MY PARENTS HAD BEEN DIVORCED since before I could remember. It struck me as perfectly normal that I should live with my mother in London and then be sent off each vacation—like an airmail package—from Heathrow, with a label pinned to my lapel, to stay with my father wherever he happened to be. In fact it was a great deal better than normal because I had both of them entirely to myself. I was a double only child, a situation that suited me admirably.
I may have thought, in the supremely self-centered way of all children, that I had each of them all to myself, but of course I didn’t. Both my father and mother were enormously attractive. My mother had a perfect model’s body—fifties style, with a real bosom, tiny waist, and beautiful legs—combined, somewhat unfairly, with a stainless-steel brain. She was not conventionally pretty, her nose was too long to be cute, her jaw too strong, and her tongue way too sharp for some, but she did have that irresistible, ineffable x factor that meant she was never short of company. My father, on the other hand, was absurdly handsome, good-humored, and easygoing, with that sunny and ultimately deeply irritating—to her, at least—optimism that some lucky Americans seem to be born with. They were not well matched.
They had met at the American Embassy in Paris, where they both worked, and in a letter to her parents, my mother describes her impressions of the “Embassy Adonis,” as she called her new friend:
I have met a terrific man who is second secretary here and a big wheel in the Economic Section. Terribly rich, terribly handsome, and Yale ’39 and Yale Law and very blond (quite revolting that) and has the most beautiful car I’ve ever seen. A 1948 Oldsmobile … sleek and grey and convertible. And he took me out once and then big blank silence and so sad and heavy it was too, until today when he invited me to go for a quick tour of the château country in the big sleek grey car this weekend.
At the time my father was unofficially engaged to a nineteen-year-old girl back home in America who had the advantage of being (a) the daughter of Ambassador Harrison and (b) hugely rich. Sadly, my mother had been totally mistaken about the Wells family fortune, which turned out to be almost nonexistent. For a well-born WASP, oddly lacking a serious trust fund, who wanted to make his way in the Foreign Service, a rich, well-connected wife was probably as much of a necessity as impeccable manners and a perfectly tailored dinner jacket. But the ambassador’s daughter decided that maybe she was just too young to get married, and the spoiled “little beast, in her recently-turned-20 fashion, has just announced that she wants to shop around a bit more.” Which left the playing field wide open for my mother.
They went to stay in a haunted château in Normandy; they went skiing in an Austrian village with the wonderful name of Obergurgl; they went to diplomatic receptions at the Élysée Palace; they went to a very fancy dinner party on the quai Bourbon, overlooking the Seine, where, she wrote to her mother, “There was absolutely nothing to drink BUT champagne and wonderful lobster salad and things in molds and oriental houseboys dishing it out,” where they met “the two younger Kennedy daughters, Eunice and Pat, who are in Paris for the holidays. And very nice little girls they are too, oddly enough.” (My grandmother’s snobbery was pretty universal, and the Boston Irish were the primary objects of her contempt. The Kennedy family may have been exempted, but somehow I doubt it.)
All in all my future parents were clearly having a ridiculously good time. Reading my mother’s letters, I kept looking for evidence of that heart-stopping, feverish affliction that infects what is left of your mind and makes everything you cared about before he took over your life totally irrelevant. But instead I found this description of juggling the “Embassy Adonis” with another gentleman named Bill:
Al [my father] has just decided in true Neanderthal fashion, that After All I am the girl for him. But I am playing a tricky game these days.… I placate him and Bill and at the same time try not to alienate any of the 2nd string … all the time getting myself all fouled up. It’s a difficult game to play and one at which I am not very good. With Al you get a polo playing, stag hunting, good-at-cocktail-parties rising young diplomat who some day will be Minister to Tanganyika. Not dumb, well informed, with lots of the right ideas … but short on imagination and with about as many shadings in color as a piece of white drawing paper. Now, with our Bill you have a nice, sweet, kind and generous man who finds a great deal of difficulty in coping with the nasty materialistic world. He knows wonderful people and funny things and is so much brighter in many ways than Al. He is related to the world’s most fabulous collection of nuts … his great uncle is the Marquis d’Ormonde … his cousin is Lady Phyllis Delamere, easily the worst behaved of the whole Mountbatten tribe. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to want to carve out an empire for himself. Just wanders around ordering new gold monocles from Cartier, and waiting for his grandmother to die. The choice is a really hard one; my big complaint is that I can’t mix the two of them together and come up with one Complete Man.
In the end the stag-hunting Adonis won. A large only slightly flawed sapphire was dislodged from his father’s tiepin back in Brewster, New York, and taken to Cartier’s to be transformed into a ring, and the wedding invitations were sent out.
Their friends in Paris couldn’t understand what had possessed them to get married. My mother, a self-described “wild savage” with a tendency to view life through her own darkly ironic prism, took any chance she could to épater la bourgeoisie and anybody else who happened to be within firing range. Fools were not tolerated, authority had to be questioned, “nice” people were dull, and the worst crime—up there with cruelty to animals—was to be a bore. She liked to stay up too late and smoke too much, and her martini glass was invariably half empty, not because she was a drinker but because that is how she saw the world. My father, whose own family could not have been more bourgeois, saw no point in shocking anybody, had no problem with “nice” people, and tended to give those in power the benefit of the doubt. His mind was more practical than intellectual, his inclination was to see the best in any situation, and he had an enviable talent for extracting a huge amount of pleasure from every moment in the day—and therefore from life. He liked to go to bed early, eat too much chocolate ice cream, and his champagne glass always overflowed. I suspect they both fell in love with those qualities in the other that they themselves didn’t possess. He adored her spirit, strength, and wit, and she loved his uncomplicated cheerfulness and the reassuring solidity of his large, conventional, and seemingly prosperous family. Why not get married? It must have seemed like an incredibly good idea at the time.
When I was about seventeen and old enough to understand such things, my mother told me that she knew the night before her wedding that it was never going to work. But how could she have backed out then? The guests, the presents, the flowers, the champagne, the petits fours, the cake. Not to mention the fact that she was being given away by my father’s formidable patrician boss, Ambassador David Bruce, whom even she hesitated to embarrass. (Since the wedding took place just a month after the engagement, her parents had decided that there wasn’t enough time, or probably money, for them to get from Boston to Paris.)
As it turned out, the friends and my mother were right, and my parents were divorced, quite happily, within four years. She left my father—surprised, quite possibly relieved, but not, I think, too distraught—in Burma, where he was first secretary at the American Embassy. And instead of going home to New York or Boston, she moved with me to London. Not an easy decision, but she was an adventuress. In Rangoon she had made friends with their neighbors, Sue and Basil Boothby, who were with the British Embassy, and they offered to lend her their house in London, which at least solved the problem of where we would live. It was one of those tall terraced houses built around 1830 with two rooms on each floor and lots of stairs in between. The kitchen was in the basement with a window that let in a bit of daylight, if there was any to spare—this still being the era of Bleak House pea-soup smog—and an Aga that needed to be fed on demand, like some monstrous, ravenous baby, with constant buckets of coal. After we had settled into the house she somehow persuaded the New York Times that she was the person they needed to report on fashion and “London life,” and her salary, combined with her alimony, was just enough to live on. Slowly she built up quite a glittery social life, something she was always inordinately good at, while I set off for school each morning, in my gray flannel uniform (pleated skirt, blazer, and hat: straw in the summer, felt in the winter) and came home at teatime to play with my dolls and hamster.
After my mother and father divorced, there were always gentlemen—and lady—callers around. But in my cozy little solipsistic bubble this didn’t faze me, which must have had as much to do with the tact and charm of the callers as it did with my unshakable confidence in my parents’ love. I knew that I was the most important person in both their lives, and that none of the callers could ever change that. My great good luck was that I had no memory of them married or fighting (they both claimed they never had) or separating, and so was able to accept the situation without any of the angst and suffering that most children of divorced parents go through. Even though my mother tended to skip over the more sentimental aspects of motherhood, like smothering me in kisses and actually saying out loud how much she loved me, I never doubted for a single moment that she did. And it was only when I fell crazily in love for the first time, at nineteen, that I experienced again that all-consuming passion that I had felt for her as a child.
She was always interested in whatever I thought and was doing, and kept in close touch with my father, writing him long, chatty letters about me. (“Yesterday, when she was driving me completely crazy, I told her quite sternly to behave, to which she replied, looking aggrieved, ‘But I am have.’ What could I say?”) He would then painstakingly stick them into leather-bound albums—one for each year of my life, with the date embossed in gold on the spine—along with my report cards (“Singing: distressing”) and endless color photographs of our travels together. There I am at six, in an inky blue velvet dress, with a white lace collar, standing in front of an elaborate four-poster bed, at some gloomy Schloss we had stayed at in Austria. The enormous eiderdown rises up behind me like a bank of snow, and I look into the camera with an expression of secret satisfaction. My surroundings, my dress, and my traveling companion were all exactly as I wanted them to be. And there we are in the Piazza San Marco, dressed in matching lederhosen (what could he have been thinking?), surrounded by squabbling pigeons.
Later on the same trip we stayed at a hotel on a beach, where we somehow acquired a creature in a polka-dot bikini and gold hoop earrings, who talked way too much and showed no sign at all of leaving us alone, however much I scowled at her. The photograph in the album shows the three of us in a pedalo, her generous bosom bursting out of two pointy cones, her head thrown back in a paroxysm of laughter, with my father inexplicably smiling at her. I remember whispering to him that we should all pedal way out to sea, make her jump overboard for a refreshing dip, and then the two of us could race back to the shore. It seemed like a flawless plan, and it worked for a while, but as we sat down to dinner she reappeared, this time in a strapless dress with a huge pouffy skirt, her dark, curly hair held back by a twisted silk scarf. And, again quite inexplicably, my father stood up and pulled out her chair so she could join us. But when we left a few days later there was no sign of her, and we set off in our little white convertible with the red leather dashboard, bound for Portofino.
Now, fifty years later, I see that her totally understandable crime had been to focus all her charms on the object of her desire, and who can blame her? But the other, more permanent callers—both my mother’s and my father’s—were much cleverer and understood that if you want to win the heart of somebody attached to a small, overindulged daughter, you actually need to seduce two people. Since my father lived the life of a bachelor diplomat, first in Vienna and then in Bonn, at a time when there was actually a certain amount of spurious glamour attached to that profession, he had many ladies to entertain. But with me away in London, he didn’t have to juggle them too much. For my mother things were a bit trickier. I must have been a little like the complacent, hoodwinked husband whose wife is having a series of affairs. I sailed along, oblivious of the fact that her dinner guests were anything more than friends of the family, and in the end I was aware of only two contenders, although she later told me there had of course, been a few more. And why not? Looking back, I realize that I picked up, by osmosis, from both my mother and father (and from my future stepparents, who were also gifted teachers of this subject) the useful and life-enhancing idea that love affairs, and therefore men, should be associated with excitement and happiness, and never with guilt and angst.
The first contender I became aware of was a man named Robert Neild, who lived in Cambridge, where he was an economist at Trinity College, which can’t have taken up a great deal of his time, because he seemed to be mostly at our house in London. Robert had the most convoluted eyebrows I’d ever seen. They formed a wild ginger thatch above his crinkly blue eyes, and I unblinkingly accepted his arrival on the scene, rather as if he’d been a nice new sofa that had just been delivered by Harrods and taken up residence in our drawing room. I must have been about three or four years old when the sofa arrived, and over the next year or so, became very attached to it—so attached that I remember going to school and announcing to nobody in particular that my mother was going to marry Robert. And maybe she was. It seemed like a reasonable idea, and I was an extremely reasonable child, or so she always told me. But then one day the Harrods van turned up again on our doorstep and took the sofa away. The curious thing is that I don’t remember being in the least bit surprised or upset, because no sooner had he gone back to the Trinity warehouse in Cambridge than another, equally delightful gentleman caller appeared to take his place. God knows there must have been a bit of Sturm und Drang associated with this rearrangement of the furniture, but to everybody’s credit, it took place offstage and was so skillfully executed that it left no impression on me at all.
The new Robert was called Freddie Ayer, and my mother met him at a dance at St. Antony’s College in Oxford in the summer of 1956. This is how she described it in a letter to her old friend in Rangoon, Sue Boothby:
I have fallen madly, madly, I tell you madly, in love for the first time in my whole misshapen ill-spent life—and with an impossibly hopeless man. It all fell on me … in the drafty fan-vaulted sewer of a basement at that goddamn dance in Oxford that Philip dragged me to. I knew I shouldn’t have gone. But they all seemed so harmless, so egg headed, not to mention egg on the chin that my flaring nostril guard was down utterly. Then—I didn’t look at him and didn’t listen to his name—but what seemed to be a particularly egg headed, scruffy middle-aged professor asked me to dance. And being a well brought up girl I didn’t say for him to fuck off. And then there I was—in about twenty seconds flat my head began to reel and I felt like being sick out the window and it hasn’t stopped since. Stayed at that eightsome reel til 4 bloody thirty in the morning. Absolutely green with angst that this maniac wouldn’t be on the 6pm train to London as we had exchanged blood illuminated promises to be. But he was. And since then, I meet this menace for five minutes at the Ritz bar and I lie to Robert to go see him at 10.30 or midnight and we have what I believe are called in novels, Stolen Moments. I’m still sick regularly every other day or so, and it gets worse and worse—added to which, it is, of course, impossible. He’s had a wife, his children are grown up and he’s had every woman in London and keeps a tidy six-year old (?) mistress in the Maginot line background. He’s about 100 years old and is everything I’ve ever wanted. His name is Ayer, or Eyre or Air or Ere, I don’t really know how he spells it and he’s a philosopher. So far as I can gather from his books etc he’s the big deal in logical positivism etc. I am utterly miserable and quite unable to do anything.
Well, she got most of it right. He actually spelled his name “Ayer,” and he was a big deal in logical positivism, and he did have two children, Valerie and Julian, and he had had love affairs with an awful lot of women—and not just in London. The mistress turned out to be an Australian painter named Jocelyn Rickards, who’d been around for six years or so, but he also had a possessive ex-wife, Renée, who was his real Maginot Line against ladies who might get any fancy ideas of moving in too close on him. It seems to have been an arrangement that suited him extremely well. He lived in a tiny flat in Shepherds Market in Mayfair, which Renée had found and decorated for him in an Elsie de Wolfe meets Kierkegaard minimalist style. According to his autobiography:
Renée’s taste in decoration had been formed in the 1930’s, when there was a fashion for white walls, off-white furniture and a scarcity of ornamentation. In fact the white walls suited my small rooms, and although I only had one picture, a portrait of myself by e. e. cummings, and little or no bric-a-brac, I had comfortable chairs and a sufficient stock of books with which to furnish both my sitting room and study. That others might view it differently was brought home to me one evening when I was entertaining some pupils to drinks. They all left at a fairly late hour, and as I was closing the door, I heard a voice reaching me from the stairs, “Poor old bugger, all alone thinking in those cold, cold rooms.”
Which only goes to show how little we know about our teachers’ private lives. As it turned out, the “poor old bugger,” pace his students’ description, was only forty-six when he and my mother met, and soon after that, the Harrods van turned up again, and the moving men came wheezing up the stairs and installed the new sofa in the drawing room in Holland Park Avenue. To my six-year-old self, Freddie didn’t seem terribly different from Robert, except that his eyebrows were under some kind of control, and it looked as though he might be staying a bit longer than his predecessor. My mother may have fallen madly, dangerously, hopelessly in love for the first time in her “misshapen ill-spent life,” but for Freddie the affair was just that—an affair. He was never a man of action, and for someone whose life was seemingly caught up in a series of passionate love affairs, he was curiously passive. His view of the beginning of their liaison could not have been more different from hers:
Dee had been having an affair with a Cambridge economist but gave him up on my account. I was not yet sufficiently committed to her to renounce all other attachments, or even to profess to do so. Jocelyn, with whom I had arrived at a friendly modus vivendi, disapproved of my taking up with Dee, not out of jealousy but because she did not like her or think us suited to one another. Renée tended rather to approve of her as a counterweight to Jocelyn. I enjoyed her company, spent a fair amount of time in Holland Park Avenue and let events take their course.
Letting “events take their course” had never been my mother’s style. If it had been, she would never have run away from her god-awful family and joined the Canadian army at seventeen (where she, unsurprisingly, rose to the rank of sergeant major), would never have bought that one-way ticket to Paris, would never have married my father, and would never have left him in Rangoon and moved to London. And then she would never have fallen for the “menace” at that dance in Oxford. But now that she had done all those things, she was determined to have him. It was not going to be easy.
Poor Freddie. All he wanted was for his well-ordered, carefully compartmentalized life to go on as it always had. During the day his beautiful mind was busy grappling with issues such as proving that the major domains of empirical knowledge could be reconstructed in terms of the data of direct experience and the single relation of remembered similarity between them, but once that was out of the way, it was time for a whiskey and soda, dinner at the Café Royal, either with a group of friends or one of the lucky ladies, followed by dancing at the Gargoyle Club. There were so many things to love about Freddie, but maybe the most seductive of all was his combination of intellectual brilliance (which extended way beyond the wilder shores of logical positivism) with a delight in all the pleasures life had to offer. His old friend e. e. cummings once wrote him a birthday poem, which captured this charming duality in his nature rather nicely:
Considering the gravity of your language
And the levity of your nature
(or, at times, the levity of your language
and the gravity of your nature)
it is clear that keeping your balance
comes easier than it does to teetering us.
You walk on the tightropes as if they lay on the ground,
And always, bird eyed, notice more than we notice you notice; and the
observation follows always with the clarity
of a wire slicing cheese.
And many years later, in the midseventies, Leon Wieseltier, who was then his pupil, described Freddie as “an eighteenth-century rationalist voluptuary—he could have been one of Diderot’s friends. I remember asking him about Camus, ‘I don’t know his work well, but he and I were friends: we were making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war.’ ”
Clever my mother certainly was—Freddie told me that she was the most intelligent woman he had ever known—but his philosophical work was way beyond her and although in the first rush of love she did go out and buy all his books, she later confessed to a friend that she couldn’t read them “without Dr. Johnson’s dictionary close by and a finger tracing laboriously under every printed line.” I’m not too sure that even then she could make much sense of them, and yet what did it matter? Freddie talked about his work with other philosophers, not with his friends, and being by nature promiscuous, intellectually and otherwise, his conversation skipped happily and entertainingly all over the place. As with his dancing, he enjoyed a partner who could follow his lightning lead, and as with his tennis, he needed an opponent who could slam the ball back just as hard as he served it. He had found both in my mother.
At the beginning she was careful not to rock his carefully balanced boat. Understanding the danger of putting any pressure on him, she presumably didn’t allow him to see or hear just how hard her heart was beating. At the sizzling, red-hot start of their liaison, when Freddie had to go to Poland to give some lectures, she waited impatiently for his first letter, snatching it from the bewildered postman’s hand before he had even had a chance to stuff it through the letter box. Although Freddie was a great letter writer—he had absolutely no patience with the telephone—there were a couple of problems. The first was his handwriting, which looked like an army of embryonic ants marching across the paper in strict parallel lines and was therefore totally indecipherable. But with a magnifying glass and practice, it was usually possible to figure out the vague contours of his message. And that was the second problem. The first two words of the letter my mother had grabbed from the postman were “Dear Dee.” Wrong: Things did not improve as she read on. A brisk description of Professor Glowczewski’s shortcomings as an interpreter of Wittgenstein was followed by Freddie’s impressions of Warsaw—“chilly, but the vodka is plentiful”—his lack of appreciation of the charms of a lady philosopher, who was “large, and by no means attractive”—ending up with this measured critique of his hotel bedroom: “My bed, though hard, is not lumpy.” The letter ended with two more illegible words, one of which she thought might be “Love,” the other, presumably, being “Freddie.”
It can’t have been terribly difficult for her to conceal the extent of her passion from Freddie, because he was never the most perceptive man when it came to other people’s feelings. How else could he possibly have thought that Jocelyn wasn’t jealous? Did he actually believe that his current maîtresse en titre was just looking out for his best interests when she told him that he and this American adventuress were not “suited to one another”? So it is probably safe to say that my mother didn’t need a degree from the Yale School of Drama to convince Freddie that all they were having was a delightful affair. She surrounded him with interesting people—not too hard since he seemed to know everybody in London—and she was able to throw in a few disreputable Americans just to liven up the mix. Then she made it her business to provide him with a cozy setup at her house. A place to write and regular meals with all his favorite food: Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade (coarse cut) on his toast at breakfast, Gentleman’s Relish at teatime, and a rosy pink leg of lamb for dinner, with a good bottle of claret, and Stilton and “digestive biscuits” to follow. Forget dessert, vegetables, or salad: Freddie didn’t do sweet or green. She was always a bit of a Jewish mother when it came to fattening people up, and I remember that years later, when one of my boyfriends said he was hungry, she had to remind me that men liked two things, and one of them was food.
Her formula must have worked, because slowly they became more of an established couple. I grew accustomed to seeing him sitting in his armchair with our fat old dachshund, Monster, on his lap when I came home from school, and accepted him as part of our family. He never replaced my real father, and why should he? My father lived in Germany, took me skiing in the winter, and to Italy in the summer in his snappy white Mercedes convertible with the red leather seats that smelled like new shoes. Freddie lived in London, took me to French restaurants, fed me my first snail, and didn’t know how to drive. They could not have been less alike, and I loved them both. From as far back as I can remember I’ve had this insane idea—which can only have originated with my two fathers—that men were created to amuse me, comfort me, love me, tell me interesting things, and generally give me pleasure. I’ll admit that over the years my faith has been tested just a little by one or two men, and mocked by many more women, but mostly—and luckily—this deeply unfashionable belief has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
DIFFERENT AS THEY WERE, Freddie and my father did have one trait in common: They were not assertive, demanding, or difficult and would do just about anything to avoid confrontation. I have always assumed that this was one of the things that attracted my mother to both of them. Her primal need to be the one in charge prevented her, quite wisely, from being attracted to, or choosing, men too similar to herself. She was the sharpest, funniest, and most generous person on earth; she delighted in her talent to shock and amuse people, but the flip side to this captivating spirit was darker. She had grown up as a self-described “crafty, quick witted savage,” and it was her toughness and absolute refusal to be defeated that had helped her get where she wanted to go. Sometimes it was simply boredom that brought on the compulsion to stir things up, and she once cheerfully admitted to me that her patent cure for tedium was to start an argument. Worked every time. And so what if it escalated into a fight, with a bit of shouting and collateral damage? Many years after they were married I would sometimes hear Freddie muttering under his breath, as he paced around his study, “That dreadful woman, that dreadful woman.” But when they first met, she was just “quick witted.” The “crafty savage” was for later.
My mother must have felt she was making a bit of headway when, in June 1957, Freddie invited her to see his son, Julian, play cricket at Eton. We took a train, and I remember pointing out to Freddie the “water buffalo” (as cows were called in Burma) dotted about in the fields as we sped by. We finally arrived at a big green lawn, with a tent set up on one side, full of ladies in silly hats and men clutching umbrellas, just in case it rained. I was given strawberries and cream; while the grown-ups sipped Pimm’s and fed me the slices of cucumber and stalks of mint—infused with the strange taste of alcohol and Angostura bitters—floating in their dimpled beer mugs. In the distance tiny figures, dressed all in white, were scattered about on the grass. Occasionally one of them would summon up the energy to thwack the ball, and then walk laconically toward the stump to graze it with his bat, while the spectators would clap even more laconically and murmur, “Well played.”
Needless to say, I found the game totally incomprehensible and extremely dull: All I wanted was to see Julian. I knew he was Freddie’s son and sensed that for my mother, meeting him was important. Determined to be on my best behavior, I politely shook his hand when he was introduced to me and as soon as his back was turned, tugged at my mother’s skirt and pointed out, quite truthfully, in the dangerous way that children can, “Mummy, Julian doesn’t look a bit like Freddie. He doesn’t look like him at all.” She ignored me. So I said it again, and, still getting no response, I repeated it a little louder. Finally she bent down, put her face very close to mine, and said, “Shut up.” I don’t recall being offended, but I did shut up, and probably wandered off in search of some more strawberries.
It was only many years later that she told me why the tall, dark, and pointlessly good-looking Julian bore no resemblance whatsoever to his father. While married to Freddie, Renée had had an affair with Stuart Hampshire, another philosopher, and Julian was Stuart’s son. But nobody had ever bothered to tell him. Or, at least, plenty of malicious gossips had hinted over the years that they knew, but his three parents apparently took a rather more casual view of the situation. For my mother bushes were not something you beat about. And so, when she finally met Renée, she got straight to the point and asked her when she was going to tell Julian about his origins. Renée replied, “It’s not up to me. Freddie and Stuart are his parents.” Yet more evidence that the English were completely out of their minds.
Julian’s housemaster at Eton had even written to Renée urging her to come clean with her son: “I am certain that to learn the truth from anyone other than you and Freddie would be a mistake, perhaps even a danger, for him.” But neither of them was brave enough to tell poor Julian the truth, and he discovered it only from a girlfriend when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Isaiah Berlin remembered that Julian came to him in a state of extreme distress, wanting to change his name. I don’t know what Isaiah’s advice was, but he always had a prissy, puritanical attitude toward Freddie’s romantic arrangements and disapproved of the louche nature of his marriage. When Stuart Hampshire had confessed to Freddie, in 1937, that he and Renée had fallen in love, Freddie seems to have taken the news quite calmly and, amazingly, even agreed to spend Christmas in Paris with them. Yet more evidence, for my mother, of his near-autism when it came to emotion.
Intellectually Freddie was a child of the Enlightenment and worshipped at the altar—designed in severe neoclassical style by Jacques-Louis David—of reason and tolerance. This was the foundation of his approach to philosophy and may have served him well in his politics, his assault on religion, and even in his sex life, but love and logic have never been happy bedmates. So, not too surprisingly, the festive ménage à trois in Paris ended in tears, and Freddie, feeling a bit sorry for himself, returned to London alone. But his mood didn’t last long. He soon took up with a pretty young undergraduate at Somerville College in Oxford, who, in the incestuous nature of life, turned out to be a friend of Isaiah’s. One of Freddie’s closest friends, Philip Toynbee, wrote in his diary that Berlin, not for the first or last time, had tried to interpose himself between Freddie and a girlfriend: “Isaiah has been rushing from one to the other, urging them not to go to bed with one another. What an old fool he is.”
Over martinis at their club, Freddie told Philip all about the debacle in Paris and his new girlfriend, and they “agreed that seduction was enormous fun” and that they “shared a genuinely adventurous attitude.” That silly old fool Isaiah had no idea what he was missing.
Meanwhile life at Holland Park Avenue trundled peacefully along, or at least that’s how it felt to Freddie and me, but for my mother, who was engaged in the amorous equivalent of a Napoleonic military campaign, the situation was far from calm. Here’s how she described her progress to Sue Boothby:
The Prof. and I are still having the battle of the brains and you can just guess who is winning. He is a nimble one he is, but I have never lived far away from the abattoir and learned early that there’s more than one way to skin cats even cats on hot tin roofs like him. Sometimes I feel more encouraged than others … my latest hurdles have been fairly important ones: I’ve been taken to Eton twice (unprecedented that) to see the beautiful son. Once we took him to lunch at that chi-chi joint in Bray, and the other time we went to watch him play soccer against Westminster and then drove on to Oxford where Freddie had to give a talk. The son likes me (gleaned from the daughter who was there for lunch). Then, I’ve met the misty all-powerful wife and (absolutely unprecedented this Freddie claims) she isn’t hostile. My sister has made friends with the daughter and has even been included in cosy family dinners in Hampstead with Renée and Lord Listowell [sic], the man she got after Stuart Hampshire.
But all this lateral infiltration will never poison the well so long as the mainspring is untouched you may claim—we don’t ignore that for one moment let me tell you, but there’s no good mauling that unless the host of protective friends and family on the side are fixed too. They’re important to him, and I don’t think that one blackball excludes or I’d have been out months ago, but I think some votes are 20 times more important than others. The Maori (Jocelyn Rickards) has been in Rome for a while now trying to trap an Italian, but he wriggled out and I hear she’s heading this way. I don’t think she’s much to worry about except that she’s out-and-out hostile and is an Influence. Even so, I see a couple of huge jumps left and then the homestretch is in sight. It is the most nerve wracking thing I’ve ever been in—and it seems to go on and on for years although I see by the calendar it’s only 9 months.
Still and all, I think it’s worth the struggle—my only fear is that I won’t pull it off and will then find I’ve used up all my elasticity and sanity in the big effort and will just be a gibbering blob for the rest of my life. Which would be brief for, naturally, I would plaster damning notes all over London and then jump off Big Ben. It really does give pause for reflection though on the ultimate wisdom of not putting all the eggs in one basket. Though, if you don’t, you can never hatch the number of chickens you want. I guess that most people just learn to settle for fewer chickens.
But just as soon as my mother felt she was within sight of victory, yet another dragon would rear its ugly head. The next one was called Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal. And she was far from ugly. In fact she was one of the most beautiful women in London. The daughter of the Marquess of Anglesey, she was married to a wonderful man named Raimund, the son of the Viennese poet and librettist of Der Rosenkavalier, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. (At the very end of his life Freddie confessed to me that he had been in love only three times: with Renée, with Liz, and with his third wife, Vanessa.) It wasn’t as though Liz was about to abandon her family (she and Freddie had known each other for twenty years, and when the affair had started or ended was all a bit hazy), but she was an Influence, and her vote counted. Again my mother confided to Sue:
Wish somebody would poison that f—ing Lady L.Von H. She is the biggest fly in anyone’s ointment and I think fills F’s head with stories of how ruthless and uncivilized I am and will make him miserable. She has just had a baby stuck in her tubes and I wish to god it had popped her off. But modern science has pulled her through and she is sitting around in feathered bed jackets getting in my way.
AND VERY FETCHING she must have looked swathed in chiffon and swansdown, sipping tea in her lit à la polonaise with its pale pink chintz curtains, held back by silken ribbons and tassels. Birch logs glowed in the fireplace, and above its marble mantelpiece hung a portrait of Liz’s equally beautiful mother, who had the same creamy, magnolia skin, blue eyes, and almost-black hair as her daughter. The dressing table stood in front of the bay windows, festooned in a flouncy white petticoat, and on her bedside table, beside a flowering jasmine plant, was the all important telephone: the electronic conduit for pouring venom into Freddie’s ear.
How, you may be wondering at this point, is it that I am so familiar with the decor of Lady Elizabeth’s boudoir? Well, years later, when my mother and Liz had become friends, and I was old enough to go to grown-up dinner parties, I would be invited quite often to the Hofmannsthals, since I was roughly the same age as their son Octavian. Looking back, it does seem a little incredible, but in some houses, in those dim and distant days, the ladies actually followed their hostess out of the dining room after the dessert, leaving the men alone so they could have their brandy and cigars unencumbered by feminine company. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me, because at that point in the evening you were always longing to pee, and also needed to brush your hair and spackle on more makeup. And the bonus was that you got the chance to poke around in your hostess’s bathroom, examine the contents of her medicine cabinet, see what interesting pills she might be taking, and douse yourself in her perfume. Having done all that, you’d then lounge about in her bedroom for a while—sometimes a bit too long—and, if you were lucky, exchange delicious little petits fours of gossip.
I don’t want to give the impression that the Siege of Freddie occupied all my mother’s time or formidable brain, because she actually loved her work and was just as determined to succeed in journalism as she was to become Mrs. A. J. Ayer. Having started out writing about fashion and London life for the New York Times, she quite soon moved on to reviewing movies, and then became the lead book reviewer for the Sunday Express. Her highly opinionated pieces began to create a stir and caught the attention of the Express’s proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook. The Beaver, as he was known, was Canadian, and incredibly right wing, and I think my mother enjoyed winding him up, and he, being the consummate newspaperman that he was, undoubtedly enjoyed the controversy that she attracted. In 1959 my mother wrote a scathing review of a book called Beloved Infidel, by Sheilah Graham. It may not have interested the Beaver particularly, but it was all too relevant to Freddie’s byzantine private life.
The title was taken from a poem that Scott Fitzgerald had written about Sheilah, and the subject of the book was their love affair. They had met at a party to celebrate her engagement to the Marquess of Donegall, given by Robert Benchley in July 1937, at his Garden of Allah bungalow in Hollywood. Fitzgerald was writing scripts to pay for his daughter’s education and his wife’s catastrophic medical bills, drinking way too much, and trying to finish The Last Tycoon. Sheilah was a syndicated Hollywood gossip columnist. The marquess was unemployed, as marquesses generally are, and returned to his estate in Ireland, without his fiancée, the day after the party. In Beloved Infidel she describes, in touching detail, her life with Fitzgerald, who was to die in her arms on December 21, 1940. Sheilah had grown up dirt poor in the slums of London, with no education, but had parlayed her dazzling looks, charm, and street smarts into a career, first as a chorus girl and later, when she moved to New York and Hollywood, as a journalist. But it was Fitzgerald who made up for all the schools she never went to, when he became the private tutor in her “college of one,” and drew up the long list of books that she would read and they would discuss together. The book that Sheilah subsequently published almost twenty years later was good enough for Edmund Wilson to review in The New Yorker, calling it “the best portrait of Fitzgerald that has yet been put into print.” But my mother thought otherwise, and dismissed it in the Sunday Express, concluding “And I suppose in a way you have to hand it to this ex–East End orphan, once named Lily Sheil. Just what to hand her, I’d be hard put to say. But I do know it’s nothing I’d touch with a ten-foot pole. With gloves on.”
Whatever the merits of Beloved Infidel, the main issue, from her point of view, was that Sheilah and Freddie had been lovers in New York during the war. It’s not as if she posed any threat, but my mother just could not resist sticking the knife in and twisting it around, especially with an audience of five million readers. The situation was made even more complicated by the fact that Sheilah had given birth to Freddie’s daughter, Wendy, in September 1942. There had been no question of marriage (he was still, conveniently, attached to Renée), so she had rather nimbly turned around and married the hapless Trevor Westbrook, after a “whirlwind romance,” and had presumably convinced him that the baby born “prematurely,” but curiously large, was his. (Interestingly, her next child, Robert, born in Hollywood, was rumored to be Robert Taylor’s son. One sperm bank for brains and one for beauty.)
Sheilah kept in touch with Freddie over the years, and used to bring Wendy to London to see him, without ever telling her the truth about who her real father was. At one of these cozy lunches, in 1959, it emerged that Freddie had actually seen the review before it went to press but had done nothing to prevent its publication. As if poor Freddie, who loathed all confrontation, would ever have dreamed of doing any such thing. All he could come up with in his defense was to tell her that he had said to my mother, “Don’t you think that’s a bit strong?” As if my mother, who loved all confrontation, could ever have been persuaded to tone it down. Sheilah stormed out of the restaurant, leaving Freddie and Wendy to poke around at the remains of their lamb chops in embarrassed silence.
While my mother was writing her reviews for the Express, Freddie, in addition to his philosophical work, was also becoming something of a public intellectual and television star after he started appearing regularly on a program called The Brains Trust in 1956. I think we actually bought our first television set in order to watch him. The format was deceptively simple: Line up four brainiacs, throw in a moderator, add questions from the viewers, and see what happens next. Of course it helped that both the guests and the questions were of an unusually high caliber. Freddie was a natural performer and soon became one of the regulars on the show. Others included scientists like Jacob Bronowski and Julian Huxley, writers like his brother Aldous and Cyril Connolly, plus the odd Jesuit like Father d’Arcy, peers like Lord Longford, and Dr. Strangelove himself, Henry Kissinger. Freddie, a well-known atheist, and Father d’Arcy were, curiously, old friends, but when presented with a question like, “Do you believe in the Devil?” they were every television producer’s dream team. In his autobiography Freddie describes their encounter like this:
“No,” I said immediately, “and not in God either,” giving my reasons as briefly as I could. Father d’Arcy replied with less than Jesuitical urbanity and a lively discussion followed. Later, we were asked whether we believed in original sin and Father d’Arcy said that he did. I was tempted but forebore to point out that this committed him to belief in the literal existence of Adam and Eve. Father d’Arcy with whom my personal relations were always good, admitted after the programme that he would have been embarrassed if I had fastened this doctrine on to him, and thanked me for not doing so.
So Freddie not only scored points off Father d’Arcy intellectually, forcing him to lose his Jesuitical cool, but also graciously let him off the hook. The debate apparently provoked Lord Longford into making a speech in the House of Lords to the effect that since “we live in a Christian country such atheists as Julian Huxley and myself should not be permitted to appear on television.” Naturally nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to the Lord Longford, and Freddie went on to appear on the show forty-three times. He was always disarmingly honest about how much he enjoyed his growing fame, and confessed years later that “My success on the Brains Trust had given me an uncritical appetite for publicity.” There were many other television appearances, including a memorable one on Valentine’s Day with Eartha Kitt, which he later came to regret:
We were asked a question about romantic love and I tried to talk learnedly about the troubadours. Out of mischievousness or boredom she made a show of flirting with me. Instead of bringing my speech to an end, or better still responding in kind, I floundered on and was made to look thoroughly foolish.
Freddie knew he was better off with a Jesuit than with Eve and that tempting apple.
LIFE WITH MY MOTHER and Freddie was never boring. They both shared the same sense of humor and the fundamental idea that although life was clearly a serious business, there was no reason why it should not also be fun. Clever and funny. Funny and clever. That was what they were, and that was what I assumed everybody must be. Like all children, I accepted my own family and circumstances as being utterly normal. And it was only as I got older that I came to realize that not everybody commuted between Europe and America, got divorced, had multiple lovers, the odd illegitimate child, and, most surprising of all, that the world was actually full of people who were neither clever nor funny. The last revelation was the real shocker and much the hardest to adjust to.
I remember one trick they concocted together that involved, in Freddie’s words, “our appealing but incontinent dachshund, Monster,” who was inordinately fond of him. The idea was that the next time Freddie appeared on The Brains Trust he should contrive to say the dog’s name really loudly, and we three should sit at home in front of the TV set and see what happened next. So there we were on the sofa, with a special box of Maltesers—his favorite chocolates—for Monster, when Freddie appeared on the screen, gabbling away about metaphysics, possibly with poor old Father d’Arcy again, and suddenly said, “I see no empirical reason to believe in the existence of God, any more than I do in the Loch Ness MONSTER.” The experiment was a huge success. Monster lunged at the TV, barking wildly, the Maltesers scattered all over the floor, and we both fell about laughing.
When it came to my birthday they were both ridiculously indulgent. Not necessarily with extravagant presents, but with humoring my wishes, however ludicrous. The year I turned eight I was caught up in my ballerina fantasy. I went to classes every Wednesday in a dank church hall in Notting Hill Gate, where my lack of any musical sense was overlooked by my kindly teacher, a tiny, sparrowlike woman who spoke with an impenetrable “foreign” accent of no clear provenance. But since I didn’t much care about the actual dancing, my complete absence of rhythm didn’t matter. It was the clothes I was interested in. My deepest desire was to look like the tarty, twirling figure on top of the mirrored jewelry box that I had been given for Christmas.
Together my mother and I concocted what we thought was the perfect birthday tutu. The bodice was pink satin, the spaghetti straps were embroidered with rosebuds, and the skirt was cantilevered out from my nonexistent waist with multiple layers of tulle. White tights, ballet shoes encrusted with silver sparkles, like a Woolworth’s Christmas tree ornament, and a tasteful not-too-large rhinestone tiara, completed the ensemble. Decked out like that, my mother knew there was only one place in the whole of London we could possibly have gone. King Edward VII and Lily Langtry had gorged on tournedos Rossini and peach Melba there; Oscar Wilde had entertained the fatally attractive Lord Alfred Douglas with quail’s eggs and Veuve Clicquot there; and on top of all that, it was Freddie’s favorite restaurant. Mirrors, gilt, crystal chandeliers, pink, pleated silk lampshades, red velvet banquettes, silver candelabras: the Café Royal had it all. I was led to our table—toes carefully pointed out, ballerina style—seated between my mother and Freddie, and given a menu only slightly taller than myself. I ordered sole meunière, my mother had oysters, which made her sneeze, as she always did when she felt too much money was being spent on food, and Freddie probably had turbot, as he usually did. For dessert there was a special cake that had been ordered ahead of time, with eight candles perched precariously on top of a pillow of whipped cream. As far as I was concerned the evening was a total triumph. And I like to think they may have had quite a good time too.
In fact my memories of them together at this point in their lives were entirely happy, but I was, of course, unaware of the continuing Siege of Freddie. By 1959 she was making serious progress and wrote to her friend Sue:
Freddie seems to be worked up to a pitch of enthusiasm not likely to be possible again. He doesn’t shake and tremble and mutter No no no No no noooo all night anymore and he on his own steam actually went to Somerset House and got a copy of his grandpa’s will which has a trust fund thing out of which I hope to con the money for the house. He also even got a copy of his divorce papers and that I never even suggested as a thing to do. He is now off to New York to see Valerie [his daughter with Renée] get married tomorrow to a frightful sounding swotter from Rochester. He is bound to appreciate my fine sensitivity and European ways even more when he gets back, and that is why I want to find the house to pop him in quickly and slam the door.
Nothing like a trip to Rochester in the winter to concentrate the mind. But my mother still felt she needed to bring on her one last bit of heavy artillery, and for that she turned to a somewhat surprising ally. My father was living in Bonn at this point, working as a kind of senior aide-de-camp to Ambassador Bruce, entertaining his ladies, and taking me on our regular road trips around Europe. That year we were due to visit Sue and Basil Boothby in Brussels, where they had been posted by the Foreign Office after Rangoon, for the 1958 World’s Fair:
I think your cup runnething over as it does you are likely to have that old Al and Gully with you around the 22nd or so. And they are not only going to see the fair, they are going to the fucking flower fields of Holland and some midget village or something near Amsterdam.
After we toured the “fucking flower fields” and the “midget village” (quite fun, as I recall) I was put on a plane back to London, and my father returned to Germany, where he found a letter from his ex-wife waiting for him. Would he do her a huge favor, please? Could he write her a letter, saying that he was outraged and disgusted by the thought of his precious daughter living in such a sinful ménage, and what was my mother proposing to do about it? He roared with laughter, spent a happy evening composing a suitably indignant letter, and sent it off in the diplomatic pouch posthaste to London. Sadly the document hasn’t survived, and my father only told me about it, still laughing, after my mother’s death. But it may have been the piece of paper that broke Freddie’s back, because in 1959 he wrote, rather mournfully, to e. e. cummings’s wife, Marion, in New York:
I agree that I should probably not make a good husband. We don’t in fact plan to get married, at least not straightaway, but for various reasons, including the attitude of Gully’s father, it may be difficult for us not to. And anyhow, the point is not so much being married as living with one person. My being away at Oxford during the term may or may not make it easier. We are both full of forebodings, but it seems feeble to back out now, having gone so far.
Having confided his doubts to Marion, he then turned to his old mistress, Jocelyn, the “Maori,” who was now living with the playwright John Osborne, and invited himself to lunch. In his autobiography Osborne describes what happened next:
I found Jocelyn, her face streaked with tears, more upset than I had ever seen her. It confirmed my view that Ayer was possibly the most selfish, superficial and obtuse man I have ever met, spitting out his commonplace opinions to an audience mystified by the tricks of manipulated sleight-of-mind. He had announced that he was contemplating marriage to an American, but was undecided whether the match fulfilled his standards of wisdom and self-esteem. He offered his ex-mistress a two-card choice: he was prepared to marry the American unless Jocelyn should feel impelled to offer herself as an alternative. Anyone less kindly would have kicked this pear-shaped Don Giovanni down the stairs and his cruel presumption with him. She could find nothing to say except, “But Freddie, it’s too late.”
And so, dear reader, the pear-shaped Don Giovanni married the American adventuress.
My mother found a house, just off Fitzroy Square, into which she popped Freddie and then quickly bolted the door. It was a smaller version of Holland Park Avenue: a typical London town house with endless stairs and two rooms on each floor. My bedroom was right at the top, and I chose a flamboyant, and probably ill-advised, wallpaper of cauliflower size turquoise roses, a green carpet, and broderie anglaise curtains for the windows. For all her bossiness, my mother was happy to leave me to make my own decisions, however ridiculous they might be, when it came to clothes, decor, and just about everything else. Freedom was something she believed in: If I wanted meringues for dinner, and leftover spareribs for breakfast, why not have them? With her, there were never any of those pointless decrees and nitpicking that other children I knew had to endure from their more conventional parents. She lived by the ethos that rules were there to be ignored, icons were for smashing (unless you had smuggled them out of Russia, as she did on a trip to Moscow), and that if you really wanted to do something, you should just go ahead and do it. Quite naturally I later rebelled against her, and became the prissiest, most conservative girl in all of swinging London.
The sixties blew into town and caught us both by surprise. My mother had always been a rebel and was thrilled that society had finally come around to her way of thinking. She had incredible legs, so what could be more flattering than a short leather skirt designed by her friend Mary Quant? She had dead-straight auburn hair, so who better to cut it than Vidal Sassoon? She was an anarchist, so why not let your young son run around naked and go to bed whenever he damn well pleased? She loved to shock, so what’s wrong with smoking a joint or two in front of your kids? And while I was perfectly happy to go shopping for miniskirts and have my hair cut at Sassoon, I was a cautious, careful child who craved order and routine. The cautious child became a cautious teenager who behaved like a disapproving—but secretly admiring—maiden aunt, clucking her tongue at the wild antics of her naughty mother. Even if I had wished to misbehave, which I didn’t, whom would I have done it with? As an A student at an all-girls school with a mild—but for me, totally debilitating—case of acne, I didn’t have a long list of suitors eager to tempt me off the straight and narrow. In fact I had none. But in my early teenage years this didn’t bother me at all, and I was quite happy devouring books and hanging about with my parents and their friends, wondering if I would ever have as much fun as they did when I finally grew up.
THE DAY OF THE WEDDING my mother and I got up before dawn and headed off to Covent Garden to buy flowers for the party that night. We returned in a taxi filled to the roof with roses, delphiniums, mimosa, and enormous branches of apple blossoms, which we arranged before getting dressed for the ceremony at St. Pancras Town Hall. The lunch afterward was in the sun-filled, mirror-spangled dining room at the Ritz, overlooking St. James’s Park. Three other couples had been invited to join us: Sue and Basil Boothby, Margie and Goronwy Rees, and Sonia and Michael Pitt-Rivers. I don’t recall very much about the lunch except that I was seated beside Michael, with whom I fell instantly in love. The fact that he was old, married, and, I was later told, gay, did absolutely nothing to diminish my ardor. He was a dazzlingly handsome farmer with a large estate in Wiltshire that had been left to him by his father, a truly terrifying man who had been one of Oswald Mosley’s more rabid acolytes. The rolling, carefully manicured green hills were sprinkled with bizarre and incongruous follies, brought back by his grandfather, an eminent Edwardian anthropologist, from his travels around the world. A tree house from Sumatra loomed over a bank of rhododendron bushes; an Iraqi meetinghouse, constructed entirely of rushes, stood beside the lake, and, on an island in the middle, a bark hut from Papua New Guinea was flanked by two weeping willows. It was the perfect backdrop for elaborate parties of an exotic nature, which usually involved Michael’s dressing up as an Indian prince with lots of jewels and brocade, his flawless features enhanced by dusky Othello-toned makeup and meticulously applied kohl eyeliner. Sometimes elephants and tigers were brought into play.
A couple of years before the wedding, Michael had been arrested, along with his friend, Lord Montagu, after they had spent the weekend at Montagu’s stately home entertaining some dashing young guardsmen they had picked up in Green Park. Homosexuality was a criminal offense in those days (Freddie was one of the leaders of the campaign to have the law repealed, which finally happened in 1967), and Michael was sent to jail. Ironically his jailer turned out to be a man called Tubb, who had served under him in the army during the war. So each morning, when he came into the cell with the prisoner’s bowl of gruel, Michael would leap up and say, in his best British commander’s voice, “Morning, Tubb,” and poor Tubb, before he could stop himself, would snap to attention and reply, “Morning, sir”—which, Michael always said, was the only fun part about being in jail.
As soon as he was released he got married. Why, nobody could ever figure out. The lady he chose was George Orwell’s mercurial widow, Sonia, and the marriage, predictably enough, was not a great success. They soon divorced, and Michael went on to live happily ever after with a cherubic, golden-haired young painter named William, who shared his passion for dressing up and riding around on elephants.
AFTER THE LUNCH at the Ritz there was a huge party at our new house. Probably shell-shocked, Freddie wrote in his autobiography, “I remember nothing of the party which followed our wedding.” And he wasn’t much more revealing about their honeymoon: “We went to Venice, which I found enchanting, despite the prevalence of German tourists. Then we stopped in Split, where we visited Diocletian’s palace and from there went by sea to Dubrovnik where we settled into a moderately luxurious hotel outside the town.”
But things started to look up a bit when they joined their close friend, Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, in the palatial villa he had rented from the Yugoslav ambassador to London. No doubt Tito had been told all about the ambassador’s distinguished guest, and various Communist-themed treats were laid on, like a trip down the Dalmatian coast on the president of Croatia’s yacht, accompanied by the head of the Yugoslavian trade unions. A fun-packed week followed, until the day Freddie took it into his head to go swimming:
Although the sea was rough and I am not a good swimmer, I succumbed to the temptation of joining the others in a bathe. There was no difficulty in plunging into the water and for a short time I quite enjoyed being buffeted by the waves. The difficulty was in getting out again. You had somehow to ride the crest of a wave and let it deposit you on the hotel terrace.
Riding the waves was never Freddie’s forte, and eventually he was in real trouble and had to be rescued, ending up with his lungs full of seawater. A fever followed, and “No sooner was he aware of my condition than Hugh ordered me to bed.” Since they were due to leave later that day, my mother seems to have been rather more concerned with catching the Orient Express than with Freddie’s fever, and she persuaded her new husband that he was perfectly well enough to travel. Obediently he got up and started putting his clothes on. But then, “Hugh came into the room while I was dressing and in almost no time at all he had me back in bed.”
It was a battle of the wills between the leader of the Labour Party and the Canadian sergeant major, with Freddie in the middle, pulling his underpants up and down. Amazingly the politician won. “I was very much impressed by this glimpse of Hugh Gaitskell in action. Dee is an exceptionally strong-minded woman but her will was no match for his.” In the end good old Tito came through with an airplane and a promise that the Orient Express would be held up, if necessary, and they arrived back in London, tired but happy, ready to embark on married life together.