A Story Lately Told (14 page)

The next day, Lizzie and I went riding, and I broke my wrist, falling off a young stallion when he tried to climb a barbed-wire fence to get to a mare.

•  •  •

When I was eleven, Mum, Nurse, Tony, and I moved in to Lizzie Spender’s house on Loudoun Road in Swiss Cottage for almost a year. Lizzie’s parents had gone on an American tour. Tony occupied her brother Matthew’s old room, and Nurse was downstairs. Lizzie and I shared her bedroom on the top floor, and Mum was next door. Mum had finally found a house she liked on Maida Avenue in nearby Maida Vale and was in the process of buying it and reconfiguring the interior.

Through Stephen and Natasha, who was a concert pianist, I met the poet W. H. Auden, who took tea in his carpet slippers in their kitchen, and with them visited Henry Moore, whose garden in the countryside was populated with immense abstract bronze nudes. Another friend of theirs was the opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti, from Spoleto, who told me a story about Mum when she was first a starlet in Hollywood. They had met at a party, and because she seemed lonely, he befriended this beautiful girl from out of town, taking her frequently to lunches
and dinners. One evening, while driving her home, he made a derogatory remark about Laurence Olivier. Mum asked him to stop the car. When he did, she insisted on getting out and walking the rest of the way to her apartment. She could not bear for her idol to be insulted.

It finally became evident to my mother that the Lycée and I were not a perfect match. I had the measles, and the faculty was threatening to hold me back for a third year in 7ème, when she got the picture. I began attending Town and Country, a school for “artistic” teenagers nestled on a leafy residential street in Swiss Cottage. It had a laid-back atmosphere compared with the Lycée, and was a much smaller school, with the added luxury of having classes conducted in English.

Lizzie, Tony, and I all got the chicken pox. Lizzie taught me the score of
West Side Story,
and together we fell in love with the Beatles. There was one to suit your every mood—John if you wanted smart, Paul for romance, George for spirituality, and Ringo for fun. Sometimes we’d go to Crufts dog show, and the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley Arena, where I would cheer for Ireland’s own Tommy Wade on his little piebald horse, Dundrum.

•  •  •

Beginning in 1963, when I was twelve, Joan and Lizzie came to St. Clerans three times a year, every year, over the school holidays. Joan visited for several months in the summer as well. Lizzie remembers being there one summer with no grown-ups around. Betts’s father was unwell and she’d gone to Kilcullen. I guess the Creaghs were on hiatus. For a couple of months, a shrewish woman called Sheila served us an unrelenting diet of white soda bread, raspberry jam, and macaroni and cheese. We heard rumors that Dad had gambled away the house. We put
on a dog show that attracted the locals for miles around. We made our own ribbons for contests like “Best Fancy Dress” and “Most Intelligent Dog” and served cornflakes in melted chocolate at a concession stand.

The Pony Club met several times over the course of the summer, a motley group of some ten to fifteen children of ages varying between seven and thirteen. We learned the points of the horse, riding etiquette, and games on horseback—such as a version of “bobbing for apples,” where you had to grab one in your teeth from a trough of water without the use of your hands, remount your pony, and race to the finish line. We also played musical chairs on horseback. When the music stopped, you had to dismount and run to claim a seat. Tony distinguished himself once by knocking me out of the only remaining chair even though everyone had seen me get there first.

In the summers, Paddy Lynch drove us—Tony, Lizzie, Patsy, Mary, and me—in the horsebox to gymkhanas in towns within a forty-or-so-mile radius of St. Clerans, places with names like Gort, Ballinrobe, Claremorris. Sometimes the Pony Club came together for three-day events. Generally speaking, the ponies that liked to hunt were rarely happy in the formal-show jumping ring, but others enjoyed the attention, and the cross-country eventing was always fun. I loved winning rosettes on Victoria, and Lizzie would be beaming astride Angela Hemphill’s horse, the dun Patsy Fagan. Tarka and Leonie King boxed their ponies over from Oranmore, the Lynch children always attended, as well as the Scully boys, and from down the road in Craughwell, Diana Pickersgill, daughter of the master of foxhounds, on a sizable hunter. When not riding, Diana wore a fox’s brush pinned to her kilt at all times.

On the road, Paddy would sing at the wheel—Elvis and Jim
Reeves songs. “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,” which I always thought was “put your sweet lips a little closer to the foam,” with a vision in my mind of a lonely mouth lapping at an imaginary shoreline. Our favorite song was “Oh Wasn’t She Charming for Nineteen Years Old,” a song about a deceived husband who discovers that the young woman of his dreams is in fact a wretched crone of ninety:

She pulled off her left leg and I thought I would faint,

And down from her cheeks there rolled powder and paint.

She pulled out her eyeballs, on the carpet they rolled.

Ah, shur wasn’t she charming for nineteen years old!

We thought this was the best song ever and begged Paddy to sing it over and over. He would pull the car to the side of the road to buy fruit and ice cream, and we would choose from the three flavors in the block—chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry—and they would cut off a slice and put it between two wafers, like a sandwich.

Tony’s summer visitors included Tony Veiller’s son, Bidie, who first came when his father was writing the screenplay with Dad for
The List of Adrian Messenger,
and Tim, the son of Dad’s production designer, Stephen Grimes. We all liked Tim; he was wry and funny, and he provided a nice counterbalance to all that Joan, Lizzie, and I had going on in the way of cattiness toward Tony. Tony and I had found ourselves some allies, and he didn’t seem to need to bully me as much anymore. Bidie pinched Joan’s bottom under the Sarsfield Bridge. They were forever telling jokes to which I was not privy, so I invented a word, “Witchturla,” with which to torture Joan, and told her it had a really filthy meaning.

Often, as the long summer days turned to evening, we
would think of amusing things to do to divert the adults, such as dressing up in white sheets and cantering our ponies up and down the field in front of the Big House as they were eating supper in the dining room. One night, Peter O’Toole jumped out of the ha-ha in his
Lawrence of Arabia
costume to surprise us.

I think it was Bidie who brought the 45 of Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” into our possession. We played it every night on the gramophone in the Lynches’ kitchen, and Bidie taught us the Twist; we’d heard it was all the rage in America.

Lizzie and I went along with Mary and Patsy to see Paddy win the silver cup for the Championship Stone Wall event at Mountbellew, on Mum’s horse, Errigal. As the judges raised the height of the jump to well over six feet, we yelled with pride when Errigal cleared it with a foot to spare, beat the competition, and won the prize. Paddy said later the jump was twice the size of himself.

Later in London, when I told Mum about this triumph, she said, “If they aren’t careful, they’ll break that horse’s heart!” At once, all the pleasure in his performance dimmed. I had never considered that too much was being demanded of Errigal, and I felt ashamed. When I regaled Mum with stories and anecdotes about Betts and Zoë or Suzanne, she grew stiff at the mention of their names. I recognized the sharp glance, the clenching of the jaw that hardened her features as she went back to being the stubborn victim of Dad’s rejection. Ireland and London, like my parents, were pulling away, dividing loyalties, leaving one in a position of constant betrayal of the other side.

•  •  •

There was a measure of challenge to Dad’s morning inquisitions: How high had we jumped our ponies? How was our French coming along? How many fish had Tony caught?

“The worst thing,” he opined one morning behind a curl of smoke from a brown cigarillo, “is to be a dilettante.”

“What’s a dilettante, Dad?” I asked in some trepidation. I was unfamiliar with the word. It sounded French.

“It means a dabbler, an amateur, someone who simply skims the surface of life without commitment,” he replied.

I hadn’t considered the dangers of the condition. From his lips, it sounded like a sin, worse than lying or stealing or cowardice.

Now and again, I sensed intrigue and mystery among the grown-ups, with their raised eyebrows and whispering in the halls of St. Clerans. Magouche Phillips, who had in a previous decade been married to the painter Arshile Gorky, caught kissing Dad’s co-producer behind the stone pillars on the front porch. Or Rin Kaga, a samurai warrior whom Dad had encountered on the making of
The Barbarian and the Geisha,
descending from the Napoleon Room in full kimono, with tabis on his feet. He spoke not a word of English but had shed a few joyous tears at breakfast when he was reunited with Dad. Dad explained that a samurai was allowed to cry only a few times in his entire life. For me, who until recently had cried an average of three to four times a day, this was an extraordinary idea to ponder.

Tony and I would climb the mahogany ladder in the study and take down art books from Dad’s extensive collection. Volumes ranging from the mysteries of the Greek, Egyptian, and Mayan cultures to his great loves, Rembrandt and Picasso. Dad knew a great deal about sculpture and painting and expected our tastes to reflect his own. The names of the painters he admired reverberated with import—El Greco, Rubens, Velázquez, Caravaggio, Vermeer.

Seated on the green corduroy sofa at the coffee table in front
of the turf fire, framed by its veined Connemara marble mantelpiece and Mexican finials, Dad sketched on white notepads in pencil and Magic Marker, his back to the great wealth of achievement on the bookshelves, which inspired and interested him. A high level of accomplishment was like fuel. He’d ask a question to command my attention, scanning me as his hand began to trace my likeness.

I would try not to appear too self-conscious or overly self-critical when I saw the sketch. He spoke about painting as if he’d missed his true calling. I’m sure that he could have been a great painter if he had pursued it as a vocation and committed himself to that discipline. But painting is isolating, and Dad was a social creature; he liked to have people around him, working with him, listening to him, and keeping him company.

Often, when we were up at the Big House for lunch, Dad would beam when Lizzie walked into the dining room. “Isn’t Lizzie beautiful!” he would exclaim. And Lizzie would blush. After lunch, Dad might recruit someone to pose for him up at the loft. One holiday he asked Lizzie if he could paint her portrait, but later down at the Little House, I begged her to say no. I did not want Dad to focus any more attention on her. The following morning I took her over to his studio and showed her his paintings. Along with several still lifes and a portrait of Tony with the ubiquitous hawk and his young friend John Morris in deep ocher and brown oils, there was a scattering of pictures of Dad’s girlfriends, from Min Hogg to Valeria Alberti, and a playful nude of Betts eating an apple. “I understand,” Lizzie said. “I won’t do it.”

We were all in the study late one summer afternoon. Dad was drawing, the light was dim and fading. Margaret came into the room to lay the turf for the fire, then moved to turn on
the lamps. Dad held up his hand as if to stop time. “Hold on, honey, for a few moments,” he said. Our features softened as the color deserted the room, and outside the sun set beyond the riverbanks.

•  •  •

In June 1963,
Freud
was screened at the Berlin film festival. I went to the premiere with Dad. Mum had found a sweet Victorian cotton dress for me to wear, with white gloves and a blue satin ribbon for my hair. The editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin, a friend of Dad’s from the war, joined us. They had an easy camaraderie. They had decided to go to East Berlin and to take me with them. A friend of Bill’s was living there, someone who had worked for the resistance during the war.

As we drove up to the checkpoint, a little kiosk on the far side of a bridge separated East from West. This was Checkpoint Charlie. We saw plaques and bouquets of flowers and handwritten notes commemorating the dead. Russian soldiers were goose-stepping on the eastern side, which would have been funny were they not so deadly serious. I was troubled by it, but I felt safe with my father and Bill. Some officials took our passports and disappeared for what seemed like a long time, then returned them to us, stamped some papers, and issued visas for the day. As soon as we crossed the border, the lights and commerce of the West were cast off like a party dress, revealing the gray bones of the East. Platforms stood high along the length of the wall; our driver said they had been put up so that people could stand on them and wave to their loved ones across the border. It seemed even worse, somehow, that this terrible compromise had been reached. Maybe we saw a woman with a dark babushka on her head, riding a bicycle, but otherwise no activity at all.

We drove the length of the wall, stopping a few times to climb the lookout posts to see low lines of barbed wire stretching to the other side. It felt barbaric. We went to Bill’s friend’s bar for lunch. It was a short drive to the inner city, all gray streets with no people. When the friend saw Bill, he wept. They held each other for a long time, and then the friend sat down with us and smoked a cigarette as Bill and Dad drank schnapps.

Dad wanted to go to a museum to see the head of Nefertiti. Except for a few guards, we seemed to be all alone in the place, so dank and gloomy, until we came upon this rarest and most delicate artifact—the most beautiful and legendary of all women, a perfect little bust, smaller than life-size, glowing in that tomb in East Berlin. It was like a little hint of hope.

•  •  •