Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found (20 page)

There was still brits out graffiti on the railway bridges, and bombed-out buildings left over from the Blitz. They fascinated me: buildings with their sides sliced away to expose zigzagging staircases, faded wallpaper, plumbing with nowhere to go. I loved walking the streets and looking into people’s windows: lots of round paper lampshades hanging from the ceilings, and beneath them people cooking, working, playing, or just moving around.

Joan Buck was back in London now, living in a book-crammed top-floor flat in Earls Court Square with her new husband. She showed me her wedding dress, ruched and pleated in a deep smoky purple, her signature color. She told me what a bitchy columnist had written: “The bride looked purple in a radiant dress.” It was the kind of witticism I wished I could come up with, and I admired Joan for being able to laugh about it even though it was cruel and aimed at her. She took me to the offices of
Vogue,
where she worked, and introduced me to people as her little sister. She didn’t have a sister of her own, and I was thrilled to be that for her. She had known me since I was born.

We’d walk down the street playing general-knowledge games like Botticelli, or a category game where you had to guess a person by asking questions like “What kind of kitchen implement is he?” Joan was clever and read lots of books, but she wasn’t bookish and boring—which meant that I didn’t have to be either. She was fun and glamorous and knew famous and interesting people; and she actually wanted to spend time with me. Our minds seemed to work the same way—which was a new experience for me. Usually I had to try hard to get it right, to be the kind of girl I thought the person I was with wanted me to be. When I was with Joan, I seemed to get it right without thinking about it.

Knowing of my crush on John Travolta, she gave me her ticket to a press screening of
Grease
at the Fox offices on Soho Square. The journalists howled with laughter, and I did too—and felt my crush thin, like paint mixed with turpentine. When I came out of the screening room at ten o’clock, there was still light in the sky: an otherworldly, luminous gray-blue, as if every atom of air and solid matter glowed from within. In L.A., so much farther south, the space between day and night was short, and the light was never like that. Somewhere in the blind passages of my memory, maybe, summer evenings at St. Cleran’s or in London glowed with that same magical light. I drank in its energy through my eyes; I wanted to swim in it,
as if it was the elixir of joy.

The house we lived in was strange, with the gilt-and-purple sunroom on top (next to my bedroom, which had a wallpaper of green trellis that made it feel like a birdcage, and me the bird), and a windowless dining room furnished like a monastery on the ground floor, with a long table and hard, narrow pews to sit on. Every room was ringed with cast-iron heating vents, which tripped you up if you were wearing high heels, and the only way out was down a tightly spiraling cast-iron staircase, which you had to take on tiptoe in order not to sink through the holes.

Jack and Anjel’s room was on the middle floor, off the living room, which was rarely used. I thought of that as a movie-star thing: they hung out in their bedrooms, and living rooms were more like transit zones. The only time I ever saw anyone sit in the living room of Ryan’s Beverly Hills house was when he was meeting with a producer about
The Champ,
which he hoped to star in with Griffin. When I visited Marlon Brando’s house, the living room had that same deserted air. That lifeless room separated us, so that we seemed to be living in the house separately, not together.

In the mornings, after Jack left for the studio, I’d go downstairs and sit with Anjel on her bed, watching her put on her makeup. She kept it in a pouch in her enormous handbag, and she’d apply coat after coat of mascara, twirling the brush into her eyelashes, which grew longer and longer in curved arcs, in perfectly parallel lines. I wished my own short eyelashes would do that, but they just stuck together in tarry clumps. The whites of Anjel’s eyes glittered like quartz, and the greeny-brown irises shimmered like sunlight on a tree-shaded pond.

When she finished, she’d open a baggie and put a generous pinch of grass into the lid of a shoe box. Then she opened a packet of rolling papers and used the flap to winnow out the seeds. I thought of this as Anjel’s job, since she always did it, not Jack. A sweet smell
rose up, and the seeds rattled dully against the cardboard. Her wrist, cocked just so, was bony and elegant, the stroking of cardboard against cardboard rhythmic and soothing.

“Can I do it?” I asked one day.

“Sure.”

She handed over the shoe box lid and the Rizla packet. It was harder than I thought; either the clumps of seedy grass just got pushed up the box, or the whole lot fell to the lower edge. But soon I got the hang of it: I learned to look for the black-green spots in the densest clumps, and tease them free. It was work I could do for hours—a service for Anjel, a meditation. Maybe it chimed with some strand of our Italian peasant DNA: the satisfaction of a good harvest.

She showed me how to roll the grass into a joint: stick two Rizlas together, spread the pinch of grass so that the sausage was a little fatter at the ends than in the middle, then fold over the edge of the paper and tuck it in, pressing down the outside edges of my index fingers while my thumbs rolled it tight. Then a quick, businesslike lick from left to right to seal it, slide it under the elastic strap of an enameled Art Deco cigarette case, and start on the next.

I never wanted to smoke one, and she never offered one to me. Fiction was my drug of choice. I could lose myself in a story for hours, but snap back to reality in a millisecond. My emotions were so exhausted that I felt very little, and I liked it that way. The thought of getting stoned, of losing control of my thoughts or my body, terrified me.

Anjel’s birthday came in early July, and not knowing what to give her, I gave her the thing I valued most in the world: a print of the photo of Mum that had been on the cover of
Life
. It had been in a portfolio of Halsman photos of her, which was among the things that had arrived at Gloom Castle one day: a trunkload of my stuff from St. Cleran’s. I didn’t know where the trunk had been during those years that I’d lived at Cici’s house, but seemingly Dad had decided, as soon as I’d been parked at Gloom Castle, that my situation
was now permanent enough to have it delivered to me.

Aunt Dorothy had put the photograph—Mum posed as the
Mona Lisa
—in a pale green-and-gold frame. I’d brought it with me to London—a guardian angel.

Thrilled with myself, I wrapped it and gave it to Anjel. When she opened it, tears came to her eyes.

“Thank you, Legs.” Her voice broke as she said it. I knew I’d given her something no one else could have given her, something far more valuable than the diamonds and rubies she got from Jack.

My fourteenth birthday was six weeks later. We went to stay at someone’s country house for the weekend, and I was put at the children’s table for dinner. I felt that Anjel had betrayed me, so I sulked. When everyone went for a walk the next day, I refused to go. The woman whose house it was didn’t go either, but sat on the step in the sunshine, shelling peas. They dropped with ghostly pings into a metal bowl, making little whispers as they skittered around and came to rest. I stopped reading, and watched. She was so serene, warmed by the sun, green pearls falling from her fingers. That was who I wanted to be.

We’d been in London for a month or more before John Julius called and asked to see me. I had made no effort to get in touch with him. Probably Cici told him I was there, and gave him the number. I didn’t particularly want to see him, but I accepted the meeting—just as I had to accept the fact that he existed. I would have preferred it if he hadn’t, but at least his existence made sense of things. That logical puzzle went around in my brain, but I felt nothing. There must be something wrong with me, I thought: I should feel something, anything. I was sleepwalking. I was taking steps forward in some kind of unconscious agreement with myself, without having any sense of what or why—or of where that “forward” might lead.

John Julius asked if I’d like to see Bath. I didn’t know what Bath
was—only that it was a strange name for a place. So I said yes. “No” would have been argumentative and troublemaking, and might have made him ask what I would like to see. I wouldn’t have been able to answer.

The drive to Bath took two hours—a long way for a day trip. I wondered if he was trying to put distance between us and the rest of his life. I hoped he wouldn’t ask me if I’d read the books he’d sent: three volumes of his mother’s autobiography, and one volume of his father’s, and each December a new little pamphlet called
A Christmas Cracker
. I hadn’t opened any of them.

I had a strange sense of dislocation as I watched my father drive us west down the M4. Dad never drove. Someone always had to drive him: Betty, Paddy Lynch, Cici, Gladys, chauffeurs and taxis. It hadn’t occurred to me, before that day, that there was anything unusual in this. Suddenly, as I sat in the passenger seat of John Julius’s silver-blue sedan, Dad’s kingliness seemed demanding and grandiose. Despite his title, John Julius was more solidly a part of the real, democratic world.

In Bath, we drove to a car park: a dreary, randomly aligned expanse of asphalt and concrete. A tall woman with white hair walked to meet us.

“This is Mollie,” said John Julius.

“Hello,” I said politely. He didn’t explain who she was, beyond that. It was obvious she wasn’t his wife. She was beautiful and elegant in a rangy, tweed-trousered way.

There was something furtive, I thought, about meeting in a car park. I wasn’t sure whether I was the one being discreetly kept away, or Mollie was. Perhaps because we were both peripheral, we didn’t have to be hidden from each other. I wondered, suddenly, if I was just an excuse that allowed John Julius to meet up with Mollie. If he’d really wanted to spend the day with me, why was he bringing her into it? I took it as a slight. He must love her very much, I decided, to drive such a long way just to see her for lunch.

They took me to the Roman baths. I didn’t know the Romans had been in Britain, and John Julius didn’t think to explain it to me. So I didn’t quite understand why the baths were ruined, or why we were looking at them at all. I felt muffled, as if nothing I was seeing was quite in focus, and whatever sounds I heard seemed to come from far away. The information coming into my brain was fuzzy and jumbled. I couldn’t bring it together to mean anything.

I thought he was relieved when he finally dropped me back at the house on Cheyne Walk. I was a duty he’d performed nobly, and it was a good thing I was a semi-secret. I had been an embarrassment to him just by being born; and I was an embarrassment in myself, now. I felt stupid, nonfunctioning, American. My clothes, which I’d liked till that day, were all wrong. I’d worn my best outfit, which Anjel had bought me during the Ryan time: a gray wool skirt, cream shirt and jacket, and Maud Frizon boots—but they were two-tone cowboy boots in cream and magenta, and the cream part, which was canvas, was stained blue from the day I’d been caught in the rain wearing jeans.

When I got up to my birdcage room and took off my jacket, I saw that it was smeared with red all down one side. So was my handbag—a canvas Sportsac with short handles that tucked into my armpit. A red pen had leaked, right through the canvas. The jacket was ruined; the ink would never wash out. I cut a strip of cotton—the cream-colored shirt had come with a matching piece of fabric to tie around the neck—and glued it to the handbag over the red stains.

I could have bought a new bag. Sportsacs weren’t expensive, and Anjel wouldn’t have minded. I didn’t. The bandage kept the red ink off my clothes, and no one would see it if I kept that side next to my body. I was more or less able to hide it when I unshouldered the bag and set it down. I felt defensive about my bandaged bag—which Anjel must have sensed, as she never questioned it. She would look at it doubtfully, and I would pretend not to see and brazen it out.
The bandage got messier as the edges, which I never sewed down, pulled away from the glue. Still, I kept it. It was damaged, but that didn’t make it worthless. I had fixed it, and even though I hadn’t done a great job, it was good enough.

“How can you be spending so much money?”

Anjel was furious, standing over me where I sat on the purple-carpeted floor eating my dinner and watching
Top of the Pops
on the tiny TV, with punk bands like X-Ray Spex and British singers like David Essex that nobody in California had ever heard of. It was September. The decision had been made that I would stay with her and Jack in London through the autumn.

I knew I’d been spending too much, but I couldn’t help it. The tutors who were teaching me my American schoolwork were scattered all over London, and I was taking five or six taxis a day. I was trying to be frugal, not buying things for myself beyond what was necessary, but in less than a week the envelopes of ten twenty-pound notes that Tim, Jack’s cook, gave me were gone.

“Do you think you’re some kind of princess? You can’t go on a bus or tube like everybody else?”

Joan had told me what bus to take to her flat, and where to find it, but I’d never been on a tube train. I didn’t know how to read the maps.

“I always had to go everywhere on public transport,” she said, and stormed out.

I felt a rush of panic. What if Jack said I couldn’t stay because I was too expensive? I knew he had lots of money, but that didn’t mean he had to spend it on me. And if he did say that, what would that mean for Anjelica’s relationship with him? I didn’t want to be the cause of another breakup between them. She belonged with him, it was obvious, and I was virtually holding my breath that this time it would last. He was being very generous in letting me live with
them—with her. And could I be spending so much that it was a lot even for him? The last thing I wanted to do was make him think I was a burden. I was doing my best to be sweet or, best of all, invisible.