Nigel and Nicola arrived on a blinding-bright morning on the ferry from Naples, a girl of sixteen and a boy of fifteen who looked shockingly alike. They were not twins, but nobody could doubt they were products of the same union. Lanky as their parents, with sharp blue-gray eyes, they were indistinguishable from a distance. Nicola seemed not to have the slightest trace of female sexuality, although close inspection revealed small breasts and slightly enlarged hips. Nigel was like an arrow, straight and fledged with thick yellow hair like that of his sister, worn long and parted in the middle. They both wore khaki shorts, white shirts, and sandals without socks.
“Isn’t it darling? They wish they were twins,” said Vera, as they approached. “But they’re rather hard work.”
More hard work, I thought. It relieved me to hear they would be gone from the island in five weeks or so. Back to the Hundred Acre Wood.
The children were eager to see Grant, but they would have to wait until lunch. As they understood, he would never break from his writing until just before one. This was a boundary he kept resolutely in place, though he hadn’t seen his children for several months. I remarked on the oddity of this to Vera, but she dismissed the idea that anything was strange about it. “It’s important for them to remember who he is,” she said. “It’s part of who they are.”
The fact that Nigel and Nicola looked alike faded quickly, since their affects were entirely opposite. He was moody and ironic, casting his scorn in random directions. Nicola radiated energy and optimism, and had brought a thick portfolio of art work recently completed, which she laid out for everyone to see—a dozen pastel watercolors of damp English gardens. There seemed always to be a cathedral spire in the distance.
Nicola’s portfolio was discussed over lunch. Vera and Holly enthused over the pictures, while Nigel maintained that “nothing serious was ever conceived in watercolors.” He admitted to a “certain restraint” in the pictures that he admired, but recommended that she “lose the spires.” Grant—who hadn’t seen the portfolio yet—merely grunted, although one could see that he adored Nicola when she kissed his broad forehead and called him Daddy. Marisa put in a rare appearance, sitting gloomily through lunch, then disappearing to her room afterward. (“On the bloody rag?” wondered Nigel.) Holly, who had befriended Nicola during their last school holiday, chatted amiably about the latest exhibition at the Tate, a retrospective on the career of Henry Moore. “I adore Moore,” she said.
“I used to see a lot of Moore,” said Grant. “What an unpleasant fellow.”
This set the table aflame, and soon the conversation swirled around the question of what part character played in the quality of an artist’s work. Holly was quite firm, saying that a painter’s moral stature was evident in each brush stroke. Vera sided with her. I, impulsively, took the opposite side, arguing that Caravaggio, Titian, and Picasso were no paragons of personal virtue. I said that, where writers were concerned, there was less connection between the quality of the work and the artist. Joyce, for example, was self-centered and inconsiderate.
“Joyce was a minor figure,” said Grant. “Were it not for American academics, he would have disappeared from sight ages ago.”
“Oh, Daddy,” said Nicola, with a scorn that reeked of admiration.
“Pater is right,” said Nigel. “The Irish are always overrated.”
Grant nevertheless approved of my argument. “The life and the work are not related,” he said. “Or if they’re related, it’s in ways no critic could ever fathom.”
Nicola interrupted him: “I think one sees the personality of an artist in the line itself, the firmness of character. That’s why I think Michelangelo must have been a lovely man.”
Nigel acquired a mocking expression. “A lovely man? I can’t believe I’ve come all the way from England to listen to this pseudy shit,” he said, the word “shit” rhyming with “kite.” It was a peculiar affectation of his, the distortion of certain key words so that he sounded hip. “Tell us the local gossip, Mummy. Who is bonking who?”
“Whom, darling,” said Vera. “Who is bonking whom?”
“Bonk?” I asked. The word was unfamiliar to me.
“It means fuck in your bloody language,” said Nigel.
“Lorenzo is a civilized American,” Grant explained.
“Is it possible?” wondered Nigel.
“You must ignore my son,” Vera said to me. “He puts great store by his sophistication, but he’s just a schoolboy.”
“Good for Mummy,” Nicola said.
With a mildly scolding air, Vera cautioned: “Be nice to Alex, both of you. We consider him part of the family.”
“I’m always nice, Mater,” said Nigel.
I had never experienced anything quite like the Grant children, with their adult mannerisms and glorious looks. Young Nigel, in particular, was ethereal, with classic English features, although his straight teeth were anomalous in an English mouth. His nose was long and straight. His voice had recently lowered, hovering uncertainly on the brink of maturity, and occasionally squeaking. He slouched a bit, forcing his shoulder blades to poke through his T-shirt. His sandals exposed large toes, which he tended to wiggle whenever he spoke.
Nicola was also straight-toothed and straight-nosed. Like her mother, she was desperately thin, but strong. Without intention, she was sexy in a boyish, innocent way. There was something preternaturally wise in her steady gaze: a sense of balance that, as I soon learned, was a kind of emotional falsework put up, like scaffolding, while the building itself was under construction. It could not have been easy for a young girl, on the cusp of full sexual maturity, to have a father like Grant, who slept casually with girls who could easily be his own daughters, although I could not be sure exactly how much the children knew about their father’s intimate arrangements.
“Who are you sleeping with around here,” Nigel suddenly asked me, over coffee.
“Be still, Niggy,” his mother said.
“Infy! Infy!” he bellowed, pounding the table. This was apparently a bit of school slang that nobody else understood.
“He’s very rude,” Nicola said, “but his friends at Charterhouse are worse. That whole Carthusian lot should be taken into the woods and shot.”
“I simply want to know who is bonking whom,” Nigel said.
“I’m bonking nobody in this room,” I said. “It’s unpleasant, but true.”
Holly looked at me briefly, then dipped her eyes. I detected a faint smile on her lips.
“Jolly well said, Lorenzo,” Grant observed.
“I’m writing poems, Pater,” Nigel said.
“Not homoerotic love poems, I hope? Carthusian speciality, that,” Grant said. He was himself an Old Carthusian, and in Play the Game—a memoir of his schooldays—he’d confessed to a homoerotic attachment to a boy called Aleric, two years his junior. (“Now a cabinet minister,” as he liked to say.)
“I’m hetero to the hilt, Pater,” said Nigel. “It’s an affliction, as you know.”
“Good chap,” he said.
Vera clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t need to listen to this. You’re all mad, the lot of you.”
Indeed, they were. I realized that the entire Grant clan, including Vera, was mad.
Now Maria Pia came into the dining room with an urgent expression. She whispered in Vera’s ear, looking in my direction. There was apparently a telephone call for me from America, where by my calculations it was early in the morning, well before breakfast.
“Take it in the library,” said Vera.
This was a peculiar time for anyone to attempt to reach me by phone, and I knew something was wrong. As yet, I had not received a single call from home, and it was unlike my parents to attempt such a thing unless there was an emergency.