Songs of Blue and Gold (36 page)

Elizabeth certainly fell for his literary romanticism there. For Julian Adie misled her, along with all his other readers. He had been a terrible husband to Loula Habib.

The question is: how far was Elizabeth aware of that? The diaries make much of the romanticism, but the slowly dawning doubts about him are implicit rather than set down in black and white.

When, months later, Elizabeth finally found the will to paint, she filled vast canvases with abstract roars of the sea, tumultuous waves and treacherous rocks.

The year following his wife Simone's death was a turning point for Julian Adie. All biographical sources agree on that. His
joie de vivre
was gone, according to reports from many of his old friends and accounts in several memoirs. His long correspondence with Don Webber faltered, and he began the long retreat into solitude at the imposing house in Sommières. He wrote nothing but rambling thoughts for his notebooks; no poetry, no travel pieces. It would be four years before he managed to channel his demons into the next big novel cycle,
The Carcassonne Quartet
.

Long-standing confidants such as Peter Commin and Bernard Bressens who tracked him to his Languedoc lair found the ‘
bumptious little satyr
' of old much reduced in spirit, and morbidly introspective. ‘
He had pulled back into two rooms at the back of the house, which
remained shuttered and neglected. He claimed this was due to the expense of heating the place, but that cannot really have been the issue, and certainly not in high summer
,' said Bressens in a concerned letter dated October to Adie's literary agent (and their mutual friend) Peter Hobday.

Hobday made a visit himself and was shocked at what he found, including the extent of Adie's drinking and the bats colonising the top floor of the old manse. ‘
Julian was a deeply troubled and unhappy man,'
he said
. ‘It was more than just the loss of Simone, dreadful though that was for him. He told me it was the loss of hope, of self, of any cohesiveness. It was shocking because this was a man who had reinvented himself so often before, in a new country, with a new wife, with a new style of writing. I would say it was a breakdown – it was very serious indeed. But he would not accept any help. He was determined to push through it on his own
.'

Adie's plight was reported in much the same terms by a journalist and photographer sent by the London
Sunday Times
when they went to see him in November 1968. The celebrated writer was withdrawn yet prone to sudden rages. He indulged in forensic examination of his own character and motives where previously he had always been more interested in abstracts and other people. He objected vehemently to the suggestion that he spend more time in the company of trusted friends, retorting that he was all the company he needed, and when he was bored of himself he drove down to Aigues Mortes and
picked up ‘the saddest fishiest-smelling whore' he could find. It was impossible to tell if he was telling the truth or deliberately trying to strike a bum note.

Julian Adie was a survivor, though. So long as he had a sunny landscape away from the prison island of Britain, with a passionate effort he could ride out the bad times. He professed that his love for France was in inverse proportion to his hatred of the old country. If anyone dared to point out that France suffered just as much industrial unrest, and paralysis of the state system, he would narrow his eyes, their colour changed to stainless steel, and decree, ‘It's completely different. The British worker downs tools because his life is unbearable – well, he's right there. Only he thinks it's about money and factory hours, not seeing it's the whole grinding wretchedness of the country. The French strike for a
philosophy
.'

Superficially these were good years for him. He had achieved fame, and the books supported him without the necessity of having to find other employment. His gift for making enduring friendships sustained him; there is no doubt his company was relished by a host of fond individuals, from writers and intellectuals to the dustman with whom he enjoyed fruitful discussions of existentialism. Wine was plentiful and cheap. He soaked it up, along with the light, the heat and the respect accorded him.

 

- 1973 -

 

When Elizabeth saw Julian Adie again, she was a married woman with a small child.

She and my father Edward were idling in the south-west of France under a benign September sun. Edward was trying to set up an appointment to view a renowned collection of Byzantine art at a private house in Nîmes. Through an ex-colleague at the Courtauld, he had arranged a fortnight's rental of a cottage not far from Uzès, and combined it with a lazy holiday before the start of his college term.

Edward Norden was a lecturer and art historian fifteen years older than Elizabeth. They had met at a private dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club in early 1970 when she was drawn to his self-assurance and wit, as much as his sandy, bluff good looks. Occasionally he wrote pieces of journalism, he said, and he would very much like to interview her for a feature on up-and-coming female painters. He adored the seascapes. The resulting article was less a newspaper interview than a whirlwind romance.

He always claimed that he made Elizabeth's name in more ways than one. He had promoted her paintings in a series of serious studies and continued to do so. Even that was beginning to look like selfishness. He loved telling people his wife was Elizabeth Norden, although that marital fact never stopped him pursuing other artists, invariably attractive female ones.

That day, in late September 1973, I would have been two years old.

Elizabeth was enervated, not knowing quite why – or at least not admitting the reason to the diary she kept. ‘
I wanted – I needed – some small escape that morning
,' she wrote. ‘
I wanted to let him see for himself what it was like
.' By this, I assume she meant her husband, and his propensity even after less than three years of marriage for leaving her to her own devices (and a demanding toddler) while he pursued his own interests both at work and play.

This time, though, Elizabeth, usually so resigned to his behaviour, rebelled. She walked out leaving me with him for once.

She took the car and drove west, aiming on a whim for Carcassonne. But she had misjudged the distance – it was much further than she thought. She was stopped, forcibly, in a tiny fortified village where a market blocked the road. St Martin de Londres, read the scratchy sign. Why go on, she reasoned, if she did not feel like it?

She managed to squeeze the car into a parking space among battered vans and ancient Peugeots, and went in on foot.

The casual artistry of the fruit and vegetable stalls entranced her: the polished red peppers like grotesquely oversized plastic lips, the smiles of split watermelon, the sensuous pink of the fig she pulled apart in her fingers.

An old woman in black sat in a doorway with a single tray of fungi. Stunted men swayed past with rolling gait and the wide chests of fighting cocks.

Elizabeth was dizzy with the colours and textures. She sat down at one end of a café table whose other occupants were a group of middle-aged women discussing their ailments, and those of their families, with the competitive concentration of a contract bridge party. She gave in to her own thoughts, let the scene pass like a film in front of her.

She noticed his hair first. The tanned
paysan
with blond hair. Perhaps there were touches of grey in it. Short and stocky, that expression of secret satisfaction playing about the lips, in the flow of market shoppers but apart from it. The confident swagger, chin jutting up.

It was Julian Adie.

He was poking beadily about the cascades of vegetables; a mean string bag dangling from his wrist contained a few small lumpy parcels.

Her heart was pounding. What should she say? She rose unsteadily to her feet, but hesitated for too long. He had gone past before she had decided what she was going to do. She stood up and called his name, meaning only to be friendly, but he was disappearing into an aisle of stalls, his tracks closed by the other shoppers and browsers.

‘
And that is when I began to think of him again. Just that glimpse. It brought it all back when I had almost succeeded in forgetting about him
.'

When Edward suggested buying a property in France, spending summers under unbroken sunshine, eating good
food and surrounded by the true colours of the south, she surprised him with her keenness. If she realised that his motives were as much concerned with the buying of a slice of freedom for himself as much as a plot of foreign soil, then she kept her reservations to herself.

He travelled to France by himself several times over the next year, for academic as well as house-hunting reasons. In 1974 they bought the tumbledown
bergerie
at St Cyrice.

It was Elizabeth who made it her choice, finally. ‘
It was nothing to do with Julian Adie, and it was everything
,' she wrote.

After the first few years, it was just as well she was happy there. She and I were spending most of the summers there alone while Edward pursued his own interests. Gradually they pulled further apart until they were effectively separated. For my sake, I think, they maintained the decencies.

We saw less and less of him. He died before I had a chance to know him as an adult. He was fifty-five when he had a heart attack. A twenty-four-year-old classical violinist was with him in the hotel room in Milan.

 

- 1974 -

 

Julian Adie wrote that the past is not fixed. It is always at the mercy of perception, a perspective which changes with deepened knowledge and experience. The act cannot change, but the understanding of how it happened can.

In the Languedoc, Elizabeth tried again to contact him.

‘
All the questions had rushed back. I needed to know what had really happened, that night in Corfu
,' she wrote in her diary.

But Elizabeth was snatching at air. Adie would have none of it. Several letters survive from this time, rough drafts, or nearly good copies which were spoiled by a nervous mistake. It was important to her to get the words right, especially to him. Desperate for a response, she was ‘
willing someone to say something that chimes with my own understanding, someone who understands my reference points
'. Again she writes, ‘
The mind locks – taking pictures one after the other, painting pictures one after the other, hoping to transform it into what one hopes to see. Romance over reason, desperation over reason
.'

Finally there is the letter sent, but returned.

Several times she wandered around Sommières in the hope of bumping into him. But perhaps the Julian she had known on Corfu already no longer existed, just as the adventurous blond youth of
The Gates of Paradise
had long since slipped away to be superseded by the older man. In a newspaper photograph she kept, dated 1976, he was almost unrecognisable. He was drinking so much that his nose had developed into a lumpy purple protrusion, his bright blue eyes were sunk in fatty folds. He was stout, and apparently in disguise under a woollen hat of the type worn by French countrymen.

Finally, she steeled herself and went to his house. She found the only inhabitants were two very young Swiss women in his swimming pool. Adie was not there, they informed her.

Adie was elsewhere a great deal, at this time. He had begun placing advertisements in the personal columns of the newspapers, hoping to meet as many women as possible. This he defined as creative endeavour (and admitted it in a forthright interview in
Midi Libre
): not only was there a good chance of finding some uncomplicated sex, but he was on the look-out for new characters for dissection in his ambitious new sequence of novels.

When Elizabeth found out about this, she wrote: ‘
He is making a stupid spectacle of himself, but hardly seems to care. It is the talk of the cafés and bars of Sommières
.' The news hurt her; her attitude seems that of a discarded wife (which in reality she was, though not Julian Adie's), a woman who had a vested interest in keeping a scandal at bay that might taint her by association.

She left her telephone number with the Swiss girls at his pool, and again on the notepad by the telephone in the kitchen as she left (in case they forgot or were too high on dope to remember), but received no call. She wrote at least one more letter which was similarly ignored.

Was there an element of deluded romance about her chase? Her own words hold nothing to suggest she would
have liked to resurrect the affair at that stage. The romance was all in the past. And why would she have wanted to, given his current activities? For what it is worth, I am sure that was not in her mind, not even to have her revenge on my father.

My mother was an elegant woman not only in her appearance but in the sense that she always behaved with dignity, having been unable to escape the creed of good behaviour ingrained in her since childhood, despite her few notable rebellions. She was self-contained, and averse to taking risks. Adie's behaviour would have horrified her. No, by that stage, I am sure she would not have been interested romantically in Julian Adie.

Yet each Saturday in summer she would take me – at least until I was old enough to want to stay with friends in the village – to the market at St Martin de Londres. There we would sit in the café by the fountain, and we would watch the faces as they passed. It was our game, or so I thought.

She never saw him there again, but the hope persisted that she might.

The following excerpt from her diary shows that her sense of guilt was hardening, compounded rather than eased by the years. Julian Adie was the only person she could talk to about it, but he would not.

She began to blame herself, although not without an appreciation of the irony.