THERE WAS NOTHING REMOTELY CHIC or comfortable about our journey to the south of France. Crammed into our soi-disant station wagon, we barreled through the endless, grisly suburbs of south London, hit a few miles of open road and the odd green field, and then found ourselves on the outskirts of Dover, where we followed the signs—a cheerful-looking tugboat bobbing around on wiggly lines—for the Channel ferry. A couple of hours of lurching about on deck, trying not to be sick, and we were in Calais, and from there we drove, already exhausted, to Paris. But not the Paris you may be imagining. We were headed for a dark—it was then about ten at night—and rather sinister railway siding, where we left the car with a man in blue overalls who loaded it onto the clanking train.
Festooned with plastic bags—our supplies for the night—we traipsed down the train’s hot, crowded corridors in search of our compartment. Except that it wasn’t ours at all. My mother had booked only four of the six couchettes, so two fat ladies were already firmly installed on the lower bunks, one with a Lone Ranger mask over her eyes, presumably trying to sleep, and the other eating a greasy sandwich while reading France Dimanche. We all said “Bonsoir” very politely, and I climbed up the ladder and lay down, my nose a couple of inches from the ceiling, and wondered ungratefully why I wasn’t an orphan traveling alone in a wagon-lit with real sheets and a pillow, to stay with my elderly, homosexual guardian in his sugar-almond-pink villa overlooking Cap d’Antibes.
Something happened in the night, and when I woke up early the next morning, the world outside the train’s window had been totally transformed. The landscape was illuminated, like one of van Gogh’s paintings from the madhouse in Saint-Rémy, by the sharp, uncompromising clarity of the sun of the Midi. And it wasn’t just the light that was so different from the opaque, misty look of England. The entire scene had been painted in a whole new palette of colors. The sky shone a fierce, brilliant blue; the roofs of the stone houses were faded terra-cotta; and the crumpled cubist mountains rose up in the distance in delicate shades of gray and violet. As the train shuddered to a halt, we gathered together our plastic bags, said Au revoir to the two fat ladies, and emerged into the heat and dust of a railway platform just outside Avignon. Nicholas started to wail, and Robin poked a placatory bottle into his mouth. Freddie and my mother lit cigarettes, and I took a deep breath, marveling that even the air of the south was perfumed with some mysterious new scent I couldn’t begin to recognize. Sweet and almost sickly, it came from the sticky pink blossoms of the oleander bushes growing outside the station-master’s neat little house alongside the tracks. Mixed with rosemary, wild mint, and thyme, it was the smell of Provence.
Wedged back into our cozy “station wagon,” with Freddie, the map reader, in charge of guiding us on our way, we headed due south. But it wasn’t long before we found an excuse to stop. How could we just zoom by and miss Aix-en-Provence? My mother saw the road sign up ahead and, surprisingly, became quite misty about her honeymoon there with my father.
“We stayed in a tiny hotel right on the Cours Mirabeau, which only happens to be the most beautiful street in all of France. And we had breakfast every morning on the terrace of Les Deux Garçons, which is just what we’re going to do right now. Don’t you want to see where your Mum and Dad had such a good time before you were born?” And before you left him four years later.
Of course I did. Not wishing to be outdone, Freddie then announced that he too had spent a night in Aix, during the war, with a French lady, whose name momentarily escaped him, and that he had never forgotten it. The town, that is. Genuinely curious about why Aix had left such an impression on him, since he never usually noticed his surroundings at all, she asked him, “And what picture comes into your head, when I say Aix to you?” Freddie closed his eyes, put the tips of his fingers together and sat there thinking. And thinking. And thinking. And finally the magical image came floating up from his subconscious,
“I see Mirabeau.” (Mirabeau had been born in Aix.)
“And?”
“I see Mirabeau telling the king’s representative in the National Assembly on June 23, 1789, ‘Tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people and will leave only by the force of bayonets.’ Splendid words, splendid man.”
Which was only slightly better than his reply when my mother had asked him the same question about Paris, when he had said, “I see a road sign that says Paris.”
LES DEUX GARÇONS first opened its doors for business in 1792, and its various owners had seen no reason to change the shabby elegance of its green-and-gold interiors since then. And why should they? The dappled sunlight of the Cours Mirabeau was reflected in its ancient speckled mirrors, a lazy ceiling fan swooshed above our heads, while waiters darted across the tiled floor, trays piled high with patisseries and coffee for the ladies who had just come from the market. Their baskets were stuffed full of tiny tomatoes the size of large pearls, feathery girolles mushrooms, fragrant bunches of basil, and pink-and-white peaches with the complexion of a Boucher milkmaid. The ladies’ maquillage had been perfectly applied, and their fine-grained-leather handbags, silk foulards, and discreet but expensive jewelry betrayed the French bourgeoise’s obsession with quality. Clearly they had been up early—it wasn’t even nine o’clock—patroling the market stalls on the outlook for delicacies to set before their demanding families that night. Although I had not yet heard of my future heroine M. F. K. Fisher, she happened to be living in Aix with her two young daughters in the early sixties, and she had fallen under the spell of the Cours. And they too would stop by Les Deux Garçons every day to have “breakfast on the terrace, and talk with whoever stopped beside us, and usually stay longer than we’d meant to, in a kind of daze of well-being and satisfaction about the rhythm and beauty of the town, the people, the fountain music.” Who knows, they might even have been there with us on the terrace that morning.
After we had finished our coffee, my mother reckoned we had just enough time for a little promenade along what she now upgraded to “the most beautiful street in the whole world.” A double row of plane trees shaded both sidewalks, filtering the early morning light and meeting in the middle to create the monumental vaulted nave of a leafy green cathedral. As a piece of town planning, the Cours is wonderfully free of any practical purpose. The concept of a wide urban boulevard had come from Italy at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Cours Mirabeau was constructed soon after, as a place where the Aixois aristocracy could parade around in their carriages, as the Italians did on their daily passaggio. This was not a road that actually led anywhere, other than up and down the complicated, slippery snakes and ladders of the social scene.
Elegant hôtels particuliers built of the local honey-colored stone, with gray shutters, line the street, and twirly wrought-iron balconies supported by gigantic Atlantes whose lapidary beards are as tightly curled as the hair under their muscular arms. It was Leonardo who said, “Let the street be as wide as the height of the houses” (why don’t all architects just listen to him?), and in Aix they knew that perfect proportion, like Garbo’s bone structure, is the secret of lasting beauty. The Cours is 440 meters long and generally 44 wide, while the houses are never more than four stories high, and it is this geometry that makes the result of the equation eternally pleasing to the eye. Not only did the architects do their math right, but they also believed that nature had to be included in the construct—and understood that there is something intrinsically satisfying about the combination of stone, water, and trees.
Water is what brought the Romans to Aix. On their conquering march through what was to become their Provincia, they discovered warm sulfuric water gurgling up from a series of underground springs, and built their first settlement around them, calling it Aquae Sextiae in honor of the consul Caius Sextius Calvinus. And two thousand years later the water is still bubbling away in the four fountains that punctuate the length of the Cours. My favorite is the Neuf Canons (just across from Les Deux Garçons), whose granite basin was constructed in Louis XV’s time, with especially low sides for the thirsty sheep that were driven each year through the town on their spring migration to the hills. Sadly the sheep have all gone, but there are still plenty of dogs in Aix, who now use it as their local bar, stopping for a reviving slurp or two as they pass by.
THE MAN WITH THE KEY, whose tongue Loulou had so skillfully preserved, would not have recognized the house. The haunted “cave” now had French windows and a tiled floor, and the ground-floor animals’ quarters had been transformed into an enormous kitchen, with a real live fridge and a gas-propelled stove, and a large window that opened onto the shady terrace where the lime tree grew. On the second floor the one and only bathroom had been shoehorned into a cupboard at the top of the stairs, and although it did have a sparkling new bath and basin, and a loo that flushed straight into a sparkling new septic tank, it had no door. Actually there was a door, but instead of being attached with hinges, it leaned precariously against the doorframe, with huge, embarrassing, breezy gaps on either side. Having assured my mother that the door would be installed before we arrived, Monsieur Choremi revised his schedule and promised it would be done before we left. And, being a man of his word, he did indeed pull up in his battered Citroën, six weeks later, on the morning we were setting off for the station in Avignon, just as Freddie was once again wrestling with the Medusa snakes and the rusty roof rack.
Is there any point at all in having a beach nearby unless you go there every single day for as long as you possibly can? I thought not. And, although everybody else was moderately enthusiastic, none of them quite shared my fanatical and monomaniacal devotion to Bikini Beach. Without question it had everything you could possibly want: glamour, social life, pedalos, pizza, Orangina, trashy magazines, sugar-roasted nuts, ice cream, and that eternal—and irresistible—combination of sun, sand, and sex. As soon as breakfast was over, I started hopping about, offering to help my mother with the picnic, or Robin with the baby, and tempting Freddie with The Times. Rattling the Leaning Door of La Migoua, as he lolled in his soupy bath, I would remind him that if we didn’t leave soon, there wouldn’t be a single copy left in the whole of Les Lecques, and he would have to make do with Le Monde, which didn’t even have a crossword. Finally, like an irritating sheepdog, I got them all rounded up, into the car, and we were on our way to the beach.
On our jaunts from Austria to Italy, in his white convertible that smelled of new shoes and had room only for the two of us, my father and I had always played our own private version of “I Spy.” As we turned a corner, a sliver of blue would suddenly appear in the distance, and I would shriek, “There it is!” and he would say, “You win” (I always did), and there before us was the mesmerizing Mediterranean. The “station wagon” was permeated by the smell of Ambre Solaire and tuna fish sandwiches, but that didn’t stop me from playing the game silently, all by myself, and still feeling the same jolt of excitement when I caught that first glimpse of blue as we came over the crest of the hill.
There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that Bikini Beach was the most stylish patch of sand in the whole of Les Lecques. Which, of course, was not saying a great deal. I still had fantasies about my guardian in his pink villa, high above the real Côte d’Azur, but I was a sensible child, and understood that I was stuck with my terminally unfashionable family and so would have to make the best of it. I tried hard to smarten them up, but there was only so much a girl could do. Freddie’s beach outfit consisted of a pair of beige linen shorts, which were not short at all, since they flapped around his knees and approached his armpits on top. Far worse were his underpants: Blue and even more voluminous, they extended a good few inches above his “waist,” and below the hem of the shorts, giving them a nice, contrasting blue-border effect. With this he wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt and some faded espadrilles. My mother usually favored a more colorful look, like a loose, flower-patterned dress, topped off with a brightly spotted bandanna, to hold back her hair, so she could see to drive, for crissakes. Robin was let off the hook because she wasn’t family, and Nick was a baby, so he didn’t count.
The Queen of Bikini Beach, its very own Diana Vreeland, its social arbiter and strict enforcer of its byzantine code of conduct, was Monsieur Maurice. Of indeterminate age, hunchbacked, with mahogany skin, distended, licorice-colored nipples, and his hair dyed orangutan orange, he wore a yellow thong and patrolled the beach, rake in hand, keeping us all in order. His beaklike nose was covered in a matching yellow plastic guard, attached to his sunglasses in a Groucho Marx arrangement, like something from a joke shop. He was a savage snob, and his favorite reading material was Point de Vue, a magazine entirely taken up with the meaningless doings of deposed royals, with a particular focus on the rivalry between the two claimants to the tragically still-vacant throne of France. Monsieur Maurice worshipped the Gypsy (Sylvia), whom he always addressed as “Madame la Princesse.”
The exclusivity of the beach was maintained partly by two fences, which kept the hoi polloi mostly at bay—although by law they had to be allowed to walk along the seashore—and partly by Monsieur Maurice’s discriminating gate policy. Jaunty triangular blue flags marked the entrance on the boardwalk, and some rickety wooden steps led down to the sand, where a row of cabanas stood up against the cement wall. Sometimes a forlorn-looking family would appear at the top of the steps—their unappealing children clutching plastic buckets, the mother too fat, the father too thin—hoping to rent a couple of deck chairs and an umbrella for the afternoon, and would be told, before they had even opened their mouths, “C’est impossible. On est complet.” How else could one possibly be expected to maintain “le standing” of Bikini Beach?
Mattresses covered in blue-and-white-striped canvas, deck chairs, small tables, and parasols were all arranged in parallel lines facing the ocean. As at the theater, the front row was the most desirable location, and was, understandably, reserved for Monsieur Maurice’s favorites, while the rest of us were grateful to be allowed to camp out farther back, in front of the cabanas. But at least we were closer to Madame Carrère, whose plywood hut offered up all kinds of treats. A glossy map of multicolored ice creams was tacked to the outside, and behind the counter, a chalkboard advertised two kinds of sandwiches, pâté and ham; fougasse, a kind of primitive Provençal pizza, minus the tomatoes; and salade niçoise. The filthy, sagging shelves were stacked high with slices of stale fruitcake, studded with sticky cherries and wrapped in cellophane, bubble gum, chocolate, and every conceivable kind of candy. Our favorite drink was something a French marketing whiz had decided to call “Pschitt,” which we thought was screamingly funny. The joke, of course, was entirely lost on Madame Carrère, who just handed over the bottle and wearily added its exorbitant cost to our parents’ already inflated accounts.
“I got the last copy of The Times, as well as the Telegraph and the Express,” Freddie arrived, flush with the triumph of his shopping expedition. Whenever we traveled, finding English papers occupied a good part of every outing, but in that summer of 1963 my mother and Freddie’s appetite for news from home seemed to have escalated. As soon as Freddie plopped himself down in his deck chair, he announced: “That tart Keeler has started to talk, and Stephen Ward has killed himself.”
My mother snatched the paper from his hand and disappeared behind it, while he calmly opened another one, and nothing more was heard from either of them for at least an hour. I knew something was going on; I just couldn’t figure out what it was. And nobody would tell me. It had all started before we left London, when I heard them talking about somebody called Profumo. He looked a bit startled—as well he might—in the photos I’d seen of him on the front pages, and he seemed to have lost most of his hair, and was in some kind of awful trouble with the prime minister, Harold Macmillan. The whole thing was incredibly complicated, and involved not just “that tart Keeler” but also her friend Mandy, and their doctor, Stephen Ward, who had been kind enough to invite them both to come and live with him in his pretty mews house. A Russian spy and a homicidal West Indian with a gun had walk-on parts, as well as some man called Astor, who Freddie said was a shit, and had been at Eton with him. How on earth the shit from Eton could be connected to the West Indian, or how the nice doctor (whom a friend of my mother’s had gone to see with her bad back) had met the Russian spy, or why on earth the prime minister should care about any of these people, I could not begin to understand. And, just to add to the bouillabaisse of confusion swirling around inside my head, Freddie had some more news to share with us: “And that other tart, Margaret Argyll, is up in court too. It seems that the ‘headless man’ is Duncan Sandys, which, on top of Profumo, will drive Macmillan completely mad.”
“We can but hope. And let’s also hope that those two Tory sex maniacs lose him the next election” was my mother’s only response from behind her paper.
Were the two “tarts” connected in some way? Did Margaret perhaps live with Mandy and Christine in the doctor’s mews house? Clearly Mr. Profumo and Mr. Sandys both worked for the prime minister, and both were deranged by sex, which Mr. Macmillan was quite understandably furious about. But that still left the question of where Mr. Sandys’s head had gone. Exasperated by my whining, my mother finally put her paper down and turned to me. “Okay, so here’s the story: The Duchess of Argyll is in court because she’s divorcing the duke. And they have a photograph of her kneeling in front of some naked guy she worshipped, called Duncan Sandys, who’s so tall you can’t see his head at the top of the picture.”
“Is that it?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
I decided to go swimming.
THE BAY AT LES LECQUES looked like something a child might draw. A perfect semicircle, with a pretty little toy town at one end and a rocky promontory at the other, a sandy beach in between, palm trees, and tiny white boats bobbing around in a Crayola-blue sea. The water may have looked blue, but that didn’t guarantee anything. How dirty it was we didn’t know or care, but it was true that you couldn’t see through it very well, and we did quite often find strange things floating about, mainly plastic bags and once, rather excitingly, a real live turd. None of which, in my mind at least, detracted from the irredeemable glamour of Bikini Beach.
But as an amateur anthropologist I wasn’t there just to have a good time; I had my fieldwork to do. Observing the differences between my British and French subjects was that summer’s special project. Representing England—and who better?—I had Nanny St. Aubyn, whom Lorna had dropped off that morning, with her two small charges, Teddy and Minky. What the old dragon’s real name was we never discovered, and anyway it didn’t matter, because all real nannies automatically acquired the last name of their employers. Sartorially Nanny had made no concessions to her day at the beach. Dressed in her usual starched uniform, thick white stockings, and lace-up shoes, she spent most of her time stopping the children from indulging in anything that could remotely be construed as having fun. They had to keep their tops on, sit in the shade, were not allowed to eat anything from Madame Carrère’s hut, could go into the sea only up to their knees, and had to take a two-hour rest after lunch. She made a halfhearted attempt to strike up a conversation with Nanny Ayer before quickly realizing that she was dealing with an impostor. Not only did we call her Robin, but she addressed her employers as “Dee” and “Freddie,” she was wearing a bikini, and it soon became all too clear that she did not know a single one of the nannies in Kensington Gardens whom Nanny St. Aubyn hung out with.
This was the sixties, and Bikini Beach had gone topless. Some were bananas, others torpedoes; skinny women had poached or—if they were unlucky—fried eggs; and one girl’s were so perfectly rounded that they looked like the two halves of a juicy grapefruit. But it was the huge saggy ones, and their owners’ amazing lack of embarrassment in displaying them, that fascinated me the most. They lolled about on their mattresses, their bosoms slopping over the ill-defined edges of their bodies, like over-the-hill houris in some downmarket seraglio, while their husbands calmly smoked, drank their beer, and read the sports pages of Le Figaro. Sometimes, though, the animal urges of the French male were just too strong to be contained. And then he would heave himself on top of the lady beside him, the matted thatch on his chest pressed seductively against her oily bananas, and start fiddling with the tangle of gold chains around her neck. This I recognized as a clear prelude to some much more serious fiddling later on. In London the couples smooching on the grass in Regent’s Park were always a bitter disappointment, because whenever I got close to them—on the pretext of retrieving my skillfully tossed ball—they glared at me, and anyway they had far too many clothes on. But here they might as well have been naked and didn’t seem to notice or care who was watching them. The French had to be the sexiest people on earth.
Sylvia, the Gypsy, lay on her striped mattress in the front row, her toes almost touching the water, smoking a cheroot, and drinking a tumbler of rosé. Occasionally she would scoop out an ice cube and let it dribble down the back of her neck before popping it into her mouth. She had discarded her top and lay on her stomach, dressed in nothing more than a triangular scrap of black fabric, her turquoise-and-silver tribal bracelets, and a shimmering slick of bergamot-and-almond oil, mixed specially for her by the man in the drugstore in Ollioulles. Monsieur Maurice hovered above her holding a collection of ice-cream wrappers and cigarette butts retrieved from the sand, longing for an excuse to strike up a conversation with Madame la Princesse.
“Oh là là, qu’il fait chaud!” was his safe opening gambit, but then, unfortunately, he noticed what she was reading. “Ah, Cocteau,” he sighed, and paused soulfully, forcing Sylvia to put her book aside and listen to an emotional account of a fleeting visit to Tangiers, many years before—the mysteries of the Kasbah, the music of the nightingales, the scent of the roses, the potency of the kef, the heat of the sirocco, the beauty of the boys—when he had passed an entire evening in the great man’s company. Sylvia pretended to pay attention, but, suddenly announcing that the heat was quite intolerable, she stood up and waded into the water, leaving him there, rake in hand, still lost in the dreamlike maze of the medina.
The Gypsy was much taken with all things artistic and liked to surround herself with poets, painters, and writers. Where this left Prince Azamat, other than playing backgammon at White’s, I was never quite sure. She classified Freddie as an intellectual, so at least he was spared the discussions about Rothko or Pollock, but, on the other hand, he was expected to come up with something scintillating when she fancied a chat about a new edition of Apollinaire’s poems or existentialism or, indeed, Cocteau. He dreaded these Sylvia seminars. But the Gypsy was not just a hungry consumer of art and ideas; she was also an artist herself, who showed her work in real art galleries in London, where real people paid real money to acquire them. My mother loved Sylvia and was a loyal friend, so I would be dragged to her openings, where we would marvel at how a simple string dishrag could, in the right hands, be transformed with a few, judicious dabs of paint, into something or other—what, we were never quite sure. My mother and I may not have known much about modern art, but we knew what we liked; and we liked Sylvia’s dishrags because Sylvia had painted them.
At her last private view, arriving early to show support, and flailing around for something to say, my mother had, in desperation, singled out one of the larger pieces for special praise: “This is amazing … I’ve never seen anything like it … how do you create these?” Sylvia was genuinely pleased by her friend’s enthusiasm and, worried that the dishrag in question would be snapped up once the hordes arrived, she kindly asked the gallery to put a red sticker on it immediately. A couple of weeks later a package, wrapped in brown paper, was delivered to our house, along with an invoice containing a surprising number of zeroes.
NANNY ST. AUBYN had never been so hot in all her life. She was fanning herself with one of Freddie’s discarded newspapers, had soaked all their towels in water, and then draped them over the children’s heads and shoulders.
“I can’t think where Mrs. St. Aubyn could possibly be. She said she would be here to collect us on the dot of three, and now it is almost five o’clock.” It was indeed hard to imagine what Lorna might be up to. Being tortured by Roger seemed the most likely possibility, but then again she might just be having a much-needed cocktail. Who knew? But Nanny was right: It was unbearably hot and Lorna was late.
While Teddy and Minky sat under their parasol, wrapped up like Egyptian mummies, forbidden to move, a couple of boys, no more than five or six years old, were running wild across the sand, fighting, screeching, and gorging themselves on candy and bottles of Pschitt from Madame Carrère’s hut. Nanny St. Aubyn did not approve, and I could hear her muttering under her halitotic breath, something about “Regular little savages, these Frenchies.” At that moment Sylvia emerged from the sea, and started walking toward us. In this heat, why bother with a towel? Standing beside Nanny, dripping and glistening, her bracelets clanking, her bananas tanned the same deep espresso as the rest of her sinewy body, she looked a bit like a regular savage herself.
For the Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss of Bikini Beach, it was the perfect juxtaposition, and made all more delicious by the expression of disgust on Nanny’s face, and by the arrival of Monsieur Maurice, who added the missing louche element to the tableau. Instead of his customary rake he was carrying a bulky blue file under his arm. He nodded to Nanny, addressing her as “Madame,” bowed deeply to Sylvia, and, crouching down beside Freddie’s deck chair, he asked Monsieur le Professeur if he would do him the honor of reading his novel. He had actually started writing it in Tangiers, more than twenty years ago, “Quand j’étais là avec Monsieur Cocteau, vous voyez,” he explained, lowering his voice discreetly. Never one to miss an opportunity of bringing the conversation around to himself, Freddie then embarked on a story about some glittering dinner at the British Embassy in Paris, just after the war, when Lady Diana Cooper had introduced him to Cocteau as “our most brilliant philosopher.”
“Elle était très diplomatique.” Freddie laughed, pretending to dismiss his hostess’s remark with this disingenuous joke, and then, remembering the manuscript, added that, speaking as one writer to another, “Je serais ravi de lire votre livre.” Monsieur Maurice was so affected by the Professeur’s response that he took off his sunglasses with the attached yellow plastic nose guard, and I saw his sunken, crocodile eyes light up and his tight little mouth crack into a misshapen smile as he handed over his precious life’s oeuvre. Freddie dumped the file into the beach bag, on top of his wet bathing suit and a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich. (Later that evening I heard him muttering in his study, “I can’t possibly go on reading this, it’s filth. Pure pornography. Homosexual pornography. What on earth am I going to say to him? Oh God, Oh God!”)
On the way back to the car, I turned around and saw Nanny standing there, red faced, feet firmly planted on the sand, her uniform now slightly stained, with only a damp hanky on her head to shield her from the fierce tropical sun. It looked as if she was trying to say something to the two dusky, bare-breasted natives—a man and a woman—on either side of her, but however slowly she spoke, they just waved their hands about, jabbered away in their own language, and paid no attention to her at all.