The House in France: A Memoir

Je Reviens

EVERY SUMMER FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS I would gather up my children and take them to stay with their grandmother in her house in France. There they would do the things that children do—paddle in the inflatable pool set up beneath an ancient lime tree, throw bits of baguette at the bloated goldfish in the village fountain, demand to be taken to the beach, swing in the hammock, and if they were really bored, push handfuls of gravel through the holes in the hubcaps of her car. But once they reached the age of reason, it was the Drawer of Death that fascinated them the most. Visiting this macabre mausoleum was something they would never have dared to do on their own. It was far too frightening, and precious for that, so its curator had to be persuaded to take them upstairs to the living room, settle them down on the sofa, and then slowly slide the drawer out so they could examine its contents together. Who knows why my mother decided to start her collection, but each summer there were always new acquisitions in her witch’s Wunderkammer to drive them mad with delight.

The cabinet itself was something she had bought in the Friday market in Le Beausset, where, in among the sweet-scented Cavaillon melons, purple pyramids of fresh figs, courgette blossoms, and viscous green local olive oil, were a few stalls of junk: inky black cast-iron pots too heavy to lift; linen napkins as big as pillowcases, embroidered with swirly, illegible initials; a brass lamp in the form of a gently pornographic naked nymph, with a tattered pink silk shade; and quite a few objects whose purpose, and use, even the seller was at a loss to explain.

On the shelves of the glass-fronted top of the cabinet were arranged some conventionally pretty pieces of china, which of course the children had absolutely no use for. It was the drawer beneath that they were after. And no wonder. Who could resist a bird’s nest full of dead grasshoppers, or the pale-green-and-orange butterflies, shaped like miniature stealth bombers? The collection had begun innocently enough with a few furry bumblebees, a starfish no bigger than a thumbnail, and some translucent cicada skins; but then, over the years, altogether more intriguing creatures were added. A shriveled toad, a sinister black centipede, lizards, and scorpions all huddled together with the broken remains of a mouse’s skeleton. And there, hiding behind a snail shell, was one of the dreaded hornets, which had built their nest in the old olive tree and were capable, or so my mother always claimed, of dispatching a baby with a few strategic strikes. The tiny silver snake that I had found flattened on a dirt track in Sicily, and mailed to my mother in a cigarette box, lay alongside the corpse of a New York–size water bug that had met its maker behind my fridge in Greenwich Village and made its last journey across the Atlantic in a Ziploc coffin. United in death, they sat in their dusty Provençal tomb all year, to emerge only briefly into the daylight at the beginning of the summer, in order to terrorize Rebecca and Alexander.

I FINALLY WENT BACK to the house six years after my mother died. I was too much of a coward to do it sooner. Living in New York made her death seem less real, and I could trick myself into thinking that if I just got on a plane and flew to Marseille, drove to Le Beausset, and headed up the hill, through the vineyards, past the old yellow schoolhouse on the left, I would see the cypress trees ahead, turn the corner, hear the click-clacking of the wooden beads, and she would emerge from the front door to greet me. She would be standing there in one of the faded cotton dresses that she only ever wore in France—not chic enough for New York or London, they lived in the house year round—and some old espadrilles. Her pale sapphire eyes would light up as soon as she saw me, and I could hear her voice inside my head telling me to come quick and taste the Brie—so runny its sides had to be shored up with little wooden sticks—she had bought in the market that morning. I kept this reassuring fantasy going for as long as I could, but gradually, as the pain began to fade, and after I had already survived (bruised but still relatively sane) the dismantling of her home in London, I knew the time had come.

What is it about a certain house that allows it to take on, as if by some strange process of architectural osmosis, the precise character of its owner? How can a complicated, intelligent human being and an inanimate structure, stuffed full of random rubbish, resemble each other so closely that they might as well be twins? It isn’t something that happens quickly; in fact it usually takes decades, and it isn’t universal—sometimes it never happens at all. In my mother’s case the symbiosis was long established and deeply rooted. My problem with returning to the house was not just that it reminded me too much of her but that it also made me angry. How dare it be basking—stupidly, complacently, lazily—in the warm sunlight of Provence, when she no longer could? How could it possibly have had the ill grace to survive her? Surely it ought to have gone up in flames, like a dutiful Indian wife, on that dark dismal day at the crematorium in Golders Green?

But once I actually walked through the clackety beads and into the familiar, cool, terra-cotta-tiled kitchen, I realized that I had gotten it all completely wrong. Instead of sadness and fury I felt oddly relieved to have come home to a place that knew me so well. I forgave the house for being alive. Standing there, I gazed around the room and realized that nothing had changed: In fact it scarcely looked any different than it had when we first moved there in 1963. The beams, the same shape as the tree trunks they were made of (the long dead builders had scarcely bothered to hack at them; maybe it had been a rush job, or perhaps they were just too tired) were still hung with old baskets, straw hats, dried flowers, and the odd bunch of dusty bay leaves, rosemary, and fennel. The loaf of bread, baked in the form of a wheat sheaf, that I had found in a boulangerie in Sainte-Anne d’Évenos, was still there on the wall; and the marble-topped dining table, bought from a man with one arm at a brocante in Toulon, still ran down the middle of the room, surrounded by rickety, rush-seated wooden chairs, just like the one in van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles. That first summer one of my stepfather’s many ex-girlfriends, an elegant blond lady named Alvys, had come to stay on her way to Italy, and had sat there at the table, with her chic tortoiseshell glasses balanced on her perfect retroussé nose, sewing a pair of curtains for the kitchen window. I looked at the faded ocher-colored fabric and remembered the precise moment, only a few days after she’d left, when my mother told me she had been killed in a car crash, with her lover, on a mountain road above Ravello.

It must have been after nine o’clock before we (my husband, Peter; the children, Rebecca and Alexander; and my brother, Nick, plus his girlfriend, Stephanie—I had made quite sure that I was carefully cocooned for my rentrée) all sat down to dinner at the long marble table. The wine was a Domaine Tempier, cuvée La Migoua, made from grapes grown on the hills that surrounded our hamlet of the same name. The pâté de campagne, studded with pistachios, the Brousse (a creamy fresh goat cheese), and the sweet red tomatoes all came from the market. The basil grew in a huge, cracked terra-cotta pot out on the terrace, buffeted almost horizontal by the mistral, which had started up that morning. The mistral is a mysterious wind, a joker that gets its kicks by barreling down the chimney of the Rhône Valley, in order to drive the inhabitants of the Midi completely mad.

The pharmacien in the village, a man with a tight, mean mouth, humorless eyes, and a neatly pressed white coat, told me years ago that it had a special penchant for odd numbers, so that he always blew for three, five, or seven days. Or, presumably, for seventeen or thirty-three or any other odd number that took his fancy. In addition to his fondness for certain numbers, the mistral is also the most appalling snob, tormenting only those who, like us, had the misfortune to live at the terminally unfashionable western end of the Mediterranean. He also used to be a godsend for anyone accused of a crime passionel, since defense lawyers regularly argued, with perfectly straight faces, that their clients had been obliged to murder their wives on account of mistral-related insanity.

The wine was finished, the tarte aux pommes and crème fraîche had disappeared, and slowly, we made our way upstairs. My daughter was sleeping in my old room, on the curlicued, white wrought-iron bed that used to be mine, with its saggy mattress and antique quilt festooned with blowsy pink roses. And I found myself in my mother’s room. I could hear our neighbors next door on their terrace, squabbling as usual, the wife’s voice becoming louder and more aggrieved with every glass of her well-deserved (imagine forty-five years of marriage to him) vin d’orange, and, in the distance, some dogs started howling at the mistral. I gave up, got out of bed, and crept into the living room. The enormous blackened fireplace stared back at me like the entrance to a cave, and there, on my mother’s desk, was the paving stone, used as a paperweight, that had been uprooted from the rue Gay-Lussac in Paris during the événements of May ’68, and had been given to her, as a radically chic memento of those thrilling days, by our neighbor Francette Drin. Above the sofa hung a poster of a fraise des bois plant. Its heart-shaped leaves and thin etiolated stems spread languidly across the paper; the tiny, jewel-like, red berries shone in the moonlight, and there in the corner was a cross-section of its delicate white flower. Just like the drawings I used to do in biology class in school. The words Deyrolle et Fils were printed at the bottom, with the address, 46, rue du Bac, Paris VII. My mother’s favorite shop in the entire world. Its ostensible business was to supply the harried teachers of France with the tools to help them impart their knowledge of the natural world to their uncaring students. But to her they were decorators. Stuffed tarantulas, jagged lumps of purple quartz, the life cycle of the flea (one of their smaller posters), the many stages of cheese making, ditto winemaking, an iridescent Amazonian beetle the size of a small dog, snake skeletons in all sizes: There was nothing they didn’t stock.

As I gazed around the room, my eyes inevitably fell upon the Drawer of Death. Earlier in the evening, at the back of the old armoire in the kitchen, I had seen an earthenware jar, and when I looked inside I knew precisely what it contained. Very quietly I went downstairs, scooped a teaspoonful of the ashes into the palm of my hand, and returned to the living room. On the top shelf of the cabinet, beside a slightly chipped Limoges teacup, scattered with forget-me-nots and sky blue ribbons, I noticed a small cockleshell. Carefully emptying the ashes into the shell, I slid open the drawer, gently placed it in the bird’s nest, closed the drawer, and tiptoed back to my mother’s bed.

La Famille

MY PARENTS HAD BEEN DIVORCED since before I could remember. It struck me as perfectly normal that I should live with my mother in London and then be sent off each vacation—like an airmail package—from Heathrow, with a label pinned to my lapel, to stay with my father wherever he happened to be. In fact it was a great deal better than normal because I had both of them entirely to myself. I was a double only child, a situation that suited me admirably.

I may have thought, in the supremely self-centered way of all children, that I had each of them all to myself, but of course I didn’t. Both my father and mother were enormously attractive. My mother had a perfect model’s body—fifties style, with a real bosom, tiny waist, and beautiful legs—combined, somewhat unfairly, with a stainless-steel brain. She was not conventionally pretty, her nose was too long to be cute, her jaw too strong, and her tongue way too sharp for some, but she did have that irresistible, ineffable x factor that meant she was never short of company. My father, on the other hand, was absurdly handsome, good-humored, and easygoing, with that sunny and ultimately deeply irritating—to her, at least—optimism that some lucky Americans seem to be born with. They were not well matched.

They had met at the American Embassy in Paris, where they both worked, and in a letter to her parents, my mother describes her impressions of the Embassy Adonis, as she called her new friend:

I have met a terrific man who is second secretary here and a big wheel in the Economic Section. Terribly rich, terribly handsome, and Yale ’39 and Yale Law and very blond (quite revolting that) and has the most beautiful car I’ve ever seen. A 1948 Oldsmobile … sleek and grey and convertible. And he took me out once and then big blank silence and so sad and heavy it was too, until today when he invited me to go for a quick tour of the château country in the big sleek grey car this weekend.

At the time my father was unofficially engaged to a nineteen-year-old girl back home in America who had the advantage of being (a) the daughter of Ambassador Harrison and (b) hugely rich. Sadly, my mother had been totally mistaken about the Wells family fortune, which turned out to be almost nonexistent. For a well-born WASP, oddly lacking a serious trust fund, who wanted to make his way in the Foreign Service, a rich, well-connected wife was probably as much of a necessity as impeccable manners and a perfectly tailored dinner jacket. But the ambassador’s daughter decided that maybe she was just too young to get married, and the spoiled little beast, in her recently-turned-20 fashion, has just announced that she wants to shop around a bit more. Which left the playing field wide open for my mother.

They went to stay in a haunted château in Normandy; they went skiing in an Austrian village with the wonderful name of Obergurgl; they went to diplomatic receptions at the Élysée Palace; they went to a very fancy dinner party on the quai Bourbon, overlooking the Seine, where, she wrote to her mother, There was absolutely nothing to drink BUT champagne and wonderful lobster salad and things in molds and oriental houseboys dishing it out, where they met the two younger Kennedy daughters, Eunice and Pat, who are in Paris for the holidays. And very nice little girls they are too, oddly enough. (My grandmother’s snobbery was pretty universal, and the Boston Irish were the primary objects of her contempt. The Kennedy family may have been exempted, but somehow I doubt it.)

All in all my future parents were clearly having a ridiculously good time. Reading my mother’s letters, I kept looking for evidence of that heart-stopping, feverish affliction that infects what is left of your mind and makes everything you cared about before he took over your life totally irrelevant. But instead I found this description of juggling the Embassy Adonis with another gentleman named Bill:

Al [my father] has just decided in true Neanderthal fashion, that After All I am the girl for him. But I am playing a tricky game these days.… I placate him and Bill and at the same time try not to alienate any of the 2nd string … all the time getting myself all fouled up. It’s a difficult game to play and one at which I am not very good. With Al you get a polo playing, stag hunting, good-at-cocktail-parties rising young diplomat who some day will be Minister to Tanganyika. Not dumb, well informed, with lots of the right ideas … but short on imagination and with about as many shadings in color as a piece of white drawing paper. Now, with our Bill you have a nice, sweet, kind and generous man who finds a great deal of difficulty in coping with the nasty materialistic world. He knows wonderful people and funny things and is so much brighter in many ways than Al. He is related to the world’s most fabulous collection of nuts … his great uncle is the Marquis d’Ormonde … his cousin is Lady Phyllis Delamere, easily the worst behaved of the whole Mountbatten tribe. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to want to carve out an empire for himself. Just wanders around ordering new gold monocles from Cartier, and waiting for his grandmother to die. The choice is a really hard one; my big complaint is that I can’t mix the two of them together and come up with one Complete Man.

In the end the stag-hunting Adonis won. A large only slightly flawed sapphire was dislodged from his father’s tiepin back in Brewster, New York, and taken to Cartier’s to be transformed into a ring, and the wedding invitations were sent out.

Their friends in Paris couldn’t understand what had possessed them to get married. My mother, a self-described wild savage with a tendency to view life through her own darkly ironic prism, took any chance she could to épater la bourgeoisie and anybody else who happened to be within firing range. Fools were not tolerated, authority had to be questioned, nice people were dull, and the worst crime—up there with cruelty to animals—was to be a bore. She liked to stay up too late and smoke too much, and her martini glass was invariably half empty, not because she was a drinker but because that is how she saw the world. My father, whose own family could not have been more bourgeois, saw no point in shocking anybody, had no problem with nice people, and tended to give those in power the benefit of the doubt. His mind was more practical than intellectual, his inclination was to see the best in any situation, and he had an enviable talent for extracting a huge amount of pleasure from every moment in the day—and therefore from life. He liked to go to bed early, eat too much chocolate ice cream, and his champagne glass always overflowed. I suspect they both fell in love with those qualities in the other that they themselves didn’t possess. He adored her spirit, strength, and wit, and she loved his uncomplicated cheerfulness and the reassuring solidity of his large, conventional, and seemingly prosperous family. Why not get married? It must have seemed like an incredibly good idea at the time.

When I was about seventeen and old enough to understand such things, my mother told me that she knew the night before her wedding that it was never going to work. But how could she have backed out then? The guests, the presents, the flowers, the champagne, the petits fours, the cake. Not to mention the fact that she was being given away by my father’s formidable patrician boss, Ambassador David Bruce, whom even she hesitated to embarrass. (Since the wedding took place just a month after the engagement, her parents had decided that there wasn’t enough time, or probably money, for them to get from Boston to Paris.)

As it turned out, the friends and my mother were right, and my parents were divorced, quite happily, within four years. She left my father—surprised, quite possibly relieved, but not, I think, too distraught—in Burma, where he was first secretary at the American Embassy. And instead of going home to New York or Boston, she moved with me to London. Not an easy decision, but she was an adventuress. In Rangoon she had made friends with their neighbors, Sue and Basil Boothby, who were with the British Embassy, and they offered to lend her their house in London, which at least solved the problem of where we would live. It was one of those tall terraced houses built around 1830 with two rooms on each floor and lots of stairs in between. The kitchen was in the basement with a window that let in a bit of daylight, if there was any to spare—this still being the era of Bleak House pea-soup smog—and an Aga that needed to be fed on demand, like some monstrous, ravenous baby, with constant buckets of coal. After we had settled into the house she somehow persuaded the New York Times that she was the person they needed to report on fashion and London life, and her salary, combined with her alimony, was just enough to live on. Slowly she built up quite a glittery social life, something she was always inordinately good at, while I set off for school each morning, in my gray flannel uniform (pleated skirt, blazer, and hat: straw in the summer, felt in the winter) and came home at teatime to play with my dolls and hamster.

After my mother and father divorced, there were always gentlemen—and lady—callers around. But in my cozy little solipsistic bubble this didn’t faze me, which must have had as much to do with the tact and charm of the callers as it did with my unshakable confidence in my parents’ love. I knew that I was the most important person in both their lives, and that none of the callers could ever change that. My great good luck was that I had no memory of them married or fighting (they both claimed they never had) or separating, and so was able to accept the situation without any of the angst and suffering that most children of divorced parents go through. Even though my mother tended to skip over the more sentimental aspects of motherhood, like smothering me in kisses and actually saying out loud how much she loved me, I never doubted for a single moment that she did. And it was only when I fell crazily in love for the first time, at nineteen, that I experienced again that all-consuming passion that I had felt for her as a child.

She was always interested in whatever I thought and was doing, and kept in close touch with my father, writing him long, chatty letters about me. ("Yesterday, when she was driving me completely crazy, I told her quite sternly to behave, to which she replied, looking aggrieved, ‘But I am have.’ What could I say?) He would then painstakingly stick them into leather-bound albums—one for each year of my life, with the date embossed in gold on the spine—along with my report cards (Singing: distressing") and endless color photographs of our travels together. There I am at six, in an inky blue velvet dress, with a white lace collar, standing in front of an elaborate four-poster bed, at some gloomy Schloss we had stayed at in Austria. The enormous eiderdown rises up behind me like a bank of snow, and I look into the camera with an expression of secret satisfaction. My surroundings, my dress, and my traveling companion were all exactly as I wanted them to be. And there we are in the Piazza San Marco, dressed in matching lederhosen (what could he have been thinking?), surrounded by squabbling pigeons.

Later on the same trip we stayed at a hotel on a beach, where we somehow acquired a creature in a polka-dot bikini and gold hoop earrings, who talked way too much and showed no sign at all of leaving us alone, however much I scowled at her. The photograph in the album shows the three of us in a pedalo, her generous bosom bursting out of two pointy cones, her head thrown back in a paroxysm of laughter, with my father inexplicably smiling at her. I remember whispering to him that we should all pedal way out to sea, make her jump overboard for a refreshing dip, and then the two of us could race back to the shore. It seemed like a flawless plan, and it worked for a while, but as we sat down to dinner she reappeared, this time in a strapless dress with a huge pouffy skirt, her dark, curly hair held back by a twisted silk scarf. And, again quite inexplicably, my father stood up and pulled out her chair so she could join us. But when we left a few days later there was no sign of her, and we set off in our little white convertible with the red leather dashboard, bound for Portofino.

Now, fifty years later, I see that her totally understandable crime had been to focus all her charms on the object of her desire, and who can blame her? But the other, more permanent callers—both my mother’s and my father’s—were much cleverer and understood that if you want to win the heart of somebody attached to a small, overindulged daughter, you actually need to seduce two people. Since my father lived the life of a bachelor diplomat, first in Vienna and then in Bonn, at a time when there was actually a certain amount of spurious glamour attached to that profession, he had many ladies to entertain. But with me away in London, he didn’t have to juggle them too much. For my mother things were a bit trickier. I must have been a little like the complacent, hoodwinked husband whose wife is having a series of affairs. I sailed along, oblivious of the fact that her dinner guests were anything more than friends of the family, and in the end I was aware of only two contenders, although she later told me there had of course, been a few more. And why not? Looking back, I realize that I picked up, by osmosis, from both my mother and father (and from my future stepparents, who were also gifted teachers of this subject) the useful and life-enhancing idea that love affairs, and therefore men, should be associated with excitement and happiness, and never with guilt and angst.

The first contender I became aware of was a man named Robert Neild, who lived in Cambridge, where he was an economist at Trinity College, which can’t have taken up a great deal of his time, because he seemed to be mostly at our house in London. Robert had the most convoluted eyebrows I’d ever seen. They formed a wild ginger thatch above his crinkly blue eyes, and I unblinkingly accepted his arrival on the scene, rather as if he’d been a nice new sofa that had just been delivered by Harrods and taken up residence in our drawing room. I must have been about three or four years old when the sofa arrived, and over the next year or so, became very attached to it—so attached that I remember going to school and announcing to nobody in particular that my mother was going to marry Robert. And maybe she was. It seemed like a reasonable idea, and I was an extremely reasonable child, or so she always told me. But then one day the Harrods van turned up again on our doorstep and took the sofa away. The curious thing is that I don’t remember being in the least bit surprised or upset, because no sooner had he gone back to the Trinity warehouse in Cambridge than another, equally delightful gentleman caller appeared to take his place. God knows there must have been a bit of Sturm und Drang associated with this rearrangement of the furniture, but to everybody’s credit, it took place offstage and was so skillfully executed that it left no impression on me at all.

The new Robert was called Freddie Ayer, and my mother met him at a dance at St. Antony’s College in Oxford in the summer of 1956. This is how she described it in a letter to her old friend in Rangoon, Sue Boothby:

I have fallen madly, madly, I tell you madly, in love for the first time in my whole misshapen ill-spent life—and with an impossibly hopeless man. It all fell on me … in the drafty fan-vaulted sewer of a basement at that goddamn dance in Oxford that Philip dragged me to. I knew I shouldn’t have gone. But they all seemed so harmless, so egg headed, not to mention egg on the chin that my flaring nostril guard was down utterly. Then—I didn’t look at him and didn’t listen to his name—but what seemed to be a particularly egg headed, scruffy middle-aged professor asked me to dance. And being a well brought up girl I didn’t say for him to fuck off. And then there I was—in about twenty seconds flat my head began to reel and I felt like being sick out the window and it hasn’t stopped since. Stayed at that eightsome reel til 4 bloody thirty in the morning. Absolutely green with angst that this maniac wouldn’t be on the 6pm train to London as we had exchanged blood illuminated promises to be. But he was. And since then, I meet this menace for five minutes at the Ritz bar and I lie to Robert to go see him at 10.30 or midnight and we have what I believe are called in novels, Stolen Moments. I’m still sick regularly every other day or so, and it gets worse and worse—added to which, it is, of course, impossible. He’s had a wife, his children are grown up and he’s had every woman in London and keeps a tidy six-year old (?) mistress in the Maginot line background. He’s about 100 years old and is everything I’ve ever wanted. His name is Ayer, or Eyre or Air or Ere, I don’t really know how he spells it and he’s a philosopher. So far as I can gather from his books etc he’s the big deal in logical positivism etc. I am utterly miserable and quite unable to do anything.

Well, she got most of it right. He actually spelled his name Ayer, and he was a big deal in logical positivism, and he did have two children, Valerie and Julian, and he had had love affairs with an awful lot of women—and not just in London. The mistress turned out to be an Australian painter named Jocelyn Rickards, who’d been around for six years or so, but he also had a possessive ex-wife, Renée, who was his real Maginot Line against ladies who might get any fancy ideas of moving in too close on him. It seems to have been an arrangement that suited him extremely well. He lived in a tiny flat in Shepherds Market in Mayfair, which Renée had found and decorated for him in an Elsie de Wolfe meets Kierkegaard minimalist style. According to his autobiography:

Renée’s taste in decoration had been formed in the 1930’s, when there was a fashion for white walls, off-white furniture and a scarcity of ornamentation. In fact the white walls suited my small rooms, and although I only had one picture, a portrait of myself by e. e. cummings, and little or no bric-a-brac, I had comfortable chairs and a sufficient stock of books with which to furnish both my sitting room and study. That others might view it differently was brought home to me one evening when I was entertaining some pupils to drinks. They all left at a fairly late hour, and as I was closing the door, I heard a voice reaching me from the stairs, "Poor old bugger, all alone thinking in those cold, cold rooms."

Which only goes to show how little we know about our teachers’ private lives. As it turned out, the poor old bugger, pace his students’ description, was only forty-six when he and my mother met, and soon after that, the Harrods van turned up again, and the moving men came wheezing up the stairs and installed the new sofa in the drawing room in Holland Park Avenue. To my six-year-old self, Freddie didn’t seem terribly different from Robert, except that his eyebrows were under some kind of control, and it looked as though he might be staying a bit longer than his predecessor. My mother may have fallen madly, dangerously, hopelessly in love for the first time in her misshapen ill-spent life, but for Freddie the affair was just that—an affair. He was never a man of action, and for someone whose life was seemingly caught up in a series of passionate love affairs, he was curiously passive. His view of the beginning of their liaison could not have been more different from hers:

Dee had been having an affair with a Cambridge economist but gave him up on my account. I was not yet sufficiently committed to her to renounce all other attachments, or even to profess to do so. Jocelyn, with whom I had arrived at a friendly modus vivendi, disapproved of my taking up with Dee, not out of jealousy but because she did not like her or think us suited to one another. Renée tended rather to approve of her as a counterweight to Jocelyn. I enjoyed her company, spent a fair amount of time in Holland Park Avenue and let events take their course.

Letting events take their course had never been my mother’s style. If it had been, she would never have run away from her god-awful family and joined the Canadian army at seventeen (where she, unsurprisingly, rose to the rank of sergeant major), would never have bought that one-way ticket to Paris, would never have married my father, and would never have left him in Rangoon and moved to London. And then she would never have fallen for the menace at that dance in Oxford. But now that she had done all those things, she was determined to have him. It was not going to be easy.

Poor Freddie. All he wanted was for his well-ordered, carefully compartmentalized life to go on as it always had. During the day his beautiful mind was busy grappling with issues such as proving that the major domains of empirical knowledge could be reconstructed in terms of the data of direct experience and the single relation of remembered similarity between them, but once that was out of the way, it was time for a whiskey and soda, dinner at the Café Royal, either with a group of friends or one of the lucky ladies, followed by dancing at the Gargoyle Club. There were so many things to love about Freddie, but maybe the most seductive of all was his combination of intellectual brilliance (which extended way beyond the wilder shores of logical positivism) with a delight in all the pleasures life had to offer. His old friend e. e. cummings once wrote him a birthday poem, which captured this charming duality in his nature rather nicely:

Considering the gravity of your language

And the levity of your nature

(or, at times, the levity of your language

and the gravity of your nature)

it is clear that keeping your balance

comes easier than it does to teetering us.

You walk on the tightropes as if they lay on the ground,

And always, bird eyed, notice more than we notice you notice; and the

observation follows always with the clarity

of a wire slicing cheese.

And many years later, in the midseventies, Leon Wieseltier, who was then his pupil, described Freddie as an eighteenth-century rationalist voluptuary—he could have been one of Diderot’s friends. I remember asking him about Camus, ‘I don’t know his work well, but he and I were friends: we were making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war.’ 

Clever my mother certainly was—Freddie told me that she was the most intelligent woman he had ever known—but his philosophical work was way beyond her and although in the first rush of love she did go out and buy all his books, she later confessed to a friend that she couldn’t read them "without Dr. Johnson’s dictionary close by and a finger tracing laboriously