A Story Lately Told (13 page)

Betts was a hero of mine. She never looked better than astride Kildare, her beautiful gray mare, her hair curled in a
hairnet under her navy-blue velvet cap, just so. Around her throat, a perfectly tied white stock secured with the ruby-eyed gold fox pin that Dad gave her for Christmas, piercing the cotton below the knot.

Sometimes she gave me gingersnaps and cigarettes when we were waiting in the cold coverts on our horses—Gold Flake in the yellow packet, or Players with the sailor framed by a life preserver on the cover. She was an extraordinary rider of grace and gentleness and precision. I loved to follow a few strides behind her in the field, taking on the big walls like a dance.

Oonagh Mary Cusack Smith, whose mother hunted the Bermingham and North Galway Foxhounds, appeared at the meet on a young gelding she had just received for Christmas. One afternoon we were lined up, about to jump a section of stone wall into what we thought was just another field, when the gelding leaped over and disappeared from view. Oonagh Mary surfaced, black with mud, but we could see that the horse was sinking in the muck on the other side. From his position we could tell his back was broken. Someone ran to a farmhouse and got a shotgun to put the animal out of his misery. Oonagh Mary was distraught. Everyone agreed it was an awful thing to happen. The previous year, her mother, Molly, was taken by a confidence trickster called Goodtime Charley, who made love to her, cut the tails off all her foxhounds, and left with the family silver.

In memory, Christabel Ampthill was a person so brilliantly composed as to almost seem a work of fiction. She must have been in her late sixties when I first saw her. A lithe and imposing creature, she had the grace and bearing of a seasoned aristocrat, and until I followed suit, she was the only member of the Galway Blazers to ride sidesaddle. She was immaculately turned
out, with a beautifully pinned stock, the gleaming ebony toe of one hunting boot with its shining silver spur peeping from the hem of her blue serge riding habit.

She wore a beaver top hat with full veil over an impeccably coiffed chignon. Two stripes of snow-white hair ran from her temples to the nape of her neck. She spoke imperiously, and most people were afraid of her, me included. But she took a liking to me and sometimes asked me to tea at her fairy-tale Dunguaire Castle, named after the seventh-century King Guaire of Connaught, on the southeastern shore of Galway Bay near Kinvarra, surrounded by wild swans. Lady Ampthill saved many foxhounds from being destroyed after they were too old to hunt, and there were always several mangy, smelly terriers eating scraps off Wedgwood plates at her dining table.

Notable for her part in an infamous court case in England known as “The Sponge Baby,” Lady Ampthill had filed a paternity suit against her ex-husband, even though they had been estranged for several years. She had won the case in front of a judge by claiming that when she and Lord Ampthill had guested separately at a country house on the same weekend, they had, in her words, “accidentally used the same sponge.”

Everyone was awed by Christabel Ampthill. She was serenely brave and galloped over five-foot double stone walls with the ease of a gazelle. I never saw her falter, but because she was no longer young, the hunt members worried about the inevitable fall. One day, it happened that she did come loose after taking on a ditch; her foot caught in a stirrup, her habit tangled in the hook of the sidesaddle, and she lost her seat. Her long hair was whipping about the hocks of her mount. Betts, through some miraculous feat of her own, managed to intercept seconds before the horse took off over a big stone wall in a jump
that undoubtedly would have killed Lady Ampthill. And from her position dangling below the horse’s belly, Lady Ampthill exclaimed, “I suppose I should thank you, but what a wonderful way to go!”

There was nothing so close to the feeling of flying as being on a good Irish hunter when the hounds picked up a scent. All the senses engaged in perfect synchronicity and rhythm—your heart and your horse’s heart beating as one. Trusting your combined power to fly is an intimate connection.

I
can’t remember being formally told that we would be leaving Ireland to go to school in England, but it was a time of few explanations. I didn’t ask questions, because I was afraid of the answers. Suddenly, in 1961, Mum, Nurse, Tony, and I were living in a white semi-detached house that my mother was renting on Addison Road in Kensington, walking distance to the French Lycée. My Irish tutors and the Sisters of Mercy had not prepared me for the expectations of my new school. I was miserable there. I found the curriculum impossible at the Lycée. All the
classes were in French, with the exception of English literature and language. I was backward, the stupidest girl in class. I understood maybe a third of what was being said. Math in French brought on panic attacks. I sat in the back row next to Pierre, an unpopular dark-haired boy with restless eyes and a short attention span, who liked to tease me and pull my hair. None of the students spoke to me. On the playground, there was a concrete yard surrounded by chain-link fence and a nurse’s station—a little hut with a gas heater, where we were occasionally admitted to warm ourselves in the winter. Tony was going to a crammers for private tutoring to prepare for entrance exams to Westminster School.

Tony and I were familiar with London; we had traveled there over the years. We went to a dentist on Harley Street called Dr. Smith, who wanted me to stop sucking my thumb and told me that if I didn’t, my teeth would stick out like a witch’s. I had just celebrated my tenth birthday at Claridge’s; Gladys gave me a crate of mangoes, my favorite fruit.

At the end of my first year, my report card read “
assez faible.
” There’s no perfect translation. “Rather weak” doesn’t quite convey the French disdain. My teacher, Mme. Ferguson, recommended that I repeat 7ème. I would spend two dismally friendless years at the Lycée, save for the tolerance of Parviz, an Indian girl in my class whose father owned a modest hotel on the Cromwell Road. There were occasional visits from Joan Buck, three years ahead of me in the same school, who dropped in on the junior playground to check out how I was doing. Her interest was the only credibility I earned with the other children.

At Whitsun, the seventh Sunday after Easter, Tony and I returned to Ireland. I picked some white flowers that looked like bluebells and carefully folded them in damp cotton and newspaper
for the flight home. All the way from St. Clerans to the Lycée to present to my new 7ème teacher, a pregnant, sour-faced woman who unwrapped the flowers, smelled them with distaste, declared, “
Ça scent des onions!
” and dumped them in the waste-basket. I remember feeling sorry for her unborn baby.

From that moment I contrived to come down with every childhood disease in the book. I was pushed over in the playground and hurt myself. The nurse refused to allow me to go home early. The following morning, when I complained that I was still in pain, Mum took me to see Dr. Apfel, a German doctor with a clubfoot, who said I had fractured several small vertebrae in my neck and put me in plaster from the collarbone to the ears, which was far from comfortable. But I couldn’t believe my luck. It kept me out of the Lycée.

•  •  •

Dad was making
Freud
in Munich. He wanted me to join him and Tony, who had traveled to Germany several weeks before. When I arrived, I was met by Gladys and Dad’s driver, and taken to a hotel, the Vier Jahreszeiten. When Dad opened the door, I could see a man seated behind him in the murky light. Dad said, “Anjelica, this is Monty Clift.” The man was weeping. As I approached, he held his arms wide and said, “Come here, darling, give me a hug.”

I was enveloped in a shuddering embrace. He smelled of alcohol. “Go to your room,” Dad said to me. “It’s late.” He indicated a door at the end of the suite. As I lay in bed, I felt compassion and concern for the beautiful bearded stranger.

Monty was having an ongoing struggle with drinking. He was showing up on set with a thermos of grapefruit juice and vodka, and by noon he would be staggering. Dad was angry and frustrated. Although he too liked to imbibe, he particularly
disliked displays of sloppy behavior and would not tolerate it on set. To compound the issue, the leading lady, Susannah York, sympathized with Monty in thinking Dad a brute. I had heard from Betty that when Monty came to St. Clerans a few months before, he was discovered in the wee hours attacking the Limerick ham. He and Nan Sunderland had struck up a great friendship and were exchanging loving handwritten letters, which must have contributed to Dad’s exasperation.

I never much liked going on Dad’s films—his first assistant director, Tommy Shaw, was always shouting at Tony and me to be quiet, and there was nothing going on beyond the set. On
Freud,
the locations were doctors’ offices, consultation rooms, and medical institutions, shot mostly in the studio. Dad had engaged the services of several authorities to advise on authenticity and, in some cases, to practice real hypnosis. The English heart surgeon David Stafford Clark was a presence. He and Dad became good friends. Dad’s driver, Mike, befriended Tony and took him to the Bierfest, where hundreds of people seemed to stay thunderously drunk for days, wearing national costume (lederhosen and dirndls), drinking from ceramic jugs, eating footlong sausages and kraut, and singing boisterously together. I recognized the blond from the topless pictures in the box in Dad’s bathroom when she made an appearance on set as a mental patient.

•  •  •

There was a brief tenure in a flat belonging to Leslie Waddington, at Rosary Gardens, a grim row of Victorian redbrick in Kensington, where one day Tony threw Mindy’s beef marrowbone across the room at me, resulting in a black eye. I could see that the direct hit surprised him, but he showed no remorse. I was sad and longed to return to Ireland.

Soon Mum, Tony, Nurse, and I moved to Cheval Place, a mews house on a cobbled street in Knightsbridge, around the corner from the Bucks, on Montpelier Walk. A woman modeled ceramic pigs in a garage a few doors down from our house. Joan and I called her “The Piggy Lady.” She allowed us to hang out with her and play with clay.

I loved the Bucks and I was delighted to be living in such proximity to Joan. She and I would walk Mindy and Vladimir, her new black standard poodle, in Hyde Park. He was a big rambunctious puppy, and everyone agreed he was spawn straight from the devil. Joan also had a fast-multiplying family of white mice that she kept in the close quarters of her bedroom. Jules and Joyce invited me to go with them and Joan to see the premiere of Peter O’Toole’s
Lawrence of Arabia;
this was my first grand outing since
The Boy and the Bridge,
a command performance for Princess Margaret, which I’d gone to with my father some years before in London. Joan was upset that I was allowed to carry an evening bag, and barely tolerated my presence under the hot lights of the movie theater in Leicester Square. We were to go home early, because her parents were attending the opening-night gala afterward and said we were too young to go along.

When we opened the door at Montpelier Walk, the place was in shambles. Vladimir had committed total mayhem, and there we were—white mice, dog shit, and torn curtains, and us in our party frocks having to clean it all up.

•  •  •

I remember Mum saying that she thought I would like Lizzie Spender, the daughter of the poet Stephen Spender and his wife, Natasha Litvin. A year older than I, strong and tall, Lizzie had skin like peaches and cream, thick corn-yellow hair, blue
eyes, and Slavic cheekbones, and she shared my love for horses and dogs. Like me, she had a poodle; hers was called Topsy.

We met one weekend when her parents took Mum and me to Bruern Abbey, the beautiful Oxfordshire estate of Michael Astor. Lizzie and I were in the pantry giving Mindy a clip, and it was taking forever to trim her fur. Upstairs the adults were having a dinner party. Mum and Natasha came to tell us it was time for bed, but we resisted. Lizzie said, “How would you feel going to bed wearing half a mustache?” That was the night Mum met John Julius Norwich.