by Gully Wells
Now, if that didn’t keep the viewers glued to their television screens, Peter didn’t know what would.
“Sounds splendid! We’re bloody well not going to be dragged down to the level of those ghastly commercial channels. We need to maintain our standards. Nothing but the best for the BBC [etc.].”
Peter could not have agreed more.
MONSIEUR LE PROFESSEUR was everything a distinguished historian should be. Silver-haired, sexy in an elderly Frenchman way—tweed jacket, suede patches at the elbow, mouse-colored corduroy trousers, an old Hermès tie—supremely erudite, never boring, and delighted to take us to his local bistro for dinner. Bien sûr, he knew my Oxford tutor Theodore Zeldin, and yes, of course Claude Lévi-Strauss was an old friend, who had inspired him to set forth on his particular path, uncovering the hidden lives of forgotten ordinary people who had been unjustly neglected by old-fashioned historians’ obsession with the nefarious doings of kings, queens, and emperors. Oui, s’il vous plaît, a silver platter of oysters (resting on their green mattress of popping seaweed), a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and then we will look at the menu again. Would Mademoiselle prefer the civet de lièvre or the canard aux navets, or maybe she was more in the mood for a simple coq au vin? Mademoiselle was lost in love, for Peter, for the Professor, for the two sad ladies at the next table, for the fussy old waiter, for the drooping tulips in a jug at the end of the bar, for Paris, for the entire world, and could not have cared less what she ate next—or if she ate anything else ever again.
Sometime later that night we decided to get married.
LIKE ANY AMBITIOUS Bostonian matron in the Gilded Age who had dragged her daughter to London for the season, my mother assumed I would “marry well.” She had given me all the things she’d never had as a child—pretty clothes, deep love, an education, stability, and an easy entrée into the sunny uplands of London social life. And what did I do? I went to Paris with some man she had never met and came back and told her I was going to marry him.
“Is he rich?”
A very good question. I’d forgotten to ask. But I had to admit (but not to her) that it seemed unlikely. The BBC was definitely a bad sign, and so were the émigré parents, who had left Vienna just before the Anschluss to make a new life in London. Can’t pack a castle in a suitcase, always assuming you had one to pack. In fact Peter’s mother came from what I suppose you’d call the landed gentry, and before the war there had been lots of servants, a brick factory, and a hunting lodge on a small estate in northern Germany, but by the time Mr. Hitler had finished with his shenanigans, everything had disappeared. Peter’s father’s story was even worse. A penniless Viennese Jew (he had been even more of a hit with his wife’s mother than Peter was with mine) who through his not inconsiderable wits had turned himself into a publisher. Not an easy journey and, alas, not necessarily a wildly profitable one either. It was not a pretty picture.
But what about the house in Hampstead? Apparently it was so big that Peter had divided it into two flats, and kindly allowed his elderly, and presumably hard-up, parents to live in the spacious ground-floor one, which opened onto a lovely garden full of apple trees. Sometimes we would spend the night there, and as I nodded off to sleep, I would think of those nice people in their cozy flat downstairs, and marvel that they had managed to produce a son with such a huge heart, overflowing with so much parental love. What a good father he would be to our children. (The situation, oddly enough, turned out to be quite the reverse. In fact, it belonged to his kind parents who allowed Peter to live in the upstairs flat, but when they died, we inherited the house, so what was a mere slip of the tongue?)
However, the fact remained that Peter was not a half black socialist duke who had set up a foundation to save Africa’s entire population of dogs from disease and starvation and had recently been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And for that my mother never forgave him.
THE WIND RUSTLED in the willows, boxing-glove clouds scudded by, baby ducks bobbed about in the river, and a beet-faced man in a boat called Fancy That chugged by and turned to wave at the wedding party lined up on the dock. The bride was leaning over to adjust the sash on the little girl’s dress, so she didn’t see him, but the tall older gentleman with a sunny wide-open smile—must be her dad—waved back, and so did all the others, except for that lady in the sunglasses, who didn’t look too pleased with the proceedings and kept her arms folded in front of her. The man in the boat thought back to his own wedding day, and felt a twinge of masculine sympathy for the nice-looking young man with the flower in his buttonhole—must be the groom—who had no bloody idea what he had just let himself in for.
Somewhat surprisingly lunch moved along smoothly from champagne on the terrace, with something or other to eat in the dining room in between, and then on to more champagne with dessert. The two publishers—Peter’s father and Colin Haycraft—talked books, my mother-in-law charmed Freddie, and Nick, an assiduous scholar of all things punk, kept some sort of conversation going with my Wells brother, Christopher, an international relations major at Columbia. And there were my mother and father laughing away together—she even had her hand on his arm—the thing that every child of divorced parents always longs to see. Peter was chatting with my beautiful stepmother, and I gazed around the table, lost in some inane reverie about the miraculous melding together of all the members of my funny family.
Wreathed in yellow rosebuds, pale green leaves trailing prettily across its snowy icing, the wedding cake rose up in sedate tiers, a silver knife sitting by its side. My father got to his feet, tapped the side of his glass, and I heard my mother mutter, “Oh Christ, he’s going to make a speech.” Yes, that did seem to be his boring, conventional, sentimental idea. The father of the bride had come flying across the Atlantic for his only daughter’s wedding, and he’d quite like to say a few words on this happy occasion, if that was okay with his ex-wife.
A few months later Peter persuaded the BBC that he would be just the man to run their office in New York.
“What a good idea! There’s quite a nice house in Greenwich Village that comes with the job; don’t stint on the entertaining, frightfully important to show the BBC flag in America. I’m sure your wife will be a splendid hostess. Off you both go. Bon voyage!”
New York
DO ALL SANE—OR EVEN SEMI-SANE—children know they need to run away from home? I think so. Hardly bothering to wave good-bye, indifferent to our parents’ feelings, unable to imagine that they might miss us, thinking only of our own desires—and self-preservation—we flee, and sometimes forget to come back. And then if we’re lucky, and haven’t made a total mess of our own children, they do the same thing to us. Many years ago Anna Haycraft explained to me how the world works. She said it was really quite simple: Men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters. That’s just the way it is, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it. Not being a mother at the time, and crazily in love—as usual—with some man or another, I couldn’t begin to understand what she was talking about. But now I know precisely what she meant. Men love women—that’s obvious, and quite right too—then the women have babies, and become totally besotted with them—that’s natural, but not so much fun for the fathers—and then the children fall for a furry animal, and the next time you turn around they’re off. Peter and I just upped and left, never stopping to think that my mother, Freddie, and both his parents would all grow old and die in London while we were gone.
At first I was mystified by my happiness. Was it just the thrill of starting a new life with a new husband in a new city, or the scent of the wisteria blossoms that floated up to our bedroom from the terrace outside, or being in New York, where I couldn’t ride in a cab without hanging my head out the window like some mad panting dog so I could see every single building all the way to the top? No, something else was going on: I had escaped, I was independent, I had my own house, my own telephone number (really grown-up, that bit), and my mother wasn’t
stomping around upstairs.
I arrived at Bank Street eight o’clock sharp, in the very last of the light. Overhead the sky still scintillated, but there was a film of green up there among the pinks and blues, an avocado tinge of beautifying city sickness.… Bank Street looked like a chunk of sentimental London, black railings and pale blossoms girding the bashful brownstones, even a cautious whiff of twig and leaf in the night-scented air.
Not my words but Martin Amis’s description in Money of the street where we lived. The house had been thrown in with the BBC job, and Martin was right, it was “a chunk of sentimental London,” which must have been why I felt so at home there. The stairs were crooked, the windows didn’t fit, the roof occasionally leaked, the bathrooms and kitchen had been put in before the war, but what did any of that matter as you drifted off to sleep to the sound of owls hooting from the trees in the garden below? In the hot jungly New York summer nights there were even mosquitoes—and if that isn’t the ultimate urban luxury, then I don’t know what is.
Before we had children the house on Bank Street operated as a hotel for our friends. Some stayed for a night or two, others for a few weeks, and one—Christopher Hitchens—lived with us for six months when he first arrived in New York. The previous December, Peter and I had fled Christmas in London—when the entire place packs up, forcing you back into the familial bosom for perhaps longer than you might wish—and had borrowed a creaky old apartment in Greenwich Village, where we happily ignored the whole wretched business. Christopher must have had the same clever idea, because soon after we arrived we ran into him with Anna Wintour in Mortimer’s, a restaurant on the Upper East Side owned by a poisonous, snobby old queen who placed his favored customers up front where they could be seen but allowed riffraff like us to lurk at the back. Carried away by the glamour (could that be Jacqueline Onassis walking by on her way to the ladies’ room?) and the energy (you could actually get a cab on Christmas Day!) of the city, the three of us (Anna was already living in New York) decided this was clearly the place to be. And so the “pact of Mortimer’s” was sealed. Peter got the BBC to deliver, and Christopher persuaded Victor Navasky, the kindly editor of The Nation, that his publication would sparkle even more brightly with the addition of the Hitch.
Christopher was the ideal guest: hardly ever there, didn’t eat, bought his own whiskey and cigarettes, spent no time in the bathroom, and—this was easily the best part—he made us laugh. The room he occupied was called Smike’s parlor, in honor of the pathetic stunted Smike, who is rescued from Dotheboys Hall by Nicholas Nickleby, and whose sad end allows Dickens to wallow in yet another of his long-winded, mawkish deathbed scenes. The longer Christopher stayed, the more Smike-like his parlor became, with cigarette butts floating in old mugs of tea, clothes draped over the radiators, the desk piled high with papers, until the cleaning lady decided it might be simpler for everyone if she bypassed the room entirely.
In those days before cell phones, part of my role as hostess was to act as an answering service, and nobody got more calls than Christopher. Usually his friends were perfectly polite, but there was one especially pushy lady, a real ratbag who looked like a snake and masqueraded as a writer (her first novel had been snapped up by a publishing house owned by her hapless husband) and never stopped calling. I suppose she must have had designs on Smike’s undernourished body. Whatever her motives, the old—she was well past forty—hellhag rang one morning and was not best pleased to be told that the object of her desire was in the shower.
“Okay. Just say it’s Patsy. I’ll hold on until you get him out.”
I made a gargoyle face into the receiver and said I’d be sure to trot along and fetch him immediately. The bathroom door was ajar, so I pushed it open and there, protruding from the shower curtain, was Smike’s paw holding a cigarette, with a neat little pile of ash on the tiled floor below. Oh Smike, must you?
As a guest Martin was no more trouble than Christopher and just as much fun. If the two of them happened to be in New York at the same time, they liked to meet for a late hangover-haunted lunch at some Italian place in the Village, and then they would while away the afternoon at the Show World Center in Times Square where—boys will be boys—the entertainment consisted of watching naked girls dancing. Naively I envisaged a stage with prancing showgirls in sequined G-strings and stilettos, silk tassels glued to their nipples; but it wasn’t like that at all. Apparently the management thoughtfully provided each member of the audience with his own cozy little cubicle, furnished quite simply with a chair (upholstered in plastic), a box of Kleenex, and a window whose shutter was somehow connected to a ravenous machine that had to be fed a constant diet of tokens if you wanted to experience Sheri in all her glory.
Whoever came to stay with us was always included in our social life, as we were in theirs. Sometimes we had dinner with old friends like Anna—Hitch had accompanied her to our wedding and used to call her the “foal” on account of her ludicrously long, slim legs and the thick chestnut bangs that almost, but not quite, covered her eyes—sometimes we went to an awful pinball parlor on University Place where Martin could indulge his addiction to video games, played on clanging, fridge-size precursors to Xbox, and sometimes we went to parties. One memorable evening Martin’s date decided she had something better to do with her time than see him, so instead of a solitary return visit to the pinball parlor, he decided to come out with us.
The apartment occupied the top floor of a building somewhere in Chelsea. Its hallway, illuminated by a fizzing fluorescent light, was painted a dispiriting pea green, and, just to add to its charms, the architect had forgotten to put in an elevator. Martin manfully took the lead and started the trudge up, stopping for a reviving wheeze on each landing, until we finally heard the distant beckoning sound of too many people crammed into too small a space, trying to have too good a time. Standing by the open door was our hostess, dressed in an off-the-shoulder ruffled chiffon number, a necklace of shells, beads, and seedpods draped across her freckly décolletage, and a bloodred hibiscus flower tucked optimistically behind one ear.
“Hello, I’m Martin Amis.”
Not necessarily the words she wanted to hear. Not the ideal greeting from the man you had slept with just a few days before.
Still, you could see how the poor fellow might have become confused: “The thing is she had her hair up, and it was rather dark at the top of those stairs.”
SOON AFTER we settled into our apartment on Bank Street with the bumblebees and owls and mosquitoes, I received a truly alarming letter from my mother. At first I didn’t quite understand what it was about, so I read it again slowly. It seemed that she had finally had enough. She was done with snobby old England, she was done with that old fart Freddie, she had sold our nice old house, she was getting divorced, and she and Hylan were about to board an ocean liner to start a new life in the New World. My job was to find them a sublet where they could live while they looked for a permanent home.
I settled on the Chelsea Hotel, an Edwardian pile on West Twenty-third Street, ten blocks from Bank Street. It was just their kind of place, and I knew they would be happy there. Diego Rivera had lived at the Chelsea in the thirties while he was painting his mural Man at the Crossroads for Rockefeller Center, which featured Lenin’s heroic visage and had caused such a furor that it was soon taken down; Sid Vicious died there; Dylan Thomas had had his very own “Smike’s parlor” there—but had chosen to die at the White Horse Tavern instead; Andy Warhol made his movie Chelsea Girls there, and Charles James, the great American couturier—this would surely appeal to Hylan—had also been a longtime resident. The ceilings were high, the rooms dark (perfect for my mother), it was cheap, and best of all, El Quijote, a lugubrious establishment on the ground floor, served lobsters for only six dollars a pound. My mother adored lobster.
Still, the question remained: What had possessed these two middle-aged people to abandon their lives—and children—in London and set out on this insane—at least in retr
ospect—enterprise? My mother had always been an adventuress, so maybe she felt she needed to reinvent herself one last time before it was too late; then again it may have been some nostalgic impulse that made her want to come home to the country she had left when she’d bought that one-way ticket to Paris in 1947. Many years later I talked to Hylan about it. “It was crazy, almost incomprehensible. We had conjured up this ‘other America’—it was pure fantasy. An escape from our slightly false, slightly ill-fitting Englishness that was so attractive, but was not really us.”
Whatever their motives and whatever I felt about my mother’s becoming my neighbor once again doesn’t really matter, because there were two other people—Nick and Alex—whose lives were turned upside down and inside out by their parents’ decision. Sixteen and seventeen, respectively, they had both been left behind in London. Nick told me later that he has no memory of talking to our mother about the move, and that he just arrived home one day to find that the house had been sold, although he does admit that it’s entirely possible that she had told him, and that he had subconsciously blocked out this unwelcome news. Either way it was a bit of a shock for a teenager whose difficulties with both school and drugs continued, and who now found himself homeless. Freddie had gone off to live with Vanessa in Fulham, and since his son had not been invited to join the lovebirds in their new nest, Nick went to stay with a series of friends. Some had managed to hang on to their parents and were still begrudgingly at home; others had had quite enough of the old codgers, and had taken over an abandoned building, where they lived as squatters. Alex’s situation wasn’t a whole lot better. At least she had Hylan’s flat—her own mother, being something of a free spirit, was living in a caravan in Holland at the time—and at least she had a nice boyfriend, Ronnie (now her husband), who moved in, helped with the bills, and gave her life some kind of stability.