by Gully Wells
I wish I could say things calmed down, but they didn’t. In fact they got much worse. Peter was still upset, and my mother was even more upset after I suggested she might like to stay with her friend Sylvia for a couple of nights; I slapped Nick on the face when he made it clear he wasn’t grief stricken over Vanessa (admittedly she had never been particularly nice to him, but she was dying); Katherine wasn’t feeling well (she too would be dead from cancer before the end of the year); and I was mostly in tears. Rebecca was the only one of us who laughed and burped and giggled her way through that nightmare summer.
The day after Peter drove his mother back to London, Freddie called again. It was over. The woman who had stolen her husband and destroyed her marriage was dead. Did that make my mother the victor? I wonder if that’s how it works. She was left standing on the battlefield, or rather stomping around her kitchen shouting at Francette’s dog, while her opponent was being carried off in preparation for her burial—surely that must count for something? And yet, if the battle had been about possessing Freddie’s heart and mind—which presumably it had—then Vanessa had triumphed long ago, and her victory over my mother was total and irrevocable.
“Tired and emotional” is an English euphemism—made up by Private Eye—for being drunk, but my mother and I started arguing at breakfast, so how could those nice, innocent bottles lined up on the sideboard have been to blame? Emotional I certainly was, and after the week that had just passed, utterly exhausted too. How it began hardly matters, but what fueled it was my dismay at her reaction to Vanessa’s death—the same hysterical impulse that had made me slap Nick. The absence of feeling, the refusal to even fake some empathy, the inability to utter the customary soothing platitudes—and I was demanding that from a person who had spent a lifetime scorning, and attacking anything she judged to be dull, hypocritical, predictable, and worst of all, conventional? Shows you how far gone I was.
I suddenly needed my daddy. The gentle, happy, smiling man who had stood up—“Oh Jesus, he’s going to make a speech”—and said all the usual cheerful boring things that a father should say at his daughter’s wedding. It had always been my plan to take Rebecca to see him that summer, and after lunch I went down to the travel agent in the village and booked us onto the night train from Toulon to Geneva, leaving at eleven that evening.
WHEN THEY HAD DECIDED to get married in Paris in 1949, my mother and father both secretly knew they had not made the wisest choice of partner, and as their friends had predicted, they were divorced within five years. The next time around their judgment had improved dramatically, and a few years later they both presented me with a perfectly chosen set of extra parents. Freddie was easy—we were already old friends by the time my mother married him—but what about this hussy in Washington, who had come out of nowhere to seduce my father away from me? I felt rather the same way about her as my mother had felt about Vanessa. A spoiled only child, I was not accustomed to sharing my toys.
The hussy was called Melissa. Tall, blond, and beautiful, she possessed some special witchy magic that, over one summer in Georgetown, transformed a disagreeable and extremely jealous nine-year-old into an adoring stepdaughter. She gave me a baby alligator, no bigger than a lizard, who liked to lounge around in the sun being fed steak tartare; she curled my eyelashes, put up my hair, painted a new face on top of my old one, hung pearls from my ears, dressed me up like a grand duchess, and took a picture that I still have. She picked leaves from the fig tree that the two Eves wore instead of bikinis as they sunbathed in the backyard, and she took me to a silly movie that we both agreed my father would hate, so we left him behind at home. I trusted her completely.
Twenty-five years later Melissa was working for the UN in Geneva, and my father was slowly restoring the old stone manor house they lived in at the edge of a village just over the border in France. She had become an ambassador, and while she was at the office my father went around banging nails into things, Rebecca splashed about naked in an old stone trough in the courtyard, and every day at one o’clock sharp he would put down his tools, which was the signal for us to get into the car and go out to lunch. We always went to the same place. Grass grew down the middle of the dirt road, oak trees joined together overhead, creating a cool green tunnel that we drove through, up and up, ears popping, until we reached the top, where a vast sunlit meadow suddenly opened up ahead of us.
A few wooden tables were set up under the apple trees—no chairs, just wobbly benches, and no kitchen—just a tiny cuckoo-clock chalet where apple-cheeked Madame stood in front of her stove, melting butter in a frying pan until it bubbled and frothed—omelette aux fines herbes was the only dish on the menu. Behind her, homemade fruit pies—apricot, cherry, plum—were lined up, cooling complacently on the shelf. Outside, Rebecca took a twirl on the swing, watched over by her handsome grandfather, while a ridiculously appealing puppy tumbled around in the daisy-strewn grass. “À table, à table,” I called out, clapping my hands. An earthenware jug full of wildflowers stood in the middle of the table along with a bottle of red wine, a platter of saucissons, cornichons, and a loaf of pain de campagne. Madame’s glistening omelette, scattered with fresh herbs, and a bowl of mesclun followed and after that we shared one of the complacent fruit pies. The whole thing was too good to be true—a cliché out of some ad campaign dreamed up by the local tourist board.
It was past three when we gathered ourselves together, said Merci beaucoup and Au revoir and À demain to Madame, and started back to the car. I turned around for one last look, and there at the edge of the woods, two sleek girls on two sleek horses were cantering across the meadow, hoping they were not too late for Madame’s famous omelette aux fines herbes.
Le Voyageur
HOW IT HAPPENED I DO NOT KNOW. But in 1979 I had sailed off to start a new life in America, leaving my family safely behind me in London, and then one way or another they all ended up in New York. The gloom and lobsters of the Chelsea Hotel had pleased my mother so much—or maybe she was just lazy—that she looked no farther and bought an apartment in a brownstone one block away on Twenty-second Street. And there two Americans who had finally come home set up house together, not in the New York of their imagination but in a harsh, expensive, ugly, and indifferent city where, instead of being feted by le tout Londres nobody paid much attention to them at all. Hylan wrote me a letter describing what a punishing adjustment it had been:
America was meant to be some kind of rebirth with little reference to the social reality. And the realities were so much more than we had imagined. Our little English souls were tried. Gone was the exceptionalism and in its place a sordid squalor that permeated everything we even vaguely understood. Holing up in the Chelsea Hotel with its shabby glamour, we struggled through our separate terrains, wandering New York like ghosts looking for a lost time. Dee was still funny through it all with that pilgrim’s resilience shielding, somewhat, a state of disbelief.…
The awful irony was that their “little English souls” were far more disturbed in New York than their big American souls had ever been in London. Playing the brash outsider while married to Freddie, whose fame had turned the lonely little boy at Eton with the funny name and looks into the consummate insider, was easy. As Lady Ayer (acquired when Freddie was knighted in 1970) she could piss all over anything and anybody she wanted from inside the tent—to borrow LBJ’s inimitable metaphor—but with Professor Sir Alfred Ayer removed from the construct, Dee Wells found herself entangled in a mess of soggy canvas and frayed ropes, in a strange campsite that she didn’t care for at all.
ALTHOUGH HIS GYPSY WANDERINGS around London, squatting with various friends, had come to an end when he moved in with Freddie and Vanessa, Nick was still having trouble staying in school and staying off drugs. He had dropped out of City and East College, then he had dropped back in, and by the time he left he had pulled off a major coup by failing to pass a single solitary exam. The drugs business was much more serious. If Nick didn’t break out of that world s
oon, he knew he would get sucked in deeper and deeper, until Christ-knows-what happened. Just about the only thing his parents agreed upon, as their divorce cranked its venomous way through the English legal system, was that their son needed to get out of London and make a fresh start in—where else?—New York.
Professionally Nick was willing to give anything a whirl. He started out with Larry’s Italian Ices, sold from a street cart, with Larry taking most of the profits, moved on to a similar arrangement with the Great Dane Pastry Company, which always made me think of those gigantic dogs but was actually a silly pun. Nick soon tired of being outside in the healthy fresh air all day long, and his next venture involved a vintage clothing store called Trash and Vaudeville on St. Mark’s Place, followed by a short spell at a rival establishment, Andy’s Chee-Pees, located on the same busy street. But maybe Nick wasn’t cut out for the schmatte business after all; perhaps home furnishings would be a better bet? And so it turned out to be. Having started as a stock boy at ABC Carpets, by the time he left he was the manager of the new furniture department.
Still, Nick knew that his picaresque adventures in the ice-cream, carpet, pastry, distressed-jeans, and sofa business couldn’t go on forever, so on a visit with his dad to Bard College, where Freddie was being given an honorary degree, a deal was made: If he could pass his SATs (which he did with no trouble at all) he could start at Bard in the fall of 1984. For an extremely bright kid whose education—through no fault of his own—had been a total dog’s dinner, Bard was just the answer. Apart from stuffing Nick’s head full of possibly useful, or at least interesting, notions and knowledge, it had the added advantage of getting him out of Twenty-second Street and two hundred miles away from his mother.
That first Christmas after Vanessa died, Freddie came to stay with us in New York. Deeply wounded, almost unable to function, he’d had a true coup de vieux and was suddenly a vulnerable old man in need of looking after. At home with baby Rebecca, my life floated by in a milky miasma watching my daughter lurch about the playground, cooking soothing nursery food, and teaching her to put bits of it in her mouth. When Freddie arrived in Bank Street, I just set another place at the table, and we all had shepherd’s pie and rice pudding together, served on Peter Rabbit plates. Without the strength to do much of anything beyond reading, and writing a bit, he would sit slumped on the sofa, an unopened book by his side, and stare despairingly out the window. How, alone in his midseventies, could he ever hope to rebuild a life for himself?
ONE DAY when Rebecca was well over two years old, Peter and Harry Evans had lunch, and as they parted on the sidewalk outside the Century Club on Forty-third Street, Harry asked him what I was up to. Not a lot, bugger all. She has sunk into a bottomless milky pit, lost her mind, and fallen in love with somebody else: “Actually, we’ve just [sic] had a baby, but I know she is really eager to get back to work.”
“Ask her to call me, please. I’m starting a new magazine.”
Until Harry came along, travel magazines published yawn-inducing rubbish cobbled together by sycophantic hacks who roamed the world, courtesy of the airlines and hotels they wrote about. But what if you did things in a completely different way? What if Condé Nast Traveler were to send writers incognito, pay its own way, tell it like it is, and run stories that sometimes scared advertisers away?
“You mean, Harry, I can call up any writer I like and send them anywhere in the world?”
Oh, this was going to be way more fun than dealing with those argumentative Israeli generals at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Edna O’Brien got tangled up in the romance of Dublin; V. S. Pritchett explored his private London; Peter Matthiessen trekked through the Himalayas; Norman Lewis, at age eighty, returned to the Ronda; Christopher Hitchens profiled the incomparable Patrick Leigh Fermor; Jan/James Morris described what it was like to travel both as a man and as a woman, as only she/he could have done; Christopher Buckley cruised the Amazon with Malcolm Forbes; Gregor von Rezzori went back in time to his childhood home in the Danube Delta—and so it went on. On a trip to London I discovered a book by Wilfred Thesiger, documenting his travels among the Marsh Arabs in the thirties (a half century later the marshes and their inhabitants would be decimated by Saddam Hussein) that became a twelve-page feature, illustrated with Thesiger’s own photographs. Reading Granta in the bath one day, I came across an extract from a book by Martha Gellhorn, who had famously reported on the Spanish civil war (she’d met Hemingway, her future husband, while they were both being shelled by the Nationalists), and after a long epistolary courtship, persuaded her to write a piece for me.
I don’t recall how Harry and I came up with the idea, such as it was, but I remember we both thought it was rather inspired at the time. Martha Gellhorn lived in Wales, Lord Snowdon had a Welsh title; why don’t we send them off to wander around this country so dear to both their hearts, and see what happens? At first Ms. Gellhorn quite sensibly resisted our scheme, but after an evening spent getting drunk together on vodka and orange juice, served in tooth mugs, in her hotel room in New York (for some reason she’d refused to go to the bar), we agreed that she might think about it again. Her next letter began “Dear Gully, I think boozing in a hotel room justifies first names, don’t you?” But she was still holding out on the earl. And after I’d given up hope of ever getting her to do it, I suddenly received this: “Dear Gully, I may be loopy and you may have found another writer, but I’ve changed my mind. Suddenly it seems funny to me, Snowdon and me, really the Odd Couple. We have in common being branded for life by our first mistaken marriages. Only I am much worse off than he is.”
However, Martha was an extremely busy lady, and it was impossible to pin her down on dates. She was revising two books, starting a new one, making a television documentary in Finland, looking after her roses, and if that wasn’t enough, she had just been visited by a plague of Welsh locusts:
A hamsin was blowing yesterday and there is an invisible and inaudible insect, called the harvest bug because it appears in the spring, lasts all summer and disappears invisibly at harvest time. It attacks only under clothes and preferably in the erogenous zones. Its bite beats anything I have met in jungles, tropics, or anywhere on earth, size of a really strong hive, burns for days.
She ended the letter with “Are you well and pretty and still short-skirted? When I see new fashion pictures I think of you.” I was touched and ridiculously flattered.
But back to the earl:
I think I’ve made a five star mistake in thinking it would be fun/funny to travel with the Earl … the telephone rang, a young female voice said, “Is Martha there?” I tried to think who it was, always frightened of forgetting and hurting feelings. Then she said, “I have Lord Snowdon for you,” and I sat holding the telephone, waiting. I’ve read of this, but never experienced it.… I think my mad habit of trying out any new experience may have led me into a minor horror journey.… I was warned by chums in London, but paid no heed.
The trip turned out to be less awful than she’d feared: “Dear Gully, It is over and I am exhausted. He wasn’t so bad, the Earl, and I reckon he’d say the same of me.”
So that was good. I eagerly awaited the piece, congratulating myself on having pulled off this editorial coup. Her next letter was addressed not to me but to Harry, who had taken the liberty of rearranging one or two of her paragraphs: “Dear Mr. Evans, I am appalled by the treatment of my Wales article. Would ‘shambolic’ be too strong … I am told that you think it would be a good idea to move the goal posts; now a touch of Tony-and-Marty-in Wales is needed.… In fact the trip was cold, wet, unbelievably uncomfortable and boring.…”
In the end I managed to broker some kind of peace, and the article was published alongside the earl’s moody (as she had informed Harry, the weather had been rainy, cold, and cloudy, just for a change) photographs. Somewhat surprisingly she forgave us both, and a few months later wrote telling me about a new trip she was anxious to embark on as soon as possible: “I have to get myself to Diksmuide i
n Belgium, the last Sunday in June, where if you can believe it, Neo-Nazis from all over Europe meet to honor the Nazi dead in WW2, in Nazi uniforms etc.” Possibly not quite the thing for the Traveler, but if we didn’t want that, how about sending her scuba diving in the Maldives? She was eighty at the time.
What’s with all the geriatrics? What had possessed me to collect a stable of writers whose combined ages approached the millennial mark? Apart from the fact that they wrote superbly—which would be the main point—they were living witnesses to a now-vanished era of travel. Long before tourism became the world’s biggest industry—which it is today, extending its tentacles to every back of beyond on the planet, engulfing us all in a flood of sweaty fellow travelers—they had ventured to foreign places when they really were foreign.
But perhaps I could write, too. Hadn’t I spent every summer since the age of eleven in that house in France? Surely in all those years I must have learned something about Provence. Of course I had. How about a story on Haute-Provence, where an enterprising Parisian architect had just opened a hotel in a remote Saracen village called Crillon-le-Brave? It worked. Now why hadn’t I thought of that before?
Next, I took on the Romans who had given Provence its name (Provincia was their Miami, the place where retired generals and legionnaires settled to enjoy their hard-earned sunset years) and returned to Arles, Nîmes, the Pont du Gard—and of course, the Hôtel Nord-Pinus. After that it was Avignon, the Palais des Papes and a hotel of laughable perfection where I slept in a room wallpapered with delicately painted pagodas, peacocks, and chattering monkeys swinging through a forest of bamboo. French windows opened onto a terrace, which in turn led down to the garden, where the air buzzed with the sound of bees, drunk on sticky oleander-flower cocktails.