by Gully Wells
“You just watch me,” I hissed back.
Evenings chez Polly started out with cocktails and tapas on the terrace, followed by several more drinks, and then it was time for the boys to drive us—yet another novel notion, make men do the driving!—to some quaint, seaside restaurant where a toothless old fisherman’s wife made the “best camarones a la plancha in the whole of Ibiza.” Polly’s world was populated with wonderful little men and women whose lot in life was to supply her with goods and services for a fraction of what they should have cost. The “little” lady around the corner who would run up curtains/transform an old Dior dress/copy a new one, all for a pittance, or the “little” man who would fix the lawn mower/dishwasher/car, for practically nothing: an army of happy, busy midgets whistling while they worked. Politics was not necessarily a subject you wanted to explore with my hostess. Franco—who really was little—had saved Spain from the Communists and was, thank God, still firmly entrenched in power in 1969, and the Guardia Civil, his enforcers, were those “handsome gentlemen with patent-leather typewriters on their heads.” She was actually quite right: Their hats did look like shiny black typewriters, and some of them were kind of cute, in a thuggish sort of way. Polly’s views of El Jefe and his fascist regime may have seemed a bit outlandish to a well-brought-up, radical-chic girl like myself—how could I ever forget that peasant costume and the “Abajo Franco” sign?—but I knew that only boring prigs allowed things like that to interfere with friendship. So I never did.
After we had stuffed ourselves with the charred tentacles of an extended octopus family, an entire nursery of baby squid, the gigantic grilled camarones, and way too many bottles of vino tinto (known as vino tonto because tonto was what it surely made you), we all knew that there was no choice about what had to happen next: dancing. Dancing at a terrifyingly noisy discothèque with seizure-inducing strobe lights. That was what we needed. My recollections of the rest of the evening—and all the other evenings, because they tended to follow a similar pattern—are a bit hazy after forty years, but I do remember what happened when we staggered back to the house a few hours before dawn. Polly went to bed and the four of us settled down to play strip poker.
Cards—along with jigsaw puzzles, backgammon, charades, dominoes, and every “bored” game ever invented, as well as all sports, from hopscotch to hockey—have always been a mystery to me. Not unlike Freddie’s attitude to fidelity, I’ve just never been able to grasp what the point is. The consequence was that I had absolutely no idea how to play anything, least of all poker, which I’d never even encountered before. Patiently, through a miasma of vino tonto, with quite a bit of repetition, rambling segues, and several conflicting interpretations, the rules were explained to me and I nodded obediently, pretending to understand. Was I ready to start playing now? “Oh yes.” I smiled, horrified. It soon became clear that Serena had no more idea of what was going on than I did, because within half an hour we had both lost most of our clothes, and shortly after that our little group had been transformed into some tacky, twentieth-century version of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. How could this have happened? Were Sean and Ed secretly professional poker players? Could they have fiddled about with the cards? Unable to figure it out, I sat there in silence, mesmerized by the astonishing shape and size of Serena’s breasts—softly rounded, gravity-defying torpedoes that projected straight out from her slim torso—and by her total insouciance at being stark naked. Contemplating my own poached eggs along with my pathetic embarrassment, I had an epiphany. If I didn’t get on with doing that thing that people do, I would be a sad, lost soul forever more. And more specifically—whether I liked it or not—the job had to be done before I went up to Oxford. There was only a month left.
THE DAY AFTER I arrived back from Ibiza, my mother announced that we were going on our annual pilgrimage to Saint-Tropez. Which sounds a great deal more glamorous than it was. This outing had very little to do with lounging about at Senequier sipping pastis in the company of Bardot’s discarded lovers, or shopping for see-through crocheted mini-dresses, or even revisiting the scene of Freddie’s wartime exploits, when he had liberated the tiny fishing village: It was all about having lunch with their friends, the Kaldors, who lived in La Garde-Freinet about twenty miles from the coast. Born in Budapest, Nicky Kaldor was a brilliant Cambridge economist who was now one of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s advisers on how best to revive the wheezing British economy. Who knows what fantastical schemes he came up with, but Freddie had once told me that Nicky was the genius behind the “famous cobweb theory” of economics—he had even made a futile attempt to explain it to me—so whenever I saw the Kaldors, all I could think of was spiders.
The journey to La Garde-Freinet was the usual farce of upside-down maps and swearing, but we finally arrived at their rather grim house, on a snaky backstreet of the medieval village, just in time for lunch. There was nothing remotely spidery about our host, who was bald as a melon, fatter than the Michelin man, and sweeter than a baby. My mother and Nicky had met through Robert Neild (her boyfriend before she ran off with Freddie the menace), and they adored each other. (I’m not at all sure Mrs. Kaldor shared her husband’s enthusiasm.) Inside their hot dark kitchen, set out in the middle of the dining table, was a large, brown platter of braised meat encased in a jiggling mountain of urine-colored jelly. Which is all I remember about our meal apart from the startling sight of Professor Kaldor falling asleep and snoring, sitting upright in his chair, fork halfway to his mouth, just as he was about to start on his second helping of this disgusting dish. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention.
Refreshed by his little nap, Nicky woke up about half an hour later, finished off the remains of his congealed lunch, and, smiling brightly, said, “Now, who wants to come with me in the boat to Saint-Tropez?”
I thought he’d never ask. An alarming drive on a narrow zigzagging road down through the hills followed, with the roly-poly professor pinioned behind the wheel of their ancient Mercedes—would he have another one of his narcoleptic spells?—and the next time I dared look out the window we were in the suburbs of Saint-Raphaël. From there it took us about the same amount of time to crawl through the tourist-clogged streets until we reached the marina where the boat was docked. A quick change into our bathing suits, and we were all lined up and ready to go—Nicky in his “grape smugglers,” me in the magical bikini, Freddie in his billowing “shorts,” my mother in an innocuous black number, and Mrs. Kaldor in something she must have spotted while window-shopping in Zagreb. The boat turned out to be—appropriately enough—a luminous orange floating version of a Michelin man, with just enough space for Nicky and one other person to squeeze into the cavity, and an outboard motor the size of a hairdryer glued onto the back.
“So, I am the taxi driver. First I’ll take Gully, and then I’ll come back and fetch the rest of you.” A strategy worthy of the brain behind the famous cobweb theory. Dangerously low in the water after the chauffeur got on board, the hairdryer spluttering, we set off—waving merrily to our friends on shore—for Saint-Tropez, just visible through the shimmering afternoon haze on the other side of the bay. The boat swerved and bounced around, I held on tight, and Nicky swore loudly in Hungarian at assorted Frenchmen who—unable to understand our wildly erratic course—were in constant danger of crashing into us.
“Et voilà, on est arrivé.”
The relief of actually making it across the water must have inspired Nicky to launch into his rather shaky French as he steered the boat into the harbor and tied it up.
“Et maintenant nous allons à la plage.”
Walking along the boardwalk all I could think of, in my shameful narcissistic way, was what we must look like together. I needn’t have worried. Why would anybody even bother to glance at us, when all they would see was a mirror image of themselves? The entire place was a seething mass of overtanned girls in practically nonexistent bikinis and their fat, old, bald companions. They all seemed perfectly content in each other�
�s company, so I told myself, quite sharply, to snap out of it.
After about ten minutes Nicky suddenly stopped and pointed at a crudely painted sign—palm trees, parrots, turquoise water, yellow sand, and the words “Bora Bora”—nailed to the side of a wooden hut.
“That’s our place. Follow me.”
It was a replica of Bikini Beach: the same blue-and-white striped parasols, the neat rows of canvas-covered mattresses, the deck chairs, the cabanas, and the same shack selling Pschitt and slices of stale cake in cellophane wrappers. The only thing missing was Monsieur Maurice. Instead of an ancient hunchbacked queen with a yellow plastic nose guard and literary pretensions, “Bora Bora” was ruled by a sullen decidedly unbookish prince who looked like a young—very young—Alain Delon. Busy smoking and entertaining his harem of giggling girls with a filthy convoluted joke involving several sheep and a saucisson, he wasn’t about to forgo the punch line, and so he ignored us.
“Excusez-moi, monsieur.”
Nicky repeated his greeting in a slightly louder voice, and the prince swiveled around and sauntered toward us.
“Oui, monsieur?”
“Bonjour. C’est très simple.” Nicky smiled, the prince didn’t.
“Je voudrais une maîtresse. Mais seulement pour l’après-midi.”
It certainly was very simple: All poor Nicky wanted was a nice, comfy, canvas-covered mattress for the afternoon. Not a mistress. Because he clearly already had one of those. Which the baby-faced smirking Alain Delon look-alike was quick to point out.
“Il semblerait que vous avez déjà trouvé une.”
And he winked at me.
“Mais si vous en avez besoin de deux, suivez-moi.”
Nicky’s French wasn’t quite as shaky as I had thought. He had caught the drift of this exchange and started to laugh, delighted at the thought of having two mistresses and by his own sudden burst of fluency in this perplexing foreign language.
“Oui, tout à fait. J’ai besoin de deux maîtresses.”
Nicky left me lying down on top of his other mistress while he went back to the boat. My love affair with the sun started before the age of consent and has, I’m vaguely ashamed to admit, outlasted all the others. Exhausted by the boat trip, still reeling from the boeuf en gelée, and blurry from the wine at lunch, I positioned my body so that it was in the direct gaze of my lover, turned over onto my stomach, discarded my bikini top, closed my eyes, and sank into the sounds of the beach. Baby waves slurping against the sand, a child’s indignant shriek as her mother tried to put a sun hat on her head, the hoarse baritone of a man hawking roasted nuts and France Dimanche, the lazy put-put of a small airplane high above, the murmuring of two women exchanging secrets, the barely audible laughter of the prince’s harem—they all slid together as I was gently lulled toward sleep.
It sounded as if the couple beside me were making love, except every now and then they would interrupt their sighing and moaning and start singing to each other. Her voice was high and delicate, tinged with an English accent; his was smoky and deep and oh-so French. “Je t’aime, oui je t’aime, oh mon amour,” she began, which was understandable enough; however his reply, “Moi, non plus [Me neither],” was a little confusing. But then again what did I know about the sensual, enigmatic vocabulary of the French male in love? Rien du tout. Sadly.
This was followed by lots more moaning as he told her, “Je vais et je viens entre tes reins,” which sounded sexy except that I happened to know that reins were kidneys, which are not, in England at least, the most obviously alluring part of a woman’s body. Must be another French thing. Finally I gave up and stopped listening to the words and just lay there in the sun, mesmerized by the pure unadulterated pornography of this intoxicating song. As it turned out, “Je t’aime, moi non plus” was the song of the summer of 1969, and everywhere I went I was tortured by the sound of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin breathlessly coming and going between each other’s kidneys, reminding me that I had only three weeks left.
IN ADDITION TO THE ÉMIGRÉS from England and America, my mother and Freddie did actually have some French friends, mostly neighbors and people they had met through Francette. The closest, at least in terms of geography, were the Tricons, who lived two houses down, at the other end of the tiny hamlet of La Migoua. But however often we saw them—which would be several times a day—and however friendly we all were—which would be very—the relationship necessarily always retained its quite proper element of French formality. It must have taken at least ten years to progress beyond Monsieur and Madame to Marcel and Jeannine, and in all the forty years we knew them, we would never have dreamed of switching from vous to tu.
Conversation revolved in cozy, concentric circles around the business of La Migoua (septic tanks, the scourge of hornets, the lack of rain), sometimes stretching as far as Le Beausset (the iniquities of the mayor, a well-known espèce de collaborateur during the war, the new fountain in the place, the opening of an American-style supermarché), and always included a quick résumé of important events that had happened during the past year (Georges was doing his military service, Madame Tricon’s mother had died, Monsieur Tricon had expanded his business into canned snails). Jeannine was a good if not great cook, and knew how to make all the Provençal classics like bouillabaisse, pistou (a Niçoise vegetable soup, which my mother naturally called “piss stew”), and aioli, but her true talent was as a winemaker. The recipe had come from her grandmother and called for white wine, Seville oranges, eau-de-vie, sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla, all combined in what proportions I never discovered, bottled, and left for a month or so, to transform itself into a nectar called vin d’orange.
The nectar was always served at the annual Ayer-Tricon pétanque tournament, played on the dirt road that ran in front of both our houses. Freddie, who was the most competitive man I have ever known (the galaxy of girls must have been about more than mere love or lust), never met a game he didn’t need to win, whether it was a debate on television, decimating my boyfriends at chess, or beating poor Marcel Tricon on his home turf. It’s just what he did. And he usually did it in such a guileless, childish way, taking such obvious delight in his victories, that it was hard to hold it against him. In some curious way he never stopped being the precocious little boy he once was, and I suspect that the origin of his absolute determination to succeed in life, whether it was socially, in his work, with women, or in games, lay in his lonely and rather bleak childhood and in his feeling that he was an outsider.
His father was descended from Swiss Calvinists and his mother from Dutch Jews, and even Freddie, the Aspergian snail, recognized it was not a happy marriage. An only child, he was packed off to prep school at six, followed by Eton at twelve—all bankrolled by his maternal grandfather, after his father’s catastrophic bankruptcy. For a physically small, wildly intelligent (he had won a scholarship) Jewish boy with a funny last name who didn’t excel at sports and had very few friends, life among the ferociously snobby boys at Eton must have been pretty good hell. But he always had his brains. And, like my mother, he used them to escape the dreary, constricted world of his family and fly away to the sunlit uplands of Oxford, pretty ladies, and intellectual and social triumph.
My mother told me she felt he looked at the world with “big desiring eyes,” and even after he had succeeded in achieving so much of what his eyes had desired, that underlying insecurity still lurked in the shadows of his psyche. Anthony Grayling, who was his last graduate student at Oxford, told Ben Rogers, Freddie’s biographer, that after a few drinks Freddie had once confessed, “You know, I always think that one day someone is going to point a finger at me and say: ‘You are a fraud. You got into Eton and to Christ Church, you were an officer in the Welsh Guards, you became Wykeham Professor at Oxford and you secured a knighthood. But underneath you are just a dirty little Jew-boy.’ ”
Which may go some way toward explaining why the “little Jew-boy” had to beat the shit out of the mild-mannered flan salesman from Toul
on at pétanque. Of course he didn’t always win, but when he did a beatific smile would spread across his face, his big, desiring Coca-Cola eyes would light up, and we would all gather on the Tricons’ terrace to celebrate with yet another round of Jeannine’s celestial vin d’orange.
About halfway up the hill between Le Beausset and La Migoua lived some very different French neighbors. Unlike the Tricons, André and Nicole Padula were not locals, they were not bourgeois in the least, and it was tutoyer from the day we first met them. They seemed more American than French with their openness, warmth, and easy informality, which must have been what drew my mother to them in the first place. In addition to their many other charms, they also had an adopted son, Frédéric, who was exactly Nick’s age, and the two boys were told by their respective mothers that they loved playing together, and did so frequently, whether they wanted to or not. (But forty years later, with all the parents long gone, they still have regular playdates, so maybe there is something to be said for arranged friendships after all.) André, who was an architect, had decided to build his dream house on an idyllic stretch of hillside, where, if you stood in exactly the right place and squinted a bit, you could actually see a glittering patch of the Mediterranean in the distance. The long driveway was guarded by cypress-tree soldiers lined up on either side, and the house itself, with its sliding plate-glass windows, open-plan kitchen (with a dishwasher!), and exposed stone wall and fireplace, also felt curiously American. Ranch style, it had a huge living room (with speakers hidden in the roof beams!), an avocado bathroom (with a sunken tub!) and looked just like something from a House Beautiful feature, circa 1964. It was the perfect house for parties.