SERENA AND I SHARED A BLACK LEATHER SKIRT so abbreviated that the belt—with its big round brass buckle—actually occupied half its “length.” The skirt belonged to her, but since we had ended up in rooms right next door to each other, she kindly allowed me to borrow it whenever I liked. And Serena, of course, had reciprocal membership of my wardrobe. Saint Hilda’s, like all the women’s colleges at Oxford, was ugly and Victorian and, we naturally assumed, full of lesbians intent on getting firsts in chemistry or quite possibly geography. The best things about it were that the Cherwell meandered past the bottom of the garden, and that it was just across the bridge from Magdalen College, so you never felt as if you were stuck in some distant, dank nunnery in north Oxford. The only other good thing was that most of my tutors were in other colleges, so I was hardly ever there.
But back to Serena’s skirt. A few days after my mother dumped me in Oxford—a hit-and-run job with no lingering, which was just fine with both of us—Freddie invited me to dinner at New College. Clearly I would have to wear our skirt. Early that evening I carefully laid out my clothes on the bed: first the horizontal strip of leather, then a black chiffon blouse (too diaphanous for a bra), black fishnet tights, and there—lying on the floor like two fearsome dead snakes—the thigh-high suede boots I had gotten at Biba’s the week before. In keeping with the witchy hooker theme, I outlined my eyes in kohl, smudged neutral concealer over my lips, and put on the long black academic gown that had come as part of the deal (along with fifty pounds a year) with the Acne Scholarship in Modern History.
I walked out through the gates of Saint Hilda’s (locked every night at eleven thirty), crossed the bridge, my gown billowing out behind me like the sinister black sail of some pirate ship, and headed up the High Street. Turning right onto New College Lane, I passed the crenellated remnants of the ancient city walls and presented myself to the porter at the lodge, who didn’t even blink at my outfit. And neither did Freddie—maybe the gown had managed to hide the worst of it. Or, far more likely, he just didn’t notice. First we stood around in a gloomy paneled room with his ancient colleagues—most of them were probably about my age now—savoring a glass of sweet viscous sherry, and then it was time to form a procession, led by the warden, and slowly walk up the length of the medieval dining hall to dinner. Already seated at their long wooden tables, the rows of undergraduates turned to watch us, and they at least (or, so I imagined in my awful vanity) appreciated the unreconstructed tartiness of my getup. Never mind Freddie and the blind old fool in the lodge; they were the men I had dressed for.
Sandwiched between the Regius Professor of Greek and some physicist, or maybe it was the Reader in Divinity and a mathematician, or the bursar and a geologist, when grace was said I thanked God, from the bottom of my heart, for the munificence of the New College wine cellar. The table glittered with elaborate silver candelabra, plates, saltcellars, a grisly depiction of hounds tearing apart a stag, and other shiny loot acquired over the college’s six-hundred-year history. The chef’s repertoire was similarly indebted to the past. Potted shrimps on toast or smoked trout, followed by hunks of beef, legs of lamb, or—when in season—venison, grouse, and pheasant, accompanied by elderly boiled vegetables. Dessert came next, maybe lemon posset or trifle, or something heavy and steamed, like bread-and-butter pudding served with cream so thick you needed a spoon to winch it out of the jug. After that, cheese: Stilton, Caerphilly, or cheddar (nothing exotic or foreign, thank you very much) with crisp stalks of celery and slightly stale biscuits (never bread) that lived inside several small ornate silver drums.
The finale was always a savory. Just when you thought dinner must be over, some bizarrely named dish would appear, like Scotch woodcock (toast smeared with Gentleman’s Relish, topped with scrambled eggs) or Angels on Horseback (bacon rolled around an oyster) or Devils on Horseback (same idea, with a prune instead of an oyster). Whatever made the English think it is a good idea to serve cheese and a strange canapé after dessert? Must be something to do with putting the French—and their misconceived notion of ending a meal with fruit or something sweet—in their place. Angels, devils, or woodcocks all gobbled up, the warden would then lead us out of the hall into another dimly lit paneled room where a bottle of spectacularly old port made its courtly way—always clockwise, never counterclockwise, or was it the opposite?—around the table. Nuts, chocolates, coffee, and maybe just one more go-round of the port, and it was time for me to thank my hosts and make my mildly drunken way back past Magdalen, across the bridge, and into my—conveniently located—convent, before the gates clanged shut.
WHEN I GOT TO Oxford I knew only three people: Freddie, Serena, and the man who was to become the first great love of my life. Martin Amis and I had met the year before in London. No, it wasn’t at some sexy drug-infused party in Chelsea, nor was it at a throbbing down-and-dirty disco, nor at a chic dinner party with some brilliant mutual friends: The embarrassing truth is that we were set up on a playdate by our parents. As I recall, Jane, Martin’s stepmother, and my mother met when they were both on some television talk show, yammering away at each other from different ends of the political spectrum. In the green room afterward—on-air disagreements forgiven—they discovered they had kids about the same age, and thought it might be fun if we could meet. They were right. It turned out to be much more fun than they could possibly have imagined. Sometimes Martin and I had dinner at the house in Maida Vale that Jane shared with his dad, Kingsley, and sometimes we went out on decorous dates to the movies, usually followed by a boiling-hot curry at some Indian dive, and then he would take me home in a taxi. I’m not sure we ever kissed, but if we did I have forgotten, so it amounts to the same thing. Maybe he didn’t want to? And I would have been the first to understand that. Still trapped inside my Mademoiselle Lévi-Strauss persona, convinced of my own unattractiveness, with zero experience of men, I knew all I had to offer was that I wasn’t totally stupid, and could sometimes be quite funny. He, on the other hand, was very funny and very clever. I was always a sucker for that particular combo—maybe it reminded me of home—he made me laugh and told me things I didn’t know. In my prelapsarian state, undistracted by lust and still innocent of the heavenly havoc it causes, I was free just to giggle and chat with the most fascinating man I had ever met.
Our favorite movie theater was the Curzon in Mayfair. It was like going to a fancy private screening room, not that I’d ever been anywhere near one. But Martin had, so I felt I knew. Underground and tiny, it was a plush cave with thick carpets and squashy armchairs that tipped way back—and even more decadently the cave also served real drinks. Off to one side was a cocktail bar, covered in quilted black fake leather, the bottles reflected in a pink-tinted mirror, like miniature skyscrapers outlined against the dawn sky. Never had I been anywhere quite so slick with anybody quite so cool. It wasn’t just the way he looked—the skintight black velvet pants, the snakeskin boots, the gossamer shirts covered in swirling jungle flowers, with huge rounded collars and cuffs so long they must have had at least six buttons—it was everything about him. His irony, his wit, the sardonic throwaway remarks that never missed, his wholly original and brilliant vocabulary, his unsentimental view of the world and … his sweetness. The way he didn’t smile too much—could have been the disastrous teeth, not that I ever noticed anything wrong with them—but loved to laugh, and always extracted the maximum humor from the grisliest situations. The grislier the better, because that made it so much funnier. Then there was his face. The wide mouth, shaped like a crinkle-cut chip (a description he borrowed from me and later used in one of his novels), his infinitely intelligent eyes, the sultry hint of a monobrow. The way his hair was strictly maintained at a permanent five-day degree of dirtiness; the grease making it easier to arrange in an artfully disheveled style. (It was a complicated process that involved a daily wetting, only very occasionally allowing a thimbleful of diluted shampoo anywhere near it.) After a month or two—or was it longer?—I disappeared to Paris, then to the house in France, and didn’t miss him at all. In fact I don’t think I ever thought about him again until the day I arrived in Oxford.
He was just as I remembered him, but something had changed, and I fell inexplicably, deliriously, desperately, irrevocably, shamelessly, hopelessly in love. Only the most awful clichés could possibly do justice to the way I felt. After the fall my life became a pathetic parody of all the mediocre lyrics of every mediocre pop song ever written. He was always on my mind, he was just too good to be true, I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, and I never wanted to let him go. And amazingly it seemed that this guy was in love with me.
In addition to the sexy French kidney business in Serge Gainsbourg’s song, Martin introduced me to all kinds of other exciting things I’d only dreamed of. Stuff any normal teenager would have yawned at, like smoking, hanging around in his rooms listening to loud music (T. Rex and Led Zeppelin), getting drunk (on Special Brew, a spectacularly unpleasant beer, whose only virtue was that it made you very drunk), and, most daring of all, sleeping over in his tiny single bed. Having a girl in your room after the gate was locked at night was against the college rules (how dull kids’ sex lives must be in coed colleges today) but, disappointingly, I never heard of anybody actually being punished for this primal sin. By 1969 the old-fart university busybodies must have realized the game was up, the tide had turned, we had taken over the world, and youth ruled. Or something along those lines. Then again, maybe they were wiser than we knew and just could not have cared less. Well, if they didn’t mind sex, what about drugs? They must have given up on that, too, because I never knew anybody who got into trouble over them either. However, drugs were another subject where I had a lot of catching up to do. A slack student, I wasn’t especially interested, being quite content with my Special Brew, the odd bottle of vintage port Freddie gave me, and the pretty pink—and very cheap and sweet—Mateus rosé that Martin favored whenever we went to a restaurant. He told me it went particularly well with Indian food, and who was I to disagree? Still, drugs were cool, so whether I wanted to or not, I knew I’d have to get serious about them at some point.
ONE BALMY SUMMER’S DAY we were lolling about in the garden at Exeter College, enjoying a refreshing cup of tea, when Martin’s friend Adam loped across the lawn to join us. Even though he was an undergraduate, Adam seemed much more grown-up, partly on account of his age—he was about five years older than we were—and partly because he exuded a sexy, knowing air of world-weariness. He’d been around, he’d lived—I think he might even have been to India or Afghanistan on a Harley, or perhaps in a Land Rover. He looked like Jim Morrison, with sideburns the size of small Mason Pearson hairbrushes, smelled of pepper, and I couldn’t begin to imagine how many women he must have had. Adam was Martin’s best friend—they dressed like twins in the same velvet “strides,” cobra-skin boots, diaphanous shirts, tightly fitted velvet jackets, except Adam liked to complete his ensemble with long wispy scarves or one of those chicken-wire Arafat numbers. (Martin and I despised scarves—why I have no idea.) Sometimes Adam would exaggerate or add a little extra embroidery to the truth, but you always knew when he was about to do this because he’d preface the whopper with “virtually,” so that was okay.
Adam sat down on the grass and asked us if we’d like to have some fun. I thought I was already having more fun than I’d ever had in my entire life, but apparently I was mistaken. Adam had something in his pocket—he reached in and produced three little cubes, wrapped in silver foil—that was guaranteed to blow our minds. Did we ask what they were? Where he’d gotten them, or what they might do to our brains, apart from blowing them apart? No, we did not. That would not have been cool. Even I knew that. The fate of my teacup was the first clue that the sugar cubes had started to work their special magic. I was standing up, my saucer a long way away below me—it felt like miles—on the grass, so I just dropped the cup onto it. They both broke. Now, that wasn’t right, Martin told me gently; people might think I was on drugs. Might be best if we split. A picnic was what was called for in a situation like this. Christ, why hadn’t we thought of it before? Special Brew, sausage rolls, Scotch eggs—what more could we possibly want? Music. Can’t have a picnic without music. Christ, we weren’t thinking straight. Adam and Martin had the records, and I had a small portable, plastic record player—powder blue, I think—that my father had given me for Christmas.
While we had been having our tea the sidewalk on the High Street had, rather extravagantly, been resurfaced with diamonds. Embedded in the concrete, they flashed and sparkled in the sunlight just like Marie Antoinette’s infamous necklace, which had been the beginning of her end. Commissioned by Louis XV for his mistress Madame du Barry, the rivière became the dazzling centerpiece of a scandal that destroyed the tragic Austrian queen’s reputation and … I was busy pointing all this out to a bewildered passerby when Martin took me firmly by the arm and nearly pushed us both under an oncoming bus. Christ Church meadows: That was the place we needed to be. Cows, clover, voles, dandelions, rabbits, Queen Anne’s lace, mice, birds, cowslips, deer, buttercups, ants, trees, fish swimming about in the river, moles burrowing around under the ground—nature in all its Wordsworthian glory. Martin could recite poetry to me, and I could tell him lots and lots more about poor Marie Antoinette.
Led Zeppelin, Special Brew, cigarettes—bliss was it to be sprawled on the grass (we’d forgotten to bring a blanket), flies buzzing around my sweaty face, but to be stoned, and in love, was total ecstasy. The fact that I had departed this world and would never see any of my family ever again was not a problem. That’s just the way it was. Like Alice—it had to be of cosmic significance that we were within sight of Charles Dodgson’s college—I’d tumbled into another universe and was quite comfortable there.
Martin and Adam were not so happy. They were not country people and had no idea how to appreciate flora and fauna the way I—especially in my new state—did, and after a while (minutes, hours, days?) they told me it was time to go. Fortunately there wasn’t much packing up to be done, since we’d eaten all the Scotch eggs and sausage rolls and had thrown the Special Brew bottles behind a bush. Adam shoved the records into a plastic bag, and Martin picked up my record player. Oddly enough, during our picnic it had been transformed into the kind of vanity case—a mirror embedded inside the top, elastic pouches to hold miniature plastic bottles—that tarts carried their cosmetics around in. He looked like a complete fool. A poofter with a handbag, a slut with her bag of tricks, a transvestite swinging his/her purse around—I couldn’t stop laughing. Martin turned round and asked me what was so fucking funny, and—tears streaming down my face and about to wet my pants—I told him. The vanity case had to go. Get rid of it. Chuck it in the river. Now. Which was the end of any music in my sad little room at Saint Hilda’s.
I KNEW MY MOTHER would love Martin—clever, funny with a famous name, he was a triple plus. Freddie liked anybody who made me happy and—as befitted the tolerant rational person he knew himself to be—was prepared to give Martin the benefit of the doubt and overlook his dad’s abhorrent, lower-middle-class (yes, Freddie was a snob), rabidly right-wing political views. Apart from me, Freddie and my new boyfriend didn’t have a whole lot in common, but they used to play gladiatorial chess, and occasionally Martin would give Freddie a ride in his car so he could watch his favorite team play football. Here’s his description of my stepfather’s approach to puzzling objects—like ashtrays:
Twenty years ago I drove the late A. J. Ayer to White Hart Lane to support Tottenham Hotspur. On the way Ayer smoked three cigarettes. For his first butt he disdained, or did not see, the obvious—and butt-infested—ashtray, favoring the naked tape-deck with the fiery remains of his Player. (The tape-recorder itself had been stolen, true, but the empty console had the word PHILIPS clearly stamped on it.) His second butt he squeezed into the base of the hand brake, his third he ground out on the speedometer. The high point came with his third spent match, which, with incredible skill, he balanced on the bare ignition key, where it wobbled for at least three seconds before dropping inexorably to the floor.
The first time I slept with Martin at home, he left in the middle of the night—maybe we thought it might be best if he met my parents over the dinner, rather than the breakfast, table—and the next morning my mother had some advice for me. An enlightened parent, she didn’t care whom I slept with or where (she never tired of talking about the married, fascist, rapist hairdresser) but she certainly didn’t want me getting pregnant, and wouldn’t it be a good idea if I went and saw our friend Dr. Slattery? This struck me as a bit odd, since she had never before shown the slightest interest in helping me unravel the mysteries of sex, or the female body.
But I still wish that my mother had thought to tell me what you are supposed to do when you wake up for the first time in a pool of blood and are due to spend the day at some fancy country club, frolicking in a swimming pool, with a school friend and her very stuffy parents. It was not a pretty sight. Even less lovely was the backseat of their Jaguar, after they had dropped me at home. Why would you let that happen to your daughter? It must have had something to do with her own mother’s neglect, and the way she had learned early on to look out for herself, because nobody else was going to do it for you. She had gone to the drugstore alone, at twelve, to buy a box of Kotex, so why shouldn’t I? As far as Dr. Slattery went I told her not to worry: It had already been taken care of.
FOR CHRISTMAS THE YEAR I went up to Oxford my father gave me a present that was even more fun, and considerably more expensive, than the now-drowned record player. A great believer in the virtue of wholesome outdoor activity (I was never allowed to go to the movies if the sun was shining), he decided to treat me to a skiing vacation in Switzerland. A nice, well-brought-up young man I knew was organizing a chalet party in Zermatt, with some other nice, well-brought-up young people, and invited me to join them. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea at the time. How was I to know that it would become totally unreasonable—no, totally abhorrent—within the space of a few months? Of course I had to go, my father had already paid for it, and it was only for a week, and I couldn’t let my friend down, but every time I thought of leaving Martin I would start to cry.
I went to sleep crying the night before I was due to go, I cried in my sleep, I woke up crying, I cried in his car on the way to the airport, and we were both in tears by the time we parted at the gate. The nice young people soon realized that they had a deeply disturbed person on their hands. A couple of the girls, softhearted debs with concerned, blinking eyes and furrowed brows, clucked around offering me hankies and sweets, telling me they knew just how I felt (how could they possibly? how could anyone?). The men busied themselves organizing tickets, being bossy to hapless brown porters, hauling clanking piles of skis about, and steered well clear of the loony. Lost in grief, I huddled in my seat on the plane and cried some more. Things did not improve once we arrived at our cozy chalet. I kept the softhearted deb who was sharing my room awake all night with my sobbing, refused to go skiing, and sat in the chalet crying. The next day I called Martin and said I was coming home, and started to pack, dizzy with joy. When my friends returned from their fun-packed day on the slopes, the loony was dancing about, laughing. The men looked nervous, the girls genuinely relieved, and when I told them I’d be flying back to London in the morning, they all looked extremely happy.
There he was at the airport, standing at the gate; I ran into his outstretched arms and burst into tears. I told him I was never ever going to leave him again, and I never did. We drove straight back to Kingsley and Jane’s sprawling house in north London, where we holed up in unlawful, unmarried bliss for the next couple of weeks. Martin once described Lemmons, as the house was called, as “a citadel of riotous solvency.” And that it was. The marble-shelved larder, the size of a small kitchen, looked like a corner of Harrods Food Hall, stuffed with whole hams, pork pies, homemade jams, sausages, Stilton in pottery jars, rounds of cheddar, confit de canard, pâté en croûte, and row upon row of chutneys, pickled onions, and gherkins. These last three items had to be stocked in industrial quantities because Kingsley ate them with everything. Jane was a truly gifted cook, but whatever she made—ethereal blanquette de veau, sublime risotto with wild mushrooms, juicy magret de canard, spicy Sicilian bouillabaisse—Kingsley’s plate would always be piled high with his palate-annihilating pickles. In addition to the larder, the freezer was packed full of frozen delights—haunches of venison, more kinds of ice cream than Howard Johnson’s (served with heavy cream and liqueurs)—and an enormous cupboard off the kitchen was similarly stocked with an array of drinks that would have put the bar at the Curzon cinema to shame.
Like my mother, Jane was married to a man who did nothing but sit in his study all day long and scribble. And like my mother, as the years passed, she became increasingly angry with the same man she had once been crazily in love with. Kingsley (like Freddie) had never learned to drive, so Jane was the chauffeur, housekeeper, chef, gardener, and household accountant; and once she had taken care of all of that, she too sat down to scribble, producing a series of very good novels and short stories. But on Sunday mornings, when it came down to the choice between standing at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes with Jane, or going to the pub and getting pissed on laughter and alcohol with Martin and Kingsley, I went with the boys.
Nearly forty years later I still feel ashamed, but what else was a spoiled and selfish twenty-year-old to do? The trouble was that there were just too many potatoes to be peeled, because the house was constantly full of people, which was what made it so much fun. In addition to the permanent ménage—Jane’s brother, Colin, always called “Monkey”; Sargie, a painter; and Jane’s desiccated mother, who rarely (thank Christ) left her room—there were endless weekend guests. Kingsley and Jane loved to entertain in the true meaning of that word. It went way beyond the delicious profligacy of her cooking and his skills with the corkscrew; it was about sitting down at a huge round table and knowing that whatever else happened, the next few hours were absolutely guaranteed to be entertaining. It was just like being at home, only better—much better—because I was with Martin. We spent the rest of the Christmas vacation in the “citadel of riotous solvency,” recovering from the “hell of Zermatt” (what our new friend Christopher Hitchens would call a “tumbrel” remark, as in the cart that dragged poor misunderstood Marie Antoinette to the guillotine) until it was time to go back to Oxford.