Songs of Blue and Gold (37 page)

‘
We were all playing games that summer in Corfu, and they knew better than I did what the score was. But this one was my game. Did I regret falling for him? Not in the beginning, when it was happening. He was exciting, and generous and kind. I came back into myself under his touch. He was like a healer to me and I will never forget that. But afterwards, yes. In retrospect I understand much better. Perhaps I was stuck with a lingering infatuation, but I accepted that was all it was. That was for Julian as he
was
in my mind, not as he became
.'

It must be right to see her continuing interest in Julian Adie as obsessive. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the reason behind it remained unchanged. In any case, she would see Julian Adie again, although it would be several more years before they finally spoke.

 

- 1975 and after -

 

When Julian Adie met Annick Plazy on the banks of the Vidourle in 1975, she was twenty-three and recently married. From their first shared
pastis
at the Bar Vidourle, they had an understanding. They began an eight-year affair which suited them both: in Annick's own words ‘no commitment, only pleasure'. It was his ideal made real, and did not preclude another marriage for him, this time to Marie Basselin.

Marie was the only one of his wives who knew of him by reputation before they met in Paris; she should have been prepared.

Sophisticated and cultured, she was a green-eyed russet-haired beauty from a wealthy family. He met her through the daughter of a long-time friend. She was only in her thirties, a fashion model and latterly a designer. Excelling himself with his own self-regard, Julian Adie was unfaithful to her the day after their wedding with a tourist he picked up at the Bar Vidourle.

There was no honeymoon. According to Marie, in conversation with Adie's first biographer Stephen Mason, disillusionment was almost immediate. Adie was suffering blackouts triggered by alcohol abuse. ‘Like many who take refuge in drink, he was mean and embittered. But he was still clever. He used his words and actions to destroy me. No, I am not exaggerating. He had always to gain the upper hand, to outwit you, to blame you for everything so that he could be absolved. You could not reason with him. It would all be twisted back at you.

‘He got angry because here was a woman not falling in with his plan of how life should be and what should happen next! He did not realise how strong I was, and he did not like it!

‘But it was hard, because there were times when I would have to question my own judgement, when he justified his behaviour with crazy fabrications: once I refused to come out in the car and collect him from a nightclub in Nîmes at four o'clock in the morning, so it was my fault that he went off with a tart he picked up
when they were both too drunk to see. And after a while I would start to feel, even though I knew it was not logical, that it was my fault, that I had made him do it.'

If his writing is any indication, his moods were dark during this time. His playfulness is edged with cruelty, and his creations obscene – sadistic, even. Self-destructive despite his continuing success with a harem of local women, who seemed to care for him beyond all reasonable expectation, he would rage at Marie when she tried to moderate his intake. Construed as criticism, her efforts would make him more determined to drink as much as his body would take.

She would leave for Paris, return, only to repeat the process. He manipulated her. She retaliated. They fought – violently at times.

‘It was a mad time in my life,' said Marie. ‘He did manipulate my mind, because I loved him and I feared losing him, having to admit the marriage was a disaster. It was only when I woke up and realised he had lost me, not the other way round, that I could regain my self-respect. Now I look back and wonder how it took me so long. But at the time . . . I was too close. I could not see it.'

The shortest and most disastrous of Julian Adie's marriages was over in a storm of recriminations over his women, his drinking and her spending of his money.

The novel he published in 1977, written during the stormy year of their marriage, is even darker and edgier
than the previous offering in
The Carcassonne Quartet
. The lyricism is tainted with obscenity. In a radio interview to mark its appearance, Adie sounds short-tempered and sour.

Asked about himself, he growls, ‘My life? It's all there in the books. Read them or don't read them. I don't care.' When asked whether his much vaunted theories of ‘modern love', sex and marriage brought him, or anyone else, as much pleasure as they were supposed to, he declines to answer.

‘He did not age well. There was a suppressed rage all the time, I always felt,' said Sally Commin, second wife of his old friend and bibliographer Peter. ‘No one enjoys getting older, but he found it harder than most to adapt.'

He thought of himself as a romantic and a force of nature. Others thought him a self-centred egotist, raging against the serial failures of his marriages and the lack of any genuine appreciation (as he saw it) of his literary gifts in the home country he had always dismissed so vituperatively. He was mired in the kind of bored, dissolute expatriatism that he vigorously despised.

Newly divorced, Adie could be as affably garrulous, intelligent and amusing as ever. He was fizzing with new ideas. But there was a new hardness that was all too easily polished to a gleam by drink. In repose, one newspaper interviewer reported, he had the blank stare of a lizard waiting to strike.

And it is true that his work became progressively darker, more cruel and perverted. Friends who had previously only glimpsed Adie's black side were now offered novel-sized vistas of the inner workings of his mind, and had found themselves shocked as each successive volume of
The Carcassonne Quartet
appeared.

According to Dr Braxton,
The Carcassonne Quartet
contains Julian Adie's ‘confession'. Braxton is jubilant to find what he calls the final piece of the puzzle in
Adele
, the third novel in the sequence, published in 1979.

I found Elizabeth's copy of
Adele
in the room at the
bergerie
where I discovered the diaries.

A page was turned down, and a passage marked, or rather roughly scored with red ballpoint pen until the paper had torn.

Within these furious etches, the narrator is describing how he is young again in the water, released from the poisoned watch of advancing age. The sea is black and cold but his limbs move smoothly, porpoise-supple. Under her gleaming fish-scale dress the woman is naked on the rock above, thighs parted, taunting him with the scarlet slash between her legs. He sinks his teeth deep into her, hard enough to draw fresh blood, rejoicing in the viscous oyster taste. His hands are spiny starfish on her white thighs. He looks up, breathless. Then he pulls her abruptly down,
deliciously conscious of her pain as the sharp stones rip into her. She cries out as salt attacks the gashes in her flesh. She struggles, protests she cannot swim. He tows her by the hair, wedges her into the angle of a rock and leaves her gasping as he swims back, sleek as a water rat, Poseidon to her Medusa.

The other woman, waiting under the trees, is excited.

The prose is urgent, the images sickening, obscene in places. Braxton would love to claim this as the final confession, he says, but stops short. Even he admits the danger of assuming a work of fiction must necessarily be an insight into the author's own thoughts. As we have seen so many times, Adie was a man who used his experiences in his work, but the result was never the whole truth.

So, in his reassessment of Julian Adie, Dr Braxton asserts that he and Elizabeth Norden were implicated in Veronica Rae's death. He strongly implies (but does not go quite so far as to claim conclusively) that Julian Adie killed Veronica Rae.

His claim that Julian Adie was never to see Elizabeth again after their separate departures from Corfu that summer is, strictly speaking, untrue although in essence, he is correct. Moreover, Braxton's claim that this sudden rupture was due to Veronica Rae's death, indicating some form of guilt, perhaps joint, perhaps individual, cannot easily be dismissed.

‘
My life is all there, in the books and poems
,' Adie once
said, and my mother wrote out that quote in her diary for 1979. I cannot tell how literally she took it.

Perhaps this does explain how Elizabeth became the person I knew as my mother, how it squares with what I understood at the time. When I think back to those years at St Cyrice, I have to peel back layers of my own. Most of the memories are of my preoccupations such as swimming and making camps in the woods with village friends, mending my bicycle or finding someone else's father to do it for me. She is there, of course, at the table in the kitchen, or working the garden, but she is at the periphery of the main picture, which is of myself, as a child, coming back to the
bergerie
hungry and dusty, asking what's for supper.

If Elizabeth had been red-eyed or weeping when I returned, naturally I would have known she was unhappy. But she was not. My mother was herself: calm and capable, slow to show annoyance. The
bergerie
was clean and bright. She prepared delicious, adventurous food for us to try, chatting about the markets she'd been to and what she had found there, the people she'd spoken to. She drove off on her own expeditions to churches and cheese-makers,
brocantes
for cheap old furniture which she could sand down and paint. All I can conclude is that, yes, it was possible – in practical terms – for her to have been the person Annick described haunting the streets of Sommières because she had the transport, and
the opportunity while I was happily in the company of the neighbours' children. If I were asked whether I recognised that person, I would unhesitatingly deny it. Yet she was. I have her word for it.

It is true, now I think hard, that we were almost always alone in the evenings, and that she could be very quiet. At the time that did not seem cause for concern. She read a great deal.

I never heard the name Julian Adie from her. Not even when the newspapers were full of his name and the terrible suicide of his second daughter Hero, his ‘
Egyptian child
' who hanged herself in 1985 using a pair of silk stockings just as the character of Adele had done in his novel. My mother never uttered a word when the column inches subsequently poured out, picking over Adie's malign effect on the women who had loved him.

It must have been just as well that she never spoke of him. Imagine how our circumstances might have unfolded if the use of his name had been easy and familiar. It is hard not to conclude that Elizabeth was better off without him, whichever version of his life you wanted to believe. What for her began as a disappointment, many would interpret as nothing less than a lucky escape.

There is another quality she had, which I did not fully appreciate at the time, and that was her quiet determination. It carried her through her marriage to my father to self-sufficiency and a second successful
career. It ensured we both held our heads high. It would also ensure she saw Julian Adie just once more.

In 1990 Julian Adie was found dead in his bath, a bottle of rough red wine spilled on the floor, and a bunch of black grapes clinging plumply to the lip of the tub. In his throat, always so busy, always producing words with such brio in life, was lodged a large, whole grape.

For many months afterwards, a rumour ran that a woman had been seen wild-faced and driving erratically away from the house in a small white car at the time of death. The tale was never proved anything but apocryphal although it would have been all too easy to believe.

Before I left France that summer, I did find his house in Sommières. I went on foot this time, knowing I must have missed it first time in the car. Behind high walls it stood, closer to the Roman bridge than I'd expected, the building proud, well-maintained and now divided into apartments. A new road clips the edge of its territory. No longer is there a vineyard to the side, but a municipal football pitch, and to the front, fine wrought-iron gates which open onto the glorious vista of a vast parking lot and a Champion hypermarket.

The picture I was left with was not the golden young romantic on his island, but the gnarled traveller at
the end of his journey, and with him only ghost companions. The sensuous pagan who had tried to disengage time had grown old. Not a bad man, but a lost one.

As I stood outside those gates, I thought too of my mother: the summers at St Cyrice and the secret patterns of her life; all those years when I had no idea of her state of mind or intentions. The woman who had come to this great bourgeois house with only the skin and bones of her hopes, was completely different from the mother who cared for me. I had thought it had been just the two of us for so long, I had no concept that there was another person who was with us all the time, informing her decisions, clouding her thoughts and drawing on her compassion. I was there with her, at the time, and yet I did not know.

I knew nothing of the gaps in my knowledge. When I finally realised, and set out to try to fill them, I had to look for Julian Adie first. My search was made all the harder by a poignant imbalance: profound though his impact on her life was, she barely registered in his. It may well have been due to Dr Braxton's approaches to her during the previous months that my mother gave me the book with the inscription. Peraps I misjudged what I should do with it. In retrospect I wonder whether all she wanted was for me to take it away and lose it somewhere, which was what usually happened to books she lent me.

Travelling in Adie's footsteps, I pieced together a sad and surprising story which told me a little more about her character than I knew already, although nothing that would alter it profoundly, and a great deal more about myself.

In re-evaluating her life, I discovered a more complex version not only of her personal history but of our joint history. To push the theory further, perhaps that is the point of biography: by reading the lives of others we are only ever trying to find points of reference for ourselves. Their journeys are our own.