CHAPTER 6

THAT FIRST summer of 1946, the first peacetime summer, David had two weeks leave and we decided to visit the Mediterranean, for me only imagined through staring at the picture postcard wall at the Bon Viveur. We went by train, via Paris. The trains were decrepit, held together by rattling bolts and pieces of wire it seemed—best not to look out the window. There were no restaurant cars, no sleepers, very few seats not occupied by troops still being moved around Europe. We shambled, if a train can be said to shamble, through the shell-scarred towns and villages, hot and tired and happy, David sitting on his suitcase in the corridor and I on the lap of an obliging soldier. Deep red rocks against deep blue sea—the first glimpses of the sea in the Var region—are still for me the instantly summoned memory of that year.

The Hotel du Reserve at Beaulieu reopened after the war the week we arrived. We were the first guests, our room number 22 was the prettiest, and the manager, M. Potfer, welcomed us as the first sign of returning normality. Forever afterwards he called me his good-luck mascot. I am glad that I would not want to go to La Reserve now: it is ruinously expensive—different people, different atmosphere, different world. Its first impressions, though, stay with me as fresh as ever. I had never had melon for breakfast before, never had champagne in the bath, never seen a woman lie bare breasted in the sun, never known that in France, as part of a couple, you could register in a hotel with your correct name and not a falsely assumed marital one—something not done, if not illegal, in England and unheard of in Australia.

At the end of two weeks David had to report back for duty and we braved the rattling old train again. This time it let us down. Twenty-four hours after we embarked it panted slowly into the Gare Saint-Lazare, barely half an hour before our boat train was due to leave the Gare du Nord. The taxi which sped us across Paris arrived as the barriers clanged shut. The train stood tantalisingly on the platform. We pleaded in vain to be allowed to run for it. Finally, David shouted, ‘Mais je suis l’officier du Navy Brittanique et je sera A.O.L.’ The guard lifted the barrier just enough for him to squeeze through saying grudgingly: ‘Alors—allez—mais Madame et le baggage doit rester ici.’

Like Linda in Nancy Mitford’s novel The Pursuit of Love, hot, hungry, tired and dirty, I sat on our pile of suitcases and wept. I was rescued, not by a dashing French duke, but by a kindly porter who deposited me with a mercifully honest taxi driver. Luckily I had my own passport and just enough money for the taxi ride. He took me to a passably comfortable and totally respectable hotel in the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas. I booked a room, and rang the only telephone number I had in Paris, that of the parents of Nicki d’Ivangin, a young Russian dancer who had been dear to me and my family all through the war in Australia and who had recently died.

Nicki’s brother answered the phone, delighted that I was in Paris, thrilled to meet me at last—and fortuitously able to collect me in half an hour. I had time for a hurried wash and, starving, desperate for some coffee, I waited on the pavement outside the hotel.

Nicki’s brother, when he arrived, was resplendent in the outfit of a Thomas Cook tour operator. He was in the company of some thirty-odd American tourists, and he escorted me proudly to the front of the bus, which was en route to Versailles for the day. I was too young and too tired to protest, and so, in a state of consciousness heightened by hunger and exhaustion, I learnt all about Marie Antoinette.

In the four days I remained in Paris I learnt, too, much about the Paris of the Russian émigrés. We went, en famille, to visit Nicki’s grave, in the Russian cemetery at Saint-Genevieve-des-Bois, on the very day a close colleague of Rasputin’s assassin, Prince Yusupov, was being buried. I met many of the mourners, some of them relations of David’s, and through the d’Ivangins I met many more Russians: princesses who were head vendeuses at the haute couture establishments; noblemen who were secretaries at the grand men’s clubs; waiters and taxi drivers who were not all princes but who, for the most part, behaved like them. And I was reunited with Wolfgang, whom I’d last seen in Australia, Nicki’s dearest friend.

I owe a large slice of my life to Wolfgang Cardamatis, a half-Greek, half-German painter, who, since his teens, was brought up, under protest, in Australia. He dropped the ‘Wolfgang’ some years later, after he shed his German passport, and adopted one of his seven other names—in reality Johannes, but now simply ‘Janni’ and therefore more Greek. I owe him years filled not only with gaiety and hilarity but also with depth and knowledge. I learnt from him almost all I know and from which I derive pleasure: of great paintings; of minor art; of the conscious use of observation; of the stones of Venice as felt and seen by an inhabitant of that magic city. He taught me how to see with joy. I owe him, too, my one brief Venetian love affair, without which I believe one must feel cheated; for he lent me for the occasion—indeed orchestrated its happening—the beautiful young man with whom he was then living. Wolf was not possessive in his affections. He wanted everyone he loved to love each other.

I owe my best times in Paris as well as the later ones in Venice to Wolf. After Nicki’s death, he lived there in a series of attics, by his wits and his charm and unashamedly off his friends for years. When David and I arrived he was always waiting at our hotel for a drink, a meal, a bath, and to entertain us and to show us a Paris we would not otherwise have known. If we drank too much a great deal of the time as I fear we did, we were drunk, too, with youth and excitement. I owe to Wolf my one encounter with Picasso, just as I owe to my youth the fact that I failed to benefit from it. I owe my unthinking enjoyment to the fact that I was a woman.

One summer, Wolf was living in Antibes, and his newest friend, Mario Ruspoli, a young Italian prince, was living next door. We three became firm summer friends, whilst up in the hills Picasso was organising his first show of pottery and the beginnings of his gallery. We helped him hang his canvases and display his plates and it never occurred to me to ask for so much as an autograph. Or, far better, a plate. But I did find time for a brief and delightful romance with Mario.

Wolf lived for a while in a garret in Paris with a ginger kitten called Cleopatra, who ate only fillet of sole, or the occasional breast of chicken. Cleo’s upkeep eventually became too taxing, so Wolf rose one dawn and deposited Cleo warm and secure in her lidded basket on Colette’s doorstep—secure in the knowledge that she would be taken in. Many, many years later I had occasion to visit Maurice Goudeket, Colette’s widower, and I longed to ask him if he remembered the arrival of Cleo, but our conversation was for the purpose of establishing some copyright in Colette’s work: Cleo seemed too frivolous an intrusion.

Wolf and Nicki and I had been a firm threesome in Australia: Wolf and I now became like brother and sister in Paris and London. Paris in the 1940s was somewhere David and I went whenever he had leave and often I stayed behind with Wolf for a few days. Paris in the 1940s was perhaps more than anywhere in the world the embodiment of the feel, smell and sound of that vibrant decade. I know, now, from other people’s histories what a demoralised and tired decade it was, but for me it was vibrant.

I didn’t, of course, realise that in spending my nights at the then-famous nightclubs—at Vieux Colombier, at Madame Arthur’s, at Scherezade, at Jimmy’s Bar and in listening to, drinking with, laughing with, dancing to: Juliette Gréco, Jacques Becker, Claude Luter, Charlie Parker, Stéphane Grappelli, all then famous in the musical world—I was at the centre of something special, short-lived but resounding. It was special to me, but I saw no significance, outside the moment. I do remember how wonderful Juliette Gréco was in her ordinary black dress and with her extraordinary long nose, before Darryl Zanuck, haute couture and fashion diluted her originality. I do remember the gaiety and urgency of Claude Luter’s music, and the sad, doggy little face (because I have it with me in a photograph) of Eartha Kitt, coming to the transvestite boîte, Madame Arthur’s, after her own performance as one of a troupe. At Madame Arthur’s, the audience frequently ran out by the back entrance as the police stormed in by the front. I remember the violins playing at one’s table at Scherezade, and the fact that caviar was for the general. I remember going to Jimmy’s Bar with Jimmy Donohue, notorious U.S. society figure; La Grenouille in Montmartre and the usually drunken proprietor, Roger; and Patachou who cut off all the men’s ties at her bar across the way. I remember famous singer Suzy Solidor asking me to tea, and I neglecting to go.

Days shopping at the marchés aux puces I recollect from the random purchases made before I had any dwelling of my own; they are now much treasured and providential possessions. The canary still sings in its gilded cage; the painted tin watering can, though battered, has a distinguished air to it; the glass bottle in the shape of a gun is, I expect, a collector’s item, for there are people who collect bottles. Before the Rue Jacob was as fashionable or as expensive as it is now, I bought frivolously and copiously: frivolous because I had no permanent home and the nature of my purchases—an inlaid chess table, massive brass firedogs, an Empire causeuse, a green woollen carpet with bright upstanding wired white and yellow daisies—were hardly suitable for a nomad who didn’t play chess. I sold, eventually, the chess table for a regretted pittance. The carpet, before I had realised its rare and singular charm, was plucked bare of its woollen daisies by careless youths and eaten bald of its grass by energetic moths. Only the dogs and the causeuse have survived in constant use.

With my monthly allowance, and egged on by Wolf, I shopped at Jean Dessès’ for dresses, at Jeanette Colombier and d’Albouy for hats, at Guerlain for scent. One night at a restaurant a waiter brought a note to my table: ‘Thank you for wearing my dress so beautifully,’ it said, and was signed ‘Jean Dessès’. I smiled at M. Dessès, then threw away the note—and shortly thereafter gave away the dress.

All the couture houses were eager for custom and the excitement was heightened by the fact that they had been in hibernation throughout the war. I chose the house of Jean Dessès as my particular pet because early on I had met the head vendeuse, a charming and elegant lady called Jacqueline Harrari, and we were fortuitously the same size. I dressed in the height of fashion on every penny of my allowance from Australia, either through clothes brought over to England on Jacqui’s back and thereby free of both customs and rationing or through trips to Paris, long hours of fittings and almost as long snippings on my part of all the grand labels, which—if left intact and of course if I had retained any of the clothes—would now garner me a small fortune. These beautiful creations were thereby shorn of their identity—I didn’t even keep the labels. My loyalty to Jean Dessès suffered a brief lapse when Christian Dior burst upon the fashion world with his ‘New Look’. I bought two of his first creations, discarded the labels before braving customs, as our foreign currency allowance was then still restricted to £25 per annum.

On those frequent trips to Paris, usually with David, and sometimes when left behind with Wolfgang, and therefore into trouble, I also shopped madly for hats. Hats were mad, in those days, but they were exquisite things and somewhere in the back of a cupboard I have one solitary example which has survived—a little brown felt beret with the label ‘Albouy’, miraculously still attached. There was a wonderful confection by Jeanette Colombier—black tulle and jet and soaring plumes and eye veils which also survived in a cupboard for some years, until discovered by Wolfgang and made into quite another creation.

A Slovakian refugee sculptor who had made his name in Australia, Arthur Fleischmann, tracked me down a year or so after I had arrived in London, asking for introductions. Prince Philip (then plain Lieutenant Mountbatten, just prior to his marriage) was dug up by me, and David’s Uncle Dickie (Lord Mountbatten) and Fleischmann went to work. In no time, he was under Royal patronage and busy, rich and famous. He telephoned to say he wished to show his appreciation to me for having ‘launched’ him and was about to offer me a token of this appreciation. I thought of furs, diamonds—several Jean Dessès dresses, perhaps. The good man wished, however, to sculpt me. It was an excessively hot summer. Afternoon after afternoon, David drove me to his baking studio where I posed under the glaring summer light. When finished, it looked pretty, far too pretty for me, and in any event I had nowhere in my life to put it. Its pouting terracotta face remained in shadows, under stairs and in cupboards for some years. One day Wolfgang dug her out of the cupboard and by night she was transformed into a person. The terracotta face was covered in Max Factor pancake makeup, rouge, false eyelashes and my very expensive (and fashionable) chignon. My grandmother’s jewellery and Aunt Juliet’s lorgnettes hung around her neck; crowning it all was the black jet and net Jeanette Colombier. Looking back, she was a beauty, but she lived on, as a joke, unappreciated, on my bookcase for months: a figure of fun and a conversation piece. When tired of this, she went back, scrubbed, into a cupboard. The hat was, I expect, discarded in a dustbin and the chignon given over to the moths…

She had a third life, some years later. My doctor husband found her, fell somewhat in love with her and put her on the top of his desk. (We never could get all the Max Factor out of the cracks: she has an interesting and unusual complexion for a terracotta lady). Now, she is in my bookcase, soberly adorned with just one necklace, and people ask who she is: no reflection on Arthur Fleischmann, only on me. I looked like her once.

It was a time when David, Wolf and I took three of the iron chairs from the grass verge then bordering the Champs-Élysées, and sat in the middle of the avenue, forcing the cars to drive around us. It was a time when nobody thought of arresting us. It was still the time when cars were hoisted on to the cross-channel ferry by cranes.

There is much more opulence now, in our materialistic Western world: no recent memories of hardship, death and danger, less excuse for abundance taken recklessly.

I savoured the experiences—I liked my new acquaintances, I was enchanted with my possessions, it was all enormous fun—but I did not appreciate the singularity of my luck, singular because that particular brief era of excellence will not come again in my lifetime, and probably not that of my children.

At the end of my first year in London, George Silk followed me from Shanghai. I was still living in a tiny one room flat in Kensington Close found for me by Nan. I could not believe that I had ever seriously—or even fleetingly—contemplated marriage to George, nice and attractive as he was, but I felt very responsible for his presence. He, on the other hand, having come all this way, was determined to resolve the matter one way or the other. It was the weeks before Christmas. George became impatient with my prevaricating, my obvious lying on the nights when David was in London and I didn’t want to see him, and my chronic inability to say a definite ‘no’.

He hit upon the idea of flushing me out of my flat and into his life in a final spectacular gesture. Every day, in the week before Christmas, a huge Christmas tree was delivered. One just fitted into the flat, although it meant pine needles down the neck when squeezing into the bathroom. The other six or seven trees were lined up by the porters in the narrow hall. George gave up as Boxing Day dawned, and I am sure he has sometimes since reflected on his lucky escape.