The House in France

by Gully Wells

After we moved to New York, I saw him a few times across a crowded room at big parties, and once he was sitting at a nearby table at a funny little place around the corner from our house in the Village. Wiping pasta sauce off Rebecca’s face, I glanced up and noticed him looking at me with a slightly puzzled expression on his face—perhaps he was wondering what kind of a crazy mother would take a five-year-old out to dinner in a restaurant at that hour of the night.

  A few years later, on one of those perfect sunny but cool New York spring days, when the popcorn trees are in full bloom along on the sidewalks, I was getting out of a cab outside the Café des Artistes, feeling stupidly happy, and saw him coming out of the door. Now, why shouldn’t I just smile and say, “Isn’t this the most beautiful day, Mr. Mayor, and what a pleasure it is to see you again.” No, on second thought, the “again” probably wasn’t such a great idea. I definitely would not say “again.” But as I reached out my hand to him, he suddenly grabbed hold of my arm to steady himself, and losing his balance, almost knocked me over. Christ, something was very wrong. He didn’t respond when I asked if he was okay, just kept flapping his free arm at some parked limousines, so we shuffled toward them until I eventually found his driver, who helped me get him into the car. Then, with the beautiful mayor slumped in the backseat, he drove off and disappeared into the rush-hour traffic.

  Le Mariage

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1987 the house in France became the scene of an improbable—or maybe not so—reconciliation between my mother and Freddie. She was on her very best behavior, and he wrote, possibly somewhat surprised and relieved, to his old girlfriend Jocelyn, “Dee arrived a few days after Nicholas and I did, and has been very easy to get along with.”

  My mother knew that Hylan would be gone by the time she returned to New York in the fall, and it must have been especially painful to be back in the house where they had once been so happy together. However, she had always been a gifted actress, and put on a cheerful facade for Freddie and Nick, and maybe took some comfort from reverting to her primal role as the wife/mother and undisputed ruler of La Migoua. Without Hylan she knew that New York would be even more desolate, and without his income, her financial arrangements would be even more precarious—the time had come to move back to London. The second siege of Freddie was about to begin.

  Freddie hadn’t been overeager to marry her thirty years before, and after their poisonous divorce, why would he wish to repeat the experience? Being a gentle, reasonable soul, he certainly wanted to be her friend, but her husband—was he mad? No, just weak and, sadly, increasingly sick. Cancer had removed Vanessa from the equation, and now emphysema (those goddamn cigarettes, of course) and pneumonia would come to my mother’s rescue, and transform her into Lady Ayer once again.

  Sitting up in bed in the hospital the following June, recovering quite nicely from yet another bout of pneumonia, Freddie thought he would cheer himself up with a little treat, and reached for the smoked salmon that one of his lady friends had smuggled in that morning. In his haste or greed or hunger, he gobbled a morsel of the delicious oily fish too fast, choked, passed out, his heart stopped, and technically he “died” for four minutes before the doctors managed to revive him. Here’s how he described the experience. He had felt himself being pulled toward a blinding red light—“exceedingly bright, and also very painful”—which he understood was responsible for the government of the universe. “Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space,” but they wanted nothing to do with him, so knowing that the ministers in charge of time were nearby, he tried to get their attention and became “more and more desperate” when they too ignored him.

  Beatrice, who was sitting by his hospital bed when he woke up, remembers his talking, in French, about crossing a river—the Styx?—and that he seemed deeply disturbed by what he had just been through. In the first article Freddie wrote about the experience, he admitted that it offered “rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness,” but in a later one he backtracked a bit and said he had meant only that the mind or brain doesn’t stop functioning with the heart, that it had all been nothing more than a strange dream, and then proudly declared himself to be “a born-again atheist.” The National Enquirer, which picked up the story, begged to differ and went with a far more exciting version of his adventures that ran under the headline—“Incredible after-life shocker! Man dies and meets … The Masters of the Universe.”

  An interesting postscript to this puzzling episode surfaced in 2000, eleven years after Freddie’s death, when Dr. Jeremy George contacted William Cash, after seeing a play that Cash had written based on the incident. Dr. George had been on duty when Freddie had been admitted to the hospital, and by a strange coincidence had been a student at New College in the 1970s. He immediately recognized his patient, and after Freddie’s experience with the smoked salmon and the Masters of the Universe, Dr. George returned to his bedside later that evening.

  I came back to talk to him, and asked what it was like, as a philosopher, to have a near-death experience. He suddenly looked rather sheepish. Then he said, “I saw a Divine Being. I’m afraid I am going to have to revise all my books and opinions.” He definitely said “Divine Being,” and I think he felt slightly embarrassed because it was unsettling for him as an atheist.

  Freddie admitted he had seen a Divine Being? How could that possibly be? He certainly never said this to anybody else, but then again, eminent doctors don’t usually tell lies.

  That summer my mother once again joined Freddie in La Migoua, where, he wrote in a letter, they had gotten on “even better than last year. There has been no further talk of our remarrying. I think we both realize that this would endanger our present good relations.” Oh dear, that may well have been what he thought. His future bride, however, had no such misgivings, but she wasn’t foolish enough to bring up the dreaded subject. Instead, with a little prodding from Nick, his father agreed that maybe they should try living together again. Freddie was too frail to manage on his own, she hated New York—it was the perfect solution to both problems. Once she had sold her apartment she would move into his house in London.

  Freddie may have been old and sick (he was back in the hospital again in October), but he had escaped the red light, defied the masters of the universe, returned to the right side of the river, so who could blame him for wishing to celebrate this magical renewal of life with—what else—love? Heather and Freddie had met at a party in Toronto about fifteen years before; the next day they declared—and demonstrated—their passion in the back row of a movie theater, and then embarked on an intermittent affair that had been going on ever since. And now the temptress had suddenly turned up in London. After a couple of delirious weeks together he was telling Heather, and his friends, that he wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with her. Perhaps he felt that with Heather by his side he could trick death—and my mother—into leaving him alone for just a bit longer.

  Sadly, it was not to be. Heather lived in the United States and by Christmas, Freddie was back at La Migoua with Nick, our aunt, Beegoonie, and his once and future bride. Despite feverish letters and telephone calls to his “princess” in California, he was having a surprisingly good time with my mother, and after quite a lot more judicious prodding from Nick, Freddie capitulated and decided that on the whole he did want to marry her again. What with the warm weather, the dry air, his pride in his son’s prowess at chess, and my mother’s talents as a chef/wit/nurse and procuress of the English papers and delicious things to eat, he was feeling remarkably cheerful, and even had the strength to challenge Monsieur Tricon to a game of pétanque. But the dramas weren’t quite over yet.

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1942, Freddie had been having dinner in New York with Sheilah Graham, the Hollywood columnist, when Sheilah suddenly put down her fork and announced that she simply couldn’t eat another bite—her contractions were getting too painful. Taxi! Freddie rushed her to the hospital, where later that night s
he gave birth to their daughter, Wendy. At the time he was married to his first wife, Renée, and the new mother had celebrated her own whirlwind wedding to Trevor Westbrook in January of that year. As a little girl, on trips to London with her mother, Wendy used to come visit us in Regent’s Park Terrace, and I had grown up knowing that she was Freddie’s daughter. (Just as I knew that Julian Ayer was not his son. In that accepting way of children, neither fact seemed the least bit odd to me.) You had only to look at Wendy’s face to see it was true. She had his bright dark eyes, his hair, the same-shaped head, and the same expression around her mouth.

  In the summer of 1988 Freddie was once again having dinner in New York, this time with Peter, Christopher Hitchens, and me at a restaurant in the Village where he always ordered the same thing: soupe aux poissons, daurade grillée, and Domaine Tempier red wine, “to remind me of La Migoua.” Wendy happened to be sitting at a nearby table so she joined us for coffee, and when the two of us slipped off to the bathroom, Freddie turned to Hitch and announced—beaming with pride I was later told—“There go my two daughters!” Indeed.

  Just over a year later, in the middle of packing up her apartment in New York and getting ready to spend Christmas in France with Nick and Freddie, my mother came to dinner with us in Bank Street. Sheilah had died a few weeks earlier, so thinking Wendy might need a bit of cheering up, I invited her to come along as well and seated them next to each other. In her memoir, One of the Family, Wendy describes their conversation.

  Dee’s plan was to join them [Nick and Freddie] at their house in France. “And we’ll probably even get married again,” she said, clearly pleased. She made a passing wry reference to the Oxford widow’s pension, but I felt the heart of the matter was something else. “Freddie could have so many beautiful women—even now. And it’s me he wants,” she told me. There was an intensity in this expression of triumph that made me feel I had seen something too intimate—a wound, a desire; I wondered if she knew she had shown it to me.

  I don’t imagine it was pure coincidence that my mother asked Wendy to drop her home. She must already have decided that with Sheilah dead, and Freddie not likely to last terribly much longer (Trevor Westbrook had died ten years before), it was time to tell Wendy the truth. As my mother got out of the car, she turned to her and said, “Has it never occurred to you that Freddie is your father?”

  No, it had never occurred to Wendy, not once.

  “How do you know this? Is it from Freddie?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  As Wendy describes it:

  He (Trevor) was a man in whose company I had never been at ease; I had always felt the stress of trying to be his daughter. Freddie was the blithe sparkling hero of my childhood, who had bought me Tess of the D’Urbervilles, walked me through the Tate looking at the Turners, introduced me to small French restaurants in Soho and Mayfair. As I got into bed late that night, I allowed Dee’s revelation a final moment of unreserved magic. “Freddie Ayer is my father.” The sentence reverberated in my head—a question, an exclamation and something close to a prayer.

  Finally convinced—after looking at photographs in Freddie’s autobiography and discovering that her parents had married in January ’42, and not in December ’41, as Sheilah had always claimed—Wendy was both thrilled and angry. She felt “a great swell of fury at my mother, who … had kept this attractive father from me … for robbing me of Freddie was in an important way robbing me of myself. The question now was to what extent I could recoup the loss, redress the wrong.”

  After writing a tactful letter to Freddie, saying she wondered if he might, just possibly, maybe be her father (my mother had asked Wendy not to land her in the shit, and to pretend she had worked it out by herself), she got a letter back confirming that this was indeed the case, ending with, “For my part, I am happy and proud to own you as a daughter.”

  Wendy was “deeply moved” when she read these words. “I felt rescued from my old life and self … transfigured by Freddie’s acknowledgement into someone new and better—or perhaps someone who had been there all along but unperceived and unappreciated—a person who deserved this father.”

  Freddie, on the other hand, was the same as ever, and even if he had been younger and healthier, I somehow doubt that he would ever have been able to give Wendy everything she needed and desired. It wasn’t just that it was way too late; the problem was also the Aspergian snail side to his character—his lifelong difficulty in connecting with the complicated depths of other people’s emotions. But what if she had been told ten years before, after Trevor died (or even before), who knows how things might have developed? Of course Freddie would never have taken the initiative—that’s just the way he was—but I honestly believe that if Sheilah had talked to him about telling their daughter the truth, his kindness, his natural sense of justice, and his affection for Wendy would have made him happy—and proud—to welcome her into the insane, capacious bosom of our family. And I still can’t think of one good reason why that shouldn’t have happened. Which I guess only goes to show that I have never been able to think straight when it comes to children—even grown-up ones.

  Freddie’s momentous letter led to an invitation to visit him in London that April, which is how Wendy found herself at Marylebone Register Office witnessing her father’s wedding to my mother. Iris Murdoch and her husband, John Bayley, were the only other guests. Nick and I had decided to visit the newlyweds on their honeymoon in France that summer. And in any case Freddie would be back at Bard in the fall, and I would be back in Bank Street once again cooking Sunday lunches for him—and his lovely new bride.

  I AM NOT QUITE SURE why I didn’t fly to London as soon as the shipwreck started in the middle of June. But that’s a lie. The reason was a combination of great love and shameful cowardice—the truth is I couldn’t bear to see him dying. A terrible admission. Knowing he was surrounded by people who loved him, most of all Nick, who slept in his room toward the end, I hung on desperately, selfishly, guiltily, to my memories, most especially those of our last two years together in New York. We spoke on the telephone once, I called for daily bulletins, and he died on June 27, 1989.

  Instead of burning in hell, wicked Londoners who don’t believe in God get consumed by flames in a far more depressing place called the Golders Green Crematorium. Evil roses that feed on dead people’s ashes fill the flower beds, and a hideous redbrick facsimile of a “Lombardic” campanile—the chimney—fitted out with electronic chiming bells, rises up above a glowering toad of a building that stinks of floor wax and disinfectant. Outside on the terrace dead people’s wreaths—stridently colored, cards attached—are propped up against a wall, waiting to be admired by groups of murmuring mourners, while hearses creep silently up and down the dank driveway. If you woke up feeling a bit low on the morning of your loved one’s funeral, once you get there you are guaranteed to be dragged down to the slimy, inky bottom of your own private pit of misery.

  Some of Freddie’s favorite tunes—“Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” cranked out on a desolate organ—were all we had to listen to, and the coffin was all we had to look at, as we sat in—what? An approximation of a dark, wood-paneled chapel in a particularly nasty Edwardian boarding school, minus the cross, pulpit, drooping flowers, and the hearty sermon, was what it felt like. No eulogies (Freddie was very specific about that), and there, off to the side of where the altar should have been, were the ghastly doors that opened up, just as the last chords of “Cheek to Cheek” faded away, allowing the coffin to creak its way along the tracks and be consumed in the fiery furnace.

  God must have been cackling away. “See, I told you so. This is what you end up with if you doubt me—ugliness, desolation, ashes, and despair. I cornered the market on beauty long ago—the stained glass of La Sainte-Chapelle, Mozart’s Requiem, Giotto, all of Bach, the gilded reliquaries in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the King James Bible, that grassy graveyard behind the
white clapboard church in Connecticut—they’re all mine. And I could also have given you redemption and everlasting life—but you’ve missed out on that too.” Cackle, cackle. Oh piss off, God. We can look at your art, listen to your music, and read your books anytime we damn well please, and by the way, Mr. Know-It-All, only a lunatic would want to live forever. Or believe in you.

  The newly widowed Lady Ayer had always known how to give a spectacular party, and this time she was determined to get it absolutely right. The guest list encompassed every aspect of Freddie’s life from philosophers like Isaiah Berlin to politicians like Roy Jenkins, poets like Stephen Spender, novelists like Iris Murdoch and Martin Amis, neighbors like Jonathan Miller, V. S. Pritchett, Alan Bennett, Colin and Anna Haycraft, old girlfriends like Beatrice and Jocelyn Rickards, and new ones like Heather, as well as his family—all of us, plus Vanessa’s children and his “new” daughter, Wendy. In the end there must have been about four hundred names on her list. There would be speakers—the widow, of course, Jonathan, Roy, a couple of philosophers, Peter Strawson and Ted Honderich—and Peter O’Toole had agreed to read a poem.

  Now all she needed to do was to find just the right place for Freddie’s memorial service—I mean, meeting. It wasn’t so easy, and in the end she settled on a rather dispiriting, garishly lit lecture hall adjoining University College London, with a melancholy cafeteria next door for the reception. My whole life, my entire family, everybody I’d ever known in London, everybody who had ever loved Freddie, swam before my tearful eyes that morning. One of the philosophers described him as “a hussar against nonsense,” which he would have loved; Roy Jenkins remembered him as “a fine ally with whom to go into a fight” against the forces of reaction; but it was my mother who gave the performance of her life.

  After everybody else had spoken she stood up in the middle of the stage, dressed in high-heeled boots, a coat of many colors, eyes blazing, hair perfectly in place, and let rip with a speech that was part love letter, part paean of admiration, and part a call to arms against some Tory schmuck in Thatcher’s government who had dared to criticize Freddie within days of his death. She was at her sarcastic, rabble-rousing best as she laid into the unfortunate minister for education with her whiplash tongue, praising her husband as the tireless champion of the underdog and leaving the schmuck for dead by the time she was done.