by Edna O'Brien
She moved among them like an empress, and as soon as the barrier gate was open and we were allowed in, they followed, her satellites, and I followed too, somewhat tentatively, knowing that I must not show the merest jot of emotion. My main function was to carry one of the requisite hampers with cooked ham, pickles, and Stilton cheese, along with a clandestine bottle of port. In the carriage, which Wanda imperiously chose, there was a space next to her on the seat, which I knew that Carlo would have liked to take. He was being encouraged by his friend Norrie, who was on her other side. But with a proud, sad gesture, he declined and went on down the carriage to sit alone, where he took out his book, Piers Plowman, immersing himself in the humble Plowman’s allegorical search for a heaven.
It was through their letters that I began to get to know my children, the different them, already forging their independence. Carlo wrote:
I am composing this elegy in the Bedales School Memorial Library, which normally exudes silence and the overpowering smell of wax. But as you will know from our garden, flowers can mitigate that smell and moreover the librarian having planted daffodils and crocuses in the garden beneath, the fragrance has improved the library’s somnolent air. I think that partly due to you and your examples and education and partly through my own experience I have learned that there is in this world so much that one can fill one’s life with and that we must become our own enrichers. Now that I have discussed the philosophical implications of my maturity, I propose to discuss the financial. I forgot to ask for money for the Common Room’s new regime which comprises of myself and Jeremy Phillips. We would like to buy some posters with our own money also spiral folders for the extensive notes I have taken on my six academic subjects. That being so, is it not wiser to have your written permission to get money from the Bursar and have the entire sum paid at the end of term. Also my pyjamas is in flitters, I am practically a pauper. Love.
A letter from Sasha was contrite. After I took them to the film Performance, he was so enamored of the psychotic hero Chas, played by James Fox, that he began to imitate Chas in voice, mood, and inflection, and tended to monopolize conversations with gangster talk. When I mentioned this in a letter, he wrote back:
I have taken to heart what you have said. It is not a question of my not seeing the wood for the trees, it is a question of my seeing neither because of foolishly looking in the wrong direction. I am turning over a new leaf. Are you coming this Sunday?
He decided he wanted to go to France to improve his French, along with a boy called Anthony. Anthony had a heart condition. He was to stay in Tonneau, in western France, and accommodation had been found by the school. In the one letter that I exchanged with their future landlady, everything seemed ideal. They would attend classes in the morning and then return home in time for lunch, becoming part of the family, so that they could polish their French pronunciation. The family consisted of mother, father, who was a postman, and two children, who resented their being there at all. The family had roast for lunch, while Sasha and Anthony were given some sort of rabbit ragout. Anthony had taken an instant dislike to the mother, refusing to speak to her, simply hitting his plate with a spoon and saying, “I hate this woman, I hate this cow, cette vache.”
In Central Park, New York, 1968.
All this I would hear later when Sasha returned home, buoyant and full of aplomb. Life at Tonneau was lackluster. In the evenings they walked to the town, which bordered a lake, and then out of the town toward the dunes and beyond, to where there were clumps of pine trees. They had hoped to bump into girls and instead met families with their dogs. While he was there, I had received one imperious postcard, saying that if there was a letter for him, it was to be placed in the Oxo tin. This I took to mean that I must not open it. I guessed that he had fallen in love with a girl at Bedales, proof of the infatuation in a song he kept singing,
There she stood in the street,
Smiling from her head to her feet.
I said, hey what is this?
Maybe, maybe she’s in need of a kiss…
Little by little I could feel that he was, inevitably, growing away from me.
Sean Kenny, the theater designer, brought color and diversion into my world. His father was a stonemason in a parish on the opposite side of the lake from us, in County Tipperary, but Sean had left that world and was sought after in London circles. I would read his name in the newspapers, and sometimes of scrapes he had been in at a club in Soho, of which he was an habitué. He was renowned for his theater design, and critics called his sets radical, revolutionary, but to me they were more than that, they were little temples, worlds of imagination brought to life. It was in Alvaro’s restaurant in London, where Sean and I had been invited by a television producer, John Irwin, that we met. Sean arrived late, his sleeves rolled up, his jacket over his shoulder. He was not a city person: you could tell by his hands, which were broad and strong, and his eyes, the hard blue of cobalt but with a flinch in them. He was abrupt with us, and scornful of the glamorous clientele all around. Every other word was “bullshit.” Writing, he declared, was bullshit. Francis Bacon was the presiding London genius, A for Apple and B for Bacon, he said loudly. He loved Francis Bacon, as he loved Hieronymus Bosch. Mellowing a little after a few drinks, he said he could tell that I was a cave person, whereas he was a tent person, ergo a wanderer. Nevertheless, he gave me his phone number, and for all of two weeks I rang, but got no answer. Finally, when I did get him, my fluster was such that I had to invent a reason for ringing and so heard myself inviting him and his friends to a party the following Saturday.
“I’ll only come for the bread and the wine,” he said, half joking, and so the precedent was set.
That day was all bustle, the kitchen like a hotel kitchen, pots and pans on the long table, cookery books open, meats marinating, the doorbell ringing with deliveries, Joe Langdon from the greengrocer’s arriving with fruits and vegetables, and afterward he split the pale wooden crates and made kindling for the fires. With shyness he accepted an Irish coffee, sitting on a milking stool by the fire, recalling that first day when he saw me on the High Street and I stood out.
Around nine o’clock that evening an entourage filed behind Sean Kenny on the outer porch. There were several young blond women, all of whom entered in such a nuanced file that it was impossible to know who was with whom, and for me, most crucial of all, which of these might be his girlfriend. Among them was the composer Lionel Bart and his chauffeur, “Jim the Limb,” who went around prodding people on the arm, advising on the benefits of alcohol over heroin. Andrew Loog Oldham, tall, supercilious, who had been a manager of the Rolling Stones, had also come and took a particular liking to the potcheen, the homemade brew which my mother brought on her annual visit. It was all the more disquieting for me to learn, years after, that he wondered what Sean Kenny saw in me, as I was patently a social climber. But then again, he claimed that Princess Margaret joined him in drinking the potcheen, whereas she always drank Famous Grouse whiskey. She came with her husband, Lord Snowdon, who had taken photographs of me which Francis Wyndham had commissioned for the Sunday Times and which he said had the serenity of a Corot painting. When he invited me to Kensington Palace, the taxi driver, who happened to be Irish, was dumbfounded at the fact that I was being allowed “indoors”!
From the cast of characters of those days, Tony and Francis are the two people I have kept in touch with over the years, mostly by telephone. We reminisce a bit, make plans to meet, but rarely do, and the last time I saw Tony it was in the Cromwell Hospital, where we were both being wheeled down for x-rays and he blew a stream of kisses.
Portrait for Sunday Times, 1970.
Marianne Faithfull was also one of the regulars at my parties, the archetypal flower girl with her long hair and her ropes of necklace, walking around barefoot, putting music to Yeats’s “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloth.” Diane Cilento would bring the I Ching, the book of ancient Chinese wisdom, and the special bronze coins for us to thr
ow so that we could learn from the hexagrams and trigrams what the future held for us. Sean Kenny, clearly besotted with her, could be heard saying that Sean Connery, who was within hearing, was “a slow-burning turf fire.” It still baffles me how I came to know all these people; some serendipity threw us together and united us in the chimera of the “Swinging Sixties.” It was a more innocent time. The famous were not so famous, and were not surrounded by gloating cohorts. Coming from County Clare, I was excited by this galaxy of visitors, and yet I was never carried away. I knew it was transitory, we were all en route, heading for other places, orbiting up, up.
Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda had come to stay with me, as there was a producer interested in my writing a screenplay for Jane and her brother, Peter, from a novel called The Blue Guitar. Vadim presided like a Russian prince, and women were smitten with him. Yet he was also an extremely practical man who before the guests arrived would advise on my wardrobe and on my hair. He was also the one to come to my rescue in the kitchen when a minor catastrophe occurred, as I dropped the goose taking it out of the oven; we pieced it together to make it look presentable. Later I saw Judy Garland, the famed Dorothy, in the living room, wistful and perplexed as she looked around, then nudged her escort, who was also a stranger to me, to indicate that they should leave, which they did, disappearing without a word to anyone.
The children were allowed home one weekend a month, and to them those jamborees were a seventh heaven. They wore red embroidered tunics that I’d got them in the antique market (which two years later they would discard as being sissyish) and threw themselves into the celebrations, little monarchs in that heady acoustic of song and talk and stunts. They answered the door, carried crates of champagne up from the basement, acted as barmen, and obviously Carlo took an exceeding interest as a joint was rolled and passed around to those who wanted it. Oh, the hilarities they witnessed! Shirley MacLaine, taking my hand to read my past lives, pronouncing in all seriousness that I had been “mother and prostitute, many times.” Then it was George Melly’s Man, Woman and Bulldog, a silent tableau for which, naked and with a deft maneuvering of the genitals, he accurately portrayed man, woman, and bulldog, an unlit cigar dangling from his lips.
The news from Bedales was unsettling. Carlo, obviously led astray by the revels, had been found with another boy smoking cannabis at the end of the paddock. This was conveyed to me in a health farm in Hampshire, not far from their school, where I was spending four days on a punitive diet of grapefruit and herbal tea. Though not feeling hungry, I was thinking longingly of Dundee cake, which I don’t even like. I was sitting on my bed looking out at the rain and the lake, to which I had walked the evening before and listened to the ducks going quack-quack and stood on grass that was sodden and strewn with their gray-white droppings. Hearing the voice of Tim Slack, the assistant headmaster, I took fright and asked if there had been an accident. No, it was not that, he assured me, though I realized something must be amiss. I heard myself rave on about the effects of fasting and how everything was altered and clouds resembled camels, as they had to Hamlet. Then he blurted it out. Carlo had been found smoking “cannabis regis.” I was furious, I was flabbergasted, I was apologetic and promised to give him a stern scolding.
“The thing is…” Tim said, mastering his intermittent stammer, “he says that he turned on with you, Miss O’Brien.” Things began to fracture. I saw, as in a lurid flashback, Diane Cilento throwing the I Ching, Jim the Limb miming the heroin needle, and remembered the brown sticks of hashish being warmed, then crumbled and lit as the clean smell pervaded the room.
I assured him that home life from that moment on would be more rigorous, and put the blame on some tearaways who would not be invited to my house again.
As it happened, the children were coming to the health farm for lunch the next day. I had arranged that they would have a cold chicken salad, while I persisted with the grapefruit. As they came up the steps, Carlo lagged behind, and then in the dining room our voices had to be muted, since law-abiding people sat at nearby tables. I asked him in a hoarse whisper what in Christ’s name he was doing, smoking a joint at the end of the paddock. He was contrite, admitted to it, but said it was the evening of the dance and his friend Norrie had asked him if he would like to “turn on” before the dance. It was mostly to get the courage to ask girls up. His eyes, which were large and blue-gray, were now overflowing, and I could see that we had drawn attention to ourselves. Intending to be stern, I said that I would cancel their weekend home, which was soon due, but they well knew that I was sure to relent. It was a cheerless lunch, and they trotted off, very unfulfilled and without daring to ask for extra pocket money.
My mother visited once a year and did not like the tempo of the parties. Why, she inquired, had Joe Bushkin, whom I had met only once, hired a swankier piano for a particular Saturday jamboree? Why had I, on impulse, bought a second sideboard, when bottles and spare glasses could easily be kept under the table in the kitchen? Sensing wanton extravagance and sexual innuendo, she sat in the winged chair, her hair swept up in tortoiseshell combs, sizing up the guests. She would retire, waiting for my step, which would be some hours later, her lamp still on. I would go in, and once, sitting up in bed, reprovingly, she asked, “Are you or are you not a good girl?”
It was Sean Kenny who succeeded in persuading R. D. Laing to come one Saturday night. Laing, half Lucifer, half Christ, pale and aloof, sat apart, refusing food, seemingly bemused by his surroundings. But that, I told myself, was the outer him; there was the him who had written Bird of Paradise, with its jangled ecstasies, reminiscent of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. In it he described a pivotal moment when, as a medical student in Glasgow, he was on his way to the laboratory with the remains of a grotesque infant, wrapped in newspaper, and he went into a pub and had this sudden desire to unwrap the paper, to make them see, “to turn the world to stone.”
He came most Saturdays, maintaining the same half-mocking aloofness, and surprisingly, one evening a row erupted between him and Sean. I saw Sean bristle with rage, sleeves rolled up, goading him to a fight, calling him “Black Teeth Laing” and threatening to throw him down a long flight of steps. Laing met the barrage with the calm of a Buddha and afterward took a rug off the chair and went into the garden, where he lay down on the damp grass and slept. Later, when he came back in, he danced, alone and in a trance, like a reincarnated Nijinsky. That was the night he told his wife that he could not go home because I had taken his keys, the keys to his car and the keys to his house, and so it was that night I felt he had thawed somewhat.
The parties, which went on for almost two years, always ended abruptly. In the small hours Sean Kenny would curl up on a kidney-shaped sofa and, mid-sentence, fall asleep. This would lead to a sudden exodus: blondes, having lost patience with him, would holler out the addresses of other gigs in far-flung regions of London, even as far out as Petersham. I would be alone with him, which is what I wanted. Once, however, a predatory girl called Chrissie decided to sit it out; she and I knelt by him, the two pagan Marys at the foot of the Cross, a little spent, but indefatigable, not exchanging a word, looking at that face that, in sleep, was so boyish, the light from an oil lamp that sat on a ledge just behind him giving a soft brilliance to the dome of his head, his high forehead, and the blond hair that was tousled. He was fast asleep, far away from us, a deity newly varnished. From time to time he muttered something, but he did not waken. It may have been the chimes of the grandfather clock in the hall that caused her to remember the hour, as suddenly she jumped up and asked abruptly where the phone was. It was in the kitchen, and I went on tiptoe to eavesdrop. I heard her say, “How’s Kafka?,” listen, and then slam the phone down. As she gathered her belongings, miffed at having to concede her place beside him, I asked who Kafka was. It was her dog, which her mother was minding, and she was in a foul mood at having been wakened at that ungodly hour.
Always when he wakened, Sean looked around at the chaos, glasses and dishes a
ll over the floor, white lilies wilting, as faithfully he would say, “Have the people caused the flowers to die?” He would have a dram of cognac in his coffee, then pour a few drops onto the palm of his hands, which he rubbed briskly, and then inhale. I think I knew that he would not live long, life in its ordinariness was not for him, he was like a meteor which needed to consume itself. We would sit and listen to Dion on the record player, over and over again, the words that I hearkened to, “Sit down, old friend, there’s something in my heart I must tell you,” believing that he too had something to tell me. Then he would get up to go, making the same joke about coming the following Saturday, but only for the bread and the wine.
“But you will come,” I would say.
“Of course… darlin’.”
I lived for those Saturdays.
There were nights when people came unexpectedly. Richard Burton rang the doorbell one Monday evening, late, and said he was in the neighborhood, which was unlikely, as no one was in that neighborhood by chance in those days. Never on any stage have I been so mesmerized, so entranced, as I was that night, hearing Richard Burton recite Shakespeare, torrents of it. As a boy he had memorized those speeches and spoken them down in the Welsh valleys, and vowed that all his life would be devoted to Shakespeare, a vow he reneged on and felt sorry about. He loved language and loved writers. He had written A Christmas Story, in imitation of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, to keep Dylan happy in Parnassus. A story of mine, The Love Object, was a favorite of his, one in which the spiritual and carnal ramifications of a love affair were laid bare. Maybe because of it, he took me to be more libertine than I was. He could not understand why I did not want to go to the “bed chamber,” wanting instead to sit and talk and be mesmerized. Men for me were either lovers or brothers; the lovers were more intimidating and often unobtainable, and though I dearly wanted to, I could never combine the two qualities in the same man. Richard Burton was a brother, and a bard brother at that.