by Gully Wells
My aunt always kept in touch with old friends—and old boyfriends—from New York, and that day the visiting American belonged to the second category. Andrew Arkin was a charming, elegant gentleman who worked in that least charming, gentle, or elegant of professions—the Seventh Avenue schmatte business. Andrew’s romance with Beegoonie had assumed a fairy-tale aspect in my young, impressionable mind after a visit to New York, when he had taken us both for a ride in a carriage through Central Park, followed by dinner at the Colony, there being no more chic restaurant in the entire city. How I envied my aunt her glamorous life: breakfast at Tiffany’s, lunch at La Grenouille, dinner at the Colony, moving from one to the other in a velvet-lined carriage, drawn by a prancing glossy black horse, with this dapper gentleman at her side. As it turned out, Andrew stayed on Seventh Avenue and my aunt moved to England, but they remained close friends and on that particular—momentous, in retrospect—day, he arrived at lunch with a friend, an American dress designer working in London.
No, I wasn’t there in the garden, but over the years I heard about it so often from the central actors in the drama that ensued that I began to feel as though I might have been. Hylan Booker had been born in Detroit into a large family, and after finishing high school had joined the air force because that was probably the only way that a young black kid from his kind of background could fly away and fashion the kind of future he dreamed of. (Just as my mother had signed up with the Canadian army to escape from her own very different family so many years before.) The air force took him to England, and when he got out his talent for drawing and design led him to art school, first in Swindon and then a few years later to the Royal College of Art in London. By the time Andrew brought him to lunch, he had just been awarded the Best British Designer prize by the American press at a glitzy ceremony at the Plaza in New York (maybe he had even gone for a ride afterward in one of those romantic carriages?) and was about to be signed up by the House of Worth to design its couture collection. He was a long way from Michigan.
Soon after that lunch my mother—wrestling with the guest list for one of her many dinner parties in Regent’s Park Terrace—found herself staring at some names scribbled on the back of an envelope and realized she was facing every hostess’s nightmare: too many single ladies. What is it with women? Why do they keep misplacing the men they were once attached to? What particular black hole do they disappear into? Well, she had no time to get into that, but she did suddenly remember that nice young—he was thirty-three at the time—dress designer she had met at her sister’s house, so she picked up the telephone and asked if by any remote chance he might possibly be free to come to dinner next Tuesday? Informal, eight for eight thirty. Wonderful! She would see him then. Not too surprisingly Hylan was quite popular with her lady friends—he even had a brief fling with one of them—and after several more of these parties, being the well-brought-up gentleman that he was and still is, he sent my mother a large bouquet of yellow roses with a thank-you note. Many years later he told me what happened next:
“You must understand I knew nothing of her life, nor was it a concern from my perspective since I had met Freddie at the dinner parties and found him quite charming in that cool English way. But the yellow flowers were a kind of turning point, since from then on our relationship moved in an entirely different sphere.”
AFTER THE DEBACLE with Martin I went back to Oxford, miserable and homeless. But two kind friends, Anthony and Tom, who shared an unspeakable dump halfway up the Cowley Road, gallantly came to my rescue, and offered me a room in their flat. It was quite possibly the most awful place any of us had ever seen, let alone lived in. My saviors had met each other at Eton, but they could not have been less like the drunken Christ Church louts whose antics Evelyn Waugh immortalized as “the sound of English county families baying for broken glass.” Waugh must have been thinking of the time in 1927 when the high-spirited members of the Bullingdon Club got so carried away after one of their festive dinners that they went on a rampage, smashing the glass in all 468 windows in Peckwater Quad. And don’t think that their grandsons—some of whom had been at school with Anthony and Tom, and were now at Oxford—were much better behaved in the early seventies.
The dump occupied the cramped ground floor of a squat semidetached house a long way from the center of Oxford. It consisted of two bedrooms at the front, where Tom and Anthony were lulled to sleep by the sound of trucks and buses grinding their way up and down the Cowley Road, another room at the back (soon to be my boudoir), a frightening kitchen, and a bathroom of sorts, both of which were crammed into a flimsy unheated addition that stuck out into what might once have been a garden. Anthony’s dog, who slept in his bed, whether or not his master happened to have company, completed our cozy little household.
As well as being scholars, my saviors were forward-thinking entrepreneurs, specializing in the secondhand-bed business. They had invested in a clapped-out Land Rover for pickups and deliveries, and the inventory—mainly iron bedsteads that looked as though they had done good service in some prewar mental institution—was stacked up against every available wall in the flat. As far as I can recall the beds were so content living with us that they rarely if ever moved out. We, on the other hand, tended to go out a great deal.
One evening we ended up in New College, where the haunting sound of Mick suggesting we spend the night together escaped from an open window, beckoning us up a twisty staircase and into somebody or other’s rooms. Flagons of cheap Spanish wine were lined up on a table, alongside a sweaty arrangement of cheeses and hunks of bread, while in the other room Mick had moved on to the exciting, forbidden flavor—“How come you taste so good?”—of brown sugar. And there in the dark I could just make out two figures: one, an extremely large and energetic woman, and the other an elflike man with wispy hair, swooping wildly around to the urgent deafening beat of the music. It was Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bayley, out for a night on the town.
Raymond Carr, the warden of Saint Antony’s College and my old friend from Paris, gave the best parties in the whole of Oxford. Like my mother, he knew that the key was to mix people up—academics, students, a few interlopers from London. Soon after I moved in with Anthony and Tom, we all turned up one evening chez Carr, and I remember standing by the fireplace and watching an excitable visiting professor from the University of Salamanca—an expert in the iconography of early Renaissance religious art—as he tried to strike up a conversation with a tall girl in astonishing violet suede hot pants and matching high-heeled boots. She was so stoned that she had to clutch his arm to steady herself. His fractured English quickly disintegrated into gibberish—his mujer back in Salamanca probably didn’t dress up like that too often—and when the girl, bored with his chatter, said “Let’s dance,” I saw a look of entirely misguided masculine bravado (Qué hombre, qué cojones, no wonder she wants me!) spread across his pudgy features. On the other hand she was very stoned, so even he might have gotten lucky.
That same night I, too, met somebody who asked me to dance. While I was sitting with Isaiah Berlin, talking about the only thing we had in common, which would have been my disreputable stepfather, whose way with the ladies Isaiah neither understood nor approved of, a young man he seemed to know walked over to join us. Which allowed poor Isaiah to escape, and us to join the excitable Spanish professor and his new friend on the dance floor. One thing led to another—some smooching in the garden, lots more dancing, a few more champagne cocktails, some undercooked sausages with Raymond in the kitchen just before dawn—and instead of going home we went upstairs. On the top floor we found a deserted bedroom where, exhausted, we fell asleep.
“Ah, my dear girl, you and your friend are just in time for breakfast.” It must have been around three in the afternoon, and Raymond, in a frayed stripey dressing gown, was back at the stove, using last night’s encrusted frying pan to make bacon and eggs and thick greasy slices of fried bread. And baked beans, if anybody wanted them. The entire Carr family, as
well as a couple of other stragglers, were slumped in a catatonic state around an unbelievably messy table. It was home. Just like our kitchen in La Migoua. I was even wearing my magical backless dress, the one I’d gone swimming in with the married fascist hairdresser, after he had admired my “jolis pieds” at the Padulas’ party. We found a couple of chairs, sat down at the table, and, for the first time since my disastrous visit to Monkey’s freezing bedroom, I realized, to my astonishment, that I was actually happy.
DANIEL REES, whose parents, Margie and Goronwy, were my mother and Freddie’s oldest, dearest friends, had been staying in our house in London. And one fine day he decided to come and see me in Oxford. As we sat in some fetid pub that stank of beer and cigarettes, and was festooned with horse brasses, plastic holly, and winking tiny white lights, he filled me in on the news from home. Apparently my mother had turned into a caffeine- and nicotine-crazed dervish who didn’t even bother to get dressed or wash her hair anymore and spent all day in her nightdress at the desk in her room. She was writing a novel. Later on, after it had become a huge success, she claimed, totally disingenuously, that she had started it because “I was idle and had a perfectly good typewriter and half a box of paper.” A likely story.
She had always been a writer, first of long, funny letters and after that of newspaper articles, but she knew perfectly well that real writers wrote books. Almost everybody around her did, so why shouldn’t she? She would show them that anything they could do she could do better. Although she would never have admitted it out loud—weakness and insecurity had to be locked away behind wit and aggression—I don’t think my mother ever quite came to terms with the fact that she had skipped college. Her brothers and sister had gone to Swarthmore, Harvard, and Radcliffe respectively, but her rebelliousness and delinquency, vis-à-vis anything so dull and regimented as school, meant that her education had been a total mess. So she packed it all in at seventeen. “I just said I was through with schools forever and my family didn’t dare argue with me,” and went off to join the Canadian army.
I suspect she probably felt sorry for herself ever after. Instead of long afternoons in the Widener Library and long nights in a Harvard dorm, lying in the arms of Walker Mortimer IV, she found herself freezing her ass off at eight in the morning on some parade ground in Ontario, surrounded by half-wits. But there was one shining exception—one fellow soldier, who was most certainly not a half-wit. V. R. “Bunny” Lang was a brilliant, outrageous poet and playwright from Boston, who was to become my mother’s closest friend. (My Mother’s novel, Jane, was dedicated to Bunny’s memory. She had died in 1956, and even though I was only five at the time, I can still remember the awful day when my mother got the news.) It was Bunny who had written the poem about my grandmother, the cat murderer, and it was to Bunny that she wrote a letter describing what had passed for her education:
I did not go to school very often as I didn’t like it … and when I did go, I never took books home and neither did, nor handed in any home work [sic] assignment. I smoked in the girls’ toilets and drank brandy from those tiny bottles you get on trains, in the back row. Not only did I hate the school and the school hate me, but I hated everyone in the school and everyone in the school hated me. I went less and less.
It being wartime, there were a few unfortunate children who had been evacuated from England and France in her class, and much as my mother despised these unappealing outcasts, she discovered they had their uses:
When it came time for final exams I had some disquieting moments and it was only then I realized how really bright and well-informed the refugees were. I took every exam and passed by the simple system of copying their papers. But now I was terrified that the war would end and then the refugees would undoubtedly go home, and I would have to do my own homework, and pass or not pass exams on my own hook.
But thanks to those brave young Japanese pilots who came dive-bombing to my mother’s rescue on December 7, 1941, she was able to relax, safe in the knowledge that the refugees wouldn’t be going anywhere for a very long time.
The novel my mother was writing, so Daniel told me, was about a clever, sexy American journalist in her midthirties, who has a soft spot for animals and underdogs, lives in a loft in Covent Garden, and keeps herself busy—when she isn’t reviewing movies—juggling three boyfriends, none of whom know about one another. When it came to men, Jane isn’t one of those safe, predictable women who always seem to gravitate toward the same model. Oh no, that would not have been her style at all. In fact this trio of gentlemen callers have absolutely nothing in common beyond their shared, and totally understandable, passion for Jane. The first, Anthony, is a cultured, ineffectual aristocrat, dominated by his witch of a mother, scarred by his loveless childhood and a session of traumatic buggery at Eton, who has never gotten it together to do anything at all.
The second gentleman, Franklin, is equally posh and handsome, except he’s American and black. An ambitious, high-powered, Yale-educated law professor, he wears monogrammed shirts, was the tennis champion of southern New England, and dances and makes love better than any man she has ever known—“No wonder white men are so scared of them. They have every reason to be.”
The third man, Tom, is really no more than a boy. “He was even younger than she’d thought. Eighteen? Twenty-two? Tall for fourteen? At thirty-four she was no longer sure of anything about the young.” Tom is a burglar who happens to be going about his business one rainy night on her roof, when he slips and crashes through the skylight, landing on her bed in a shower of wet leaves and broken glass. The gash on his hand is so deep that she feels the least she can do—before sending him on his way—is to give him a glass of brandy and stitch it up. But after she has done her Florence Nightingale bit, she makes the mistake of looking up at his beautiful face.
Already hooked, I needed to know what happened next, but Daniel had no idea because she was still hunched over her typewriter and refused to give away any more.
However, he did have one other thing to tell me about my mother. She had a lover. Daniel didn’t seem to know where she had met him, but he came around all the time (Freddie was safely in Oxford from Tuesday to Friday) and was a black American dress designer named Hylan Booker. I was too old to be surprised by anything my mother did (appalled sometimes, but never surprised), and I trusted her taste. Had she not married my two favorite men in the entire world? So I didn’t doubt for a moment that this improbable but amazing-sounding creature was a good thing.
Daniel had to tell me everything about him, immediately. Well, he was tall, very dark, and extremely handsome, probably about ten years younger than her, had a daughter Nick’s age who lived with him, and he had transformed my mother’s life. As only a new lover can. She was ridiculously happy; she had lost weight, her skirts had gotten shorter, she drank champagne and giggled, and when they went out at night, she wore Hylan’s creations, with swirling capes and crazily patterned stockings. They gave small dinner parties and Hylan would make Chinese food from scratch. The fridge was full of fermented black beans, water chestnuts, sea cucumber, and lotus roots, and one evening Daniel had even seen a couple of live crabs crawling around the kitchen floor. Instead of dessert they served their guests perfectly rolled, calorie-conscious joints. I could not wait to meet him.
After my mother found out about Freddie and Vanessa, she was much unhappier than I ever knew at the time. She sensed this was the real thing, unlike any of his other affairs, and Freddie knew it too. In 1968 he had told his old friend Marcelle Quinton, “I have just met someone I am absolutely in love with.” Marcelle felt that he and Vanessa loved each other “in the way people do when they think it is their last chance.” Vanessa was a geisha. She was beautiful, she whispered, she was tiny, she sat at his feet (figuratively and literally), she didn’t argue, she didn’t work, she didn’t shout or swear, and most important of all, she adored him. It would be hard to imagine any woman less like my mother.
Freddie had found somebody who ma
de him truly happy, but I doubt that he ever thought seriously about divorce. He had always been accustomed to having more than one woman simultaneously. Freddie was not the kind of man who falls violently in love and overturns everything in order to commit himself to the object of his passion. With his deep, visceral aversion to confrontation and upheaval, he just wanted to be left alone to get on with his work and sleep with whomever he pleased. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask? He didn’t think so. Of course he loved Vanessa, and he undoubtedly loved going to bed with her, but in many ways he was quite content being married to my mother—at least on the weekends. She provided him with a comfortable home, cooked the kind of food he liked, amused him, organized their social life, and above all she was the mother of his adored son.
My mother was less easily pleased. And she became spectacularly displeased when she found out about Vanessa. Her disenchantment with her husband spilled over into a disenchantment with England. She missed America and was increasingly angry about the whole stuffy, uptight, class-ridden system in this bizarre country she seemed to have landed in. Except that the anger was within her, and had always been there. She lashed out because that’s what she had been doing her entire life, and I often thought that it was really just target practice—the sniping made her feel alive and kept the dreaded boredom at bay. In any case the bizarre country was changing fast. And about fucking time too, as she would have said. The Labour Party was in power, and all the usual high-minded liberal reforms had been pushed through Parliament: no more hanging, no more corporal punishment in schools, no more throwing nice—or even not nice—queers in jail. The kind of admirable stuff Freddie had campaigned for all his life. But there was so much more to be done—and so much else going on.