by Gully Wells
As Beatrice had predicted, the poached penis was an enormous success, and we even managed to persuade Nick and Ollie Haycraft to taste it by telling them that it was very special chicken.
“Darling, I completely forgot, you’ve been in Arles looking at those wonderful Roman ruins. I don’t imagine they have changed much, have they?”
Before Freddie could launch into quoting Gibbon, which I knew he was about to, I quickly said, “No, not a lot. But, guess what, we stayed at that hotel, le Nord-Pinus, on the place du Forum, and from our balcony you could reach out and actually touch the remains of that huge temple. Can you imagine?”
Imagining things he hadn’t actually experienced himself was not Freddie’s forte, and he looked puzzled. It was unclear whether he even remembered the hotel, and he certainly registered no interest whatsoever in the pronouns “we” and “our.” Maybe he was being tactful. But I doubted it. His curiosity about the lives of others had always been minimal to nonexistent, which in this particular case suited me fine. David was my secret, and we inhabited a world of our own. We had no friends in common (Francette was the sole exception, but she was hardly his friend, since they had only met a couple of times, and anyway, what about those pesky Palestinians?), we never went to parties together, I’d never seen his house, nor had he been to mine. The comforting, dreary quotidian aspects of life never intruded on our little adulterous universe; no supermarkets, no bills to be paid (at least not by me), no leaky roof or blocked toilet, no cooking or washing up.
The cooking was the only part that I missed.
ABOUT TWO WEEKS LATER we were all sitting on the terrace at drinks time, when Freddie suddenly said to nobody in particular, “One thing I don’t understand is why Francette finds it necessary to keep shouting through the window, ‘C’est l’Israélien.’ Has she gone mad?”
“Probably. Would you like another pastis?”
Freddie seemed perfectly satisfied with my answer, and I took his glass and went inside to the kitchen. But of course it was quite simple. Since we had no telephone, and Francette did, when David called she was far too lazy to walk around the corner and get me, so she shouted through Freddie’s window instead. From the beginning Francette had been very strict about her telephone: We were allowed to use it only in cases of dire emergency. But if a call from David wasn’t an emergency, I didn’t know what was. Luckily she agreed.
“And Freddie, since we’re talking about Francette’s madness, have you ever been to Israel?”
“Darling, I did once go to a philosophical conference in Jerusalem, and I don’t mind telling you that I’d be quite happy if I never went back. It was frightfully hot and noisy, and Israelis have the most appalling manners. I do hope you’re not thinking of going there, because I doubt you’ll like it any more than I did. Of course, for atavistic reasons, I’ve always supported Israel in its conflicts with the Arabs, and I do think that the creation of a Jewish homeland was important.”
He stopped for a moment, took a sip of pastis, and continued: “But Isaiah has always felt much more strongly about Israel than I do. Maybe because he wasn’t born in England as I was, possibly because both his parents were Jewish, unlike mine. I’m not sure what the reason is. But I suspect that for him Zionism is as much an emotional as it is an intellectual concept. Not a view that I share.”
Oh yes, Freddie, it’s those emotions that will get you every time.
While we were having breakfast the next morning, a newly energized and discreet Francette came into the kitchen, closely followed by her repulsive dog, and whispered in my ear, “C’est le bel Israélien.”
I leaped up and ran out the door, leaving her in charge of making Freddie a fresh pot of tea and his second piece of toast.
Le Mari
YOU MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT that with love, fortune, fame, a devoted nest of friends, and a couple of occasionally charming children that my mother would have been content, even happy. But there you would be mistaken. She was as funny and outrageous as ever, she went to parties, she gave parties, she appeared on television, she had written a best seller, and for the first time in her life she could buy just about anything she pleased for anybody who pleased her. Freddie knew his place, caused no trouble, and slept without complaint on his collapsed mattress (the legs had fallen off his bed long ago, transforming it into an impromptu futon) downstairs. She had the house in France, where she could be alone with Hylan whenever she felt like it. She was a success, and she had a man who loved her. What more could a girl possibly want?
A naive question, I know, and one posed not by me but in a letter from an old boyfriend called Archie Albright, who lived in New York and had just read Jane:
You play games with me when you reject the suggestion that it is remotely autobiographical … but it is a very good book, and literary critic though I’m not, I have always regarded you as one of the most articulate people I have ever known. You use words, even little ones, so incredibly well. Anyway, I am enormously pleased for you. Do you feel any different—do you feel happier—to be rich and “successful” at the same time?
Even when my mother’s life was going better than she could ever have dreamed it would, the furies were still there. Her volatility and bouts of depression were merely signs that they were getting bored and restless, and felt like a bit of an outing in the nice fresh air aboveground. Of course not everybody was allowed to meet them. They restricted their social visits to my mother’s immediate family, and to a tiny handful of fortunate friends.
Much as Hylan loved my mother—and he truly did—he was sometimes stunned by her behavior.
“The fearlessness and wit could instantly morph into a nasty remark which would be amazingly mindless in terms of collateral damage.”
My mother, quite naturally, was better acquainted with the furies than anybody else, and had tried over the years, with the help of shrinks, to evict these troublesome guests from her house. When I was about fifteen she once said that she had never found a shrink as smart as she was. So what was the point?
At eighteen my mother had written a long letter to her closest friend, Bunny Lang, who was one of the very few people who had ever been allowed behind the fortifications. In it she described her family and childhood.
Darling, you hit your head square on numerous nails in your analysis of me—however what I add up to is, and always has been very clear to me. I was a very unhappy, sensitive little girl—I was gawky for years and was continually overshadowed by my brother whom everyone adored and who deserved all the good things he got—that I wanted. My father and mother hated each other for as long as I can remember; my father drank heavily and my mother has never been completely well, and recently has been getting worse rapidly. [She must have meant her mental, not physical health. Ox-strong, my grandmother died at ninety-eight.]
My brother had—call it character—enough to study, never waste time etc and of course has made a success of it—I didn’t. We didn’t have much money and it was a struggle to keep him in college, so I gave up and laughed my way through high school—literally never brought a book home—and decided I would get the love and security I longed for in my own way.
Once years ago my mother told me she despised me … and it did something to an eleven year old that could never be repaired. After the life my mother and father have had together I don’t have much faith in love. I don’t have much faith in anything. I am a very discouraged, bewildered person who seems doomed to be unhappy.
I know I am an awful listener but I don’t mean to be rude. And I admit that I don’t like to be told things—the usual way of people who realize they are not the hot shots that they try desperately to believe they are. Stanislavsky again—“If you believe it, the audience will.”
So even at eighteen she knew she had to be an actress. A glittering carapace was constructed to impress and entertain the world, and if other people fell for it, which they did, maybe she could trick herself into believing in it as well. But not really. She was not
deluded, and I think that as she got older and life got tougher, it became harder and harder to keep the mask in place. The furies would go walkabout more frequently, and the strain of trying to contain them must have been exhausting.
From an early age I remember being told by my mother that my grandmother was crazy (my aunt and uncles believed this too) and not just insane but nasty, bitter, destructive, and foul-tempered as well. She screamed at her sweet, harmless husband (no wonder the poor man consoled himself with cocktails) and withheld from her children the love and encouragement they craved. Apparently her own mother had also been “unbalanced,” and had treated her family in much the same way. Could this delightful duo’s behavior be attributed in part to their shared genes? A terrifying thought that surely must have crossed my mother’s mind and was probably instantly suppressed. Oscar Wilde (so clever, so funny, so tragic) had always been one of her special heroes, and she loved to quote his awful prophecy about mothers and daughters, making me squeal, right on cue, in mock horror. But when I quoted it back to her, she didn’t laugh.
Like that maddening little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, my mother could skip from one extreme to the other—leapfrogging right over that dull bit in between—with greater agility and conviction than anybody I’ve ever known. Good Mummy rescued a penniless young friend from a dismal summer in London by sending him a plane ticket so he could come and stay with us in France for as long as he liked. She visited an old friend in the hospital, bringing some of her own homemade leek-and-potato soup—as well as a china bowl, a linen napkin, and an elegant Georgian silver spoon to eat it with. (The spoon was left behind as a birthday present.) Wildly generous, when she went shopping for herself—whether for shoes at Charles Jourdan, cashmere sweaters at Harrods, or a painting at Bonham’s auction house—she never could resist getting something for her sister and me, as well as various friends along the way. Checks were sent off to any organization that helped animals, cash was surreptitiously concealed inside an innocent container (once she painted a walnut shell gold, hung it on the tree with all the other ornaments, and when I opened it there was a hundred-pound note), and at Christmas no lonely soul was safe from her absolute insistence that they come and spend the day with us.
Even though she was an actress, the kindness and generosity were not acts. She knew what it felt like to be unhappy, insecure, and to have no money, and she had a visceral empathy for, and a desire to help, anybody who found themselves inhabiting the despairing underbelly of life. Her acting talents were confined to dazzling the world with her wit and brilliance. And since she was a natural writer, her letters were employed to this end. Some people, like my father, stuck them in leather-bound albums; some read hilarious extracts out loud to their families; while others kept them tied up in ribbons in old shoeboxes, and after her death many of them were returned to me, where they now live in a basket at the back of my closet. Years ago I remember running into one of her friends at a party in New York, who couldn’t stop talking about all the wonderful letters my mother had written her, which were carefully preserved in a special drawer in her desk.
“You are so lucky, you must have many more of them than I do!”
But no, I don’t. Curiously I have none at all, and neither does my brother or my aunt. The letters were part of the glittering carapace, so what would have been the point in sending them to people who had seen through it long ago?
LOOKING BACK, I had no understanding at the time of the depth of my mother’s discontent (Hylan was probably the only person who did), and with all the insouciant, and I hope forgivable, selfishness of youth I was far more concerned with what was going on in my own life. Being George Weidenfeld’s publicity director may have been fun—the books, the parties, the fascinating writers—but it was starting to bore me. Maybe I should look for a new job? A friend, Jerry Kiehl, whom I had met in Paris while staying with the triste Monsieur Bretiane, was one of the producers of a huge, ambitious documentary project called The World at War. Whenever we had lunch in some Italian dive in Soho, l would listen jealously as he told me all about his research at the British Library, the interview he had done with Albert Speer, and his discovery, in the bowels of the Imperial War Museum, of some never-before-seen footage of Hitler stomping around Paris with his favorite architect. Yes, this is what I should be doing. Instead of hustling television producers to interview argumentative Israeli generals, I would switch sides and become a producer myself.
The host of the only program on television that took a serious interest in the arts, he also somehow found time to write searing, sensitive books, in the manner of D. H. Lawrence, set somewhere in the north of England—not that I had bothered to read any of them. He was about six feet tall, with eyes every bit as sensitive as his novels, and hair as thick and dark, but far more lustrous, than any pit pony’s mane. Just the man I was looking for. He may not have known it yet, but he was destined to be the magic key that would open up my new career in television. Armed with a glass of warm white wine and a laughable amount of misplaced confidence, never stopping to think whether the gentleman in question had the slightest interest in meeting me, I barged through the crowded party and introduced myself. Sadly, our conversation never did get around to what job on his program might best suit my talents, because he made a lightning escape, leaving me alone with the man he’d been standing with.
From that moment until the end of the evening we never stopped talking. It was that absolutely fatal combination of cleverness and funniness, but in its most extreme form. Lunch the next day turned into lunch once, sometimes twice a week, and still we never shut up. We always went to the same restaurant, Bianchi’s on Frith Street, we always sat at the same corner table upstairs where nobody could see us (known as the adulterers’ table, except we weren’t), and I always had the same dish (brains au beurre noir—why waste time with the menu, when we could be talking and laughing instead?). Peter worked at the BBC, where he made documentaries, apparently about anything that caught his fancy. How about a series on the alternative press around the world? We’ll get Harry Evans to front it, and I’ll go to San Francisco and New York to do Rolling Stone, then I’ll need at least ten days in Paris for Le Canard Enchaîné, after that I fly direct to Mexico City for Proceso, and from there I’ll come back to London to do Private Eye?
“What a brilliant idea! Off you go, you clever chap, and don’t worry about how long it takes or what it costs. Nothing but the best for the BBC.”
That seemed to be how it worked.
Our innocent lunches went on for several months until one day something changed. The fateful turning point came after a particularly lengthy session, involving too much wine, the usual brains (his and the poor dead calf’s one on my plate), and a meandering conversation encompassing Freud, Peter’s father’s childhood in Vienna, his halcyon days at Harvard studying with Noam Chomsky, and his mother’s relationship with Oskar Kokoschka, who had painted her portrait. Christ, it was after four, time to get back to the Weidenfeld office above the clapped-out movie theater in Clapham Junction.
Rather gallantly he offered to drive me in his brand-new claret-colored MG (affectionately called the “Jew’s canoe” by my dear friend Emma Soames, which only reinforced Peter’s theory about the amiable, happy-go-lucky anti-Semitism of the English upper classes. Still, he did laugh.). The “Jew’s canoe” weaved its way toward the South Bank via Parliament Square, where it stopped obediently at a red light beside the sober, gray walls of the Treasury building. Then, quite suddenly, its driver leaped out, leaving the door wide open and the engine running. What the hell was he doing? I couldn’t drive, the light was about to change, and the cars behind us had already started honking.
A quick pee—that was all it took to make me fall in love. The chutzpah, the recklessness, he’d taken a chance—it was exactly what my mother would have done if only she’d been a man.
“Ooh, he’s got ever such a nice voice, that fellow who keeps calling for you. I’ve
always been partial to a man’s voice; tells you everything you need to know about them. I think you should marry him.”
Maureen, the kindly and, as it turned out, prescient lady at the office switchboard, spoke the truth. Peter had the most seductive voice on earth, and she hadn’t even heard what he could do with it beyond, “Please may I speak to Gully?” And she hadn’t seen his hands, as beautiful as a Michelangelo drawing, or his almond-shaped green eyes, or his smile. She didn’t know that when I was with him I felt as though I’d finally come home to where I belonged.
OH, TO BE YOUNG, in love, and in Paris—and I was. No more “Towering Infernos,” but rather an old town house (now a hotel) just off the rue Jacob that had been divided up somewhat haphazardly into a warren of rooms, wallpapered in faded toile de Jouy, with uncertain plumbing and a cagelike elevator that cranked its way up to the top floor, where we collapsed in a daze of happiness on our sagging bed. Once again Peter had come up with an idea for a documentary that the BBC could not resist. Sitting around one afternoon, with an inspiring bottle of Glenlivet between them on the desk, he had told the head of his department about a book called Montaillou, by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie that he had just finished reading.
The title referred to a village in Languedoc where, during the early fourteenth century, Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers (later Pope Benedict XII), had led the Church’s inquisition into the inhabitants’ obstinate dedication to the Cathar heresy. While snuffling around in the Vatican archives, Le Roy Ladurie had found the bishop’s astonishingly detailed notes on the case, which illuminated every aspect of these poor, deluded, and doomed peasants’ lives—what they ate, whom they slept with, how many sheep they had, all their innermost desires and beliefs—and from this had fashioned his brilliant book. Peter was going to take Ladurie back to Montaillou, where they would shoot some footage of sheep and goats wandering about the hills, and talk at great length to the descendants of these brave heretics, most of whom still spoke the ancient local language (La langue d’Oc) and bore the same names as their ancestors.