WHEN SHE WASN’T SHOUTING, my mother was more fun than anyone on earth. And, in those early years at La Migoua, before things started to fall apart with Freddie, she hardly shouted at all. Of course there were always the machine-gun blasts of swearing, but nobody minds being called a “cuntburger,” as long as it’s done with grace and good humor. Besides, we were all used to it. It never crossed my mind that newcomers like Robin and, after her, Amanda and then Beatrice, who lived with us to help out on those long hot summers in France, might be surprised, shocked, or even frightened by my mother’s behavior. Robin did admit that she thought we were “a bit eccentric,” and I once found Amanda crying in her room, but they soon adapted to—or were corrupted by—the odd but endearing ways of the Ayer-Wells ménage. At any rate, during the first few summers, all my mother’s whirling-dervish energy was focused on fixing up the house, going to markets, cooking huge dinners, giving parties, and actually having an extraordinarily good time.
Usually we did our shopping in Le Beausset, where in those days there was only one small general store, called the Casino, on the main place. In addition the village had a couple of indifferent bakeries, a butcher, a greengrocer, and an itinerant fish truck that appeared on Thursdays and parked outside the post office. If we felt in need of something a bit more recherché, we would venture as far as Bandol, on the coast, where every Saturday there was a serious outdoor market set up around the fountain in the old part of the town. However, there was no going to the market without first dropping by the infamous Bandol dump. A smoldering Vesuvius populated by sad, soot-darkened specters who spent their days clambering about on the burning mountain, rearranging the garbage with rusty rakes: It was a scene straight from Dante’s Inferno and mesmerizing in its pathos and horror. But since the job of “sanitation worker” didn’t exist in rural France, we had no choice but to load up the back of the car with our stinking trash cans, drive twenty miles in the sultry heat, and then heave the contents onto the foothills of the mountain. Imagine having to work on the Bandol dump! The plight of these poor people should have driven me to join the junior branch of the local Parti Communiste, but instead I was inspired to dream up a simple, but satisfying, game that, I am ashamed to admit, I have been playing ever since: “Which Would You Rather?” Have your little finger amputated, drink somebody else’s pee, go to bed with Prince Charles or … work on the Bandol dump? I even got Freddie to play it with me until he rebelled—“Darling, you really are too disgusting.” And then, just for him, I came up with a subtle variation on the same theme: “Who Would You Rather?” Cleopatra or Marilyn Monroe. That tart Keeler or the Duchess of Argyll. Or, just to torture him, the Queen Mother or Madame Carrère. This game was much more to Freddie’s taste.
AS MARKETS GO, the one in Bandol was impressive, but it was nothing stacked up against the mother of all markets in Toulon. It occupied the entire length of the Cours Lafayette, which—like its fancier cousin in Aix—is a broad boulevard shaded by enormous plane trees with peeling camouflage-bark that stretches on a gentle slope from a hill at the center of the city all the way down to the harbor. Lined on each side with wooden stands overflowing with fruit—raspberries in baskets lined with fuzzy vine leaves; figs about to burst their purple skins; heavy, fat little watermelons—and vegetables—skinny haricots verts, shiny aubergines, fragrant bouquets of basil—we would barrel down filling up our bags, sometimes stopping for a quick proffered taste of peppery saucisson or a sliver of Gruyère that had arrived that morning in a truck from the Haute-Savoie. Wild field greens, arugula, and dandelion leaves, and huge briny barrels of olives—some stuffed with anchovies, others mixed with pimentos, celery, and cracked coriander seeds—occupied the trestle tables farther down toward the harbor. If we were feeling really hungry, and our baskets had gotten too heavy, we would pause for a slice of Toulonnais pizza, its thick tomato crust studded with shrimp, calamari rings, and octopus tentacles, in homage to Toulon’s fishy heritage.
During the war the Allies and the retreating Germans had between them bombed and blown up everything along the water, completely demolishing Toulon’s famous harbor. But even worse than this destruction were the buildings that had replaced the ruins in the 1950s. Reminiscent of the most lumpen architecture of the Soviet era, these mountains of gray concrete, now cracked and streaked with dirt, sit there sullenly staring out at the pure blue beauty of the Mediterranean. If you walk down to the end of the Cours Lafayette, to the part where the fishwives preside over their trestle stands, piled high with heaps of shellfish, thick slabs of tuna, and small, fierce rascasses, some with half-devoured smaller fish still hanging from their jaws, you can catch a glimpse of the sea in the distance. It is easy to be seduced by the breeze, the boats, the glint of sunshine on the water, but that’s where the gulag of concrete begins. Instead we would turn off into one of the side streets off the Cours, and get lost in the rat’s nest of dank, crooked alleyways in the old city.
The bombs were interested only in the harbor, so the neighborhood behind, which for centuries had offered hungry sailors all the consolations they craved, had been spared. I loved the way you could leave the wholesome, bright bustle of the market and be transported in just a few minutes into the secret, twilit world of some French film about a handsome criminal—Jean-Paul Belmondo, perhaps—eluding les flics, in the sleazy back alleys of a Mediterranean port. Or, at least that was how it felt to me. Not a glimmer of sunlight filtered down onto the fetid streets, and outside one bar I swear I saw a deep brown stain on the sidewalk that could only have been dried blood. The fishwives’ younger sisters—with the same peroxide hair and stocky legs but much shorter skirts, and every bit as determined to cajole, seduce, or if necessary, bully their customers—loitered about in the doorways. Just like in the movies.
Once, as we were walking past an especially raucous bar—drunken shouts and the noise of crazed pinball machines spilled out through the pink plastic-beaded curtain—my mother offered me twenty francs if I’d go in and ask for a glass of Orangina. “Go on, take a chance,” she urged me, eager to promote any form of anarchy, however mild. Like a fool I refused. But I can still hear her words echoing in my ears, and still wish I had done it. “Take a chance”—this was the precept she had always lived by, the impulse that had propelled her forward, the belief she clung to as fervently as any of the pilgrims who worshipped at the shrine of Notre-Dame du Beausset-Vieux, in that tiny chapel on top of the hill, behind our house.
The army surplus store occupied a strategic corner with entrances on two streets and a window full of faded, oddly hermaphrodite mannequins with painted-on hair and hats emblazoned with the names of long-forgotten ships perched on their lifeless heads. Sylvia had instructed us not to bother with anything other than the American navy stuff. And it’s true that we weren’t much interested in passing ourselves off as British commandos in khaki camouflage, or dressing up in baggy brown wool trousers that tucked into lace-up boots, like Tintin, or wearing silly berets trimmed in leather: What we were after was the genuine sailor look. It was Coco Chanel who had started it all when she was photographed in the early thirties in high-waisted white bell-bottoms, a skimpy little blue-and-white striped sweater, and a revolutionary suntan. The mode marine was born, and I was determined to follow in her chic, espadrilled footsteps.
Once inside the store, we went straight for the stack of not entirely clean navy blue pants (could you catch crabs just by trying them on?) with jaunty square flaps, tailored for the snake-hipped, malnourished navy recruits who had once worn them. My mother whooped with delight when she discovered an olive green double-breasted coat with gold buttons, which looked like something Marshal Zhukov might have worn on the eastern front but she claimed was just the same as the one she’d had in the Canadian army. She slipped it on over her jeans and stood there in front of the mirror, narrowed her eyes, raised her right hand in a crisp salute, and started barking out nonsensical parade-ground commands in a heavy Russian accent. So, that, along with several white canvas belts, the pants, and the striped sweaters, had to be added to our pile. The sad-looking man behind the counter, already alarmed by my mother’s Zhukov impersonation, hurriedly stuffed everything into a couple of crumpled paper bags, scribbled l’addition on a corner of the newspaper he was reading, and went back to the sports page, relieved to be rid of these noisy foreign women who had disturbed the calm of his dusty shop.
Fired up with the success of our shopping expedition, and in no mood to stop spending money anytime soon, my mother announced that since we were already in Toulon, it would be criminal not to visit a few junk stores. Contemptuous of luxury and extravagance and congenitally incapable of paying full price for anything, she nonetheless had an extraordinary eye for quality. A full-length black, backless cashmere dress (missing one pearl button), shocking pink kid gloves from Italy (slightly soiled), one half of a pair of Georgian silver candlesticks (a bit dented), a majolica teapot (spout chipped), an eighteenth-century Baroque gilded mirror (glass cracked): All these had been bought for a fraction of what they were worth and restored to something approaching perfection. Whereas “junk,” in her vocabulary, back home in England, could be stretched to cover anything from a market stall selling old plates and mugs to a real antique store, in France it was altogether different. In their mania for Cartesian order and hierarchy, the French made a clear distinction between brocante (junk that an antiquaire was too snobby to touch) and antiquaire (a better class of junk that could be passed off as Louis XV, Empire, or whatever, and sold for a ludicrous amount of money). Some objects could slide from one category to another, like the rusty wrought-iron bedstead I once saw leaning against the wall of our favorite brocante on the outskirts of Toulon that reappeared a couple of weeks later, painted white and tricked up with embroidered linen pillows, in the window of the antiquaire on the boulevard Strasbourg. But then again something like the early nineteenth-century pine grandfather clock in our kitchen, with the curvy, pregnant bulge in the middle, where the brass pendulum swung lazily from side to side, could only have come from an antiquaire. In the end, of course, none of this mattered; my mother just kept her eyes open (and taught me to do the same), skipping promiscuously from one shop to another, to truffle around for treasures in among the rubbish.
“Okay. I say we go see the one-armed bandit first, and then we can swing by that fag who sold Pussy her armoire.” It was an itinerary that neatly covered both ends of the spectrum. Roaming around Toulon, trying to find some garage that Monsieur Tricon swore would be able to fix the ailing “station wagon,” my mother discovered a junkyard, hidden away behind an abandoned factory. The spécialités de la maison seemed to be broken metal objects. Leaky cauldrons, rusting radiators, strange pipes, and mysterious bits of machinery were strewn about, all watched over by a cheerful, emaciated Algerian with one arm. On her first visit my mother had gone mad, ending up with a cast-iron casserole without a lid, a set of mismatched knives, a coffee grinder, and a large enameled green stove. Impressed by her wild extravagance, the Algerian had insisted on throwing in a free saucepan that was missing one of its handles—rather like himself. We were customers for life, or at least for his life. When we dropped by one day about twenty years later and were told he had died, out of loyalty to his memory we never went back.
BOSSY PUSSY WAS NOT interested in trash. Her taste was altogether more conventional, and her standards were high, so when she said Monsieur Renaudin—the Loulou Richelmi of antiques—was the only antiquaire in the whole of Toulon who wasn’t a thief, my mother listened. Renaudin et Fils occupied the ground floor of a Belle Époque building just off the place des Trois Dauphins. Pierre Renaudin must have been the fils part of the business because, with his sky blue cashmere sweaters, white loafers, and the rose-scented pomade that kept his thinning blond hair plastered to his bony skull, it seemed unlikely that he had any sons of his own. But what he did have was very good taste, and since he wasn’t a thief, his prices didn’t make you scream with laughter. A tinkly, flirtatious bell would announce your arrival in his shop, and he would hurry out of his tiny bureau—really more of a wallpapered womb tucked away under the staircase—to welcome you as if you had just come for a cozy dinner. And it is true that his shop looked and felt like an apartment rather than a place where stuff was actually bought and sold. The air smelled of beeswax and lavender, or at least it did at first, but once your nose got used to being there, it snuffled about and quickly detected the unmistakable acrid aroma of cat’s piss, lurking underneath the flowery top notes.
It was Monsieur Renaudin who had sold my mother the curvy clock, and as soon as we walked through the door, after our adventures in the one-armed bandit’s scrapyard and the army surplus store, he was there to greet us.
“Ah, bonjour, Madame, Mademoiselle,” and like the maître d’ in a fancy restaurant, he led us quickly through the back of his shop and out into a small bamboo-shaded garden, where one of his incontinent cats lay asleep under a gardenia bush. We must have looked exhausted, because as soon as we sat down, he said we were clearly in need of une tisane de tilleul. A few moments later he reappeared with a teapot, three cups, and a plate of—what else?—madeleines. The garden was deliciously cool—the bamboo rustled, water dribbled out of a dolphin’s mouth into a stone shell—and our sagging bodies and spirits quickly revived. Now it was time to talk about a particularly fine pair of carved fruitwood armoire doors that he had recently acquired. An old lady had died, her unsentimental children had sold not just the house but everything in it, “même ses vêtements, qui n’étaient pas tellement propres” (Monsieur Renaudin was particularly shocked by this callous offloading of her not-very-clean clothes). And even her cupboard doors, it seemed. As soon as she saw them I could tell that my mother wasn’t going to be able to resist. She gave a little involuntary intake of breath and turned to me, “These are really something else. Look at that carving and the sheen on the wood,” she said, reaching over and gently stroking one of the doors as if it had been one of our sleek, overindulged cats. It was merely a question of whether they could fit on the roof of the “station wagon.” Taking on Freddie’s role, Monsieur Renaudin wrestled with the elastic snakes, and eventually got the doors trussed up and tied to the rusty luggage rack.
“LES RIVAUX DE PAINFUL GULCH. Une histoire de Lucky Luke au Wild Ouest.”
“No, Dad, you have to read it in English. I told you that before.”
“Oh, so you did, darling, I keep forgetting. I am silly, am’t I?”
“Yes.”
“We had better start again. ‘The Rivals of Painful Gulch. A Story About Lucky Luke in the Wild West.… Lucky Luke rode into town on Jolly Jumper, the cleverest horse in the West.… We have some unfinished business to settle.… Is that so? … I reckon it is.… There’s only one place to settle this, and that’s outside.…
“ ‘So Lucky Luke, quicker than his own shadow’ ”—
“I’m hungry.”
“Darling, what can I get for you?”
“Meringues and mustard.”
“I’m not at all sure where one might find such a thing.”
Nick was naked and lay sprawled, like a tiny, bored pasha, on an armchair. Freddie was on his hands and knees, scrabbling around in the back of the cupboard, in search of the elusive meringues. And mustard.
“What the hell is going on here? We have fifteen people coming to dinner. There are two doors on the roof of the car. And I need to start cooking. Now.”
We had arrived back from our adventure in Toulon, and my mother was not pleased. I was always amazed at how she could whip herself up into a rage about something—mainly Freddie—that was not only utterly predictable but was never going to change. Imagine: We had been away all day and Freddie had, incredibly, failed to tidy the house/do the dishes/put any clothes on Nick. Imagine: After they married, Freddie had, unbelievably, gone on sleeping with other women. “Étonne-moi!” But she never stopped being astonished. And very angry.
The best way to calm her down was with furious activity. As soon as the Canadian sergeant major swept through the clackety wooden beads, we all knew she wasn’t kidding. She dumped her Marshal Zhukov coat on the table and stomped back out to the car to get the shopping baskets. Everybody snapped to attention and ran after her, eager to help, or at least eager to forestall another serious eruption. The guests were arriving at eight, the kitchen was a mess, and, as she had pointed out, we had to start cooking. Now. Freddie quite sensibly retreated to his cave, mumbling about how much work he had to do, Robin swooped down and picked up the naked Nick, announcing it was bath time, and ran up the stairs. So that left me alone with my mother.
At fifteen I’d had many years of practice and had over time taught myself to ignore her temper. It wasn’t easy, especially when I was younger and more easily frightened, but I had pretty well perfected my technique by this point. Keep calm, distance yourself, don’t argue back, and allow the impassive, slightly bored expression on your face to convey your cool—no, frigid—disdain for the whole crazy uproar. Naturally it didn’t always work. The other trick was to distract her or, even better, to make her laugh. Sometimes I’d dredge up some innocuous but faintly idiotic thing my father had said or done (I know, I shouldn’t have) and she would giggle and always come up with something even better, like the time he had given her a trout-fishing rod for her birthday. “Jesus, can you believe it? He knew I didn’t give a shit about fishing, but that way he got to keep the rod and didn’t have to spend any money on a present I might actually want.” Which allowed us to marvel, yet again, at the incomprehensible—and all-too-often reprehensible—ways of men. But that afternoon she wasn’t in any mood for jokes about their silly foibles, so I decided to adopt the frantic-worker-bee approach. She stood at the kitchen table, her hair unwashed, sweating not just from the heat and lugging the baskets but also from the exhausting, backbreaking work of shouting. For a moment she looked utterly overwhelmed, and instead of being upset, I felt sorry for her.
My mother carried most—no, all—of the household burdens on her shoulders: She was the full-time chauffeur and cook as well as the part-time, not especially skilled, handyman and cleaning lady; in fact there was nothing she didn’t insist on doing all by herself. No wonder she sometimes went mad. After we had put all the food away, I told her I would start on dinner, while she went upstairs and had a bath. “Oh, would you? Could you?” A look of genuine relief came over her face at the thought that she might be able to abdicate her sergeant-major role, if only for half an hour, and she smiled, “Thanks, Gull.” With the taste, interests, and obsessions of a fussy homosexual, I was the household’s self-appointed sous-chef, party planner, and interior decorator. But, as all artistic people know, when you happen to be blessed with a passion, however hard you drive yourself, it just never feels like work at all. Which was lucky for my mother. When I wasn’t fretting, like an old queen, over lampshades and linen napkins, I was a demented fifties housewife in a flouncy little apron, forever scrubbing floors, sewing cushion covers, polishing furniture, and arranging fragrant bouquets of wildflowers. This was my idea of heaven.
All of Elizabeth David’s books were lined up on a shelf in the kitchen, along with throwbacks to my mother’s New England childhood, like a facsimile of the 1918 edition of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer. Not much interested in recipes for baked scrod, and put off by the dumpy appearance of its unsmiling author, I became instead a rabid disciple of the woman who had taught the English how to make the kind of food she had discovered on her wanderings around France, Italy, Morocco, and the Middle East. Her recipes were wonderfully simple, hardly bothering to specify precise quantities or explain each fiddly step: She assumed you knew what you were doing. Of course I didn’t. But in my role as sous-chef, I was constantly in the kitchen, and between watching my mother, hanging around with Sylvia and Pussy, and devouring every word Elizabeth David wrote, I eventually learned how to cook.
Although I was happy to read about things like “Cou d’Oie Farci,” which begins, “When the confits of goose are being prepared, the necks of the geese are stuffed and cooked at the same time. The skin of the neck is turned inside out like the finger of a glove and the inside removed …,” or indeed the long and complicated confit recipe itself, which ends on a slightly dispiriting note: “This is only really worth doing for those who have their own geese and a dry airy larder in which to store the jars,” I knew they were not for us. Instead my mother and I concentrated on dishes like grilled mackerel: “make two incisions on each side of the fish, into these put a little butter, parsley, salt, pepper, fennel, and a few chopped capers. Grill for 7–10 minutes and serve with a squeeze of lemon.” Or, even better, a “Salad of Sweet Peppers” that consists of “cold cooked red peppers (or mixed red, yellow and green) with oil and vinegar dressing.”
The menu, on the day we got back from Toulon to find Nick and Freddie caught up in Lucky Luke’s adventures out west, wasn’t wildly ambitious, which was probably just as well: pâté de campagne and cornichons to start, grilled sardines and tomates à la Provençale, a salad of wild greens, and two cheeses—a soupy Reblochon and a gamey Époisses—all of which we had gotten in the market that morning. Sweet things were never part of my repertoire. And, as long as the magnificent Patisserie Antoine, just off the place Mirabeau, stayed in business, they didn’t need to be. We had bought the biggest tarte au citron they had, and that—along with some crème fraîche and a basket of figs so ripe their purple skins had started to split open, threatening to reveal their juicy, red, pornographic interiors—would be dessert.
The guest list was a bit more complicated. What had started out as a simple dinner with the usual suspects like the Deakins and the Guireys had somehow grown into something bigger and therefore much more fun. Freddie and my mother adored parties. She was fearless when it came to mixing people up, ruthless in eliminating bores, and would say anything to ignite the conversation. She would also do anything, like the time she decided on the spur of the moment to have a blue butterfly tattooed on her shoulder, in the days when only drunken sailors and bikers indulged in such things. Sometimes saying anything was a disaster, not that she would ever have admitted it. “Never apologize, never explain” was her most cherished precept—one she stuck to with ferocious fanaticism. Once, during a discussion about the mysteries of marriage, why some worked and most didn’t, she turned to one of her guests—a nervous lady in her sixties, who late in life had married a crazed, intermittently violent alcoholic who had stolen most of her money before running off to Spain—and asked her, “Jane, you’re not very good at being married. What do you think?” Jane looked as though she would rather be dead, if that was okay with her hostess. Freddie and Mummy were both show-offs who loved and needed an audience: No wonder they thrived in the public eye. As guests they were entertaining, and as hosts they knew how to entertain. The food was important, the wine essential, and the fussy queen/fifties housewife always made sure the long marble table looked beautiful, but in the end it was all about the people sitting around it.
Not long after we had bought the house, my mother sold the vertical shed glued onto the back, to an old friend, Francette, who lived in a rambling apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. As with so many of their friends, the connection to Francette could be traced back to one of Freddie’s love affairs. Just after the Liberation he had been posted to the British Embassy in Paris (where he had, memorably, met Monsieur Maurice’s friend Jean Cocteau) to work in the intelligence section. The ambassador, Duff Cooper, had written to the Foreign Office in London that he was “extremely anxious to have Ayer back in France … he is regarded as a first class political observer,” but when Freddie arrived, the job turned out to be a bit of a joke, so, as he wrote to e. e. cummings, “As I had no work to do, and plenty of government money to spend, I had a pretty good time.” And part of this good time was passed, quite naturally, in the company of various ladies. According to his autobiography, “I spent most of my time with a French girl of Turkish origin whom I had got to know in Algiers. She was employed by one of the French Intelligence Services, but when we were together we put our work aside.” Presumably he also put his work aside when he was with another girl, named Nicole Bouchet de Fareins. Brought up in Normandy, she and her younger sister, Francette, had been in the Resistance during the war, acting as couriers and, in an act of heroic lunacy, hiding a group of seven British airmen from the Nazis in their farmhouse. They and their children survived, but Francette’s husband, Georges, was not so lucky: He was caught and tortured to death by the Gestapo. After the war the two sisters often invited Freddie to stay in that same farmhouse, and in Paris he became part of their social circle. And when he mentioned that he would like to meet André Malraux, whose novel La Condition Humaine had made “a strong impression on me,” Francette arranged a dinner party to which she also invited Camus, “whose work I had just discovered.” The party was not a success. Malraux was intimidating, and his habit of sniffing made him appear “disdainful.” He also “gave the impression of having little regard for anyone who had not been an active combatant in the war.” Freddie inexplicably failed to tell him about his role in the liberation of Saint-Tropez.
Francette was a woman of extreme intelligence, warmth, and courage, but her great weakness was dogs. She had a succession of them, none especially appealing. They were always big, usually smelly, and ridiculously overconfident, suffering from the sad delusion that the entire world must love them just as much as their besotted maman. Her current one was called Sorgue, after some local river, and every time he trotted, uninvited, across our kitchen floor, his tail wagging with misplaced optimism, he would be met with shouts of “Fuck off! À la maison!” a greeting he quite clearly misinterpreted as some special term of endearment. But if you wanted Francette to come to dinner—and we always did—her dog was part of the deal. Sorgue reminded me of some unkempt half-witted husband who farted, tried to fuck his hostess’s leg, and ate with his mouth open but was tolerated only on account of his wife’s charm and vivacity. That evening Francette and Sorgue were the first of our guests to arrive.
Next came the entire, gigantic—there were six of them, and they were all huge—Carr family from Oxford, who were camping, in considerable squalor, down in the valley. When the Deakins had graciously invited them to pitch their tent on some land they owned, not far from Le Castellet, Pussy had made it quite clear that she wasn’t having any of them in her house. Never mind that Raymond Carr was a distinguished professor of history and his family old friends and neighbors in Oxford. “They are absolutely filthy,” she complained to my mother. “Have you seen the children’s hair?” And, with no place to wash, they became even filthier, the children’s hair even more matted, until my mother begged them to come for a shower whenever they wanted, and stay for dinner. Her generosity toward people in trouble was one of her most appealing characteristics. When her old friend Margie Rees, who had been with her at Nick’s birth, was dying of cancer, she did everything she could to help. Goronwy wrote my mother a letter a few days before Christmas in 1975:
You always were the kindest person in the world. I feel I must write and thank you not only for the marvelous smoked salmon, but for your extraordinary thoughtfulness in sending all these things [wrapping paper, tape, labels, and ribbon] which once Margie would have been able to buy for herself, but now cannot. She just spent a very happy evening using them all, which is what she loves doing.
Margie died a few months later. Sometimes my mother helped with money—always giving more than she could really afford—and other times it was something much more public, like taking up in her newspaper column the cause of some helpless, hapless victim trapped inside the government’s bureaucratic torture chamber, and forcing the big shots to back down. Her empathy and sense of justice fueled her politics, turning her into a lifelong socialist who always identified with the people at the bottom of the heap. The ruling classes might give better parties, but not so deep down she hated them for their complacent, self-serving obliviousness to the unrelenting shit and suffering that most people in the world are forced to deal with.
Of course there were always exceptions to this rule, but only she was allowed to decide which particular members of the upper class deserved to be saved and which were to be cast into everlasting damnation. Not unlike Karl Lueger, the famously anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna in the 1900s who was once asked why he chose to hang out with quite so many Jews, and replied, “I’ll decide who is a Jew,” my mother took a similar view of posh people. In London during the fifties and sixties there was one particular member of the ruling classes, Lady Pamela Berry, who was known for the glittering parties she gave every election night. Married to the proprietor of the conservative Telegraph newspapers, the imperious Lady Pamela prided herself on the ecumenical nature of her address book and also knew, as London’s most successful hostess, that a social occasion could only benefit from a whiff of barely suppressed antagonism in the air. And so my mother and Freddie were always invited to these carefully orchestrated events, along with a sprinkling of other Labour Party supporters, mainly journalists and writers, to add the required frisson to the party. On election night I would sit on my mother’s bed and watch, fascinated, as she pouffed up her hair with strategic back combing, layered on her makeup, stepped into her long black velvet dress, slipped on her sapphire and ruby rings from Burma, and finally sprayed herself all over with Arpège. If, as was all too often the case, a Tory victory looked likely, she would bring out her waterproof mascara, bought especially for the occasion, and as she sat in front of the mirror sweeping it onto her eyelashes, would hum the “Internationale” and mutter defiantly, “I’m not going to let those bastards see me crying. No, they’re damn well not going to have that satisfaction.”
Admittedly the Carrs were hardly members of the huddled masses, but they were without any question in desperate need of soap, hot water, and a hairbrush, so that summer they qualified for rescuing. Freddie and Raymond sat under the lime tree, drinking pastis and smoking, talking about the Spanish civil war or some convoluted Oxford scandal, while the kids and I lolled about with a stolen bottle of wine up in my room, in an idle, slightly drunken adolescent torpor.
IT MAY HAVE BEEN SYLVIA who introduced my mother to Busch, I don’t recall. A small, round woman, with crinkled, ice blue eyes, and wayward gray hair, she had skin that looked like very old stained brown leather—which I suppose it was. She had first come to this part of France in 1930, with her then-husband, Julius Meier-Graefe, an eminent German art critic. Sensing, with unusual clairvoyance, that the situation at home was headed in the wrong direction for Jewish intellectuals like themselves, they had left Germany, and bought a house near Saint-Cyr, not far from Les Lecques. They soon became the nucleus of a group of German and Austrian exiles, which included Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and Franz Werfel along with his femme-fatale wife, Alma Mahler. Sybille Bedford, who lived in nearby Sanary at the time and wrote the brilliant autobiographical novel Jigsaw about her life there, described Busch as Meier-Graefe’s “very young third wife—he had her elope with him straight from Swiss boarding school, pursued by telephone and police.” After her husband’s premature death, “she specialized in famous writers and artists as well as Greek ship-owners—concurrent with a discreet affair with one of their sons.” When France fell Busch escaped to America, where she married, true to form, Hermann Broch, one of the superstars of the German intellectual diaspora. In 1950 she returned to her house in Saint-Cyr, leaving Broch behind in Princeton, and lived there alone, surrounded by both her husbands’ books and a dazzling collection of German expressionist paintings, until the day she died.
It probably hadn’t occurred to my mother when she invited Busch to dinner that she would come with her own large, ill-mannered, and halitosis-afflicted “husband.” As soon as their car pulled up, he leaped out rather rudely and, barging ahead of his wife, dashed straight into the kitchen, eager to meet all these exciting new friends. Even though he clearly wasn’t Sorgue—he was twice as big and looked more like a bear than a dog—the automatic greeting of “Fuck off! À la maison!” welcomed Clovis into our home.
“Jesus, what’s with these ladies and their dogs?” my mother hissed in my ear, but then decided, rather uncharacteristically, to look on the bright side, adding, “Well, I guess they’re better than extra men, because at least they won’t get drunk, and we don’t have to set more places at the table. Or talk to them.”
The truth is that she was always much more forgiving of animals than people. And the only reason she bothered to shout at Sorgue was to provoke Francette, which for some reason always cheered her up. Her sympathy for the underdog—or the underwasp, underant, undercat, undersnail, underbird, underspider, undermouse, undergecko, undercentipede—was limitless. In the depths of a gloomy London winter she would trudge to the park with a bag of snacks—stale bread specially sautéed in drippings—for the poor freezing seagulls and ducks. At the height of a Provençal summer she would fill a shallow bowl with water, put it on the terrace, and watch, transfixed, as the poor thirsty wasps hovered just above the surface to take a restorative sip or two. Dogs and cats slept in her bed, baby birds were fed warm milk with eyedroppers, spiders were fished out of baths, and a colony of red ants, which feasted on honey and scurried around inside a special box with a glass lid, lived on the kitchen table in London for many years. The only creatures she ever tried to harm were the giant hornets that lurked inside a dead olive tree in France, and were capable, she always claimed, of killing a baby with a single, murderous strike. Francette said you could catch them by filling glass jars with sugar water and hanging them from the trees, and although we followed her instructions faithfully, I’m not sure a single hornet was ever silly enough to fall into one of these jerry-built traps.
THE SARDINES HAD BEEN decapitated and arranged on their funeral pyre of fennel, ready for the grill; the tomatoes had been sprinkled with breadcrumbs, garlic, and parsley; and a long column of candles marched down the center of the marble table, casting a forgiving, flickering glow across the kitchen. I turned off the lights and drew the curtains Alvys had sewn by hand—her glasses balanced on her elegant retroussé nose—that first summer, before she left to meet her lover and die with him on the mountain road above Ravello. Poor beautiful Alvys. But now her son, Adrian—the same nose, the same blond curls—was upstairs with all the other guests, who were jabbering away, drinking wine, wolfing down the pâté, and about to come down the stairs to destroy my meticulously arranged still life.
Since there was nobody to flirt with, Freddie had decided to do the right thing and place himself between Busch and Pussy at the end of the table. My mother made sure she had Azamat and Bill, while everybody else was allowed to sit wherever they could find a chair, and a companion who amused them. Sorgue and Clovis, who had discovered they actually had quite a lot in common and got along surprisingly well, settled down under the table, on top of their “wives’ ” feet. I flitted about making sure the breadbasket was full, mixing the vinaigrette, spooning the crème fraîche into a bowl, transferring the tarte to the big blue-and-white plate with the pomegranate in the middle, and passing little morsels of cheese to the patient, drooling “husbands” on the floor. Too young to really join in the conversation, I was quite happy in my waitress/Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss role, listening, watching, and learning how to be a grown-up.
After dessert and before coffee I slipped, unnoticed, upstairs to bed. Apart from an almost imperceptible breeze ruffling the leaves of the lime tree, the night air was soft and still, and the sound of laughter and individual voices drifted up from the terrace, like some play you might listen to on the radio just as you were going to sleep. “Yes, I do actually believe in God.” Amanda, the lovely, polite ex-deb who had been foolhardy enough to sign on as Nick’s minder for the summer, was talking to Freddie about God. Oh dear. Father d’Arcy she was not. I could hear her incredulous, nervous voice going up an octave as it dawned on her that she was actually talking to, working for, living with an atheist. It was clear the underdeb needed rescuing. “Lay off, Fred,” my mother told him, laughing—but she meant it. Amanda had become one of the freezing seagulls in Regent’s Park, and there was no way she was going to be allowed to starve.
“Monsieur Zancanaro makes this marc himself. I’m pretty sure he squashes all the grape skins and pips with his own feet, and I’m telling you it is just what one needs at this point in the evening.” Prince Azamat always arrived with a bottle of this terrifying moonshine and amazingly usually found quite a few takers. The beads clacked, the glasses clinked, and Azamat proposed a toast, to whom or what I couldn’t make out. “No, Raymond, I will not go back to Spain until that man is dead,” Freddie was taking a stand against Franco—something I knew all about. Only a couple of months before in London, I had been sent off to a Spanish-themed party, dressed up as a protesting peasant, in a baggy skirt held up with a bit of rope, proudly carrying a hand-painted sign that proclaimed “Abajo Franco.” Nervously I had pressed the bell of some fake Tudor toad of a house in Hampstead—all gables and dark leaded windows—and was greeted by my classmate Vivien, the birthday señorita, and her squealing entourage, flouncing about in flamenco dresses, tap-dancing shoes, and sticky red lipstick, with matching roses tucked behind their ears. Muchas gracias, Mummy and Freddie, for coming up with that idea.
My mother was teasing Azamat about his friend Bendor Drummond, and the mini-Cooper he kept on his yacht for little spins ashore when they stopped off in Capri or Portofino. “Where the hell do you find these people, Az?” But, thank God, he did, because the very next week she and Freddie joined the Guireys on Bendor’s smooth-as-suede teak deck, all of them happily slurping down Veuve Clicquot and nibbling on miniature squares of toast and foie gras en gelée while the yacht bobbed about in Bandol harbor. “Was Mann a homosexual? I’m not sure I know the answer.” Busch was back in the German literary world of Sanary in the thirties. “Espèce de con …” was the man who had refused to back up for Francette on the road that morning. Franco, Monsieur Zancanaro, God, Bendor Drummond, the rustling leaves, and the opportunistic drone of the mosquitoes—they all became an incoherent, dreamy miasma inside my head as I slipped over the edge of sleep, comforted by the sound of familiar voices, and knowing that nothing could ever go wrong so long as the grown-ups were laughing.