A Story Lately Told (15 page)

I was excited because Lizzie and Joan were coming to St. Clerans in July. Some days later, the two of them were giggling in the guest room that Joan was occupying down the hall; they seemed to prefer each other’s company to mine. Suddenly, I felt something sharp in my nose, a jab like broken glass. I jumped off my bed and ran into the bathroom. As I watched in the mirror, a feeble wasp backed out of my nostril and buzzed off lazily around the sink. I was starting to panic. I called out that I had been stung up the nose. I was having trouble breathing. The girls shrugged—no one quite believed me. Mum wasn’t there, which compounded my feelings of self-pity. I sobbed loudly. Finally, to appease me, Betts summoned the doctor from Loughrea. A half hour of hysteria later and they were all looking on with doubtful expressions as Dr. O’Dwyer peered up my nose with a flashlight. He wielded tweezers and pulled out a stinger, saying, “Jaysus, she’s right!” Everyone gasped.

Later that holiday, Mum came to St. Clerans to reclaim some
objects and furniture. Lizzie had just been staying with her parents at Glenveagh Castle, in Co. Donegal, the home of Henry McIlhenny, and the guests had dressed up as the four seasons at dinner one evening. She suggested we do this at St. Clerans. I remember our coming together in the upstairs Red Sitting Room. The girls in costume: Lizzie was Spring, in pale chiffon and jade beads, and I was Summer, in a blue bathing suit with sweet peas from the garden sewn all over it and a crown of overblown roses. Joan, in her favorite brown kimono and a hat of berries and thorns, was Autumn. And in layers of white and gray tulle, with painted red dots at the corner of her eyes, the tip of her nose a delicate blue, Mum was playing Winter.

•  •  •

Dad was making
The List of Adrian Messenger
at Bray, on the outskirts of Dublin. He had decided to become an Irish citizen. Tony and I had followed suit, but because I was under thirteen, I did not have to renounce my American citizenship. This decision on my father’s part may also have saved Tony from being drafted for the Vietnam War, which was already voraciously consuming the youth of America. Dad had decided to cast Tony as the son of Dana Wynter in the movie, a part that required a child who could ride.

During this time, my father had laid down, along with the director John Boorman, the outline for an Irish Film Board. Dad’s idea and intention was to work in Ireland as much as possible, drawing outside talent with the lure of tax breaks for artists. From this moment, many of Dad’s films, through
The Kremlin Letter
and
Casino Royale,
always included some scenes to be shot in Ireland.

Lizzie and I were staying at a boardinghouse on the outskirts of Rathfarnham, learning to be proficient horsewomen nearby
at Colonel Dudgeon’s riding establishment. Only on special occasions did we see the colonel. He was delicate and kind, a great rider with the straight spine of an officer. We would watch his protégée, Penny Morton, a beautiful blond Olympic equestrienne who happened to be stone deaf, sidesaddle on her bay stallion, kicking up the turf as he flew into an extended trot, practicing their dressage in the vast indoor arena.

Mum visited and decided to take riding lessons. I remember an instructor called Major McNamara, brutal, Scottish, straight out of the Queen’s Army, screaming at her, “You look like a bag of balloons. Straighten up!” And my poor mother, jogging around, with the cap on the back of her head, red in the face.

Lizzie and I went up to Powerscourt House to see Dad and Tony on set. Tony was perched high on an outrageously good-looking gray horse—its name in the movie was Avatar. He was wearing the black velvet cap and red coat of a whip-in, a full white stock and gold fox pin, white breeches, and high black boots with a tan leather turnover and spurs. He carried a loose hunting crop, which he dangled and snapped around my head a few times.

After
The List of Adrian Messenger,
Dad was offered the part of the mentor to the conflicted priest, Tom Tryon, in
The Cardinal.
He proclaimed it was all for a lark, but I think he got a good paycheck, and he certainly enjoyed the costumes. Again, Dad disappeared for many months to make
Night of the Iguana
in Mexico with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and a young ingénue called Sue Lyon. Liz Taylor was out there too, with Burton, in a village the crew had carved out of the jungle—a place close to the sleepy fishing village of Puerto Vallarta, called Mismaloya.

A story was published that Dad had thrown a big party welcoming
the actors to the set and had presented a gold-plated derringer to each of them with five bullets apiece to be used on one another should the going get fierce. From all accounts, there were the usual attractions to making a John Huston film—attractive people, a jungle location, storms, guns, wild animals, insects, and a good deal of tequila. Mum remarked that Dad never looked well when he returned from Mexico.

A
way from Ireland, from the green fields and the open air, 31 Maida Avenue, a graceful cream-colored Georgian town house on a quiet street in Little Venice, became the center of our new way of life in London. It looked onto the Regents Canal, an estuary that flows from the East End to the heart of nearby Paddington. Houseboats were moored on either side, and in summer the light filtered through the leaves of the plane trees lining the pavement above its banks.

There were steps leading up to the front door, which Mum had chosen to paint a muddy green to reflect the water. The house, like all of Mum’s creations, was beautiful. There was a large basement kitchen with flagstone floors and unvarnished pine cabinets that looked out onto an overgrown garden, at the far end of which was a wrought-iron four-poster bed, where we lounged after long Sunday lunches, when friends would come to eat or stop by after other dates, for drinks and dancing.

The living room at Maida Avenue was painted, in Mum’s words, “Irish-sky gray.” She had applied the color with rags, so the effect was uneven and cloudy. The wall that separated the living and dining room on the first floor had been removed, and the light came streaming through tall windows on both sides. Against the far wall, between the windows, the philosopher Rousseau’s daybed, framed by the curving necks of two red swans with golden beaks, had made the passage from Ireland alongside the figure of a bronze Shiva. Anemones in apothecary vials were clustered on top of a piano. A Regency chaise stood on clawed feet.

Mum’s bedroom was next to mine, off the upper landing, overlooking the canal. She had hung a turquoise Navajo chieftain’s necklace that Dad had given her after
The Misfits
on a wall the color of blackberry fool, a British dessert, above an Egyptian revival bed. Her bathroom was lined in antique mirror she’d found at junk stores and had recut, and she had commissioned Maro, the daughter of Arshile Gorky and Magouche Phillips, to paint an angel on her bathtub. Maro was going out with Lizzie’s brother, Matthew.

My room had pale salmon walls and carpet the color of burnt orange, with a huge oval mirror, gold and garlanded, with candelabra on either side. Mum and I found it together, antiquing in
Burford, on a trip to Oxfordshire. A dressmaker’s cabinet stood opposite, its shelves and drawers crammed with my antique bead-and-ribbon collection, my treasures from the Portobello Road and Antiquarius, and the ever popular hand-me-downs from Joan and Lizzie, who was kindly providing me use of her brassieres, as Mum said I didn’t need them yet. My bed was by the window overlooking the garden, with a Chinese flag we had converted into a bedspread—tongues of flame embroidered on a midnight-blue silk background. My bathroom had a fireplace. I used to lock the door, draw the bath, light the fire, and read Marjorie Proops’s Problem Page in
Woman
magazine.

Mum called me her “Sweetie Patootie.” I called her “Mug.” I loved our alliance, our sweet conspiracy. Dabbing on her perfume and sinking my finger into the glass pot with the foamy white cream called Crème de Bonne Femme; watching her stroke dark blue mascara onto her eyelashes with a little brush and making a moue when she painted her mouth with lipstick. I watched her get ready in the evenings, her reflection in the mirror, surrounded by lightbulbs, witnessing the transition from all that I knew and recognized to something that took my breath away. She had bought a dress from Madame Grès for the season. It was mauve taffeta, strapless, like a column. She wore it with the turquoise necklace. The effect was astonishing. I would forget that the eventuality was that she would leave to go out. I understood that Mum had an enormous capacity for love and was conscious of her responsibility to the many people in her life who looked to her for guidance. I was envious, not of them exactly, but of the amount of attention she paid them. She had seen my eyes open for the first time; she was the witness to my first breath. I knew she loved me most of all, and I wanted to come before anyone else.

Tony and Nurse lived on the top story. Tony was keeping his hawks, several at a time, in a little shed in the garden, and was continuing his practice of leaving a path of bloody entrails in his wake. From small yellow beaks to gizzards and claws, there was always evidence of fresh kill about the house. Mum and I complained to him about this, to no avail. He supplemented the raptors’ diets with pigeons he had bagged in Trafalgar Square and brought home on the tube.

Tony’s room was off limits, but I usually found a way to get hold of the triangular glass Hennessey bottle in which he stored a wealth of sixpences. It was quite easy to lift a few and shake the bottle to plump up the remaining coins. In Nurse’s wardrobe, on the shelf above the green high heels with the pointy toes I liked to try on, was usually a carton of Player’s or Benson & Hedges cigarettes stowed away, from which I’d help myself to a pack.

When we were first in London, Mum’s closest girlfriends were Joyce Buck and Siân Phillips. They were, as Joan later described them, the three graces of the moment, and together they went antique hunting and out to lunches and parties. The crowd was literary and artistic and theatrical. And Joan and my mother had a special friendship all their own, one that made me jealous on both sides. It was possibly one of my reasons for stealing small but significant objects from both of them.

Mum’s friendship with Giorgy Hayim was still active, but we saw less of him and more of her new friend and sidekick, a young writer called Peter Menegas. Peter was gay, short, and lithe, with a large head and a shock of brown hair. He had a big laugh and loved a social occasion. They had met through a friend of Morris Graves, called Richard Svara. Soon Peter and Mum were hanging out on a daily basis. He rented an apartment nearby and came
over in the mornings for coffee. They were writing a musical based on the story of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, called
A Girlfriend Is a Girlfriend Is a Girlfriend.
New, interesting people were coming to the house on Sundays. On warm summer nights, there was wine and candlelight and music.

But Mum was often away on trips, and I missed her when she was gone. I suspected that she was not traveling alone, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw a group of snapshots of her looking tanned and relaxed for the camera at the Winter Palace hotel in Luxor, Egypt.

•  •  •

I had a girlfriend called Michelle at Town and Country. She wore black pencil on the rims of her eyes and knew more about most things than I did. Tony was now at Westminster School in the city as a weekly boarder, Monday to Friday. He did not appear to be making many new friends in London, but he still saw Tim Grimes, with whom he shared an interest in antiques and firearms. He was taking fencing lessons from a Bulgarian ex-champion called George Ganchev, who was going out with Mum’s great friend Gina Medcalf.

I, on the other hand, had plenty of cronies now. Fewer might have served me better, as I was at most times distracted from my lessons and my homework, although I had a morbid streak and liked to write essays. One such effort was entitled “Paris from the Eyes of Death: A Suicide’s Last Look at the City He Loves.” I was tall, already flirtatious, and precocious; I looked several years older than my age. I loved to dance and I wore a lot of makeup. Every morning before school, I’d draw eyeliner twice across each eyelid, once close to the lashes, once in the hollow, and blend pearlized shadow to my cheekbones. I liked to wash my hair every day, and dried it by flipping it over my face in
front of a space heater set to high. It took me at least an hour and a half to get ready, making me chronically late for school.

There was an eccentric roster of kids at Town and Country—Anne Rothenstein, who later married the director Stephen Frears; her brother, Julian, with whom I had a good exchange in Victorian Pears soap labels, which we both collected; and Jan Markham, who became an actress. It was there that I really fell in love for the first time: Joshua Thomas was a great dancer and drew beautifully, including an epic pen-and-ink rendering of Napoleon’s retreat from Russia on the walls of the assembly room. He had white-blond hair and navy-blue eyes and a fierce contempt for the bourgeoisie. Although I think he loved Jan more than he did me, when we went to the country one weekend on a school outing, Joshua kissed me between marshmallows by the light of a bonfire.