A Story Lately Told (18 page)

As soon as my vision cleared, I ran out of his room as fast as I could, charged downstairs and across the gravel yard, and flew down the driveway to the Little House, choking on my tears. I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was hysterical. Tony found me and wet some towels with cold water and put them on my head and neck to try to calm me down. Tony could be a bully, but if anyone else attempted to hurt or take advantage of me, he always came to my rescue and valiantly tried to comfort me.

The “bumps” problem was an anomaly. Generally, Dad loved that I was athletic and that I could stand on my head or that I could bend my spine and rock my entire body like a boat. He thought that was just wonderful, though obviously not to the point of my being seductive.

After that episode, I avoided Dad assiduously. On Christmas
Day we were all clustered around the tree. We had not spoken. I’d bought him a beautiful present, a Claddagh chieftain’s brooch from a trip to Dublin, an old one that I’d found at Louis Wine’s antique shop. I think he was ashamed. He said “Thank you” sheepishly, and bent to kiss me. I didn’t want to be near him, I didn’t want to be around him. He scared me.

Tony was kind when Dad got tough with me. And Dad was certainly no easier on Tony. Tony got sent from the dining table with alarming regularity, for small infringements that became magnified by defensiveness on his part. The more guarded and stoic Tony became, the more punishing Dad could be. I was targeted at lunch for declaring that I did not like the artist Van Gogh. Dad said, “Name me five Van Gogh paintings and you can stay; otherwise, leave the room.”

Dad had given Tony some Native American deerskin jackets, which Tony had adopted as his falconry uniform. All day long, throughout the holidays, he was carrying his hawks around, his chest covered in blood, scat, feathers, and guts. When he appeared in this condition for lunch in Dad’s absence, no one at the Big House had much to say. Tony did as he pleased. But when he made the mistake of doing so in front of Dad, he was severely humiliated in front of everyone. There was a pattern developing around these infractions. The offenses were repeated and they occurred with greater frequency. The accompanying words of admonishment from Dad rose in volume according to his frustration, and before you knew it, it felt like war was being waged between them in the dining room.

•  •  •

In the summer of 1965, I went to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat with Joan and her parents for three weeks. There was a mistral and it rained most of the time, which in France, we had heard, meant
that if you committed a crime you could get off with a light sentence. The actor Jack Hawkins was living next door to the Bucks, and I had a crush on his youngest son, Andy. We listened to popular French songs like “Quand un bateau passe,” by Claude François, and “Tous les garçons,” by Françoise Hardy. In the mornings, we’d dive off the end of the dock into deep blue water. The Mediterranean was not so polluted in those days; all the seafood came from there and not from Chile.

I longed to fall in love and I was just starting to understand my power. When Joan gave a party, I spent most of the evening speaking in French to a poetic-looking blond boy much older than I. He invited me to a dinner at his villa later that week, but he wasn’t around when Joan and I arrived, and we didn’t know anyone there, so we left.

When I returned to England, Emily told me that she had been going out with Mayo Elstob, Joshua’s friend from Town and Country. I thought this would make for a good opportunity to meet up with Joshua again, as we had lost contact. Emily came over on a Saturday night with both of them, and we went upstairs to my room. I turned off the lights and lit the candles in the candelabra.

It was very beautiful in the dusk, so we decided to go up to Hampstead Heath and smoke banana peel instead; someone said it might get you high. It didn’t work, and we spent the evening wandering back down from the heath to Emily’s parents’ house on the Bayswater Road.

I called Mum and asked if I could stay over at Emily’s. She said yes. That night, Joshua came into my bed, but I was suddenly turned off by his reciprocity. He was urgent and confessional and told me that he had cared for me even while I was pining for him at Town and Country.

In the early-morning hours, we got up and went for a sad walk in Hyde Park. Joshua told me he had stomach cramps. We said goodbye. I never saw him again.

•  •  •

Mum had taken me to Venice for the first time in 1961 to see an exhibition of the fifteenth-century painter Vittore Carpaccio at the Doge’s Palace. I fell in love with the city as soon as I laid eyes on it—a soft, shimmering view across the Grand Canal to the Piazza San Marco, with its two columns topped by gold-winged lions, rising like a miracle out of the sea. The pictures were fantastic; I loved a portrait of Saint Ursula, asleep, with her cheek cupped in the palm of her hand. Mum loved the delicate little flowers and shrubs that grew in the crevices of the parterre in the paintings. I could feel her gearing up to re-create this visual in the garden at Maida Avenue.

The next time we went to Venice, she invited Emily to come with us. Our rooms were on the Grand Canal, at the Gritti Palace, and when we drew the curtains and flung open the shutters, which had been closed for the night, the early sun streamed in and the reflection of the water below danced on the ceiling of our bright red room. The gondoliers sang songs like Grandpa used to sing, and the prows of their boats, slicing through the silvery stillness of the lagoon, looked like seabirds arching their necks.

Mum had met a woman in Venice on a previous trip, someone she found very fascinating, an artist whose name was Manina. On our way to her apartment, we walked across several bridges and waterfront pavements to a chorus of wolf whistles. The Italian men loved Emily and were always trying to pinch her bottom. She was very sanguine about this—in those days one didn’t think of it as sexual harassment but rather as just something that happened to you, especially if you were young or
pretty or voluptuous. On the contrary, one was just a little flattered.

Turning the corner of a busy pedestrian thoroughfare onto a relatively quiet street, Mum paused for a moment and said, “Look! There she is! She always knows when I’m coming, even when I haven’t called first—that’s why she’s waiting downstairs!”

Manina was small and delicately made, with huge dark eyes lined in kohl and a direct gaze. She took us upstairs to her dim apartment and gave us lemonade. Her drawings of great glowering birds adorned with colored glass hung on the walls. She was creating amulets by melting lead into liquid in a saucepan and decorating the molten metal with glass beads from Murano. Then Manina introduced us all to the I Ching, and Mum, Emily, and I threw our coins.

Across the canal, in another deserted palazzo, lived a Cuban friend of Mum’s, an artist called Domingo de la Cueva. He showed us some of his work, mostly jewelry—breastplates, armbands, and circlets. The most impressive piece was a girdle of fire opals, rough rubies, diamonds, shells, and semiprecious stones, all set in rose gold. He told us he was incapable of leaving Venice, even for a holiday. “I feel I will die without her,” he said. “Every time I try to leave, I get sick. I feel as if I am never going to see my city again.”

We went for Bellinis at Harry’s Bar and had lunch on the nearby island of Torcello. We went across the bay to Murano to see glass being blown; on the beach outside the factory, the sand was strewn with colored pebbles. I collected some for future amulets of my own.

A few days later, we went to visit Grandpa, who was vacationing at his birthplace on Lago Maggiore. As we drove across the
Veneto to the lakes, Mum taught Emily and me the “Sorrow” song. Emily and I loved to harmonize together, although she had a much better voice than I.

O she was a lass from the low country,

And he was a Lord of high degree,

And she loved his Lordship so tenderly.

O Sorrow!

Sing Sorrow!

Now she sleeps in the valley, where the wildflowers nod,

And no one knew she loved him,

But herself and God.

In the tiny town of Ispra, near Varese on Lago Maggiore, we visited Mum’s family, living very traditionally in a simple but handsome house. They served us lunch; we must have been thirty people—teenagers, aunts, uncles, grandmas, babies. And most precious of all, dressed in black from head to toe, my grandpa’s eldest sister, my great-aunt Agnèsé, a woman as tiny and wrinkled and old and beautiful as we had ever seen.

E
mily and I went to some great concerts—the Four Tops, Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi in Traffic, Cream, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, Jeff Beck, John Mayall, Eric Burdon and the Animals, singing “House of the Rising Sun.” We favored the Rolling Stones, especially Mick and Keith. There were live
clubs all over London, and you could go out to Chalk Farm or Eel Pie Island to hear new groups. And in the coffeehouses, Bert Jansch or Nina Simone would be playing.

At the Royal Albert Hall in summertime, they would hold the proms, and as a student you could get in to watch beautiful concerts for free, up near the dome, “in the Gods.” These new tape recorders had just come out in America that you could sling over your shoulder and have sounds wherever you went. All of a sudden, music was everywhere. A sound track for your life.

We would go to Powis Terrace and listen to Pink Floyd rehearse in the church hall, and to Earls Court to see Jimi Hendrix make love to his guitar onstage, plucking the strings with his teeth as she wailed for him. I wore a pink satin dress with printed flowers and a straw hat with a big brim and a long blue satin ribbon. I rode a carousel next to the stage, dizzily, for hours.

•  •  •

These were the days of
Room at the Top, Darling,
Antonioni’s
Blow-Up, Georgy Girl, The Servant, Girl with the Green Eyes, Privilege,
and the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol.
Jules et Jim, Alphaville, Les enfants du paradis, La belle et la bête
—I went to all these movies with my mother. The sound track of
A Man and a Woman
was always on the record player. I loved Anouk Aimée, because she wore her hair parted on the side over one eye in the movie and looked a lot like Mum. I remember being very upset after seeing
La peau douce,
a Truffaut film, with the actress Françoise Dorléac. I think it was because I found her so devastatingly beautiful, or because the leading man, Jean Desailly, was ugly with pockmarked skin, and the movie was strange and dark and sexual.
Ready, Steady, Go
and
Top of the Pops
were our favorite TV music shows, and I loved the American series—
The Fugitive, Dr. Kildare,
and the cowboys in
Bonanza.

The women of this time were singular beauties, at parties, clubs, walking down the Kings Road, wearing crochet caps, mink from the twenties, and see-through chiffon. There was a medley of breathtaking English roses—girls like Jill Kennington, Sue Murray, Celia Hammond, the indelibly beautiful Jean Shrimpton, and Pattie Boyd, who later married George Harrison. Jane Birkin, a rock-and-roll virgin with a gap between her teeth, who ran off with Serge Gainsbourg and sang the breathy “Je t’aime, moi non plus.” There were fantastic actresses breaking out on the scene, like Maggie Smith, Sarah Miles, Susannah York, Vanessa Redgrave and her sister, Lynn. The French beauties—Delphine Seyrig, Catherine Deneuve, Anna Karina. The ingénues—Judy Geeson, Hayley Mills, Jane Asher, Rita Tushingham. The American Jane Fonda as Barbarella. Marsha Hunt, with her crowning afro. The singers—the great Dusty Springfield; Cilla Black; the barefoot Sandie Shaw; cool, tall Françoise Hardy; and the bleached-blond Sylvie Vartan. The rock-goddess Julie Driscoll, whose interview with British
Vogue
, which began, “When I wake up in the morning my breath smells like a gorilla’s armpit,” was memorably descriptive. I remember thinking this woman was not out to impress the opposite sex.

The scents of London in the sixties—Vetiver, Brut, and Old Spice for the boys; lavender, sandalwood, and Fracas for the girls; unwashed hair, cigarettes. Along the Portobello Road, fish and chips and vinegar, tobacco, patchouli, curry, freshly rotting fruit, bacon frying, a trace of body odor. The pubs would be spilling onto the sidewalks by lunchtime, everyone drinking cider and beer, football on the television. Up and down the Kings Road, the beauties in rumpled silk and denim would be
out in force on Saturday afternoons. Playful exotics blooming all around in eighteenth-century frock coats—girls with faces like cameos. The blond temptresses Elke Sommer and Brigitte Bardot paving the way for the soulful beauty of Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards’s dangerous German, Anita Pallenberg. The press called them Dolly Birds, but they were predatory—the sirens of modern sin.