by Gully Wells
Peter was not happy at all.
“Christ, what have you done now? What on earth makes you think I would want to have dinner with some drunken old German bag you picked up in a bar?”
“Shut up. It was her birthday yesterday. And anyway, there’s the doorbell.”
“Ach, I see you have cats. So much better than children.” She appeared not to have noticed Rebecca and Alexander sitting on the sofa. “I tell you I have had so many abortions I can’t even remember the number now.”
Well, never mind about that, I’ll be in the kitchen, while you two have a nice chat in German, I said with a bright smile. Peter glared at me.
When I set down the osso buco and risotto at the center of the table, they were babbling away happily in her native tongue: “I was just asking your husband when I would get my television reception back. Ever since those towers fell down, my set is kaput. I can watch nothing, absolutely nothing.”
She must have been starving and was busy sucking the marrow out of the veal bones before I had even sat down. And yes, she would like some more, danke schön. Alexander and Rebecca fled upstairs, not even the promise of cake and ice cream could keep them sitting with us for another minute. Her eyes darted around in search of more food, and grabbing a piece of bread, she buttered it and with her mouth half full, said she had one more question for Peter: “You and I are both Germans”—he nodded warily—“you know what the British did to Dresden, you know how many civilians burned in that holocaust, you know how many Germans died in the war, so please tell me this—why are Americans making all this Sturm und Drang about two towers?”
Hard to say. Strange country. Not accustomed to being attacked. Maybe it’s time I helped you fall down the stairs, you Kraut Witch.
“Promise me you will never have that cunt in this house ever again.”
I promised.
MONTHS BEFORE, my father had invited me to lunch on September 13 at his club on the Upper East Side. He and Melissa would be arriving on the QEII that morning, and they were planning to spend a few days in New York before proceeding to Washington. What a civilized itinerary, how nice to travel that way, it sounded positively Whartonesque in its stately Old World decorum.
“Just calling to confirm our lunch! We’ve had a helluva time, the ship couldn’t dock in New York.” No, I didn’t imagine it could. “So we’re in Boston and are catching the train. See you there at one!”
Walking along Sixty-sixth Street you would never have known that anything had happened. No trace of trauma, no smell, no ash, nothing but stolid robber-baron mansions, emaciated ladies with tightly drawn faces and champagne-colored hair walking midget dogs, and there, standing in the doorway of the Lotos Club, a tall, handsome man holding out his arms to me. We went downstairs to the Grill Room, sat at our table, and as the waiter handed me a menu, my father said, “So how was your summer in the south of France?”
I looked at him in disbelief. My what?
“Never mind the summer. There’s only one thing we are talking about in New York right now.”
My dear, sweet, kind father hadn’t wanted to upset his daughter. If you steered clear of unpleasant subjects, refused to acknowledge horror, maybe it would just go away. It worked for him, but I fear it is one of his many talents I have failed to inherit.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think you would want to discuss it.”
Immediately regretting my rudeness, I told him about Montaillou, lied and said my mother had never been better, and when Melissa joined us we moved on to the only subject the world was talking about.
“WHY THE HELL did those people jump?”
The telephones were finally working again and this was the first time I had been able to get through to London.
“Mum, you can’t say that. How about we play our favorite game, ‘Which Would You Rather?’ and you choose between being burned alive or jumping?”
Maybe you had to have been in New York on that day to understand. Or maybe both my parents were totally insane in their very different ways.
Over the next couple of years my mother spent more and more time shuttling between her house and Saint Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. In June 2003 she was back there with fluid in her lungs, nothing serious; the doctors said she would be able to leave just as soon as they had put in a stent to prop up yet another one of her collapsing arteries. Nick visited every day, Rebecca came from Oxford, Claus brought her a huge bag of cherries and watched as she bombarded the fire-breathing head nurse with their stones—surely an excellent sign. She told me not to be ridiculous when I suggested flying over from New York. But what if she was just trying to calm me down? I checked with my aunt and Nick, who backed her up—the doctors said she was in no danger—why didn’t I wait until she was out of the hospital?
She died—under general anesthetic, she felt no pain, she knew nothing, or so the doctors told me, and Christ do I need to believe them—on the operating table the next day.
Although there was no escaping the Golders Green funeral pyre, none of us wanted anything more to do with Stalinist meeting halls, and her memorial service took place in the journalists’ church, Saint Bride’s, on Fleet Street. George Melly did his best Bessie Smith impersonation, we sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Susan Crosland remembered the days when they were young, pretty American journalists who ended up marrying two of the most interesting men in London (Tony Crosland had been the foreign secretary in Harold Wilson’s government), and I talked about having a mother who was more fun than anybody else on earth. How could I resist telling the story about our double date at that hotel in Oxford with Hylan and Martin? Here’s what Paul Johnson wrote the next week in The Spectator.
Atheists’ funerals always pose a problem. Where are we speeding them off to? Oblivion? Annihilation? It’s all very well calling them a “celebration.” But death, whatever else it is, is not an event to be celebrated. I was thinking about this when I attended the service for Dee Wells in St Bride’s. I suppose she was an atheist: anyone who married Freddie Ayer not once but twice must have been.
Dee was the wittiest woman I ever met … the service had magnificent music, but I could not hear one word of any of the encomiums, save a brief tribute from the ravishing Susan Crosland, and a superb Dee joke told by her delicious daughter, Gully, whom I used to know as Little Miss Naughty when she was a teenager.…”
The two lovers, Martin and Hylan, were there; my old nanny, Cele, was there; Robert, the man with the convoluted eyebrows whom she was going to marry before she fell for that “menace,” Freddie, was there; my godmother from Burma, Sue, was there, and my father, without whom I could not have survived that day, was there. Peter, Rebecca, Nick, and Alexander formed a protective cocoon around me, and I was really doing quite well, or at least I thought I was, until somebody—who I can’t even recall—said, quite innocently, “I expect you will be going to the house in France this summer.” Do you not understand? That house is my mother, I have never been there without her, not once, and now that she is dead, how could you possibly imagine I would ever want to go back?
La Rentrée
IT TOOK ME SIX YEARS to change my mind. Sometimes the house inhabited my dreams, and I would wander through its rooms, opening the “Drawer of Death,” examining the desiccated lizards, grasshoppers, and scorpions inside, Freddie would look up from his work as I passed by and smile at me, my mother would be clattering around in the kitchen, and I would always wake up crying—why didn’t they know that they were dead?
As we rounded the last corner on our way up the hill, past the yellow schoolhouse and the wasp-infested mailboxes on the left, and the temperamental septic tank, overgrown with bushes, on the right, Peter honked the horn, just as Alain used to, to alert the welcoming committee. Not looking the least bit alerted, Nick was swinging in the hammock under the lime tree, and I heard his girlfriend, Stephanie, calling to him through the window, “How would you like a nice glass of cold rosé and some of the tapenade I made from the olives we got this
morning at the market?” (Not for the first time I marveled at Nick’s enviable talent—inherited from his dad?—for acquiring adoring and adorable girls, who, happy to cosset him like a pasha, managed to make the rest of us resemble the truculent shrews we doubtless over time had become.)
Stephanie, wearing one of Vanessa’s naughty French maid’s aprons—the sole survivor of my mother’s wrath and scissors—emerged through the clackety wooden beads, and, after a miniorgy of hugging and kissing, we all sat down at Freddie’s table to drink our rosé and devour the still-warm garlic toast spread with tapenade. I reached across to the basil bush, picked off a few leaves and scattered the torn-up pieces on top of the crushed olives. I was home. And at that moment, gazing at the overgrown lavender bushes our mother had planted when Nick was a baby, inhaling the scent of basil on my hands, I no longer remembered why it had taken me so long to come back to where I belonged.
Over dinner that night—pâté de campagne studded with pistachios, Brousse, tomato salad—Nick and I started to talk about the house and all the things that needed to be done. Rightly suspicious of my demonic mania for throwing things away, he did go so far as to allow that a little cleaning up and clearing out might be in order. A little? While he had been upstairs I had already had a go at the kitchen cupboards, and had put a bulging black garbage bag in our car, with instructions that Peter should take it down to the trash under cover of dark. But what about all our mother’s clothes? Not to mention Freddie’s. The voluminous linen shorts he had worn that day when Martin’s snakeskin boots had provoked his mouth-frothing tirade, the faded espadrilles, the neatly folded piles of handkerchiefs were all in a chest of drawers on the top floor. And what about the closets, full of abandoned bathing suits, Nick’s old toys, dead typewriters, broken lampshades, stacks of New Yorkers, dating back to the sixties, tied up with string, and the dusty box of twenty-year-old tampons I had found in my bathroom? And talking of bathrooms, how come there was no light in one of them? Nick sighed. “The bloody wiring is all fucked up, we’ll have to get the electrician in.” I said I’d call him first thing tomorrow morning, and tactfully avoided all mention of the closets.
Monsieur l’Électricien, bowlegged but not without a certain weaselish charm, shook his head ruefully. The wiring was très vieux and complètement foutu, it didn’t conform to EU safety regulations, our insurance company would undoubtedly refuse to pay up if there was a fire, and if anybody should be injured that would, of course, be even more grave. Our only hope was to rewire the entire house, a job that he graciously offered to take on, but not anytime soon. Il faut comprendre that he was a very busy man, much in demand, and pour l’instant he had trop de travail; however, he should be able to squeeze us in après l’été. Oh dear. But since he was already here, couldn’t he peut-être do something about the triste lack of lumière in the bathroom? Stephanie led him upstairs, where, she later reported, giggling, he had allowed himself a quick, good-natured grope of her irresistable bum while examining the lamentable state of our electrics. Nick and I were delighted. “Darling, you know we don’t have any money … he’ll probably give us a break on the price … you did say you wanted to help with the house. Oh, all right, be like that. I guess we’ll just have to go on peeing in the dark.”
THE DAY AFTER our visitation from the lascivious electrician I decided to make a pilgrimage to the market in Toulon where my mother and I used to do our shopping. In the old days she would be up at dawn, waiting impatiently for me in the kitchen because God knows there was absolutely no point in going there unless you got to the Cours Lafayette well before nine in the morning. Any later and you could never hope to park the car, it would be hotter than Hades by the time you reached the Cours, and all the best food would be gone. Like all her pronouncements, this was an incontrovertible fact. There was never any point in disagreeing.
But now that I could do anything I wanted, I took perverse delight in lingering in bed until after ten. Then I lounged about some more on the terrace, prolonging the evil pleasure, drinking coffee, painting my toenails Barcelona Red, and when the polish was dry, I had another cup of coffee, and after that, with the sun already high in the sky, I set off for Toulon. Around noon I parked the car—pas de problème—on a side street, and wandered slowly down the Cours Lafayette, filling my basket with whatever nonsense caught my eye. Miniature mauve mussels, squash blossoms with baby courgettes still attached, long red shallots, haricots verts, two boxes of fraises des bois, a log of fromage de chèvre rolled in ash, and a bag of inky, wrinkled Niçoise olives, no bigger than raisins. What would I cook with all this? Who knew, who cared? I had willfully, voluptuously, wickedly shopped without a list because she always had one.
A mild breeze blew up from the waterfront, cooling the back of my neck, and I reckoned it might just be time for a restorative vin blanc cassis. From a sidewalk café I gazed back through the dappled sunlight, at the piles of apricots, enormous, goiterlike tomatoes, thick braids of fresh garlic, and the baskets of figs laid out on their own soft fuzzy green leaves. On one stand square blocks of savon de Marseille had been built up into a huge Mayan pyramid of green and honey-colored soap, each one stamped with the guarantee Pur Végétal and its weight in grams as well as the precise percentage of olive oil it contained. Once, long ago, Francette had taken me to a ramshackle factory outside Marseille, and I remember watching an old man slowly stirring an enormous copper cauldron full of green sludge with a broomstick. He told us proudly that he had been making soap this way since he was a boy, and that the method—fabriqué à l’ancienne—dated back to avant la Révolution. (Actually the statute that laid down the law on what constitutes real savon de Marseille was passed in 1688. But this method of making soap has probably been around for almost a thousand years.) The Oliver Twist–like cauldron of porridge was stirred over a fire for ten days, poured into a mold, then left in the sun to dry, before being cut into cubes the size of a Parisian paving stone. Just like the one, ripped up from the rue Gay-Lussac during the revolutionary événements of ’68, which my mother kept on her desk as a paperweight. Everything about the market, even the soap, led me back to her, and all the times, so many lost years ago, when we used to come here together, early in the morning, the scribbled list firmly in hand, and barrel through all twenty blocks of the Cours, and still be back home—exhausted—in time to make lunch.
But if I had been vindicated—you can get up late, find a parking space, wallow in the heat, buy whatever you damn well please—why were my cheeks wet with tears? Why had I gone to such pointless lengths to prove that my lazy self-indulgence had defeated her ingrained New England belief in doing things the hard way because life is tough and that’s the only way to beat it? How could I have imagined that winning this perverse childish game would make me feel good, when all I longed for was to have her sitting beside me at the café table saying we couldn’t possibly hang about here another instant or we would get heatstroke and a parking ticket and never be back in time to make lunch. I could not stop crying and would have done anything—given Monsieur Maurice a blow job, gobbled up a toad en croûte, worked on the Bandol dump for the rest of my life—just to see her walking toward me now.
I LEFT MY mother’s room until last. It was bad enough dealing with the 2001 calendar still stuck to the front of the fridge with a cow magnet—missing one leg, like its owner—covered in her scribbled notes. July 30 “Gully arrives”; August 4 “Doctor in Toulon”; August 15 “Bill to dinner”—the night he had lost both his teeth and his trousers. Withered wishbones from chickens she had basted with mashed-up butter, garlic, and tarragon, still waiting to be snapped and make all our wishes come true, hung from hooks above the stove; a handwritten sign on how to operate the washing machine was stuck to the wall with yellowing Scotch tape; the salad plates shaped like cabbage leaves that we had bought together on an expedition to L’Isle sur la Sorgue when Rebecca was three, were stacked on the shelf, along with the blue-and-white jug she used to make lemonade in. In the cupboa
rd I found tins of dog food for the awful, and long-dead, Éloi’s cocktail-hour visits; a cardboard box of Frank Sinatra cassettes and a nylon mesh bag filled with decades of different-colored slivers of soap, waiting to be boiled up into a money-saving glob (a Depression-era trick she had learned from my grandmother, but thank Christ never actually got around to doing). All this I could just about handle, but still I refused to go into her room.
Everything was just as she had left it at the end of the summer in 2001, the last time we had been in the house together. Her little gold traveling clock sat on the bedside table, her address book was in the desk drawer with a shopping list—olive oil, eggs, capers, lightbulbs, parsley, stamps—and a stack of cards with “Lady Ayer: 10, Regent’s Park Terrace. London N.W.1.” engraved across the top. I opened the closet: Her clothes still smelled of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue, the same perfume she had worn since I was a child, and there in the back, leaning against each other were her legs, the toes of the “swimming” one painted bright red—as if nail polish could make a joke out of something so unbearable.
At the bottom of the big mahogany bed stood an old trunk, plastered with the tattered remnants of stickers from the ships, the France, the Constitution, the Queen Mary, that she had sailed on, back and forth across the Atlantic—sitting in deck chairs, wrapped in a blanket, sipping hot bouillon in the winter, swimming in turquoise pools in the summer—never quite able to make up her mind which side she belonged on. Heavy linen sheets from the market in Le Beausset (carefully wrapped in plastic, far too precious for the saggy beds in our ramshackle house) were stacked up inside along with pillowcases, napkins, and a pair of strange, split-crotch Victorian bloomers that she had once tried, unsuccessfully, to palm off on me, “Hey, you’d look great in these. Will you get a load of the embroidery!” Just as she used Deyrolle in Paris as her decorators, my mother had always regarded the women who sold antique clothing in the market as her personal couturières. Huge billowing Edwardian men’s shirts—tiny pleats running down the front with a tab at the bottom to anchor it inside your trousers—served as both dresses and nighties; petticoats became skirts and a curiously modern-looking linen shift was the perfect beach cover-up. I picked up the bloomers—maybe it was time to reconsider them? Then again maybe not. Instead I put them back in the chest and walked over to the closet, where I took one of the gentlemen’s evening shirts off the shelf, undressed, and slipped it on over my head.