by Gully Wells
HYLAN HAPPENED TO BE precisely thirteen years older than me and thirteen years younger than my mother, and far from acting like a buffer between us he actually brought us much closer together. My friends all loved him. At a party he’d hit the dance floor with a whoop of joy, hands clapping, sweeping you along in his wake, spinning wildly like a fifth top—and it wasn’t just that he knew the moves, he was from Motown, for God’s sake. In our sheltered, snobby, white Oxford world, he was probably as close to the real deal as any of us would ever get. And as for his acid-tongued, wickedly funny girlfriend, nobody, I was proud to say, had a mother remotely like mine. What had been alarming to a young child and embarrassing to a teenager were the exact same qualities that kept my friends (and me) entertained in our twenties. I had always inhabited her world, gone to grown-up parties from a ludicrously young age and hung about with her guests, and now, newly rejuvenated by Hylan, she was more than delighted to return the favor. Sometimes we even went away for the weekend together.
Ever since it was founded in 1823, the Oxford Union has suffered from an advanced case of folie de grandeur, fancying itself as the prep school for Parliament. The few times I went there as a student, it seemed to be full of self-regarding bores, whose voices were too loud and predictable opinions too strident, but amazingly a few of these windbags did actually make it into the House of Commons. So I guess as prep schools went, it wasn’t a total flop. Mostly a debate in the Union consisted of often-drunk undergraduates haranguing one another, but every now and then, just to add a bit of class and celebrity sparkle to the occasion, they would invite guest speakers from the real world to come and join in. One day my mother was the lucky recipient of such an invitation. Who knows what the debate was supposed to be about, but since she could always fashion an argument out of thin air, it really didn’t matter—what mattered was having fun. And what could be more fun than a little mother-and-daughter outing to a hotel in Oxford, accompanied by our respective boyfriends?
Even though I had made it quite clear to Martin several times—first during the hysterical night at his parents’ house, then in a stream of letters—that I would never have anything whatsoever to do with him ever again, it seems he didn’t believe me. And nor did I. He wrote in his memoir, Experience, that “we had started going out together when she came to St. Hilda’s to read history in 1969, and it lasted in its intermittent way about as long as the average marriage. Ten years?”
Was it really that long? I’m not so sure, but it still makes me oddly happy to think he remembers it that way. At any rate, when the Oxford Union came calling we were in one of our on-again phases, and since Hylan and Martin got along so well (and still do) and my mother adored Martin (and always did), the four of us set out for our double date at the Randolph Hotel full of excitement.
Our hosts—a couple of eager young men with troubled complexions and misguided notions of the depth and range of their own wit—had laid on dinner in a pub as an entertaining [sic] prelude to the great debate. Clearly they knew that their guest speaker, Dee Wells, could be relied upon to stir things up, but I wonder if they expected Mrs. A. J. Ayer to come to her husband’s home turf with her lover? Probably not. At the time this aspect of our expedition never crossed my mind, and yet, looking back, it must have been on my mother’s the entire time. If Freddie could take Vanessa to La Sorbonne for discreet lunches, then just watch me take Hylan to the Union for an indiscreet showdown. Not only would she destroy the Conservative opposition with her glorious swift tongue, but she would prove to all those greasy grind undergraduates what a sexy, desirable woman she was too. And it worked: She won the debate, she looked sensational in one of Hylan’s creations, and most satisfying of all, she must have generated enough gossip to keep the greasy grinds jabbering away for at least a week.
After her triumph the four of us sailed back to the Randolph in search of a celebratory drink. But this was Oxford, not London, and at eleven o’clock its cryptlike lounge was deserted. The crypt’s elderly, irritable keeper was eventually persuaded to bring us four small glasses of whiskey and a bowl of melting ice cubes—“Jesus, what is it with the English and ice.”—and then we sat about making much too much noise, having much too good a time, before stumbling off to bed. The next morning, after breakfast in the silent dining room—“Jesus, what’s wrong with the English. Why don’t they talk when they eat, like normal people do.”—it was time to say good-bye to the dreaming spires and head back home. My mother and Martin went to the front desk, Hylan and I collected the bags, when suddenly there was a little yelp, not a real one but a funny one, when she discovered she was apparently being charged a pound more than Martin for her equally miserable double room. She examined her bill more carefully, she examined his and then, with a smile on her face, turned to the girl cowering behind the desk: “Oh I see. You charge extra for niggers. Well, you know what? They’re worth it!”
And with that she produced her credit card and snapped it down on the counter. It was the perfect ending to a perfect weekend. I should add a postscript here. Nick, who had adored Hylan from the very beginning, soon took to using that very same word rather freely—always with great affection—following his mother’s example. The poor child was understandably a bit confused, when she told him one day that it was in fact an evil, wicked word and that he was never, ever, to say it again. So he didn’t. But she went on using it. And Hylan says he never minded at all.
Les Vacances
WITH THE NEW REGIME AT HOME, the era of cozy, chaotic, sometimes contentious, holidays en famille at La Migoua came to an end, and from 1973 onward my mother and Freddie decided that they would split the long hot summer between them. But who was going to look after little Nick and big Freddie—both equally helpless—when their mother/wife wasn’t there? (Apparently Vanessa had decided she couldn’t leave her husband and four children for a month to take on the nanny/cook/chauffeur/mistress role at this point—although later on she would.) I’m not sure exactly how my mother found Beatrice, a French student in her late twenties studying law in London, but Mademoiselle Tourot turned out to be remarkably accomplished at every aspect of her new job.
At home in her grandmother’s kitchen in the Gironde, Beatrice had been taught at a precocious age how to cook an impeccable poulet au gratin à la crème Landaise, she knew that a salade de L’Île Barbe required a dressing of lemon juice and never vinegar, and from her father she had learned which wines—a Château Pradeaux rouge 1998 and a Château Grenouilles Chablis, respectively—to serve with each of these sublime dishes. She was unfazed by the tortuous roads around La Migoua and equally fearless when it came to dealing with the murderous local drivers. Well brought up, well read, well adjusted, and well dressed, she was also witty and pretty, with curly reddish hair, just the right number of freckles, and had an engaging little gap between her two front teeth. Nick and Freddie were two lucky chaps, and I don’t imagine that either of them missed my mother for a single moment.
Nick remembers that Beatrice “made a huge effort to be liked, and succeeded. From the moment we met her, she was permanently in our lives. She could do all the things that Freddie loved—organize dinners, parties, and outings. She was fun and charming and great with children.” I suppose it was inevitable that they would become lovers. Freddie was incapable of meeting an attractive woman without wanting to sleep with her, and over the years their relationship—pace the other boyfriends Beatrice must surely have had—developed into what? I had no idea. But Beatrice once told me that Freddie had been “l’être le plus significatif de ma vie.” My stepfather had always been the ultimate juggler when it came to the ladies who inhabited his life, so for him this was a familiar pattern.
“Pourquoi pas?” was his attitude, although he did admit in a letter he wrote to Heather Kiernan (yet another of his lucky ladies) when he was seventy-three, “You might think that as I get older I would learn how to manage my affairs better but the reverse seems to be true.”
Never mind about manag
ing his affairs. What was far more amazing, and I think admirable, was that he went on having them, pretty well up until the day he died. One particular conversation comes to mind, which must have taken place only a year or so before his death in 1989. Freddie had been staying with me in New York and was having a spot of bother with that perfidious male gland, the prostate. Clearly something was up, and—far more worried about his future chances of getting it up than by any fears about his mortality—he had decided to return to London for the dreaded operation. I was full of sympathy and said all the usual useless rubbish about how I was sure everything would be fine, and not to worry, and that I would call him soon to see how it had all gone. But he beat me to it.
Freddie’s relationship with the telephone was not an easy one—he preferred letters—and he was especially mistrustful of transatlantic calls, all those complicated codes, all that unnecessary expense. So I was stunned when he telephoned me a couple of weeks later, and even more surprised to hear him sounding so cheerful and chatty. Yes, the operation had been a huge success; all his friends had come to see him; the surgeon had been at Oxford and had asked Freddie to sign his copy of Language, Truth and Logic; Nick had brought him smoked salmon and Vouvray; the pretty young nurses had brought him The Times every morning—it all sounded more like a hotel than a hospital. And even more like a hotel when Freddie revealed the high point of his visit to this delightful establishment. The surgeon was not just an admirer of Freddie’s philosophy, he was clearly a genius with the scalpel, too, or maybe it was the patient whose own powers knew no bounds. Whichever way, the end result was the same—and more than satisfactory. In fact the reason for this amazing transatlantic call was so that I could be the first to know just how satisfactory. It was unclear which of his lady visitors had won the jackpot, but apparently almost as soon as she had arrived, with a couple of well-chosen books from Hatchards and a nice fruit basket from Fortnum’s next door, she had been bundled into the alluring hospital bathroom, where they had feasted, not upon nectarines or figs but upon each other. I could hear Freddie smiling down the telephone with pleasure as he told me the story, and I hoped he could hear me smiling back when I said how incredibly happy I was too.
NOW THAT MY MOTHER was going to La Migoua with Hylan, the house became a place they could escape to, sometimes alone in the spring, and in the summer with Nick and Alex. It was transformed from a crowded barracks ruled over by an unpredictable sergeant major into a charming love nest. Who knows what our neighbors Monsieur and Madame Tricon made of this abrupt shift in Monsieur and Madame Ayer’s arrangements, but I imagine they just poured themselves another glass of vin d’orange and sighed, concluding not for the first time that “Les Anglais sont complètement fous. Mais assez gentils, quand même.” And it wasn’t just the atmosphere of the house that was transformed.
Hylan soon found himself on the roof replacing tiles, on a ladder painting shutters, and most ambitious of all, putting up a new ceiling of slatted bamboo in the top-floor rooms. The bamboo looked pretty enough, but how was poor Hylan to know that in creating this bijou effect he was actually building a well-appointed apartment complex for several generations of loirs? It took a while for these creatures, which look like obese dormice with fluffy foxy tails, to discover their new home, but over the years they settled down very comfortably in the spacious gap between the bamboo and the roof. Without access to either birth control or toilets, they scuttled around up there, multiplying at an alarming Malthusian rate, and quite soon their shit started to stream down through the slats. The last time I went to the house, the first few days were spent scraping it off the bedcovers, scrubbing the walls, picking it out of the rush matting on the floor, and attempting, none too successfully, to winkle this semi-fossilized crap—I used a knife-teaspoon combo—out of the drain in the shower. But the bamboo still looks lovely.
In 1973 my mother’s holiday in France was cut short because the BBC had asked her
to go 15 rounds with that dreadful right-wing Catholic American pig, William Buckley. It is supposed to be recorded on August 22nd. I would imagine he’ll wipe the floor with me—he even ties Gore Vidal into furious little snarling knots, and I haven’t nearly the smooth patience of Gore. Also I don’t know anything—and he, alas, though nasty is extremely well informed.
Her misgivings seem to have been justified, and she wrote in a letter to Freddie:
I did my television thing yesterday, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very good. He filled me so full of paralyzed despair that I just couldn’t work up the energy to fight him. Even the one time I had him cornered, I couldn’t find the necessary oomph to deliver the coup de grace. Frightfully depressing it all was, not just being face to face with such a lunatic, but to discover I had lost the will to kill. “Why bother?” was all I felt, and that is, in such situations, the downhill road to nowhere. What an awful man. A loony. And though pretty, not nearly as pretty as John Lindsay.
The ill-fated debate between the pig and the sergeant major was also aired in the United States, and soon after, my mother received a postcard from an old friend: “We just finished watching you try to make conversation with William Buckley and I thought we should tell you how lovely you looked and how well you talked. You were extremely pretty on color TV and intelligent, and perhaps best of all, civil to Mr. Buckley.” She quoted this message in her letter to Freddie and added:
So I think it is v. kind of them but I much fear that when people start telling you (me, especially) how pretty you looked then it perhaps says all there is to say about the quality of the discussion. However I have stopped chewing my bottom lip over it as there is nothing I could do about it at the time, and even less now, so piss to it.
ONCE VANESSA had gotten up the courage to explain to her husband that she would be spending the summer at La Migoua with her lover from now on, there was an awkward day when the two couples overlapped at the house. My mother always called it Checkpoint Charlie. The first time Vanessa came it was Hylan’s job to teach her the driving situation (she was, after all, Freddie’s chauffeur), and they set off together in the car so he could show her how to get to the beach, the Bandol dump, and where to shop, leaving my parents sitting under the lime tree, chatting away as if nothing had changed. (One of the things that certainly hadn’t altered at all was my mother’s venom toward her rival, which despite Hylan remained as poisonous as ever. I remember being at the house when she discovered a particularly fetching apron—incredibly short with flirtatious girly ruffles, like something from a bad French farce—in the kitchen cupboard. Clearly bought by Vanessa, who was utterly, irredeemably feminine and had a tiny waist, the offensive piece of fabric was instantly converted into a rag for cleaning the floor, and as I recall, the lavatories too.)
With the summer divided up between his parents, Nick’s life at La Migoua took on a more serene aspect. His mother’s unpredictable moods had been tempered by love, and she and Hylan tended to leave him alone to do what he wanted. Which sometimes was drugs. “Neglect” is just another word for freedom in a fourteen-year-old’s mind, and Nick had plenty of both. One summer he had been lucky enough to find a stash of grass, hidden away in some secret place, so secret that Hylan had forgotten where he had put it, and ever the generous host, Nick was able to treat his friends to several satisfying joints up in his sweltering room under the shit-covered bamboo ceiling.
However, at this point I have to admit that firsthand knowledge of what my curious, fractured family got up to at La Migoua for the next few years is kind of sketchy. Reports would reach me from the various players in the drama—complaints from Nick about Vanessa: “Her arms are so skinny she can’t even carry the shopping bags, so I have to. I wish Beatrice was here.” Or from my mother, delirious descriptions of Hylan’s prowess behind the wheel/grouting tiles/making mint juleps for the Tricons with Jack Daniel’s they’d brought from London. All the things Freddie had never done: “Jesus, it’s like being on a real vacation.” Well, not so much for Nick and Alex. While Hy
lan was busy slaving away at his various domestic duties and my mother was lounging in the hammock, an ashtray and a stack of English newspapers by her side, they waited sullenly, and in vain, to be taken to the beach.
I was so happy not to be there.
ONE NIGHT during my last year at Oxford I met a man at a party and was surprised to wake up the next morning in an unfamiliar bedroom overlooking the High Street. I’ve heard it said, usually by people far better behaved than I am, that something that starts this way will never lead anywhere, but who knows how the mysterious affairs of the heart and body work—or don’t? All I know is that Tom—for that turned out to be my unfamiliar companion’s name—and I have been entwined, in some funny fashion or another, ever since.
Half Spanish and wholly Catholic, he felt doubly foreign to me. Having lived a sheltered life inside my family’s atheist anti-Franco cocoon, I’m not sure that I actually knew anybody who believed in God, and I had certainly never been anywhere near Spain—which only fueled my fascination with both these forbidden subjects. The day after my final exam I flew to Madrid.
Tom was staying at his grandmother’s apartment, an enormous, gloomy maze of a place on the Paseo de la Castellana, where an endless crusade against the sun was fought daily. Heavily armed with shutters, blinds, lace curtains, and swathes of thick brocade, the servants battled away at those twin scourges, heat and light, and despite the odd setback—I did once see a shaft of sunlight break through the defenses and illuminate a strip of dusty parquet—mostly won. Señora Marañón, who must have been about ninety at the time, inhabited an armchair in a corner of one of the smaller salons, and when I was introduced to her, she smiled and slowly turned her fragile tortoise head up toward me as I leaned down to kiss her withered cheeks. “Encantada,” she whispered and reached over to clutch my arm, hanging on tightly, as if she wanted to confide some secret, but then, thinking better of it, eventually allowed me to go. Above her on the faded green velvet wall hung a crucifix; its doll-like Christ, carved in ivory, slim and elongated as an El Greco, slumped against his mahogany cross.