A Story Lately Told (17 page)

Later, in the nineties, I met Barbara Hulanicki, the creator of Biba, at a lunch. She reached for her pocketbook when the check came. I had to stop her. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you understand.” But she did, and part of Barbara’s genius was allowing us schoolgirls to get away with it—all the cutest girls in London were wearing her designs, and they were her best advertising.

Emily and I adopted a group of penniless hippies who occupied a basement under a fish-and-chip shop in Powis Terrace. They were the founding members of the London Free School, a disorganized group of hash-smoking dissidents, and we supported them by hitting up strangers for money around Notting Hill. Sometimes when our parents were out of town, we’d take them to our houses to bathe. The glut of filthy towels was occasionally difficult to explain, and my cat got a really bad reputation.

•  •  •

I had been home from a trip to Ireland for some days before and didn’t know Mum was unaware that Nora Fitzgerald had died, quite suddenly, from cancer. When I made a reference to Nora’s death, Mum burst into tears and asked how could I be so cold and uncaring as not to have told her. Was I made of stone? It hadn’t occurred to me that no one had bothered to phone from Ireland to tell her Nora had been sick. It seemed to me that these days I found myself more at fault with Mum than ever before. Because she was unable to trust one word of my sloppy excuses, she resorted to interrogation. I was called to her room for a talking-to and forced to look her in the eye. Why had I lied about stealing Tony’s sixpences? Was I smoking cigarettes? She could smell the tobacco on my clothes; she could see in my expression that I was lying to her. But when I think of it now, my parents were not being candid with me either.

Without missing a beat, I could meet Mum’s gaze and swear that I’d kept my dental appointments with Dr. Endicott in Cavendish Square, the memory of his hairy knuckles in my mouth as visceral as if it had happened the day before (this was an era before dentists wore rubber gloves).

There was the recurring nightmare of not having taken the buttons to the local dressmaker, Miss Amshel, whom Mum had chosen to make up some clothes for me. In order to cover my tracks, I hid the buttons, some twenty or more, separately in drawers, pockets, under the carpet, in my bed. Like a trained retriever, Mum had tracked down each one to its hiding place, as I stood there, finally forced to blush and cry with shame, shaking my head as if denial were still an option.

John Julius Norwich was often at the house in the morning, doing the
Times
crossword puzzle with her. He lived directly
across the canal, on Blomfield Road. Although he was genial, I didn’t warm to him. He was obviously smart and interesting looking. He was titled (2nd Viscount Norwich) and was a historian, travel writer, and TV personality. He had very fine silvery hair and wore oval glasses. He wasn’t anything like my father. But he and Mum seemed pretty cozy, having coffee at sunup, when I would come down to the kitchen for breakfast.

I was also a disappointing prospect to Miss Milner, a sweet elderly woman who had taught John Julius to play the piano in his youth. His influence on my mother, to my reasoning, was as good an excuse as any to resist learning even the simplest passage of music from his old teacher. Most of the lesson was spent beguiling Miss Milner into sharing her chocolate-covered digestive biscuits with me. I had honed my diversionary tactics years before on Mother Mary Borgia, at the convent in Loughrea, and they were now working effectively on Miss Milner.

•  •  •

In the summer of 1964 I went with the Spenders to their house in St. Jerôme, in Provence. My little black poodle, Mindy, had just died from kidney disease. My sadness at her loss was compounded with guilt at having been too lazy to walk her on school days and having left her in Ireland some months before. The house had no electricity, and on Saturday nights Lizzie and I danced with young, handsome Frenchmen wearing miniature Shetland sweaters in the village square.

Soon after I returned to London, I was in the car with Mum when she said, “Your father wants you and Tony to fly to Rome.” My immediate response was “I don’t want to go.”

“Is it because of Zoë?” she asked. I thought that was weird—I hadn’t seen Zoë, our beautiful Indian visitor, on the last couple of trips home to St. Clerans. She’d been out of the picture.

“No,” I said. “I just don’t want to go.”

“Well,” she said, “I think you have to.”

Tony and I arrived in Rome a few days later. I was surprised when Betty opened the door to Dad’s suite at the Grand Hotel. I wondered what she was doing there. She was wearing the three-quarter black mink jacket he had given her for Christmas that year. We entered the room. His back to the fireplace, Dad clapped his hands together as if scarcely able to contain his excitement. “Sit down, kids!” he commanded. Tony and I sat apart, stiffly, in wary expectation. “I’ve got some
great
news,” said Dad. After a long dramatic pause, a heroic grin lit up his face. “You have a little brother!” he announced. It hung in the air for a moment like a dead fish.

I ran out of the suite into the nearest bathroom and locked the door. I was shaking. Finally I let Betty in and sobbed onto the shoulder of the mink jacket. “I hate him, I hate him.”

Soon after, Tony and I got back into the car and were taken by Dad to a building in a gentrified part of town. We walked up some stairs to an apartment and Dad rang a bell. Zoë opened the door. Zoë, my friend. A small child was on all fours in the living room, barking. Dad thought it was hysterical that the toddler was acting like a dog, and kept telling him what a good little doggy he was. After a short time, we got up to go.

At the door, Zoë lifted the little boy and told him to kiss his brother, Tony. Tony gave him a kiss. Then came my turn; I looked at him with unconcealed hatred, and at under two years old, my baby brother, Danny, lifted his little hand and made a bear paw with it as he growled right back at me.

•  •  •

When Tony and I got back to London from Rome, something in the air had changed. Mum was sad. In the afternoon, I’d
come home from school and find her crying in her room. On her bedside table was a bottle of Perrier and a glass, the jade horse’s head, a notepad, a fountain pen, a stack of books—
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
by Carl Jung, and always something by Colette; she had given me
Chéri
to read when I turned thirteen. Mum had been advised by her therapist to write down all her dreams. I didn’t really want to know why she was crying, or dare to ask. I knew I would not like the answer.

The school year was coming to an end when Mum said, “Anjelica, can’t you make things easier on me? Can’t you see I’m almost seven months pregnant?” I remember walking down by the canal with Lizzie, asking, “How? How could Mum be pregnant?”

There is a story that when she was in her third month and already showing an expanding waistline, Mum took a plane to Shannon and arrived at St. Clerans in time for afternoon drinks with the local priest. “I haven’t seen my wife in a year,” said Dad as she entered the room, to which she responded by flinging off her cloak in front of the assorted guests. I heard later that she and Dad had a terrible fight.

Divorces weren’t nearly as acceptable then and were still practically unheard of in Ireland. Both my parents strayed during the marriage, and I think there was a sense, certainly on my father’s part, that he was simply doing what came naturally to him. Probably with my mother, there was a bit of
You want to do that? I can do that, too.
Hoping, in a way, to get his attention. When she was in her late twenties she had affairs with quite a few men. There was a rumor about a brother of Aly Kahn, as well as an adventurer and scholar of Greek history, Paddy Leigh Fermor, who at eighteen walked the length of Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople; Paddy was, I think,
an important love in her life. I heard about her intervening between Paddy and another man at a party that turned into a big Irish brawl, both men drunk and about ready to kill each other, and Mum, in a white Dior gown, covered in blood. Later, Paddy worked on the screenplay for
The Roots of Heaven
with Dad.

I couldn’t acknowledge the fact that my mother had lovers. Because to me, how could you even compare them with Dad? My father was a different cut. A swashbuckler, great-hearted and larger than life. He was intelligent and ironic, with a warm voice like whiskey and tobacco. I believe that without Dad to give shape to her existence, my mother didn’t really know what to do or who to be. She must have been trepidatious, fearful of the future. Her father was rigorous, his demands on her so exacting that I think Mum had cultivated an aversion to failure. It translated easily into her relationship with Dad, who was considerably older, dominant, proud, and egotistical.

One imagines that life won’t ever offer a decent alternative to the kind of high tension, expectations, and results of being with somebody like that. My father had a way of being dismissive that was quite devastating, of belittling people or ideas that he didn’t feel were really up to par. I’m sure Mum was seeking something to overcome a feeling of inadequacy.

John Julius was pleasant to me, but I felt that he was cold and intellectual, and I was upset by the idea that this was the new love of my mother’s life. I didn’t know that he already had a wife, Anne. I desperately wanted my parents to be together. Evidently, now, this would never happen. I had asked Mum, “How can you call other men ‘darling’ but never Dad?” And she told me that sometimes, when people grew up, they also grew apart. The details of our parents’ separation went largely unexplained, but Tony and I knew how loaded it was. It scared and
worried me. Although Tony and I didn’t talk about it, I knew he missed the old Dad, the one who spoiled us as children.

When John Julius didn’t get a divorce and marry Mum, and it became obvious that she was going to have his baby by herself, I think her heart was broken. And as I understand it now, my mother wasn’t John Julius’s only port of call.

Mum told me that when she was pregnant with Allegra, John Julius’s mother, Lady Diana Cooper, had come by the house with a bunch of violets. Mum was ambivalent about the gesture, feeling there was something condescending about it, particularly in Diana’s choice of flowers, like a bouquet a grand person might present to a poor relation, she said.

On August 26, Allegra was born. And on the third day home from the hospital, when I looked at this perfect infant with her rosebud mouth, asleep in her crib in Mum’s room, I leaned down and kissed her and instantly fell in love. Allegra as a baby had a round head, wispy pale blond hair, big slate-blue eyes, and a grave, slightly imperious countenance that reminded us of an infant Queen Victoria. She called me “Kika.” Mum used to love to dress her in antique linens and lace, and after her bath time Nurse would bring her downstairs in full regalia, smelling of shampoo and baby powder, before putting her to bed.

•  •  •

Dad stood alone. He was a lonesome pine. I think there were places that my father wouldn’t go with anyone. He had demons. He could be charming and captivating, seductive and charismatic, but if he had it in for you, watch out. His eyes were brown and inquisitive, like monkeys’ eyes, with a keen intelligence. But when he got angry, they would turn red. He was disgusted by ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity, but sometimes I think that Dad was just plain angry, and vodka fueled that rage.

The only book my father read to Tony and me was
Old Yeller,
a heartbreaker that I doubt I ever recovered from. One of his favorite conversational gambits was to question our knowledge of rarefied information over dinner, such as “Where does lightning come from? Below or above?” I always felt put on the spot, Dad’s eyebrow raised for an extended moment, in which I made the mistake of groping for the answer. Or he would lay out playful—if controversial—theories, such as that everyone in the world should be allowed to kill three others over a lifetime.

Dad was apt to declare preordained decisions about what would be best for our futures. That Tony should enter the minefield of Irish politics, even though he had hitherto shown no particular interest in that arena, rather preferring the more solitary and aesthetic pursuits of falconry and music. Or that, now, at the age of fourteen, I was to have my life in Ireland and London supplanted by art studies at L’Ecole du Louvre, in Paris. It had not occurred to him that this idea was no less than horrifying to me in light of the miseries I had suffered at the Lycée.

When he summoned me to his room for that particular discussion, I reacted so badly to his proposal that he questioned my sanity. Whenever Dad put me on the spot, I became at first quiet and then defensive, and then, more often than not, I left his room in tears. Lately, the only way to please Dad, I felt, would be to sacrifice my own choices in life to make him happy. Dad criticized the way I dressed, my use of makeup, the fact that I now smoked.

On the night before Christmas Eve 1965, a few of us were dancing in the drawing room. The actor Patrick O’Neal, who was preparing to do
The Kremlin Letter
with Dad, was visiting with his wife, Cynthia. I guess he said something to Dad about
my moving provocatively, because in the morning I got an ominous phone call from Betty, saying, “Come up to the Big House. Your father wants to see you in his room.”

I could not imagine what I had done, but I was anxious. I walked up the driveway with dread in my heart. When I entered his room, Dad told me to sit down. “I have it on good authority that you were doing the bumps last night,” he said.

I had never before heard the expression. “What are the bumps?” I asked.

“You know damn well what the bumps are,” he said, turning aside.

I asked again, “What are the bumps, Dad?” By now it was starting to dawn on me that moving my hips in a certain way—that was the bumps. I began to protest. He told me to be quiet. I started to cry. “You don’t love me,” I said defiantly. Suddenly, his arm swung back and his hand hit me hard in the face, backward and forward; the force of it was like walking into a wall.