afternoon. Our suitcases, cardboard boxes, plastic bags, Nicholas’s crib, packets of potato chips, economy-size rolls of toilet paper, and a case of Coke, were all piled up on the sidewalk. Clearly the suitcases belonged on the rusty roof rack, where it was Freddie’s job to tie them down with a tangle of Medusa-like “snakes,” equipped with metal hooks, one at each end of their long, stripey, elasticated bodies. After that the bags, boxes, and crib were stuffed in through the cupboard doors, while Robin and I clambered over the front seats (the “station wagon” had only two doors) and settled ourselves in the back. My mother then passed us everything else: first the baby, then all the other rubbish, which had to be wedged into whatever pockets of uninhabited space were left. I quickly learned to offload the cans and glass bottles onto Robin, so they could clank around her ankles, and keep the diapers and six-packs of toilet paper—which made a perfect pillow—for myself. Once the sidewalk had been cleared, Freddie got into the passenger seat, patted his pockets to make sure he had his glasses and passport, and my mother slipped behind the wheel, lit a cigarette, and said in her best cowboy voice, “Time to get outta Dodge and head south.”
La Plage
THERE WAS NOTHING REMOTELY CHIC or comfortable about our journey to the south of France. Crammed into our soi-disant station wagon, we barreled through the endless, grisly suburbs of south London, hit a few miles of open road and the odd green field, and then found ourselves on the outskirts of Dover, where we followed the signs—a cheerful-looking tugboat bobbing around on wiggly lines—for the Channel ferry. A couple of hours of lurching about on deck, trying not to be sick, and we were in Calais, and from there we drove, already exhausted, to Paris. But not the Paris you may be imagining. We were headed for a dark—it was then about ten at night—and rather sinister railway siding, where we left the car with a man in blue overalls who loaded it onto the clanking train.
Festooned with plastic bags—our supplies for the night—we traipsed down the train’s hot, crowded corridors in search of our compartment. Except that it wasn’t ours at all. My mother had booked only four of the six couchettes, so two fat ladies were already firmly installed on the lower bunks, one with a Lone Ranger mask over her eyes, presumably trying to sleep, and the other eating a greasy sandwich while reading France Dimanche. We all said “Bonsoir” very politely, and I climbed up the ladder and lay down, my nose a couple of inches from the ceiling, and wondered ungratefully why I wasn’t an orphan traveling alone in a wagon-lit with real sheets and a pillow, to stay with my elderly, homosexual guardian in his sugar-almond-pink villa overlooking Cap d’Antibes.
Something happened in the night, and when I woke up early the next morning, the world outside the train’s window had been totally transformed. The landscape was illuminated, like one of van Gogh’s paintings from the madhouse in Saint-Rémy, by the sharp, uncompromising clarity of the sun of the Midi. And it wasn’t just the light that was so different from the opaque, misty look of England. The entire scene had been painted in a whole new palette of colors. The sky shone a fierce, brilliant blue; the roofs of the stone houses were faded terra-cotta; and the crumpled cubist mountains rose up in the distance in delicate shades of gray and violet. As the train shuddered to a halt, we gathered together our plastic bags, said Au revoir to the two fat ladies, and emerged into the heat and dust of a railway platform just outside Avignon. Nicholas started to wail, and Robin poked a placatory bottle into his mouth. Freddie and my mother lit cigarettes, and I took a deep breath, marveling that even the air of the south was perfumed with some mysterious new scent I couldn’t begin to recognize. Sweet and almost sickly, it came from the sticky pink blossoms of the oleander bushes growing outside the station-master’s neat little house alongside the tracks. Mixed with rosemary, wild mint, and thyme, it was the smell of Provence.
Wedged back into our cozy “station wagon,” with Freddie, the map reader, in charge of guiding us on our way, we headed due south. But it wasn’t long before we f
ound an excuse to stop. How could we just zoom by and miss Aix-en-Provence? My mother saw the road sign up ahead and, surprisingly, became quite misty about her honeymoon there with my father.
“We stayed in a tiny hotel right on the Cours Mirabeau, which only happens to be the most beautiful street in all of France. And we had breakfast every morning on the terrace of Les Deux Garçons, which is just what we’re going to do right now. Don’t you want to see where your Mum and Dad had such a good time before you were born?” And before you left him four years later.
Of course I did. Not wishing to be outdone, Freddie then announced that he too had spent a night in Aix, during the war, with a French lady, whose name momentarily escaped him, and that he had never forgotten it. The town, that is. Genuinely curious about why Aix had left such an impression on him, since he never usually noticed his surroundings at all, she asked him, “And what picture comes into your head, when I say Aix to you?” Freddie closed his eyes, put the tips of his fingers together and sat there thinking. And thinking. And thinking. And finally the magical image came floating up from his subconscious,
“I see Mirabeau.” (Mirabeau had been born in Aix.)
“And?”
“I see Mirabeau telling the king’s representative in the National Assembly on June 23, 1789, ‘Tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people and will leave only by the force of bayonets.’ Splendid words, splendid man.”
Which was only slightly better than his reply when my mother had asked him the same question about Paris, when he had said, “I see a road sign that says Paris.”
LES DEUX GARÇONS first opened its doors for business in 1792, and its various owners had seen no reason to change the shabby elegance of its green-and-gold interiors since then. And why should they? The dappled sunlight of the Cours Mirabeau was reflected in its ancient speckled mirrors, a lazy ceiling fan swooshed above our heads, while waiters darted across the tiled floor, trays piled high with patisseries and coffee for the ladies who had just come from the market. Their baskets were stuffed full of tiny tomatoes the size of large pearls, feathery girolles mushrooms, fragrant bunches of basil, and pink-and-white peaches with the complexion of a Boucher milkmaid. The ladies’ maquillage had been perfectly applied, and their fine-grained-leather handbags, silk foulards, and discreet but expensive jewelry betrayed the French bourgeoise’s obsession with quality. Clearly they had been up early—it wasn’t even nine o’clock—patroling the market stalls on the outlook for delicacies to set before their demanding families that night. Although I had not yet heard of my future heroine M. F. K. Fisher, she happened to be living in Aix with her two young daughters in the early sixties, and she had fallen under the spell of the Cours. And they too would stop by Les Deux Garçons every day to have “breakfast on the terrace, and talk with whoever stopped beside us, and usually stay longer than we’d meant to, in a kind of daze of well-being and satisfaction about the rhythm and beauty of the town, the people, the fountain music.” Who knows, they might even have been there with us on the terrace that morning.
After we had finished our coffee, my mother reckoned we had just enough time for a little promenade along what she now upgraded to “the most beautiful street in the whole world.” A double row of plane trees shaded both sidewalks, filtering the early morning light and meeting in the middle to create the monumental vaulted nave of a leafy green cathedral. As a piece of town planning, the Cours is wonderfully free of any practical purpose. The concept of a wide urban boulevard had come from Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Cours Mirabeau was constructed soon after, as a place where the Aixois aristocracy could parade around in their carriages, as the Italians did on their daily passaggio. This was not a road that actually led anywhere, other than up and down the complicated, slippery snakes and ladders of the social scene.
Elegant hôtels particuliers built of the local honey-colored stone, with gray shutters, line the street, and twirly wrought-iron balconies supported by gigantic Atlantes whose lapidary beards are as tightly curled as the hair under their muscular arms. It was Leonardo who said, “Let the street be as wide as the height of the houses” (why don’t all architects just listen to him?), and in Aix they knew that perfect proportion, like Garbo’s bone structure, is the secret of lasting beauty. The Cours is 440 meters long and generally 44 wide, while the houses are never more than four stories high, and it is this geometry that makes the result of the equation eternally pleasing to the eye. Not only did the architects do their math right, but they also believed that nature had to be included in the construct—and understood that there is something intrinsically satisfying about the combination of stone, water, and trees.
Water is what brought the Romans to Aix. On their conquering march through what was to become their Provincia, they discovered warm sulfuric water gurgling up from a series of underground springs, and built their first settlement around them, calling it Aquae Sextiae in honor of the consul Caius Sextius Calvinus. And two thousand years later the water is still bubbling away in the four fountains that punctuate the length of the Cours. My favorite is the Neuf Canons (just across from Les Deux Garçons), whose granite basin was constructed in Louis XV’s time, with especially low sides for the thirsty sheep that were driven each year through the town on their spring migration to the hills. Sadly the sheep have all gone, but there are still plenty of dogs in Aix, who now use it as their local bar, stopping for a reviving slurp or two as they pass by.
THE MAN WITH THE KEY, whose tongue Loulou had so skillfully preserved, would not have recognized the house. The haunted “cave” now had French windows and a tiled floor, and the ground-floor animals’ quarters had been transformed into an enormous kitchen, with a real live fridge and a gas-propelled stove, and a large window that opened onto the shady terrace where the lime tree grew. On the second floor the one and only bathroom had been shoehorned into a cupboard at the top of the stairs, and although it did have a sparkling new bath and basin, and a loo that flushed straight into a sparkling new septic tank, it had no door. Actually there was a door, but instead of being attached with hinges, it leaned precariously against the doorframe, with huge, embarrassing, breezy gaps on either side. Having assured my mother that the door would be installed before we arrived, Monsieur Choremi revised his schedule and promised it would be done before we left. And, being a man of his word, he did indeed pull up in his battered Citroën, six weeks later, on the morning we were setting off for the station in Avignon, just as Freddie was once again wrestling with the Medusa snakes and the rusty roof rack.
Is there any point at all in having a beach nearby unless you go there every single day for as long as you possibly can? I thought not. And, although everybody else was moderately enthusiastic, none of them quite shared my fanatical and monomaniacal devotion to Bikini Beach. Without question it had everything you could possibly want: glamour, social life, pedalos, pizza, Orangina, trashy magazines, sugar-roasted nuts, ice cream, and that eternal—and irresistible—combination of sun, sand, and sex. As soon as breakfast was over, I started hopping about, offering to help my mother with the picnic, or Robin with the baby, and tempting Freddie with The Times. Rattling the Leaning Door of La Migoua, as he lolled in his soupy bath, I would remind him that if we didn’t leave soon, there wouldn’t be a single copy left in the whole of Les Lecques, and he would have to make do with Le Monde, which didn’t even have a crossword. Finally, like an irritating sheepdog, I got them all rounded up, into the car, and we were on our way to the beach.
On our jaunts from Austria to Italy, in his white convertible that smelled of new shoes and had room only for the two of us, my father and I had always played our own private version of “I Spy.” As we turned a corner, a sliver of blue would suddenly appear in the distance, and I would shriek, “There it is!” and he would say, “You win” (I always did), and there before us was the mesmerizing Mediterranean. The “station wagon” was permeated by the smell of Ambre Solaire and tuna fish
sandwiches, but that didn’t stop me from playing the game silently, all by myself, and still feeling the same jolt of excitement when I caught that first glimpse of blue as we came over the crest of the hill.
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that Bikini Beach was the most stylish patch of sand in the whole of Les Lecques. Which, of course, was not saying a great deal. I still had fantasies about my guardian in his pink villa, high above the real Côte d’Azur, but I was a sensible child, and understood that I was stuck with my terminally unfashionable family and so would have to make the best of it. I tried hard to smarten them up, but there was only so much a girl could do. Freddie’s beach outfit consisted of a pair of beige linen shorts, which were not short at all, since they flapped around his knees and approached his armpits on top. Far worse were his underpants: Blue and even more voluminous, they extended a good few inches above his “waist,” and below the hem of the shorts, giving them a nice, contrasting blue-border effect. With this he wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt and some faded espadrilles. My mother usually favored a more colorful look, like a loose, flower-patterned dress, topped off with a brightly spotted bandanna, to hold back her hair, so she could see to drive, for crissakes. Robin was let off the hook because she wasn’t family, and Nick was a baby, so he didn’t count.