The House in France

by Gully Wells

  L’Amour

  ONE OF THE MANY THINGS my mother loved about Freddie was his past affairs. He adored the company of women. Sometimes they were just friends, but mostly he slept with them. Never classically handsome—his nose was too big and his face too narrow for that—he wasn’t tall, and he looked a lot better in one of his neatly tailored three-piece suits than in a bathing suit; but none of that seemed to matter. His appreciation, enthusiasm, and, yes, love of women had a way of making them feel the same way about him. And truthfully, one other factor should probably be added to the equation: Our shameful susceptibility to a man’s reputation. We tend to judge a man by the company he keeps. In Freddie’s case the company was rather appealing. Who wouldn’t want to join a group of beguiling, talented, and often dazzlingly beautiful women? Admittedly it was not a small club, but despite its capacious size it still managed to be classy and exclusive. Once you had paid your membership dues the doors opened, and you were part of a magic circle, a sorority made up of the kind of women you wanted to be with, and be like. Hold up a mirror to their wit, style, and sex appeal, and, if you held it at just the right angle, you could see yourself reflected in it too.

  Growing up, I was used to being told by my mother, after I had met one of these delightful creatures, that she was “one of Freddie’s old girlfriends.” Some men collect old masters, my stepfather collected young mistresses. Or at least they must have been young when he met them, because that was a long time ago, and now he was married to my mother. It was just one of those things about Freddie, like his Coca-Cola-colored eyes, the silver chain he twiddled when he was working, the softness of his hands, his sweetness, and the way his hair curled into the nape of his neck when it got a bit too long. And since I adored him, it made perfect sense to me that all those other girls had too.

  Although my mother liked hanging out at her “club”—she loved Liz von Hofmannsthal’s dinner parties, Jocelyn’s portrait of Nick, and Sheilah Graham’s stories about Scott Fitzgerald—she wasn’t at all enthusiastic about allowing any new members in. It is even possible that the membership was closed for a while after they married, but somehow I doubt it. As a concept fidelity made very little sense to Freddie. What precisely was the point of it? Where was the rhyme or the reason? Or the logic? He was, after all, the Wykeham Professor of Logic, and a great admirer of Jeremy Bentham, who famously came up with the “felicific calculus,” a splendidly logical system for measuring the moral status of any action. Freddie once explained it to me, and as far as I could gather, it allowed you to do all the things that made you happy, as long as you didn’t hurt anybody else. The connection between morality and sex had always eluded him. In a 1966 interview he explained his point of view:

  I have always thought that morality has very little to do with sex … compared with the questions of whether or not to drop the atom bomb, what one thinks about the war in Vietnam, what one thinks about racialist questions, the question of who goes to bed with whom is surely only of the faintest interest.

  What could be more sensible than that? Even as a very young child I recognized, and loved, his voice of reason, which rose above the crazy cacophony of senseless rules and discipline—“Because I say so”—that most parents seemed to believe in. I liked the sound of this Bentham man, and was suitably impressed when Freddie told me—he was wearing black tie and looked especially dashing—that he was off to University College to have dinner with him. But the best bit was that my new hero had been dead since 1832. In his autobiography Freddie described how he came to be dining with a corpse: “Bentham had not held any belief in personal survival, but wishing to have some semblance of an after-life, he had made arrangements in his will for his body to be mummified in a seated position, and expressed the hope that it should sometimes be admitted to the company of his friends.” So once a year Jeremy got lucky, and was wheeled out from the lonely glass-fronted cabinet he lived in, seated at the head of the table, and listened, with a beatific smile on his wax face, as his friends raised their glasses and drank a toast to the man who had created the logic of happiness.

  The obvious flaw in Freddie and Jeremy’s scheme was that people did get hurt. And even though Freddie was the kindest, gentlest man on earth, the Aspergian side of his character meant that he was sometimes oblivious to the pain he caused. The fact that he had gone off to spend Christmas in Paris with his then-wife, Renée, and her lover, Stuart Hampshire, and had returned to London after only a few days, alone and miserable, should have taught him something about the supremely illogical human heart. But it didn’t seem to.

  FRANCETTE HAD KNOWN FREDDIE longer than any of us, and having never been his lover, probably saw him with clearer eyes. She once told me what he had been like in Paris, just after the war, when she and her sister, Nicole, had first met him. “The thing that made him so attractive and charming was his curiosity. He was alert and eager to experience new things, and also thoughtful about other people—bringing eggs to people who couldn’t get them. Everybody loved him.” But she felt that he had become more “insular” and selfish over the years, and much less open to the feelings of those around him. She was also critical of his cavalier approach to women.

  “He thought he was Don Giovanni, boasting about how many girlfriends he had: ‘One for breakfast, one for lunch, one for dinner.’ I didn’t like that.” When Alvys, the couturière of curtains, finally left him for a Frenchman and went to live in Paris, Freddie had gone to Francette, complaining, “But I loved her.” He was probably surprised by the reception he got from his old friend, “No, I was not very sympathetic. He had treated her so badly, what on earth did he expect?” As his stepdaughter I, of course, saw none of this. In his Benthamite desire to reconcile his own pleasure with the necessity of not causing pain (and the mother of all explosions with his wife) he was incredibly discreet. I suppose all that wartime work for His Majesty’s Secret Service must have paid off. But those tricky Nazis had nothing on a precocious teenager’s curiosity about the tempestuous affairs of the heart.

  When I saw the piece of paper lying there on his desk, I picked it up, wondering what those two columns, running like long, thin ladders from top to bottom could possibly mean. Maybe he had been adding something up? But looking more closely, I saw that the minuscule squiggles were initials, not numbers. Initials meant names. Perhaps he was planning a surprise birthday party for my mother? And perhaps Jeremy Bentham would be joining us on Bikini Beach tomorrow? A long list of people, so familiar that he knew them by their initials—I got it. Quickly testing my theory I found LvH (Liz von Hofmannsthal) about two-thirds of the way down, JR (Jocelyn) not long after her, and there was DW (my mother) quite a few rungs from the bottom. The club had clearly admitted some new members. Not particularly upset or shocked, I thought no more about it. As long as my mother and Freddie seemed happy—and they did—all was well in my solipsistic little world.

  A COUPLE OF YEARS after I had found the not-so-mysterious list I turned eighteen. The summer of 1969. And love—or rather, a frantic, unfulfilled, desire for love—was in the air. Excruciatingly aware of what I was missing, I mooned about, reading trashy French magazines, knowing that if my hair were blonder, my breasts bigger, my skin browner, my lips fuller, my eyelashes longer—I wouldn’t be mooning about reading trashy French magazines. Instead I’d be inhaling great gulps of that elusive (and, as I later discovered, highly addictive) narcotic, which floated about in the hot rosemary-scented air, perpetually beyond my grasp. In a desperate attempt to transform myself from Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss (thin brown hair, blotchy porcine complexion) into Mademoiselle Barbie (see above) I would smear my body with olive oil, soak my hair in lemon juice, and lie on a towel for hours on end, broiling myself under the merciless Provençal sun. Just like one of Elizabeth David’s chickens.

  “To roast your chicken successfully, the first requirement is that the bird be young and well fed.” Oui. C’est moi. “Season the chicken inside and out with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Inside
put a large lump of butter and a piece of lemon peel.” Non. Je ne pense pas. With burned brown skin and bleached hair—the lips, eyelashes, and breasts had refused to grow—I waited impatiently for my real life to begin.

  I was going on nineteen and, shamefully, had never had a boyfriend. Convinced of my own unattractiveness, this situation didn’t surprise me too much, and I just retreated further into my books and the forgiving cocoon of the adult world. Objectively I wasn’t that bad looking, but since I lacked all objectivity, how could I have known? Not that I was a total fantasist: My skin was clearly a disaster area. It had started misbehaving when I was about fourteen, and over the next few years had turned from petty crime to full-blown criminality.

  Despairing, I tried every cure I could find on the shelves of Boots the chemist, drank gallons of water, avoided anything fried or sweet, and even went to see an old crone on Sloane Street, who charged me a ludicrous amount of money for a jar of her patented cure for acne, made from the finest Bulgarian snake oil. Nothing worked. Apart from my distressing complexion, the other problem was that I went to an all-girls school, so I didn’t actually know any boys. If only I’d had a dashing older brother, who could have taken me to parties and introduced me to his friends; but what use would that have been, unless he also happened to be a prize-winning dermatologist?

  I may not have been a thing of beauty, but at least I wasn’t dumb. And with my strict but futile diet, at least I wasn’t fat. Even though I didn’t learn to read until I was six—my mother had learned at three, and thought I must be retarded—once I got the hang of it, she made sure I had an endless supply of books. Sometimes they were way too grown-up—was there any point in giving an eleven-year-old A Handful of Dust?—but even if I didn’t understand every single word, they became the constant friends who kept me company, comforted me, amused me, and taught me about the bizarre ways of the world. Books were my nuclear weapons in the never-ending war against loneliness and boredom. I worked hard and got good grades, so school was never a problem. Unless you count my anarchic delight in breaking the rules, which, of course, my mother never did. I suppose this tendency toward anarchism reminded her of herself, but my headmistress was less indulgent, and I was constantly being summoned to Miss Burchell’s office, where she would try to reason with me. “Now, Gully, what would happen if everybody behaved like you do?” But they didn’t; that was the whole point. Miss Burchell did not share Freddie’s love of logic.

  Bereft of all the normal teenage distractions, I would sit for hours on end in my serene blue bedroom, surrounded by the treasures that my mother and I had found in various London junk shops, and read, and read, and read. The result was that I won a scholarship to Oxford. The Acne Scholarship in Modern History. It was a thrill, but having proved that I could do it, I now had nothing to do with my mind or time other than to obsess about that rather large, missing part of my life.

  Paris. That was the answer. With six months to fill before I went up to Oxford, why shouldn’t I study la civilisation française at the Sorbonne, and “perfect” my schoolgirl French? My mother called Sylvie Boutet de Monvel, a friend from her days at the embassy in Paris, whose lovely, ivy-covered house off the boulevard Saint-Germain we had visited many times, but “Hélas” she couldn’t have me. However, her desiccated, recently widowed cousin—“Pauvre Bernard, c’était tellement triste”—who lived alone and was only about eighty and perpetually short of cash—would be delighted to have a paying guest. But the week before I was to set off, without much enthusiasm, and install myself chez Bernard, something quite extraordinary happened: I was asked out on a date.

  We met at a debutante dance in Berkeley Square. Not at all the kind of thing I usually went to. The hostess was some idiotic American friend of my mother’s, who had decided that she wanted her daughter to “come out” in London—so much classier—rather than in New York. Or maybe it was as well as, I don’t recall. The point was that a large, stiff, creamy invitation, with my name, “Miss Alexandra Wells,” written in blue-black ink in the upper left corner, arrived in a large, stiff, creamy envelope, requesting the pleasure of my company at a dance, to be held at Annabel’s, 44, Berkeley Square, Mayfair, at ten o’clock in the evening. Of course I had never been inside Annabel’s, but knew all about it from the glossy magazines I pored over at the hairdresser. When Prince Azamat and Bendor Drummond weren’t playing backgammon at White’s, they were dancing at Annabel’s or gambling upstairs at the Clermont Club with friends like its founder, John Aspinall, and Lord Lucan, who famously disappeared after his nanny was found bludgeoned to death. It wasn’t the Gypsy’s kind of place at all, and it seems that Azamat used to go there with half-witted girls in very short skirts, or so Sylvia told my mother. It sounded like heaven. And it was.

  Annabel’s was as dark as a cave, but a very civilized cave—whose discerning owner had decorated its walls with luminous paintings of silken racehorses, with doll-like jockeys perched on their backs—and the air was infused with the intoxicating scent of lilies and cigar smoke. Waiters patroled the room with silver trays crowded with champagne flutes, and in the distant, sexy bowels of the cave I could hear Mick Jagger singing appreciatively about the honky-tonk woman who had blown his nose (didn’t sound very nice) before she’d blown his mind. Peering through the gloom, I realized I didn’t know a single person there, so, slipping into my Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss role, I plopped myself down on a chintz-covered banquette to observe the primitive mating ritual of the English debutante and her eager, noisy suitors.

  The sad thing is that I can’t remember his name or what he looked like. All I know is that he suddenly appeared—with two champagne glasses, one for me and one for him—and sat down beside me on that cozy flower-strewn banquette. And, since I introduced myself as Alexandra (why spoil everything by admitting to a name as ludicrous as Gully?), he called me Alexa, because he said my real name was much too formal, and anyway it reminded him of his grandmother. He worked for his family’s brewery, and, at the end of the evening, he asked for my number. The very next day the Brewer called and invited me to dinner: a real live date. We met at an Italian restaurant in Chelsea, which, thank Christ—my skin had gone on a crime spree during the night—was just as dark and cavelike as Annabel’s, and after we had finished our warm, foamy zabaglione, we smooched slowly around the dance floor.

  The Brewer’s flat was conveniently—and maybe not accidentally—located a few blocks from the restaurant. I followed him up several flights of stairs; he opened a door and showed me into an enormous, staggeringly messy room with a skylight and an unmade brass bed at the far end. After a few more ill-advised glasses of wine, I did what Bob Dylan told me to and lay across his big brass bed. But even though I could hear my mother’s voice inside my head urging me to take a chance, just as she had outside that bar in Toulon, I didn’t dare. The Brewer was a gentleman, and gentlemen don’t insist, so a few hours later we got dressed, went down the stairs, and he put me into a cab. As he kissed me he slipped a twenty-pound note into my pocket, which either made me a cheap—and none-too-satisfactory—hooker, or him even more of a gentleman. Or both. It was all too confusing. I flopped back onto the seat and closed my eyes as the cab gurgled and chugged its way through the deserted London streets in the washed-out predawn light. Stunned, I still couldn’t believe that I had actually met a man who wanted to sleep with me. And if there was one, then it was only logical to suppose—I knew Freddie and Jeremy Bentham would agree—there might be another.

  A couple of days later I was in Paris. Madame Boutet de Monvel had spoken the truth. Poor Bernard—or Monsieur Bretiane, as I called him—was indeed “tellement triste,” and so was his apartment. Silent, musty, and dark, it snaked its way along the top floor of a gloomy nineteenth-century building on the rue de Rennes. My room was at the end of the long narrow corridor and looked out over a laundry-festooned courtyard. That evening, and for many more to come, Monsieur Bretiane and I sat across from each other at the table, set with stained,
yellowing lace placemats and mismatched silver—the vestiges of a wedding gift from the Marquis de Lamarthe, he told me, sniffing sadly—trying to make conversation as we waited patiently for the Spanish maid to serve us. Monsieur poured me a thimbleful of acrid Bordeaux, offered me some stale bread, and Señorita Mañana finally came crashing through the swinging door with a tureen of unidentifiable soup, which she ladled into our bowls. It could not have been worse.

  Eager to learn all about la civilisation française, and to meet up with my fellow students, I arrived early for my first lecture at the Sorbonne. Sitting alone at the top of the huge, crowded auditorium, I looked down, dizzy with vertigo, as Monsieur le Professeur began his incoherent musings on le grand siècle. I could scarcely see him, never mind hear what he was saying, but every now and then I would catch a word and cling to it like a life raft, in the desperate hope that it might illuminate what came next. “Richelieu” drifted up from the lectern below, and then, “l’Académie Française,” and then a date and I was lost. What’s with the French and numbers? Whose brilliant idea was it to translate 1697 into “one-thousand-six-hundred-and-four-times-twenty-and-ten-seven? Oh never mind, the professeur had moved on,