ONE DAY SEVERAL YEARS AGO Hylan came to lunch at my apartment in the Village. It was early summer and we sat outside on the terrace, shaded by an ancient wisteria vine that was slowly, deliberately choking the house—and would be murdered soon after by my landlady, who cared far more for the value of her property than for its thick jungly foliage or the ethereal scent of its dangling purple flowers. In a fit of nostalgia for La Migoua, I had cooked ratatouille and left it outside on the table to keep warm in the sun while I poured him a glass of wine and then disappeared into the kitchen to poach a couple of eggs. As soon as the whites were set and the yolks still runny, I made a little nest in the mound of ratatouille on each plate, plopped them in, and picked a few leaves of fresh basil from the bush by the door to scatter on top. A salad of lambs’-tongue lettuce, jazzed up with a handful of peppery nasturtium flowers—the greenflies flicked off when Hylan wasn’t looking—bread, some almost liquid, extremely smelly Époisses, and that was it.
After lunch we sat in the sun and he started to talk about that time, so long ago, when he had first met my mother: “She was my bad girl, and I think all of us innocent guys want that. She was like those fearless New York literary women—Dorothy Parker, Lee Miller, Lillian Hellman. She was cocky, insolent—almost masculine—worldly, funny, but underneath all that her heart was made of mush.”
But she was always careful to hide the mush away behind her bulletproof armor, so most people never even knew it existed, and those of us who were closest to her were allowed only the occasional glimpse of this tender, elusive aspect of her character. Mush might be too easily confused with sentimentality—something she despised and scorned above all else: “The soft nature of human foibles made her impatient, as if it were mere trickery.” I knew exactly what Hylan meant.
But animal foibles were an entirely different matter. Spiders were rescued from baths, caterpillars carefully put back on their leaf of choice, and no dog or cat of hers was ever allowed to eat anything from a tin. No fast food for them, oh no. Instead regular trips to the butcher yielded the ingredients for a fragrant ragout of fresh lamb’s hearts and kidneys that was kept bubbling away on the back of the kitchen stove—the yellowish gray scum boiling over, the parfum d’abattoir permeating the whole house—just like the special from Chez Macbeth.
Animals were powerless, vulnerable creatures that needed to be loved, protected, and rescued. Just like children. Or so you might have thought. And yet it didn’t necessarily work out quite that way. Hylan poured us both some more wine, turned his chair to face the sun, and told me about one particular evening, early on in their relationship. He had arrived at the house straight from work to cook dinner for his new girlfriend (conjured up in a smoky wok from the adventurous ingredients in the fridge) and afterward, when they were sitting around enjoying a joint—or maybe just some illicit fattening coffee ice cream—they suddenly remembered Nick. Alone in his room two floors below, he would have been eight or nine at the time.
HYLAN BROUGHT OUT the best in my mother. He calmed her down, made her laugh, and was probably the only person who knew how to tame the fire-breathing furies inside her. At least some of them, some of the time. He fed them a steady diet of Szechuan shrimp, chilled Vouvray, funny stories, sad stories, stem ginger drowned in heavy cream, Acapulco gold, a little music (they favored early Sinatra), and endless amounts of warmth, sympathy, and above all, love. The furies gobbled all these things up—greedily, but also gratefully—and sometimes asked for more, but usually they just curled up and went to sleep. Until they got hungry again. With Hylan there, life at home became much less fraught—he kept things steady and consciously or not became a buffer between Nick and his mother. “Buffer” is my brother’s word, not mine, but I know precisely what he meant, and why he chose it. Once, many years ago, somebody who knew my mother quite well described her to me as “a most alarming woman,” which deeply upset me at the time, maybe because it was the truth.
As a small child Nick, I think, was truly alarmed by his mother, and understandably so. Sometimes she wasn’t there at all—she was working, she was at a television studio, she was out at a party—and when she was around, you could never be entirely sure if she was going to cook lamb chops and peas and make you laugh, or whether it would be the furies who needed feeding far more urgently than you did. No wonder Nick was so eager to welcome the Buffer into the bosom of our family: “At the time I thought I had the best of both worlds.” His lovely dad doted on him at the weekends, and cheerful Hylan kept his mum happy during the week. Even better, the Buffer soon started bringing his daughter, Alex, with him, so the kids would hang out in Nick’s room, giggling, stuffing themselves with potato chips, revolting sweets, and Coca-Cola. At a remarkably precocious age—maybe around ten—Nick added cigarettes to his well-balanced diet. He had started out by pinching them from Freddie or our mother but quickly tired of the taste of Players Navy Cut, and before too long graduated to Marlboros. His equally precocious sense of design inspired him to glue the empty packs to the walls of his room, and since he smoked so much, he was soon able to create a kind of red-and-white-patchwork-quilt effect that cheered up his surroundings no end.
The patchwork nature of Nick’s education was sadly less of a success than the nicotine wallpaper. His father’s view was quite simple: Send your children to the best private schools, encourage them to work hard, buy them lots of books, engage them in lively conversations, and watch them sail off to the best universities, where they would get first-class degrees. Just as he, and everybody he knew, had. But poor innocent well-meaning Freddie hadn’t taken into account the two whirlwinds swirling around him. The first was the confusing, fuck-the-Establishment times he found himself living in, and the second was the anarchic, fuck-the-English attitude of his wife. Together they made a perfect storm that ended up sabotaging his son’s education. My mother was theoretically in favor of schools, despite her own fractured and largely hostile relationship with them, and she never lost her admiration for that highly educated crème de la crème of intellectual society that lived in some paneled library full of first editions. And yet she expected people to be naturally, effortlessly brilliant, to reach the clouds without sweating, and had nothing but contempt for what she called “greasy grinds”—those dreary, conventional kids/adults who worked too hard at school/jobs and were pathetically bereft of all glamour, fun, and wickedness.
At this stage in their marriage stuffy old Freddie had only to suggest something for his contentious, increasingly wild, and ever younger—in spirit if not in body—wife to disagree. Jesus, why the hell would she want her son to end up like every uptight, out-of-touch, private-school-educated, misogynistic, insensitive Englishman she had ever known—or been to bed with? No way was she going to subject little Nick to that. Most of her friends, enlightened left-leaning people like Jonathan and Rachel Miller, Sylvia, George and Diana Melly, had long ago come to the conclusion that it was wrong, and a waste of money, to send your children to fee-paying schools. Never mind that these same people had all gone to nice private schools and Oxford or Cambridge themselves: This was the dawning of a new age. Get with the program, Fred. How on earth could there ever have been any kind of social justice if one privileged class continued to pay for education while everybody else was forced into the state school around the corner? And Freddie called himself a socialist! Back home in America, everybody went to the same local school (no, not really) and had an equal chance of getting into Harvard (no, not at all), and that was the only way for any sane country to run its educational system. Well, she had always known the English were nuts. And don’t think this was just idle chatter—my mother and her friends put their children where their mouths were.
Little Nick’s patchwork experience started out somewhat inconsistently at a private nursery school in Hampstead with a pretty garden at the back, geraniums in the window boxes, and the reassuring onwards-and-upwards name of Stepping Stones. His father’s fuddy-duddy idea was that he should graduate from there—summa cum laude—and move smoothly right along to prep school, which would in turn prepare him for Westminster (founded in 1179), where Freddie’s hero and occasional (dead) dining companion, Jeremy Bentham, had gone. But this was not to be. Instead Nick followed his friends Tom, William, and the Melly kids to Gospel Oak, the local state school. Not altogether a bad place, but with thirty-odd kids in each class, its harried teachers didn’t have the energy, time, inclination, or training to take on Horace, the finer points of the Peloponnesian Wars, trigonometry, Aristophanes—or whatever fuddy-duddy rubbish you had to know about to pass the entrance exam for Westminster.
As far as extracurricular activities went, there was lots of smoking and regular, energizing fights in the playground, and quite soon visits to the Tavistock Clinic in Belsize Lane were added to Nick’s busy after-school schedule. Why our mother had decided a shrink might be a good idea wasn’t entirely clear. Maybe she had noticed that Nick seemed unhappy, or maybe it was because the Millers and the Mellys were sending their kids there, or quite possibly it was just another way to annoy Freddie, who had no patience at all for the good doctor Freud’s exotic excavations of the psyche. The mind was a wondrous thing, extremely useful for solving problems of a verifiable nature, but was there any point in rummaging about in its nether regions to see if one might have forgotten having had sex with the gardener at the age of seven? Freddie didn’t think so. Nick’s recollection is that he had cut himself accidentally fiddling about with his father’s razor, and when he appeared at school festooned in Band-Aids, his obviously concerned teacher had called his parents to alert them to his possibly suicidal tendencies.
Either way, or more likely both ways, Nick now found himself twice a week sitting in a room full of toys he didn’t want to play with and books he didn’t want to read, opposite an earnest gray-haired lady in Birkenstocks he didn’t want to talk to. But talk he must. That’s why he was there. “Now, Nick, what are you thinking about?” Not a lot. In fact nothing at all. His mind was a blank, all he wanted was to go home, watch the telly, and have a much-needed cigarette. But he didn’t feel he could really say that, and so he remained silent. She asked him again. And again. Finally, in despair he said he was looking at the screw in her chair. Aha! Now at last they were getting somewhere. Screw. The miasma had started to lift: Nick was thinking of screwing. Whom did he want to screw? His mother? Her? The gardener? (If only we’d had one—then the dogs’ toilet could have been transformed into a lovely bijou garden.) The poor child looked mystified, but at least he had ignited some kind of conversation; the only problem was he had no idea what she was talking about. The kindly lady had suddenly become animated—far too animated—and had taken off on an embarrassing riff about that thing that people do. At ten Nick certainly knew all about that, but what did it have to do with the screw in her chair? He fell silent again, and then, thank God, his time was up. Perhaps Freddie wasn’t such a fool after all.
HYLAN HAPPENED TO BE precisely thirteen years older than me and thirteen years younger than my mother, and far from acting like a buffer between us he actually brought us much closer together. My friends all loved him. At a party he’d hit the dance floor with a whoop of joy, hands clapping, sweeping you along in his wake, spinning wildly like a fifth top—and it wasn’t just that he knew the moves, he was from Motown, for God’s sake. In our sheltered, snobby, white Oxford world, he was probably as close to the real deal as any of us would ever get. And as for his acid-tongued, wickedly funny girlfriend, nobody, I was proud to say, had a mother remotely like mine. What had been alarming to a young child and embarrassing to a teenager were the exact same qualities that kept my friends (and me) entertained in our twenties. I had always inhabited her world, gone to grown-up parties from a ludicrously young age and hung about with her guests, and now, newly rejuvenated by Hylan, she was more than delighted to return the favor. Sometimes we even went away for the weekend together.
Ever since it was founded in 1823, the Oxford Union has suffered from an advanced case of folie de grandeur, fancying itself as the prep school for Parliament. The few times I went there as a student, it seemed to be full of self-regarding bores, whose voices were too loud and predictable opinions too strident, but amazingly a few of these windbags did actually make it into the House of Commons. So I guess as prep schools went, it wasn’t a total flop. Mostly a debate in the Union consisted of often-drunk undergraduates haranguing one another, but every now and then, just to add a bit of class and celebrity sparkle to the occasion, they would invite guest speakers from the real world to come and join in. One day my mother was the lucky recipient of such an invitation. Who knows what the debate was supposed to be about, but since she could always fashion an argument out of thin air, it really didn’t matter—what mattered was having fun. And what could be more fun than a little mother-and-daughter outing to a hotel in Oxford, accompanied by our respective boyfriends?
Even though I had made it quite clear to Martin several times—first during the hysterical night at his parents’ house, then in a stream of letters—that I would never have anything whatsoever to do with him ever again, it seems he didn’t believe me. And nor did I. He wrote in his memoir, Experience, that “we had started going out together when she came to St. Hilda’s to read history in 1969, and it lasted in its intermittent way about as long as the average marriage. Ten years?”
Was it really that long? I’m not so sure, but it still makes me oddly happy to think he remembers it that way. At any rate, when the Oxford Union came calling we were in one of our on-again phases, and since Hylan and Martin got along so well (and still do) and my mother adored Martin (and always did), the four of us set out for our double date at the Randolph Hotel full of excitement.
Our hosts—a couple of eager young men with troubled complexions and misguided notions of the depth and range of their own wit—had laid on dinner in a pub as an entertaining [sic] prelude to the great debate. Clearly they knew that their guest speaker, Dee Wells, could be relied upon to stir things up, but I wonder if they expected Mrs. A. J. Ayer to come to her husband’s home turf with her lover? Probably not. At the time this aspect of our expedition never crossed my mind, and yet, looking back, it must have been on my mother’s the entire time. If Freddie could take Vanessa to La Sorbonne for discreet lunches, then just watch me take Hylan to the Union for an indiscreet showdown. Not only would she destroy the Conservative opposition with her glorious swift tongue, but she would prove to all those greasy grind undergraduates what a sexy, desirable woman she was too. And it worked: She won the debate, she looked sensational in one of Hylan’s creations, and most satisfying of all, she must have generated enough gossip to keep the greasy grinds jabbering away for at least a week.
After her triumph the four of us sailed back to the Randolph in search of a celebratory drink. But this was Oxford, not London, and at eleven o’clock its cryptlike lounge was deserted. The crypt’s elderly, irritable keeper was eventually persuaded to bring us four small glasses of whiskey and a bowl of melting ice cubes—“Jesus, what is it with the English and ice.”—and then we sat about making much too much noise, having much too good a time, before stumbling off to bed. The next morning, after breakfast in the silent dining room—“Jesus, what’s wrong with the English. Why don’t they talk when they eat, like normal people do.”—it was time to say good-bye to the dreaming spires and head back home. My mother and Martin went to the front desk, Hylan and I collected the bags, when suddenly there was a little yelp, not a real one but a funny one, when she discovered she was apparently being charged a pound more than Martin for her equally miserable double room. She examined her bill more carefully, she examined his and then, with a smile on her face, turned to the girl cowering behind the desk: “Oh I see. You charge extra for niggers. Well, you know what? They’re worth it!”
And with that she produced her credit card and snapped it down on the counter. It was the perfect ending to a perfect weekend. I should add a postscript here. Nick, who had adored Hylan from the very beginning, soon took to using that very same word rather freely—always with great affection—following his mother’s example. The poor child was understandably a bit confused, when she told him one day that it was in fact an evil, wicked word and that he was never, ever, to say it again. So he didn’t. But she went on using it. And Hylan says he never minded at all.