The House in France

by Gully Wells

  Diana Melly had a boyfriend, and he really was a boy, the son of some British diplomats my mother had known in Burma. Of course Diana still had the kids and George at home in Gloucester Crescent, but she had also acquired a cozy love nest nearby with an enormous water bed that made you feel seasick if you so much as perched on its edge. Who knows what it must have been like after a couple of joints, when you started rolling around on top of it? One could only imagine. Sylvia had gotten rid of Prince Azamat, sold their huge house in boring old Chester Square, and had moved on to a new life in exciting young Chelsea. She favored futons over water beds, Barcelona chairs over her mother’s Louis XVI fauteuils, and became a connoisseur of both the finer vintages of marijuana and of London’s more attractive experimental artists and poets.

  Around about this time my mother decided that she too needed to make some changes in her living arrangements. She left Freddie behind in their cavelike bedroom on the ground floor—decorated in her signature medley-de-merde color scheme—and moved two flights up, where she created a dimly lit womb of her own. She hung a jewel-colored beaded curtain across the doorway, papered the walls with bloodred fabric, draped the windows in heavy jungle-printed curtains, and converted her bed into a kind of Ottoman divan, with kelim-covered bolsters and cushions. A series of nineteenth-century oil paintings of obscenely overweight cows, their spindly little legs scarcely able to keep them upright, stared down with bovine wariness from their place above the mantelpiece.

  I can’t now recall my first meeting with Hylan, but it scarcely matters because it soon felt as though I had known him forever. The thing about him was that he really liked women.

  “They don’t even have to open their mouths for him to know what they’re thinking or feeling. He just knows what they want. And not just in bed. Even in restaurants he knows what they want.… I don’t have to finish sentences with him. Sometimes I don’t even have to start sentences with him.” This is her description of Franklin from Jane, but I bet she was thinking of Hylan when she wrote it. Or then again maybe she met Hylan after she had written it, and had a blinding moment of déjà-écrit in her sister’s garden when she realized that here was the man she had already imagined. The other thing about him was that he was American. She was fed up with Englishmen, nostalgic for home, and missed that warm, wide-open, cheerful spontaneity that she associated with her fellow countrymen. Look at the way Bobby Kennedy had rolled up his shirtsleeves at Tony Lewis’s party, and made ice-cream cones with sprinkles for all those shrieking kids. Look at the way my father had surprised her in Paris when she was too pregnant to shop or cook by coming home from work one day with a tub of caviar from Fauchon and ice-cold vodka. Look at the way Hylan had made minced squab with bamboo shoots, wrapped in crispy lettuce leaves, and had served it on a tray, so they could eat dinner lolling on the Ottoman divan. Look at the way Freddie had welcomed her home from a week in the hospital: “Oh dear. I don’t imagine you are up to cooking, I suppose I’d better dine at my club.”

  Hylan didn’t have a club. He was an outsider, something my mother could understand and identify with. Even though she was Mrs. A. J. Ayer and, through Freddie, the ultimate insider, knew every interesting person in the whole of London, if you arrive in a new country as an adult, it is probably impossible to ever feel truly at home there. You can always make a virtue out of this: You may imagine you perceive things more clearly than the complacent, accepting natives; you may have deep affection for the place and grow accustomed to its funny ways; you may even decide to stay there forever, but still you will always be a foreigner. Another thing about Hylan was that he was black and beautiful—two words that had not necessarily been conjoined before—which was entirely incidental and yet curiously fortuitous. My mother had started writing the book before she met Hylan, but by the time the book came out, she and Hylan had become an established couple, which only added to the gossip swirling around the novel—and them. It was a publicist’s, and a betrayed wife’s, dream scenario.

  Freddie had old-fashioned ideas about mistresses: Clearly love affairs were an essential and delightful part of life, but a married gentleman—or lady—should never flaunt the relationship in public. A little light luncheon (an omelette aux fines herbes and a nice bottle of claret) at their special corner table in a favorite restaurant (La Sorbonne, in Oxford), followed by some stolen moments in his rooms at New College (spied on by his binocular-wielding fellow dons) was the way he thought these things should be conducted. Not entirely discreet, but those were his rules. To arrive at a party accompanied by your mistress instead of your wife was not something that would ever have crossed his mind. It would have been … vulgar.

  My mother had no such inhibitions. In fact, vulgar and inhibition were two concepts she never quite got to grips with. She was in love and wanted her friends—who were also Freddie’s friends—to meet this fascinating new man. At home there was always a thicket of stiff white invitations propped up on the marble mantelpiece in the drawing room, requesting the pleasure of the company of Professor and Mrs. A. J. Ayer at some fancy party or other. Often these glittering occasions were in the middle of the week, when Freddie would be otherwise occupied in Oxford, but no matter: His delightful, lively wife was certainly available. And so was Hylan. I suspect that more than one London hostess was a little startled to find herself welcoming not a famous elderly philosopher, but rather a much younger talkative black gentleman in a perfectly cut white suit—flared pants, wide lapels, daringly unbuttoned shirt—into her lovely home. (In a roundup of the Parties of the Year in 1974, Harper’s Queen magazine spotted my mother at “Thea Porter’s black and white party in her black, white and silver flat in Mayfair.… Dee Wells came in black with a black man in white.”) But the hostesses were instantly charmed—women liked him just as much as he liked them—and who cared if some of the more conventional husbands were harrumphing away in the background? Harrumphing out of masculine loyalty to Freddie or because my mother was having too much fun? Or harrumphing because they feared their wives might be inspired by the example of their outrageous, subversive American friend to have too much fun themselves?

  The Ayer/Wells ménage acquired a certain pleasing symmetry with Hylan’s arrival in Regent’s Park Terrace. He restored a sense of balance to the marriage, and the household settled down into a carefully choreographed and surprisingly peaceful routine: Freddie left on Tuesday morning, Hylan arrived that evening, and moved out on Friday when Freddie returned from Oxford. My mother lived upstairs, Freddie lived downstairs, and the floor between them—the drawing room and his study—was an elegantly appointed DMZ. Except that hostilities seemed to have ceased, and when the two sides met in the middle on the weekends (minus their allies) they actually got along much better than they had in a long time. It was a logical, pragmatic, oh-so-Benthamite arrangement. But how, you may be wondering, did the fifth player fit into this new regime? Ah yes, Nick. What about little Nick?

  Le Frère

  ONE DAY SEVERAL YEARS AGO Hylan came to lunch at my apartment in the Village. It was early summer and we sat outside on the terrace, shaded by an ancient wisteria vine that was slowly, deliberately choking the house—and would be murdered soon after by my landlady, who cared far more for the value of her property than for its thick jungly foliage or the ethereal scent of its dangling purple flowers. In a fit of nostalgia for La Migoua, I had cooked ratatouille and left it outside on the table to keep warm in the sun while I poured him a glass of wine and then disappeared into the kitchen to poach a couple of eggs. As soon as the whites were set and the yolks still runny, I made a little nest in the mound of ratatouille on each plate, plopped them in, and picked a few leaves of fresh basil from the bush by the door to scatter on top. A salad of lambs’-tongue lettuce, jazzed up with a handful of peppery nasturtium flowers—the greenflies flicked off when Hylan wasn’t looking—bread, some almost liquid, extremely smelly Époisses, and that was it.

  After lunch we sat in the sun and he started to talk abou
t that time, so long ago, when he had first met my mother: “She was my bad girl, and I think all of us innocent guys want that. She was like those fearless New York literary women—Dorothy Parker, Lee Miller, Lillian Hellman. She was cocky, insolent—almost masculine—worldly, funny, but underneath all that her heart was made of mush.”

  But she was always careful to hide the mush away behind her bulletproof armor, so most people never even knew it existed, and those of us who were closest to her were allowed only the occasional glimpse of this tender, elusive aspect of her character. Mush might be too easily confused with sentimentality—something she despised and scorned above all else: “The soft nature of human foibles made her impatient, as if it were mere trickery.” I knew exactly what Hylan meant.

  But animal foibles were an entirely different matter. Spiders were rescued from baths, caterpillars carefully put back on their leaf of choice, and no dog or cat of hers was ever allowed to eat anything from a tin. No fast food for them, oh no. Instead regular trips to the butcher yielded the ingredients for a fragrant ragout of fresh lamb’s hearts and kidneys that was kept bubbling away on the back of the kitchen stove—the yellowish gray scum boiling over, the parfum d’abattoir permeating the whole house—just like the special from Chez Macbeth.

  Animals were powerless, vulnerable creatures that needed to be loved, protected, and rescued. Just like children. Or so you might have thought. And yet it didn’t necessarily work out quite that way. Hylan poured us both some more wine, turned his chair to face the sun, and told me about one particular evening, early on in their relationship. He had arrived at the house straight from work to cook dinner for his new girlfriend (conjured up in a smoky wok from the adventurous ingredients in the fridge) and afterward, when they were sitting around enjoying a joint—or maybe just some illicit fattening coffee ice cream—they suddenly remembered Nick. Alone in his room two floors below, he would have been eight or nine at the time.

  HYLAN BROUGHT OUT the best in my mother. He calmed her down, made her laugh, and was probably the only person who knew how to tame the fire-breathing furies inside her. At least some of them, some of the time. He fed them a steady diet of Szechuan shrimp, chilled Vouvray, funny stories, sad stories, stem ginger drowned in heavy cream, Acapulco gold, a little music (they favored early Sinatra), and endless amounts of warmth, sympathy, and above all, love. The furies gobbled all these things up—greedily, but also gratefully—and sometimes asked for more, but usually they just curled up and went to sleep. Until they got hungry again. With Hylan there, life at home became much less fraught—he kept things steady and consciously or not became a buffer between Nick and his mother. “Buffer” is my brother’s word, not mine, but I know precisely what he meant, and why he chose it. Once, many years ago, somebody who knew my mother quite well described her to me as “a most alarming woman,” which deeply upset me at the time, maybe because it was the truth.

  As a small child Nick, I think, was truly alarmed by his mother, and understandably so. Sometimes she wasn’t there at all—she was working, she was at a television studio, she was out at a party—and when she was around, you could never be entirely sure if she was going to cook lamb chops and peas and make you laugh, or whether it would be the furies who needed feeding far more urgently than you did. No wonder Nick was so eager to welcome the Buffer into the bosom of our family: “At the time I thought I had the best of both worlds.” His lovely dad doted on him at the weekends, and cheerful Hylan kept his mum happy during the week. Even better, the Buffer soon started bringing his daughter, Alex, with him, so the kids would hang out in Nick’s room, giggling, stuffing themselves with potato chips, revolting sweets, and Coca-Cola. At a remarkably precocious age—maybe around ten—Nick added cigarettes to his well-balanced diet. He had started out by pinching them from Freddie or our mother but quickly tired of the taste of Players Navy Cut, and before too long graduated to Marlboros. His equally precocious sense of design inspired him to glue the empty packs to the walls of his room, and since he smoked so much, he was soon able to create a kind of red-and-white-patchwork-quilt effect that cheered up his surroundings no end.

  The patchwork nature of Nick’s education was sadly less of a success than the nicotine wallpaper. His father’s view was quite simple: Send your children to the best private schools, encourage them to work hard, buy them lots of books, engage them in lively conversations, and watch them sail off to the best universities, where they would get first-class degrees. Just as he, and everybody he knew, had. But poor innocent well-meaning Freddie hadn’t taken into account the two whirlwinds swirling around him. The first was the confusing, fuck-the-Establishment times he found himself living in, and the second was the anarchic, fuck-the-English attitude of his wife. Together they made a perfect storm that ended up sabotaging his son’s education. My mother was theoretically in favor of schools, despite her own fractured and largely hostile relationship with them, and she never lost her admiration for that highly educated crème de la crème of intellectual society that lived in some paneled library full of first editions. And yet she expected people to be naturally, effortlessly brilliant, to reach the clouds without sweating, and had nothing but contempt for what she called “greasy grinds”—those dreary, conventional kids/adults who worked too hard at school/jobs and were pathetically bereft of all glamour, fun, and wickedness.

  At this stage in their marriage stuffy old Freddie had only to suggest something for his contentious, increasingly wild, and ever younger—in spirit if not in body—wife to disagree. Jesus, why the hell would she want her son to end up like every uptight, out-of-touch, private-school-educated, misogynistic, insensitive Englishman she had ever known—or been to bed with? No way was she going to subject little Nick to that. Most of her friends, enlightened left-leaning people like Jonathan and Rachel Miller, Sylvia, George and Diana Melly, had long ago come to the conclusion that it was wrong, and a waste of money, to send your children to fee-paying schools. Never mind that these same people had all gone to nice private schools and Oxford or Cambridge themselves: This was the dawning of a new age. Get with the program, Fred. How on earth could there ever have been any kind of social justice if one privileged class continued to pay for education while everybody else was forced into the state school around the corner? And Freddie called himself a socialist! Back home in America, everybody went to the same local school (no, not really) and had an equal chance of getting into Harvard (no, not at all), and that was the only way for any sane country to run its educational system. Well, she had always known the English were nuts. And don’t think this was just idle chatter—my mother and her friends put their children where their mouths were.

  Little Nick’s patchwork experience started out somewhat inconsistently at a private nursery school in Hampstead with a pretty garden at the back, geraniums in the window boxes, and the reassuring onwards-and-upwards name of Stepping Stones. His father’s fuddy-duddy idea was that he should graduate from there—summa cum laude—and move smoothly right along to prep school, which would in turn prepare him for Westminster (founded in 1179), where Freddie’s hero and occasional (dead) dining companion, Jeremy Bentham, had gone. But this was not to be. Instead Nick followed his friends Tom, William, and the Melly kids to Gospel Oak, the local state school. Not altogether a bad place, but with thirty-odd kids in each class, its harried teachers didn’t have the energy, time, inclination, or training to take on Horace, the finer points of the Peloponnesian Wars, trigonometry, Aristophanes—or whatever fuddy-duddy rubbish you had to know about to pass the entrance exam for Westminster.

  As far as extracurricular activities went, there was lots of smoking and regular, energizing fights in the playground, and quite soon visits to the Tavistock Clinic in Belsize Lane were added to Nick’s busy after-school schedule. Why our mother had decided a shrink might be a good idea wasn’t entirely clear. Maybe she had noticed that Nick seemed unhappy, or maybe it was because the Millers and the Mellys were sending their kids there, or quite p
ossibly it was just another way to annoy Freddie, who had no patience at all for the good doctor Freud’s exotic excavations of the psyche. The mind was a wondrous thing, extremely useful for solving problems of a verifiable nature, but was there any point in rummaging about in its nether regions to see if one might have forgotten having had sex with the gardener at the age of seven? Freddie didn’t think so. Nick’s recollection is that he had cut himself accidentally fiddling about with his father’s razor, and when he appeared at school festooned in Band-Aids, his obviously concerned teacher had called his parents to alert them to his possibly suicidal tendencies.

  Either way, or more likely both ways, Nick now found himself twice a week sitting in a room full of toys he didn’t want to play with and books he didn’t want to read, opposite an earnest gray-haired lady in Birkenstocks he didn’t want to talk to. But talk he must. That’s why he was there. “Now, Nick, what are you thinking about?” Not a lot. In fact nothing at all. His mind was a blank, all he wanted was to go home, watch the telly, and have a much-needed cigarette. But he didn’t feel he could really say that, and so he remained silent. She asked him again. And again. Finally, in despair he said he was looking at the screw in her chair. Aha! Now at last they were getting somewhere. Screw. The miasma had started to lift: Nick was thinking of screwing. Whom did he want to screw? His mother? Her? The gardener? (If only we’d had one—then the dogs’ toilet could have been transformed into a lovely bijou garden.) The poor child looked mystified, but at least he had ignited some kind of conversation; the only problem was he had no idea what she was talking about. The kindly lady had suddenly become animated—far too animated—and had taken off on an embarrassing riff about that thing that people do. At ten Nick certainly knew all about that, but what did it have to do with the screw in her chair? He fell silent again, and then, thank God, his time was up. Perhaps Freddie wasn’t such a fool after all.