I adored my mother’s bedroom on the top floor of our house in Drayton Gardens. The candy-striped wallpaper had been hung in such a way that it felt as if you were under a big top at the circus, or an elegant marquee in the grounds of a grand house. The room was almost bare, and furnished only with a dressing-table (a ghastly, ultramodern piece she had bought with great extravagance from Peter Jones in the fifties), a brass bed, two rather beautiful chairs that had once belonged to her mother, Matty, and two huge paintings Sebastian had painted as a child. Her dressing-table housed her meagre collection of costume jewellery, and the gigantic amethyst bracelet Mervyn had bought her with the proceeds of his Society of Literature award for Gormenghast and volume of poetry, The Glassblowers. Each mirror in the three-sided dressing-table was about six inches wide and this was the only place in the house where you could study yourself, and then only in bits at a time. There were no full-length or even half-length mirrors in the house, not from any concern over pagan idolatry, but just because there weren’t any. A small oval mirror above the sink in the minuscule bathroom and a broken shaving mirror in the kitchen put paid to any lurking vanity. But in Maeve’s bedroom, I could look at myself in sections, by sitting, standing or crouching. Until I left home, I had never seen the whole of my body in one piece, unless I was in a shop or someone else’s house, and then never naked.
Over the years, my tiny bedroom had gone through many transformations. It had been a Cornish fishing village, with shell-laden nets hanging from the ceiling and cockle-filled baskets sitting on the sand-painted floorboards; a French restaurant, with a small table covered with a blue and white checked tablecloth, candle-filled wine bottles and a huge string of onions that hung from the wall, bought from the French onion seller who cycled round our area once a fortnight. He wore the obligatory striped jumper and black beret and his neck was bent with the weight of so many onion necklaces. Finally, it was a reading room, with white walls and floorboards, and decorated with nothing other than the black, grey, green and orange of Penguin books to give it colour.
While my room was cluttered and disorganised, Maeve’s was ordered and soothing. It was where I made my telephone calls, did my make-up, and got ready for the evening ahead. The room was light and had a feeling of absolute serenity, despite all the action happening on the street below. On her bedside table she kept a note-pad where she recorded everything she read, with a date, a short précis, and her thoughts on each book. She read all the time, was as lost without something ‘on the go’ as I was. If she was banned from reading, or went blind and couldn’t master Braille, she would rather die she said. She had a few hypothetical situations she would rather die than face, all of them unlikely ever to happen. Bananas repelled her so utterly that you had merely to plant one near her nose (which I did once) for her to begin retching. Far worse than the smell of a banana was the thought that one day she might be forced to eat one. Peaches didn’t fare much better. The furriness of the skin, the succulence of the flesh all anathema to her. Her major dread was being forced to spend even a second in a submarine. Apart from this, she was quite normal, unless of course it came to flat shoes.
Her cupboard stored her few but beautifully looked-after clothes. They were immensely glamorous, in whites and blacks and muddy greens and beiges. I can see her now, with her waist clinched tight in a Burberry raincoat, the collar turned up, the tight straight skirt underneath, the pencil thin stilettos, T-barred or ankle-strapped, the stork-like ankles always looking as though they might snap at any moment with the sheer weight of carrying a body around. The very word ‘sensible’ could lead her into a depression she said, so thought it much more sensible not to be sensible, and if your stilettos became uncomfortable and your feet ached, well that was just too bad.
My bedroom looked over the back garden, and the only sounds I heard were the warblings of jolly sparrows and the occasional mowing of the minuscule lawns of Chelsea. Maeve’s faced the street and was a hotbed of sound and happening. An endless stream of cars and lorries rumbled along, using our street as a thoroughfare. The queue began forming at the Old Brompton Road, and then single-filed its way across the Fulham Road, King’s Road and Cheyne Walk towards the river. The roar of London traffic and late-night partying could be heard distinctly, floating up the four floors, through her window and into her bedroom. I loved nothing more than being alone in the house, lying on her bed, listening to the traffic making its way around London and knowing that all I had to do was open my front door to be a part of it all.
The Drayton Arms was just across the road and every Sunday, if Fabian, by now married to Phyllida, and Sebastian, back from his travels, were at home, we all went there for a pre-lunch drink. We had been going there for years. It was a real neighbourhood pub, with a friendly proprietor, a roaring fire in the winter, and unchanging regulars, and there was something really pleasant about this weekly ritual. Another regular was Vyvyan Holland. I would glance at him, unable to comprehend that the man reading his paper, and enjoying a pint and a bag of cheese and onion crisps was Oscar Wilde’s son. It seemed so extraordinary somehow. Since finding a miniature edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol in my stocking one Christmas and reading De Profundis with a torch under my blankets at school, I had been fascinated. Oscar Wilde was from another time entirely, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the Drayton Arms. I always stopped myself from striking up a conversation; it would have been intrusive and insensitive to have interrupted his pre-lunch drink with some outpouring he had heard a million times before. But it didn’t stop me looking and thinking about the history he must surely have anchored to his heart.
After our wines and beers and gin and tonics we would go home to the roast Maeve had been slow cooking for hours, sitting around the kitchen table in the basement, with just the family or with friends. At one of these lunches we became aware that we were being watched. On the window sill, observing us from the other side of the glass, was a large rat. Standing on his haunches he held half a cheese sandwich in his tiny human-like hands, and there was a look in his eye suggesting that he wanted to join in the fun. Although we should all have been shrieking by now, there was something rather touching about it, and we left him alone to enjoy his lunch.
Since I’d been such an unmitigated dunce at school, it was difficult to know quite what to do with me. It must have been a real source of curiosity for my mother, who was academically very able, but I just couldn’t seem to do it. There was never so much as a hint of disappointment shown, although I’m sure that, over the years, occasional tosses and turns in the wee small hours must have produced one or two tangled sheets. I was never aware of it at the time and perhaps it never happened. Perhaps my mother would have said that not getting some good O-levels, although limiting for me, didn’t worry her in the least. Had I shown no interest in the world about me, I’m sure it would have been a very different matter. Fabian had finished at Chelsea Art School and was now winning awards at the Royal College of Art, and Sebastian was a linguist and adventurer but, in my case, there didn’t seem to be any recognisable talent for anything. Outsiders’ expectations were more difficult. Would I paint, would I write, would I create? they seemed to be saying. No, was the very bald answer.
On my first day at speed writing, before I’d even hung up my coat, I was led into the ladies by a phenomenally pretty girl I’d never set eyes on before. ‘Shall we have a smoke before we begin?’ Sarah said. Holding my hand she took me into a tiny cubicle where we shared a joint and introduced ourselves. Maeve, quietly despairing, had seen an advertisement on the tube. ‘Gt a gd jb’ it said. It was an eight-week secretarial course where you repeated the weeks until you had mastered speedwriting. I left after nine months, still on week one, but it was there I met the girls who would turn out to be friends I kept for life.
Speedwriting was located above Freeman, Hardy and Willis in Oxford Street. As well as selling shoes, the shop had a children’s clothes department, and in the clothes department was a cafe. After the stifledom of school, I was invigorated to meet girls with the same passions as I had for the cinema, the theatre, books and music, and it made it virtually impossible ever to leave that coffee bar. Speedwriting was crammed with girls who looked as though they had answered an advertisement touting for the physically blessed. I had never before seen so many beautiful, captivating, sexy, naughty, intelligent girls in one small space. Aside from my new friend, Sarah Coats, a jaw-droppingly lovely, aristocratic, small girl, none of the other girls appeared to have smoked on their homework breaks. They were all built like racehorses, with endless tawny limbs, flawless skin and cheekbones so sculpted that, for the first time in my life, I felt, at a perfectly average five foot four, like a chirpy midget. There were Russian princesses and granddaughters of Churchill, the achingly hip and the fantastically rich, sitting side by side, headphones on, hoping to find what it took to gt a gd jb.
Zoë Wanamaker, a big-hearted, witty and incredibly stylish girl, took me to weekly work-out classes with Lotte Berk, to Praed Street to obtain morning-after pills and, in a rare moment when we weren’t laughing, made a sterling attempt to clarify the Six-day War to me. In Sue, I found a glamorous and earthy friend with the same love of the cinema as I had. After a monstrously boring day speedwriting, we would saunter to the Curzon, or the Odeon Leicester Square, or hop on a tube to the National Film Theatre, to look at old and new films. Minus the nerd factor, Sue was fantastically knowledgeable, a real movie buff, and we never tired of talking, over endless cups of black coffee, of the glory of Catherine Deneuve and her equally attractive sister, Françoise Dorleac, on whom we both had crushes. We watched Belle du Jour, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Cul de Sac over and over again, and the unrelated A Man and a Woman. The slim plotline didn’t worry us in the least, and had us dreaming of kissing men in the teeming rain with Da da da da da, dardardar, da da da da da, dardardar da da da da da dardardar daar daar, dar dar da dar da playing in the background.
My other great friend was Georgie, a giant in every sense of the word. She and her long-legged mother, Kate, lived in a doll’s house in Rutland Street, Knightsbridge. Kate and I had the same birthday, a fact she never remembered. ‘No darling, we haven’t, have we? Are you serious? We’ve got the same birthday, how extraordinary, no wonder I love you,’ she said for the next twenty-five years. Georgie was the first truly sophisticated young person I’d ever come across. Her boyfriends were urbane London men who bought her expensive jewellery and took her for dinner, or cockney wide boys who made her laugh and took her to the dogs. One night she might be going out with Mr Chow, the next John Binden. In the evenings, she worked as a waitress in Gasworks restaurant and, like Zoë and Sue, also wanted to be an actress.
Thinking me an innocent, Kate had nuggets of wisdom prepared for any occasion. Delivered with great authority, these sage words were whispered deep and low, as though she were letting me in on the secret of life itself. ‘Men love girls with sticky out teeth. It’s very sexy, you see, Clare.’ ‘Never trust a small woman. They are tough and manipulative.’ ‘Never, but never, have a plain girlfriend. They’ll take your man. Men love plain women.’ ‘Die rather than show your arms past thirty.’ ‘Never show a man you’re keen; he’ll go off you.’ And most bewildering of all, ‘Paul McCartney only likes girls with fat legs and no bosom.’
I laughed a lot and was startled by Kate’s ‘all men are bastards’ dictum every other sentence. This theory was a new one to me. But the ‘treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen’ philosophy could have been invented by Kate herself, as she did treat them mean and she did keep them keen. At fifty-seven, there were men of all ages happy to be treated by Kate in any way at all, as long as they were treated. She was spectacularly elegant, utterly unafraid, horrible to men, sympathetic to women, incredibly attractive to both sexes, and about her daughter. She took enormous delight in shocking Georgie and me with her Homerically epic tales of deceit, rivalry and adventure in the thirties, and, while I found her stories wonderfully risqué and hysterically funny, Georgie could be quite thrown by them. Between them, her parents had been married five times and at seventeen Georgie was like a very pretty girl of twenty-five or thirty. They were a glamorous duo and I was entranced.
Every day after college, Georgie came to my house or I went to hers, and after she had hoovered, dusted, arranged flowers, prepared a light supper for Kate, polished some brass and written her thank-you letters, we were ready to begin the preparations for the night. Entirely due to Georgie’s influence, I took more than my customary five minutes to get ready. Georgie took hours, not that our clothes took long to assemble. Our skirts, like everybody else’s, were the width of a belt, our skinny ribs were bought two sizes smaller than we took, and our shoes were slingbacked and stilettoed. It was the make-up that took the time. There were the pale brown freckles to dot on our noses, the liquid eyeliner to coat our eyelids, the false eyelashes to glue to the top, the eyelashes to paint on the bottom, the baby pink blusher to rouge our cheeks, the pan stick to obliterate our mouths and the Je Reviens to squirt. Then we were ready.
There was absolutely no chance of either of us falling in love with one another’s boyfriends because the type I liked didn’t fall into either of her categories. I liked pretty boys who looked ill and sensitive, with no bottoms and sunken cheeks – the cool thin boy slumped in a corner, the boy who walked everywhere, had no money, and hung around Parson’s ignoring you after he had kissed you all night at a party the night before. Georgie liked sophisticated men at both ends of the social strata, men who knew what was what.
But for all her maturity, Georgie could be unpredictable. One filthy night we went to the flat of a group of boys we knew and they offered us some LSD. Neither of us had taken a trip before, and there was no doubt that Georgie would refuse, I could have bet my life on it. ‘No thanks’ and ‘Yes please’ came out of our mouths simultaneously, but out of the wrong mouths. I was staggered but thought if the responsible Georgie can, I can. We were given our little pieces of blotting paper and hung around waiting for our journey to begin. It seemed to be having no effect so, feeling extremely relieved, we decided to make our way back home. We glided out of the flat in West Kensington to be pistol whipped by the spiteful rain lashing at us horizontally. ‘Don’t look, walk straight on as if you haven’t noticed,’ Georgie bossed. ‘Haven’t noticed what?’ I asked. ‘Our knickers,’ she screamed. ‘Look, they’re down by our ankles.’ We shuffled along the Cromwell Road for the next mile or so like two geisha girls with newly bound feet, our twin knickers wrapped around our ankles.
It seems odd that I could be so influenced by her trip that I believed my knickers had also fallen down. We hailed an aeroplane that had fortuitously stopped on the runway where we were standing and, although it took days to reach my house, the pilot didn’t seem to find anything peculiar about us. I left Georgie to continue her journey, and went into what I thought would be the safety of my home. I undressed and lay in bed and, for what seemed like minutes, but turned out to be five or six hours, I watched in awe and respectful silence as the hands on my clock transformed themselves into a glamorous and heavily made up Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev. Their dancing was sublime and inexhaustible and it was only when they left my clock to clamber up my curtains for an encore that I became frightened. I crept into my mother’s bedroom on my hands and knees, got into her bed, woke her up, terrified her with my ramblings and eventually fell asleep.
A few hours later I tried to reach Georgie, but her mother Kate said she was in a mysteriously deep slumber. Georgie rang me the following morning. She had been up all night, she said, looking at herself in the mirror, and was so staggered by her beauty that she couldn’t stop admiring herself for a single second. When she eventually forced her eyes off herself for a brief moment, then returned to gaze at her visage, the image that greeted her was that of Cliff Richard. All through the night, she discovered she could change her face at will, until she had first-hand knowledge of what it felt like to be Julie Christie, Serge Gainsbourg, Sidney Poitier and Rita Tushingham. Although I was only an observer, I also felt I now had intimate knowledge of what trials and tribulations a ballerina goes through. I had seen for myself the bloody feet.
Although my figure wasn’t fashionable, at least I had the advantage of never having to iron my hair, as most of my friends did. One afternoon I was approached by a man in the Old Brompton Road, asking me to join him for a coffee as he had a proposition to make. Although middle-aged, he didn’t seem particularly threatening, and I was curious. Over coffee, he told me that he had a magazine called Penthouse, which had tastefully done nude and semi-nude photographs. Would I be interested in being in it? He felt I had a future career in glamour modelling. I said I’d let him know, kept his card in my wallet for a few years, but never rang. Although I felt vaguely flattered, a glamour model was something I had no desire to be, and if that was the impression I was giving to complete strangers, then I had to do something about it. I rushed to the chemist, bought some gauze and attempted tourniqueting my bosom into a squashed macaroon so as to camouflage the bloody thing. Flat chests were de rigueur; no one wanted a cleavage. Outwardly, the boys solemnly confessed they couldn’t agree more, although privately, I couldn’t help but notice, it seemed to be a slightly different matter.
I had done all these courses, but none was going to secure me the job of a secretary, a business woman or even a housewife, so I was nervously looking forward to beginning work for my mother’s great friend Hazel as her maid. I hadn’t the first idea of what being a maid involved, but it sounded fun and, on that first morning, we decided between us what the term meant. Hazel lived in a gigantic flat off Victoria Street and I began working for her when I was seventeen. Sebastian had preceded me when he’d been employed as a kind of un-uniformed valet. She loved the theatre but always became uncomfortable during a performance due to a botched suicide attempt some years earlier. Eventually she found the solution. She bought a vast and cumbersome blow-up cushion, not dissimilar in appearance to a whoopee cushion, which Sebastian carried in front of him like one of three kings bearing a gift. She then made herself comfortable and the people behind her infuriated.
He also ran some of her errands, but I soon found out for myself that these excursions were never as simple as the scrawled list implied. On closer inspection, her lists were daunting and unconventional to say the least. One carrot, seven screwdrivers, an Alice band, a plank of cedarwood and some Michaelmas daisies were the kind of thing she might be after. It was like a living, breathing game of ‘I went to Paris to buy …’. ‘Is that enough, Sebastian?’ Hazel would drawl as she handed him twenty-five crisp pound notes.
An Alice band in Victoria Street may not have been the hardest thing in the world to find, but the more obscure the demand, the more frustrated Sebastian became. So, for some extraordinary reason, it was suggested that I take over where he left off, and so began my first proper paid job. Hazel was a Guggenheim, the sister of Peggy and the daughter of the millionaire who famously changed into his dinner jacket in preparation for his plunge into that black ocean from the sinking Titanic. Hazel was immensely rich, and surrounded by hangers-on and opportunists, a breed I had never come across before. I was shocked by these people and found their lack of respect for Hazel revolting. I arrived early every morning to identify the clothes she wanted to wear for the day, but it could be tricky as Hazel didn’t appreciate being a size or four larger than she had once been, and preferred to wear her clothes a few sizes smaller. Together we improvised. Her yellow hair hung down in natural ringlets and, although at least sixty-five, she still had the most lovely face, with pale unlined skin and a flawless complexion.
On her mantelpiece sat a photograph taken on her eighteenth birthday. She had been exquisitely pretty and reminded me of a girl in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book, or a southern belle from a Tennessee Williams play, and she always appeared to me utterly out of place in London. They said that Peggy had been born with the brains and Hazel with the beauty and, as I gazed at the photograph every day while dusting, I imagined Hazel’s life as the adored daughter of one of the richest men in America; and whenever I heard the Noël Coward song ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’, I thought of Hazel. She could be a nightmare to work for, neurotic and pernickety, but she was always kind and I knew she liked me as I liked her.
But then I always adored older women. Even though I knew that Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy looked great, it was Jeanne Moreau, Simone Signoret and Sophia Loren who captivated me – anyone, in fact, full featured, sensual and bruised, who seemed to have lived, loved and ached. I just loved that intelligent, head held high, flawed kind of woman. I never became one. Like Hazel, I was far too fond of frills and fluff, and much too polite to be mysterious.
We were forever at cross-purposes. Her requests were invariably abstract, so when, one day, she said, ‘Draw me a bath, Clarabelle,’ I didn’t question it, and she didn’t question my request for a piece of paper and a pencil. Since I was so hopeless at drawing, it was a moment or two before either of us realised my mistake. We went along in this curious and hypothetical way for a year or so, and it suited us both very well.
One day she decided it was time she held a party. When the big day arrived, I busied myself with the stream of delivery men, carting in vast supplies of food, boxes of champagne, crates of wine, patisseries from Gloriette and exotic flowers from Moyses Stevens. Along with assorted butlers and maids, I listened as Hazel issued her peculiar requests from her bedroom and we jumped to it. ‘I’m gonna stay in bed for the party, Clarabelle, so I want you to fix the back of my dress.’ There was no back of the dress. She had just managed to squeeze the front over her head, and somehow fit her arms through the tiny puff sleeves but, for the width of a foot or so, her back was uncovered. So that the dress didn’t gape, I had to work out a way of joining the back together. Someone was sent out for strips of pink elastic and I sewed them so that the dress met at last. She stayed in it as I sewed, and we both felt extremely proud of ourselves when, from the front, it looked like a perfectly fitting outfit.
Hazel was newly in love, so she was deliriously happy that night. Her suitor was a handsome South American, about thirty years her junior, whose motives were obvious to everyone but her. She must have known, but then she had never expected anyone to be interested in her for anything but her money. I hated him on sight, and tried to make it clear by a lot of subtle eyebrow lifting and almost imperceptible nodding of my head that I was on to him (as if he’d care). The party was a success. While Norman Mailer paced the flat, leering at my sister-in-law, Phyllida, I watched old smarmy, Hazel’s beau, as he faked desire and Hazel disingenuously fell for it. But anyway, her sweet heart was broken soon after, not for the first time I’m sure, but perhaps for the last. I was far too young, too inexperienced and too fond of Hazel to have been any help, but I did notice, and I did hurt for her. She went to live in New Orleans soon after, returning to the southern gal she had always been. I never saw her again, but I never forgot.
Years later a friend bought me a biography of the Guggenheim family, a curious present in all kinds of ways but particularly since I had never mentioned Hazel to her. I went straight to the index and found the chapter on my friend. It was a terrible shock to read of the horrific deaths of her two baby sons, who’d fallen from the balcony of her Manhattan apartment when she’d been a young woman. She was with them when they fell, and although it isn’t clear what happened on that terrible day, I had known nothing of the tragedy that coloured Hazel’s life, and if my mother knew, she never told me.