The House in France

by Gully Wells

  Although I was happy to read about things like “Cou d’Oie Farci,” which begins, “When the confits of goose are being prepared, the necks of the geese are stuffed and cooked at the same time. The skin of the neck is turned inside out like the finger of a glove and the inside removed …,” or indeed the long and complicated confit recipe itself, which ends on a slightly dispiriting note: “This is only really worth doing for those who have their own geese and a dry airy larder in which to store the jars,” I knew they were not for us. Instead my mother and I concentrated on dishes like grilled mackerel: “make two incisions on each side of the fish, into these put a little butter, parsley, salt, pepper, fennel, and a few chopped capers. Grill for 7–10 minutes and serve with a squeeze of lemon.” Or, even better, a “Salad of Sweet Peppers” that consists of “cold cooked red peppers (or mixed red, yellow and green) with oil and vinegar dressing.”

  The menu, on the day we got back from Toulon to find Nick and Freddie caught up in Lucky Luke’s adventures out west, wasn’t wildly ambitious, which was probably just as well: pâté de campagne and cornichons to start, grilled sardines and tomates à la Provençale, a salad of wild greens, and two cheeses—a soupy Reblochon and a gamey Époisses—all of which we had gotten in the market that morning. Sweet things were never part of my repertoire. And, as long as the magnificent Patisserie Antoine, just off the place Mirabeau, stayed in business, they didn’t need to be. We had bought the biggest tarte au citron they had, and that—along with some crème fraîche and a basket of figs so ripe their purple skins had started to split open, threatening to reveal their juicy, red, pornographic interiors—would be dessert.

  The guest list was a bit more complicated. What had started out as a simple dinner with the usual suspects like the Deakins and the Guireys had somehow grown into something bigger and therefore much more fun. Freddie and my mother adored parties. She was fearless when it came to mixing people up, ruthless in eliminating bores, and would say anything to ignite the conversation. She would also do anything, like the time she decided on the spur of the moment to have a blue butterfly tattooed on her shoulder, in the days when only drunken sailors and bikers indulged in such things. Sometimes saying anything was a disaster, not that she would ever have admitted it. “Never apologize, never explain” was her most cherished precept—one she stuck to with ferocious fanaticism. Once, during a discussion about the mysteries of marriage, why some worked and most didn’t, she turned to one of her guests—a nervous lady in her sixties, who late in life had married a crazed, intermittently violent alcoholic who had stolen most of her money before running off to Spain—and asked her, “Jane, you’re not very good at being married. What do you think?” Jane looked as though she would rather be dead, if that was okay with her hostess. Freddie and Mummy were both show-offs who loved and needed an audience: No wonder they thrived in the public eye. As guests they were entertaining, and as hosts they knew how to entertain. The food was important, the wine essential, and the fussy queen/fifties housewife always made sure the long marble table looked beautiful, but in the end it was all about the people sitting around it.

  Not long after we had bought the house, my mother sold the vertical shed glued onto the back, to an old friend, Francette, who lived in a rambling apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. As with so many of their friends, the connection to Francette could be traced back to one of Freddie’s love affairs. Just after the Liberation he had been posted to the British Embassy in Paris (where he had, memorably, met Monsieur Maurice’s friend Jean Cocteau) to work in the intelligence section. The ambassador, Duff Cooper, had written to the Foreign Office in London that he was “extremely anxious to have Ayer back in France … he is regarded as a first class political observer,” but when Freddie arrived, the job turned out to be a bit of a joke, so, as he wrote to e. e. cummings, “As I had no work to do, and plenty of government money to spend, I had a pretty good time.” And part of this good time was passed, quite naturally, in the company of various ladies. According to his autobiography, “I spent most of my time with a French girl of Turkish origin whom I had got to know in Algiers. She was employed by one of the French Intelligence Services, but when we were together we put our work aside.” Presumably he also put his work aside when he was with another girl, named Nicole Bouchet de Fareins. Brought up in Normandy, she and her younger sister, Francette, had been in the Resistance during the war, acting as couriers and, in an act of heroic lunacy, hiding a group of seven British airmen from the Nazis in their farmhouse. They and their children survived, but Francette’s husband, Georges, was not so lucky: He was caught and tortured to death by the Gestapo. After the war the two sisters often invited Freddie to stay in that same farmhouse, and in Paris he became part of their social circle. And when he mentioned that he would like to meet André Malraux, whose novel La Condition Humaine had made “a strong impression on me,” Francette arranged a dinner party to which she also invited Camus, “whose work I had just discovered.” The party was not a success. Malraux was intimidating, and his habit of sniffing made him appear “disdainful.” He also “gave the impression of having little regard for anyone who had not been an active combatant in the war.” Freddie inexplicably failed to tell him about his role in the liberation of Saint-Tropez.

  Francette was a woman of extreme intelligence, warmth, and courage, but her great weakness was dogs. She had a succession of them, none especially appealing. They were always big, usually smelly, and ridiculously overconfident, suffering from the sad delusion that the entire world must love them just as much as their besotted maman. Her current one was called Sorgue, after some local river, and every time he trotted, uninvited, across our kitchen floor, his tail wagging with misplaced optimism, he would be met with shouts of “Fuck off! À la maison!” a greeting he quite clearly misinterpreted as some special term of endearment. But if you wanted Francette to come to dinner—and we always did—her dog was part of the deal. Sorgue reminded me of some unkempt half-witted husband who farted, tried to fuck his hostess’s leg, and ate with his mouth open but was tolerated only on account of his wife’s charm and vivacity. That evening Francette and Sorgue were the first of our guests to arrive.

  Next came the entire, gigantic—there were six of them, and they were all huge—Carr family from Oxford, who were camping, in considerable squalor, down in the valley. When the Deakins had graciously invited them to pitch their tent on some land they owned, not far from Le Castellet, Pussy had made it quite clear that she wasn’t having any of them in her house. Never mind that Raymond Carr was a distinguished professor of history and his family old friends and neighbors in Oxford. “They are absolutely filthy,” she complained to my mother. “Have you seen the children’s hair?” And, with no place to wash, they became even filthier, the children’s hair even more matted, until my mother begged them to come for a shower whenever they wanted, and stay for dinner. Her generosity toward people in trouble was one of her most appealing characteristics. When her old friend Margie Rees, who had been with her at Nick’s birth, was dying of cancer, she did everything she could to help. Goronwy wrote my mother a letter a few days before Christmas in 1975:

  You always were the kindest person in the world. I feel I must write and thank you not only for the marvelous smoked salmon, but for your extraordinary thoughtfulness in sending all these things [wrapping paper, tape, labels, and ribbon] which once Margie would have been able to buy for herself, but now cannot. She just spent a very happy evening using them all, which is what she loves doing.

  Margie died a few months later. Sometimes my mother helped with money—always giving more than she could really afford—and other times it was something much more public, like taking up in her newspaper column the cause of some helpless, hapless victim trapped inside the government’s bureaucratic torture chamber, and forcing the big shots to back down. Her empathy and sense of justice fueled her politics, turning her into a lifelong socialist who always identified with the people at the bottom of the
heap. The ruling classes might give better parties, but not so deep down she hated them for their complacent, self-serving obliviousness to the unrelenting shit and suffering that most people in the world are forced to deal with.

  Of course there were always exceptions to this rule, but only she was allowed to decide which particular members of the upper class deserved to be saved and which were to be cast into everlasting damnation. Not unlike Karl Lueger, the famously anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna in the 1900s who was once asked why he chose to hang out with quite so many Jews, and replied, “I’ll decide who is a Jew,” my mother took a similar view of posh people. In London during the fifties and sixties there was one particular member of the ruling classes, Lady Pamela Berry, who was known for the glittering parties she gave every election night. Married to the proprietor of the conservative Telegraph newspapers, the imperious Lady Pamela prided herself on the ecumenical nature of her address book and also knew, as London’s most successful hostess, that a social occasion could only benefit from a whiff of barely suppressed antagonism in the air. And so my mother and Freddie were always invited to these carefully orchestrated events, along with a sprinkling of other Labour Party supporters, mainly journalists and writers, to add the required frisson to the party. On election night I would sit on my mother’s bed and watch, fascinated, as she pouffed up her hair with strategic back combing, layered on her makeup, stepped into her long black velvet dress, slipped on her sapphire and ruby rings from Burma, and finally sprayed herself all over with Arpège. If, as was all too often the case, a Tory victory looked likely, she would bring out her waterproof mascara, bought especially for the occasion, and as she sat in front of the mirror sweeping it onto her eyelashes, would hum the “Internationale” and mutter defiantly, “I’m not going to let those bastards see me crying. No, they’re damn well not going to have that satisfaction.”

  Admittedly the Carrs were hardly members of the huddled masses, but they were without any question in desperate need of soap, hot water, and a hairbrush, so that summer they qualified for rescuing. Freddie and Raymond sat under the lime tree, drinking pastis and smoking, talking about the Spanish civil war or some convoluted Oxford scandal, while the kids and I lolled about with a stolen bottle of wine up in my room, in an idle, slightly drunken adolescent torpor.

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN SYLVIA who introduced my mother to Busch, I don’t recall. A small, round woman, with crinkled, ice blue eyes, and wayward gray hair, she had skin that looked like very old stained brown leather—which I suppose it was. She had first come to this part of France in 1930, with her then-husband, Julius Meier-Graefe, an eminent German art critic. Sensing, with unusual clairvoyance, that the situation at home was headed in the wrong direction for Jewish intellectuals like themselves, they had left Germany, and bought a house near Saint-Cyr, not far from Les Lecques. They soon became the nucleus of a group of German and Austrian exiles, which included Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and Franz Werfel along with his femme-fatale wife, Alma Mahler. Sybille Bedford, who lived in nearby Sanary at the time and wrote the brilliant autobiographical novel Jigsaw about her life there, described Busch as Meier-Graefe’s “very young third wife—he had her elope with him straight from Swiss boarding school, pursued by telephone and police.” After her husband’s premature death, “she specialized in famous writers and artists as well as Greek ship-owners—concurrent with a discreet affair with one of their sons.” When France fell Busch escaped to America, where she married, true to form, Hermann Broch, one of the superstars of the German intellectual diaspora. In 1950 she returned to her house in Saint-Cyr, leaving Broch behind in Princeton, and lived there alone, surrounded by both her husbands’ books and a dazzling collection of German expressionist paintings, until the day she died.

  It probably hadn’t occurred to my mother when she invited Busch to dinner that she would come with her own large, ill-mannered, and halitosis-afflicted “husband.” As soon as their car pulled up, he leaped out rather rudely and, barging ahead of his wife, dashed straight into the kitchen, eager to meet all these exciting new friends. Even though he clearly wasn’t Sorgue—he was twice as big and looked more like a bear than a dog—the automatic greeting of “Fuck off! À la maison!” welcomed Clovis into our home.

  “Jesus, what’s with these ladies and their dogs?” my mother hissed in my ear, but then decided, rather uncharacteristically, to look on the bright side, adding, “Well, I guess they’re better than extra men, because at least they won’t get drunk, and we don’t have to set more places at the table. Or talk to them.”

  The truth is that she was always much more forgiving of animals than people. And the only reason she bothered to shout at Sorgue was to provoke Francette, which for some reason always cheered her up. Her sympathy for the underdog—or the underwasp, underant, undercat, undersnail, underbird, underspider, undermouse, undergecko, undercentipede—was limitless. In the depths of a gloomy London winter she would trudge to the park with a bag of snacks—stale bread specially sautéed in drippings—for the poor freezing seagulls and ducks. At the height of a Provençal summer she would fill a shallow bowl with water, put it on the terrace, and watch, transfixed, as the poor thirsty wasps hovered just above the surface to take a restorative sip or two. Dogs and cats slept in her bed, baby birds were fed warm milk with eyedroppers, spiders were fished out of baths, and a colony of red ants, which feasted on honey and scurried around inside a special box with a glass lid, lived on the kitchen table in London for many years. The only creatures she ever tried to harm were the giant hornets that lurked inside a dead olive tree in France, and were capable, she always claimed, of killing a baby with a single, murderous strike. Francette said you could catch them by filling glass jars with sugar water and hanging them from the trees, and although we followed her instructions faithfully, I’m not sure a single hornet was ever silly enough to fall into one of these jerry-built traps.

  THE SARDINES HAD BEEN decapitated and arranged on their funeral pyre of fennel, ready for the grill; the tomatoes had been sprinkled with breadcrumbs, garlic, and parsley; and a long column of candles marched down the center of the marble table, casting a forgiving, flickering glow across the kitchen. I turned off the lights and drew the curtains Alvys had sewn by hand—her glasses balanced on her elegant retroussé nose—that first summer, before she left to meet her lover and die with him on the mountain road above Ravello. Poor beautiful Alvys. But now her son, Adrian—the same nose, the same blond curls—was upstairs with all the other guests, who were jabbering away, drinking wine, wolfing down the pâté, and about to come down the stairs to destroy my meticulously arranged still life.

  Since there was nobody to flirt with, Freddie had decided to do the right thing and place himself between Busch and Pussy at the end of the table. My mother made sure she had Azamat and Bill, while everybody else was allowed to sit wherever they could find a chair, and a companion who amused them. Sorgue and Clovis, who had discovered they actually had quite a lot in common and got along surprisingly well, settled down under the table, on top of their “wives’ ” feet. I flitted about making sure the breadbasket was full, mixing the vinaigrette, spooning the crème fraîche into a bowl, transferring the tarte to the big blue-and-white plate with the pomegranate in the middle, and passing little morsels of cheese to the patient, drooling “husbands” on the floor. Too young to really join in the conversation, I was quite happy in my waitress/Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss role, listening, watching, and learning how to be a grown-up.

  After dessert and before coffee I slipped, unnoticed, upstairs to bed. Apart from an almost imperceptible breeze ruffling the leaves of the lime tree, the night air was soft and still, and the sound of laughter and individual voices drifted up from the terrace, like some play you might listen to on the radio just as you were going to sleep. “Yes, I do actually believe in God.” Amanda, the lovely, polite ex-deb who had been foolhardy enough to sign on as Nick’s minder for the summer, was talking to Freddie about God. Oh de
ar. Father d’Arcy she was not. I could hear her incredulous, nervous voice going up an octave as it dawned on her that she was actually talking to, working for, living with an atheist. It was clear the underdeb needed rescuing. “Lay off, Fred,” my mother told him, laughing—but she meant it. Amanda had become one of the freezing seagulls in Regent’s Park, and there was no way she was going to be allowed to starve.

  “Monsieur Zancanaro makes this marc himself. I’m pretty sure he squashes all the grape skins and pips with his own feet, and I’m telling you it is just what one needs at this point in the evening.” Prince Azamat always arrived with a bottle of this terrifying moonshine and amazingly usually found quite a few takers. The beads clacked, the glasses clinked, and Azamat proposed a toast, to whom or what I couldn’t make out. “No, Raymond, I will not go back to Spain until that man is dead,” Freddie was taking a stand against Franco—something I knew all about. Only a couple of months before in London, I had been sent off to a Spanish-themed party, dressed up as a protesting peasant, in a baggy skirt held up with a bit of rope, proudly carrying a hand-painted sign that proclaimed “Abajo Franco.” Nervously I had pressed the bell of some fake Tudor toad of a house in Hampstead—all gables and dark leaded windows—and was greeted by my classmate Vivien, the birthday señorita, and her squealing entourage, flouncing about in flamenco dresses, tap-dancing shoes, and sticky red lipstick, with matching roses tucked behind their ears. Muchas gracias, Mummy and Freddie, for coming up with that idea.

  My mother was teasing Azamat about his friend Bendor Drummond, and the mini-Cooper he kept on his yacht for little spins ashore when they stopped off in Capri or Portofino. “Where the hell do you find these people, Az?” But, thank God, he did, because the very next week she and Freddie joined the Guireys on Bendor’s smooth-as-suede teak deck, all of them happily slurping down Veuve Clicquot and nibbling on miniature squares of toast and foie gras en gelée while the yacht bobbed about in Bandol harbor. “Was Mann a homosexual? I’m not sure I know the answer.” Busch was back in the German literary world of Sanary in the thirties. “Espèce de con …” was the man who had refused to back up for Francette on the road that morning. Franco, Monsieur Zancanaro, God, Bendor Drummond, the rustling leaves, and the opportunistic drone of the mosquitoes—they all became an incoherent, dreamy miasma inside my head as I slipped over the edge of sleep, comforted by the sound of familiar voices, and knowing that nothing could ever go wrong so long as the grown-ups were laughing.