The House in France

by Gully Wells

  Thirty years later Martin found himself sitting in a pub called the “Jeremy Bentham,” while his father lay dying in a nearby hospital, and his thoughts naturally turned to Freddie. This is what he wrote about playing chess with him:

  A. J. Ayer was the stepfather of my second great love: the dedicatee of my first novel. He used to play chess with me.… And he almost always won. Your only hope was to make it into the endgame with your knights intact. Then you could get him so frazzled by proliferating possibilities that he would disgustedly resign or even throw the whole set in the air.

  UNTIL I MET MARTIN I thought that Freddie was the most intellectually—and sexually—competitive man on earth. Apparently I had been mistaken. A bargain-basement shrink might conclude that the sex part is related to the humiliating and terrifying idea that you aren’t—and never will be—attractive enough to persuade anyone to go to bed with you. If this notion gets you in its pernicious grip early enough in life, and then if you wake up one day (I suspect that this either happens quite suddenly—or never) to discover, miraculously, that lots of people want to do just that, is it any wonder that you can get a bit carried away? At least that was what happened to me. And once it did I finally understood that long ladderlike list of ladies’ initials I had discovered on Freddie’s desk so many years before. (As far as I know, Martin’s long ladderlike list is safely locked up inside his head, where such things should remain.)

  All of which brings me back to Freddie’s new job as an assistant postman. One evening that summer, I was in the kitchen enjoying a well-deserved glass of rosé while starting on dinner. I hacked the heads off some mackerel we had bought in the market that morning, slit them open, and yanked the slimy entrails out of their silvery bellies. I chopped up garlic, parsley, and fennel; shoved them inside the corpses; sprinkled them with olive oil, sea salt, and pepper, and laid their bodies to rest inside a nice hot oven. I wrapped the fishy remains in some newspaper, took it out to the shed where the hateful dustbins lived, and was about to throw it on top of a pyramid of moldy artichoke leaves, when I stopped. There teetering on the summit were two pieces of blue paper. If I hadn’t been me I would have dumped the mackerel innards, put the lid back, and gotten on with cooking dinner. But I was born evil, so instead I joined the two halves of the paper together and started to read a letter that I should never, ever have picked up. Seemingly written in haste, the words tumbled over one another in their desire to describe the upheaval inside the writer’s heart, and every detail of the lovers’ last meeting. Intimate, thrilling, pornographic, touching—it was the kind of letter you would want to snatch right out of any postman’s hand.

  I looked at the signature—a scrawled V. Vanessa. Queen Nefertiti in her Jane Austen muslin dress with the little puff sleeves, whom I had run into that day crossing the quad in New College. Wicked old Freddie, happy old Freddie, clever old Freddie, but old—at sixty—he undoubtedly was. Imagine being in love at that age! Freddie never gave up his lifelong dance of romance with women, which was yet another reason why I loved him so much. And yet, as I tore the letter up and shoved the minuscule bits deep inside the mackerel mess, I did have to wonder what exactly he had learned in MI6. Weren’t you supposed to burn or better still eat incriminating pieces of paper, to prevent the Gestapo’s getting their evil hands on them? And talking of the Gestapo, did Freddie never stop to think about the blitzkrieg from hell that would have been unleashed if his wife, instead of his forgiving stepdaughter, had taken out the garbage that night?

  Apparently not. Silly old Freddie. Extremely lucky old Freddie.

  WHEN WE GOT BACK TO Oxford that fall, Martin moved with Adam and Kevin, another college friend, into a rose-covered cottage beside a trout-filled stream in a picturesque Cotswold village, about twenty-five miles outside Oxford. He had written to Jane earlier in the year, “The prices are around 12 pounds … I’m sharing with two other boys (I can’t look far enough ahead about Gully) so that’s about 4 pounds each on rent.” We had never talked about my joining them, so I stayed in Saint Hilda’s and went out to the Old Forge on the weekends and any night in the week when I didn’t have an early tutorial in the morning. But quite naturally I dreamed of the day when Martin would finally come to his senses and beg me to come and live with him. (Why is it that when girls fall in love their thoughts—almost inevitably and usually unwisely—become consumed with visions of geraniums on kitchen windowsills and gleaming copper pots and pans?) The house had two big bedrooms upstairs overlooking the garden and the babbling brook, and a small, dark airless one under the stairs. Since Martin and Adam obviously needed to entertain ladies in their rooms and Kevin had no girlfriend, it seemed only fair that he should live in the closet under the stairs. Or at least that’s what happened, and Kevin didn’t argue. In fact Adam no longer had any ladies to entertain because over the summer he had gotten married (how grown-up! well, not very, as it turned out) to a bossy, histrionic, but presumably sexy woman named Angela. It did not take long for the Old Forge to turn into a madhouse.

  The insanity culminated in one unforgettable weekend. I guess drugs must have been involved, sex certainly was, and rock and roll was an entirely innocent bystander. It all started on the Friday when Kevin had become a tad agitated after he’d found some girl he was—unrequitedly and unrealistically—in love with in bed with Martin’s best friend, Rob. Here’s how Martin described what Kevin did next in a letter to Jane,

  Saturday: prolonged loony behavior (stealing my car for the afternoon, spending all his money) followed by a suicide bid (some sleeping pills) us trying to make him sick and keep him awake, and then an 80 mph dash to the Radcliffe [hospital] with me at the wheel. He seemed to be O.K. and Sunday he returned while only Gully and Angela were here, a scuffle ensued (with Angela) and after this becoming scene she called the police.… He went to the local loony bin (where he has since had a fit) and Angela has gone to the London Clinic.

  He went on to add, “I hope Gully can come soon and live here which would be better in every imaginable way.”

  So, thanks to Kevin and his opportune fit, my dreams came true and I moved into the madhouse.

  ALTHOUGH STILL DEEPLY MIRED in the outrageous doings of my old friends the Tudors and Stuarts, I was allowed some choice when it came to European history, and naturally gravitated toward France and a course taught by Theodore Zeldin, at Saint Antony’s College. How could I ever forget that night in Paris with Raymond Carr when I had stood there, not daring to speak, on that shady terrace between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Professor Zeldin, who had looked just like one of the glass-eyed stuffed owls in the window of Deyrolle et Fils? And now I was being invited to study the social fabric of the Third Republic—so different in every way from the dreary litany of great men that Monsieur le Professeur at the Sorbonne had droned on about—with this paragon.

  Between Martin and the Owl, I was the luckiest girl in the whole of Oxford.

  In his study at the top of a gloomy Victorian house in north Oxford, Theodore guided us through Swann’s Way, illuminating Proust’s inimitable words with asides on the real people from whom the author had taken the disparate strands that went into the creation of his characters. We looked at photographic portraits by Paul Nadar and thought we detected in Charles Haas’s birdlike features, slightly quizzical expression, and upturned mustache, clues to Swann himself. When Proust wrote of Elstir’s paintings, “The rare moments in which we see nature as she is, poetically, were those from which his work was created,” we knew that he must have been thinking of Monet, which took us, in turn, to the impressionists. We saw aspects of Odette, Swann’s mistress, one of the grandest of the grandes horizontales, in Madame de Benardaky, who had been photographed with an extravagant arrangement of ostrich feathers and pearls perched on her head, and plenty more jewels decorating her expansive alabaster poitrine. The subject of mistresses naturally led us to President Félix Faure, who had been lucky enough to expire while entertaining a young lady in his office in the Élysée in 18
99. The rumors that flew around Paris claimed she had been giving him a blow job, which allowed Georges Clemenceau, his longtime political opponent, to write, “Il voulait être César, il ne fut que Pompée,” a double entendre that could be translated as, “He wished to be Caesar, but was only Pompey” or, far more wittily, “He wished to be Caesar, but was only pumped.”

  Clemenceau hated Faure for many good reasons, but principally for his support of the guilty verdict against Alfred Dreyfus, in that infamous miscarriage of justice in 1895. The Dreyfus Affair allowed us to study anti-Semitism under the Third Republic, which led us to the novels of Émile Zola, who had launched the campaign to reopen the case in 1898, with his incendiary open letter, “J’Accuse … !” The letter was published on the front page of L’Aurore, a newspaper owned by none other than Georges Clemenceau, who also happened to be one of Monet’s closest friends.

  Everything was connected and it was all, quite simply, thrilling.

  Less thrilling was our life in the madhouse. Martin was in his final year, and if he was going to get a first (which he did; even better, he got a congratulatory first, meaning the examiners skip the questions and just stand up and clap instead) he needed to work. And work extremely hard in a quiet place a long way from the hysterical atmosphere at the Old Loony Bin. Why we felt compelled to escape in the middle of the night, without telling Adam and Angela, I don’t know, but I’m sorry to admit that’s what we did. The plan was to find our own flat in Oxford. While Martin battled Beowulf, and marveled at Marvell, I would bring him perfectly poached eggs on whole-grain toast and fortifying cups of tea, before we retired to our softly lit bedroom for delights that Félix Faure could have imagined only dans ses rêves.

  Curiously, over the Christmas vacation Martin stopped calling me. It was so unlike him, what could possibly be wrong? Far too cowardly to pick up the telephone myself, I consulted his friend, Rob, who mumbled and rumbled, telling me nothing, and so I decided—extremely ill advisedly and extremely uninvitedly—to go to the “citadel of riotous solvency” and find out what I should already have known. It was pitch dark when I arrived, cold, windy, raining, sleeting—the weather had thoughtfully gone out of its way to come up with the appropriate gloomy backdrop for my despair. And Martin did the rest. No, it wasn’t some other girl (unless you count Aphra, Jane, and George as my rivals, which of course they were), he just needed to move back into Exeter College and get a first. He didn’t want the eggs, he didn’t want the bacon or tea, and he most certainly didn’t want me. What he did want was to walk into that room and watch those examiners stand up and clap. He wasn’t heartless or cruel, but that was how it had to be.

  I couldn’t go on sitting around in his room crying, and I was much too sad and exhausted to get on the train and go home, so I went downstairs in search of comfort. Jane was busy in the kitchen cooking dinner, but not too busy to give me a long hug, a large glass of wine, and a little Byron—“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence.” Yes! Yes! Had anything truer ever been written in the whole history of love? I sat there nodding and sniffing as she told me all about the first time her heart had been broken. It had mended, been shattered several more times, and now here she was standing at the kitchen sink, scrubbing potatoes, married to a man who no longer wanted to make love to her.

  The man in question was sitting in his study, dark velvet curtains muffling the sound of rain slashing against the windowpanes, holding a glass of whiskey that was illuminated like stained glass by the cozy glow of the lamp on his desk. Of course he already knew the whole story—“Christ, Dad, what am I going to do? She says she’s getting on a train and will be here in an hour”—having lived through the same scenario himself more times than he cared to recall. I imagined that he might have calmed Martin down with some story from his own past. Who knows, maybe he had even made him laugh? Because Kingsley was incapable of not making you laugh. But with me he didn’t say anything at all, just folded me in his arms, poured me some whiskey, patted my hand, and listened with endless patience. Which was all he could do, and all that I needed.

  Dinner passed by in a blur of misery and embarrassment and surprisingly, nobody seemed at all eager to linger at the table. Butter pecan ice cream with hot fudge sauce? Port? Brandy? Coffee? There were no takers. I suppose I must have helped Jane wash up as best I could, and then, horrifyingly, it was time for bed. Where all Martin longed for was the oblivion of sleep and an end to the nightmare. And you might have thought I would have felt the same way. But oh no, I had an entirely different plan in mind for how we might best pass the hours until dawn. It involved a great deal more talking, not acrimonious of course, just deeply emotional, combined with stroking and kissing, which would culminate in the most profound act of lovemaking that either of us had ever experienced in our entire lives. But even I realized that this was probably a long shot, and I was prepared to compromise and settle for an all-night session of cuddling, a long heartfelt conversation, and a few totally innocent kisses. As soon as we got into bed it became clear that not a single part of either of these scenarios was ever going to happen.

  Where was the man who was going to put his arms around me and kiss my tears away? Martin was not a candidate. He had been banished from my life. Forever. (History had already been rewritten, and I was now the one doing the banishing.) I was never, ever going to see, or speak to him again. But what about dear Kingsley? He had always liked me, he had been so kind to me that evening, and personally I had absolutely nothing against (extremely) older men. What if I slipped into his side of the bed? Even with my diminished sanity I knew that was nuts.

  Which left Monkey.

  Colin—always called “Monkey”—was Jane’s funny, sweet, handsome brother, who, along with their considerably less appealing mother, was a permanent fixture in the Amis ménage. Monkey did something complicated with electronics and hi-fis, was rather partial to the tanning bed, and with his absurd good looks was a huge hit with everyone. He was also one of my favorite men in the entire world, and I’d always liked to think that this affection was reciprocated. Monkey had a big heart—you had only to look into his beautiful eyes to see that—and I knew he would understand what I was going through. So I got out of bed, wrapped a towel around me, tiptoed across the passage and silently opened his door.

  The room was pitch dark and freezing cold, but there in the corner was a mountain of blankets, and from beneath it came the sound of Monkey’s gentle, decorous snoring. I dropped the towel on the floor, lifted up the edge of the mountain and snuggled up close to his lovely warm—vyella-pajama-encased—body. Poor Monkey. Not at all what he had expected or wanted or needed to find in his bed in the middle of the night. But I’d been right about his good heart. He did put his arms around me (asking him to kiss away the tears would have been pushing my luck), he calmed me down, and eventually (Christ, he must have been relieved!) I was able to creep back to Martin’s room.

  The next morning it was still dark when I left the house, punch-drunk from Dr. Kingsley’s patent medicine and my turbulent night, and stumbled onto the train back to London. “ ’Tis woman’s whole existence.” How could that Byron have known what was going on in my heart? He must have been just like Martin. The brilliance, the dangerous sex appeal, the carefully arranged filthy hair, the constant scribbling—a man who needed to keep his love apart from his life. And if a girl interfered with those poems, she would have been bundled into a carriage at dawn and sent on her way through the swirling early morning mist. Leaving her whole existence behind her. I pressed my throbbing head against the cold glass of the train window and started to cry all over again.

  L’Amant

  SOMETIME IN THE SUMMER OF 1971 my mother’s sister, Beegoonie, gave a lunch party in her London garden. This bucolic expanse, full of fat pink roses, delicately scented phlox, teetering hollyhocks, sky blue delphiniums, espaliered pear trees, raspberry canes, and drowsy drunken bees in no way resembled the outdoor dogs’ toilet that
was our garden. An idealized vision, captured in overenthusiastic color by some modestly talented Edwardian lady painter, it was the perfect setting for a delicious déjeuner sur—its meticulously maintained—l’herbe. And what made it even lovelier was the déjeuner itself.

  An entire wild Scottish salmon would be gently poached in fish bouillon, and while it cooled, my aunt would dribble olive oil, brought back from La Migoua, into deep orange egg yolks in a stone mortar, whisking them by hand into a miraculous, unctuous mayonnaise. Next, cucumber slices—so thin you could put them over your eyes and still read the headline in that morning’s paper—would be arranged, overlapping like pale green fish scales, along the entire length of the salmon as it reclined on its enormous blue-and-white platter. The day before raspberries and red currants from the garden had been briefly heated with sugar, placed in a bowl, lined with a crazy patchwork of slices of white bread (crusts removed), and left—a heavy weight compressing this celestial mess together—in the fridge. Overnight the mess would have been transformed into a summer pudding that was served—turned upside down onto a plate—along with a jug of double cream and a silver spoon, because cream that thick really cannot be expected to move without assistance.