The House in France

by Gully Wells

  The Queen of Bikini Beach, its very own Diana Vreeland, its social arbiter and strict enforcer of its byzantine code of conduct, was Monsieur Maurice. Of indeterminate age, hunchbacked, with mahogany skin, distended, licorice-colored nipples, and his hair dyed orangutan orange, he wore a yellow thong and patrolled the beach, rake in hand, keeping us all in order. His beaklike nose was covered in a matching yellow plastic guard, attached to his sunglasses in a Groucho Marx arrangement, like something from a joke shop. He was a savage snob, and his favorite reading material was Point de Vue, a magazine entirely taken up with the meaningless doings of deposed royals, with a particular focus on the rivalry between the two claimants to the tragically still-vacant throne of France. Monsieur Maurice worshipped the Gypsy (Sylvia), whom he always addressed as “Madame la Princesse.”

  The exclusivity of the beach was maintained partly by two fences, which kept the hoi polloi mostly at bay—although by law they had to be allowed to walk along the seashore—and partly by Monsieur Maurice’s discriminating gate policy. Jaunty triangular blue flags marked the entrance on the boardwalk, and some rickety wooden steps led down to the sand, where a row of cabanas stood up against the cement wall. Sometimes a forlorn-looking family would appear at the top of the steps—their unappealing children clutching plastic buckets, the mother too fat, the father too thin—hoping to rent a couple of deck chairs and an umbrella for the afternoon, and would be told, before they had even opened their mouths, “C’est impossible. On est complet.” How else could one possibly be expected to maintain “le standing” of Bikini Beach?

  Mattresses covered in blue-and-white-striped canvas, deck chairs, small tables, and parasols were all arranged in parallel lines facing the ocean. As at the theater, the front row was the most desirable location, and was, understandably, reserved for Monsieur Maurice’s favorites, while the rest of us were grateful to be allowed to camp out farther back, in front of the cabanas. But at least we were closer to Madame Carrère, whose plywood hut offered up all kinds of treats. A glossy map of multicolored ice creams was tacked to the outside, and behind the counter, a chalkboard advertised two kinds of sandwiches, pâté and ham; fougasse, a kind of primitive Provençal pizza, minus the tomatoes; and salade niçoise. The filthy, sagging shelves were stacked high with slices of stale fruitcake, studded with sticky cherries and wrapped in cellophane, bubble gum, chocolate, and every conceivable kind of candy. Our favorite drink was something a French marketing whiz had decided to call “Pschitt,” which we thought was screamingly funny. The joke, of course, was entirely lost on Madame Carrère, who just handed over the bottle and wearily added its exorbitant cost to our parents’ already inflated accounts.

  “I got the last copy of The Times, as well as the Telegraph and the Express,” Freddie arrived, flush with the triumph of his shopping expedition. Whenever we traveled, finding English papers occupied a good part of every outing, but in that summer of 1963 my mother and Freddie’s appetite for news from home seemed to have escalated. As soon as Freddie plopped himself down in his deck chair, he announced: “That tart Keeler has started to talk, and Stephen Ward has killed himself.”

  My mother snatched the paper from his hand and disappeared behind it, while he calmly opened another one, and nothing more was heard from either of them for at least an hour. I knew something was going on; I just couldn’t figure out what it was. And nobody would tell me. It had all started before we left London, when I heard them talking about somebody called Profumo. He looked a bit startled—as well he might—in the photos I’d seen of him on the front pages, and he seemed to have lost most of his hair, and was in some kind of awful trouble with the prime minister, Harold Macmillan. The whole thing was incredibly complicated, and involved not just “that tart Keeler” but also her friend Mandy, and their doctor, Stephen Ward, who had been kind enough to invite them both to come and live with him in his pretty mews house. A Russian spy and a homicidal West Indian with a gun had walk-on parts, as well as some man called Astor, who Freddie said was a shit, and had been at Eton with him. How on earth the shit from Eton could be connected to the West Indian, or how the nice doctor (whom a friend of my mother’s had gone to see with her bad back) had met the Russian spy, or why on earth the prime minister should care about any of these people, I could not begin to understand. And, just to add to the bouillabaisse of confusion swirling around inside my head, Freddie had some more news to share with us: “And that other tart, Margaret Argyll, is up in court too. It seems that the ‘headless man’ is Duncan Sandys, which, on top of Profumo, will drive Macmillan completely mad.”

  “We can but hope. And let’s also hope that those two Tory sex maniacs lose him the next election” was my mother’s only response from behind her paper.

  Were the two “tarts” connected in some way? Did Margaret perhaps live with Mandy and Christine in the doctor’s mews house? Clearly Mr. Profumo and Mr. Sandys both worked for the prime minister, and both were deranged by sex, which Mr. Macmillan was quite understandably furious about. But that still left the question of where Mr. Sandys’s head had gone. Exasperated by my whining, my mother finally put her paper down and turned to me. “Okay, so here’s the story: The Duchess of Argyll is in court because she’s divorcing the duke. And they have a photograph of her kneeling in front of some naked guy she worshipped, called Duncan Sandys, who’s so tall you can’t see his head at the top of the picture.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  I decided to go swimming.

  THE BAY AT LES LECQUES looked like something a child might draw. A perfect semicircle, with a pretty little toy town at one end and a rocky promontory at the other, a sandy beach in between, palm trees, and tiny white boats bobbing around in a Crayola-blue sea. The water may have looked blue, but that didn’t guarantee anything. How dirty it was we didn’t know or care, but it was true that you couldn’t see through it very well, and we did quite often find strange things floating about, mainly plastic bags and once, rather excitingly, a real live turd. None of which, in my mind at least, detracted from the irredeemable glamour of Bikini Beach.

  But as an amateur anthropologist I wasn’t there just to have a good time; I had my fieldwork to do. Observing the differences between my British and French subjects was that summer’s special project. Representing England—and who better?—I had Nanny St. Aubyn, whom Lorna had dropped off that morning, with her two small charges, Teddy and Minky. What the old dragon’s real name was we never discovered, and anyway it didn’t matter, because all real nannies automatically acquired the last name of their employers. Sartorially Nanny had made no concessions to her day at the beach. Dressed in her usual starched uniform, thick white stockings, and lace-up shoes, she spent most of her time stopping the children from indulging in anything that could remotely be construed as having fun. They had to keep their tops on, sit in the shade, were not allowed to eat anything from Madame Carrère’s hut, could go into the sea only up to their knees, and had to take a two-hour rest after lunch. She made a halfhearted attempt to strike up a conversation with Nanny Ayer before quickly realizing that she was dealing with an impostor. Not only did we call her Robin, but she addressed her employers as “Dee” and “Freddie,” she was wearing a bikini, and it soon became all too clear that she did not know a single one of the nannies in Kensington Gardens whom Nanny St. Aubyn hung out with.

  This was the sixties, and Bikini Beach had gone topless. Some were bananas, others torpedoes; skinny women had poached or—if they were unlucky—fried eggs; and one girl’s were so perfectly rounded that they looked like the two halves of a juicy grapefruit. But it was the huge saggy ones, and their owners’ amazing lack of embarrassment in displaying them, that fascinated me the most. They lolled about on their mattresses, their bosoms slopping over the ill-defined edges of their bodies, like over-the-hill houris in some downmarket seraglio, while their husbands calmly smoked, drank their beer, and read the sports pages of Le Figaro. Sometimes, though, th
e animal urges of the French male were just too strong to be contained. And then he would heave himself on top of the lady beside him, the matted thatch on his chest pressed seductively against her oily bananas, and start fiddling with the tangle of gold chains around her neck. This I recognized as a clear prelude to some much more serious fiddling later on. In London the couples smooching on the grass in Regent’s Park were always a bitter disappointment, because whenever I got close to them—on the pretext of retrieving my skillfully tossed ball—they glared at me, and anyway they had far too many clothes on. But here they might as well have been naked and didn’t seem to notice or care who was watching them. The French had to be the sexiest people on earth.

  Sylvia, the Gypsy, lay on her striped mattress in the front row, her toes almost touching the water, smoking a cheroot, and drinking a tumbler of rosé. Occasionally she would scoop out an ice cube and let it dribble down the back of her neck before popping it into her mouth. She had discarded her top and lay on her stomach, dressed in nothing more than a triangular scrap of black fabric, her turquoise-and-silver tribal bracelets, and a shimmering slick of bergamot-and-almond oil, mixed specially for her by the man in the drugstore in Ollioulles. Monsieur Maurice hovered above her holding a collection of ice-cream wrappers and cigarette butts retrieved from the sand, longing for an excuse to strike up a conversation with Madame la Princesse.

  “Oh là là, qu’il fait chaud!” was his safe opening gambit, but then, unfortunately, he noticed what she was reading. “Ah, Cocteau,” he sighed, and paused soulfully, forcing Sylvia to put her book aside and listen to an emotional account of a fleeting visit to Tangiers, many years before—the mysteries of the Kasbah, the music of the nightingales, the scent of the roses, the potency of the kef, the heat of the sirocco, the beauty of the boys—when he had passed an entire evening in the great man’s company. Sylvia pretended to pay attention, but, suddenly announcing that the heat was quite intolerable, she stood up and waded into the water, leaving him there, rake in hand, still lost in the dreamlike maze of the medina.

  The Gypsy was much taken with all things artistic and liked to surround herself with poets, painters, and writers. Where this left Prince Azamat, other than playing backgammon at White’s, I was never quite sure. She classified Freddie as an intellectual, so at least he was spared the discussions about Rothko or Pollock, but, on the other hand, he was expected to come up with something scintillating when she fancied a chat about a new edition of Apollinaire’s poems or existentialism or, indeed, Cocteau. He dreaded these Sylvia seminars. But the Gypsy was not just a hungry consumer of art and ideas; she was also an artist herself, who showed her work in real art galleries in London, where real people paid real money to acquire them. My mother loved Sylvia and was a loyal friend, so I would be dragged to her openings, where we would marvel at how a simple string dishrag could, in the right hands, be transformed with a few, judicious dabs of paint, into something or other—what, we were never quite sure. My mother and I may not have known much about modern art, but we knew what we liked; and we liked Sylvia’s dishrags because Sylvia had painted them.

  At her last private view, arriving early to show support, and flailing around for something to say, my mother had, in desperation, singled out one of the larger pieces for special praise: “This is amazing … I’ve never seen anything like it … how do you create these?” Sylvia was genuinely pleased by her friend’s enthusiasm and, worried that the dishrag in question would be snapped up once the hordes arrived, she kindly asked the gallery to put a red sticker on it immediately. A couple of weeks later a package, wrapped in brown paper, was delivered to our house, along with an invoice containing a surprising number of zeroes.

  NANNY ST. AUBYN had never been so hot in all her life. She was fanning herself with one of Freddie’s discarded newspapers, had soaked all their towels in water, and then draped them over the children’s heads and shoulders.

  “I can’t think where Mrs. St. Aubyn could possibly be. She said she would be here to collect us on the dot of three, and now it is almost five o’clock.” It was indeed hard to imagine what Lorna might be up to. Being tortured by Roger seemed the most likely possibility, but then again she might just be having a much-needed cocktail. Who knew? But Nanny was right: It was unbearably hot and Lorna was late.

  While Teddy and Minky sat under their parasol, wrapped up like Egyptian mummies, forbidden to move, a couple of boys, no more than five or six years old, were running wild across the sand, fighting, screeching, and gorging themselves on candy and bottles of Pschitt from Madame Carrère’s hut. Nanny St. Aubyn did not approve, and I could hear her muttering under her halitotic breath, something about “Regular little savages, these Frenchies.” At that moment Sylvia emerged from the sea, and started walking toward us. In this heat, why bother with a towel? Standing beside Nanny, dripping and glistening, her bracelets clanking, her bananas tanned the same deep espresso as the rest of her sinewy body, she looked a bit like a regular savage herself.

  For the Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss of Bikini Beach, it was the perfect juxtaposition, and made all more delicious by the expression of disgust on Nanny’s face, and by the arrival of Monsieur Maurice, who added the missing louche element to the tableau. Instead of his customary rake he was carrying a bulky blue file under his arm. He nodded to Nanny, addressing her as “Madame,” bowed deeply to Sylvia, and, crouching down beside Freddie’s deck chair, he asked Monsieur le Professeur if he would do him the honor of reading his novel. He had actually started writing it in Tangiers, more than twenty years ago, “Quand j’étais là avec Monsieur Cocteau, vous voyez,” he explained, lowering his voice discreetly. Never one to miss an opportunity of bringing the conversation around to himself, Freddie then embarked on a story about some glittering dinner at the British Embassy in Paris, just after the war, when Lady Diana Cooper had introduced him to Cocteau as “our most brilliant philosopher.”

  “Elle était très diplomatique.” Freddie laughed, pretending to dismiss his hostess’s remark with this disingenuous joke, and then, remembering the manuscript, added that, speaking as one writer to another, “Je serais ravi de lire votre livre.” Monsieur Maurice was so affected by the Professeur’s response that he took off his sunglasses with the attached yellow plastic nose guard, and I saw his sunken, crocodile eyes light up and his tight little mouth crack into a misshapen smile as he handed over his precious life’s oeuvre. Freddie dumped the file into the beach bag, on top of his wet bathing suit and a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich. (Later that evening I heard him muttering in his study, “I can’t possibly go on reading this, it’s filth. Pure pornography. Homosexual pornography. What on earth am I going to say to him? Oh God, Oh God!”)

  On the way back to the car, I turned around and saw Nanny standing there, red faced, feet firmly planted on the sand, her uniform now slightly stained, with only a damp hanky on her head to shield her from the fierce tropical sun. It looked as if she was trying to say something to the two dusky, bare-breasted natives—a man and a woman—on either side of her, but however slowly she spoke, they just waved their hands about, jabbered away in their own language, and paid no attention to her at all.

  Le Marché

  WHEN SHE WASN’T SHOUTING, my mother was more fun than anyone on earth. And, in those early years at La Migoua, before things started to fall apart with Freddie, she hardly shouted at all. Of course there were always the machine-gun blasts of swearing, but nobody minds being called a “cuntburger,” as long as it’s done with grace and good humor. Besides, we were all used to it. It never crossed my mind that newcomers like Robin and, after her, Amanda and then Beatrice, who lived with us to help out on those long hot summers in France, might be surprised, shocked, or even frightened by my mother’s behavior. Robin did admit that she thought we were “a bit eccentric,” and I once found Amanda crying in her room, but they soon adapted to—or were corrupted by—the odd but endearing ways of the Ayer-Wells ménage. At any rate, during the first few summers, all
my mother’s whirling-dervish energy was focused on fixing up the house, going to markets, cooking huge dinners, giving parties, and actually having an extraordinarily good time.

  Usually we did our shopping in Le Beausset, where in those days there was only one small general store, called the Casino, on the main place. In addition the village had a couple of indifferent bakeries, a butcher, a greengrocer, and an itinerant fish truck that appeared on Thursdays and parked outside the post office. If we felt in need of something a bit more recherché, we would venture as far as Bandol, on the coast, where every Saturday there was a serious outdoor market set up around the fountain in the old part of the town. However, there was no going to the market without first dropping by the infamous Bandol dump. A smoldering Vesuvius populated by sad, soot-darkened specters who spent their days clambering about on the burning mountain, rearranging the garbage with rusty rakes: It was a scene straight from Dante’s Inferno and mesmerizing in its pathos and horror. But since the job of “sanitation worker” didn’t exist in rural France, we had no choice but to load up the back of the car with our stinking trash cans, drive twenty miles in the sultry heat, and then heave the contents onto the foothills of the mountain. Imagine having to work on the Bandol dump! The plight of these poor people should have driven me to join the junior branch of the local Parti Communiste, but instead I was inspired to dream up a simple, but satisfying, game that, I am ashamed to admit, I have been playing ever since: “Which Would You Rather?” Have your little finger amputated, drink somebody else’s pee, go to bed with Prince Charles or … work on the Bandol dump? I even got Freddie to play it with me until he rebelled—“Darling, you really are too disgusting.” And then, just for him, I came up with a subtle variation on the same theme: “Who Would You Rather?” Cleopatra or Marilyn Monroe. That tart Keeler or the Duchess of Argyll. Or, just to torture him, the Queen Mother or Madame Carrère. This game was much more to Freddie’s taste.