What to Look for in Winter (19 page)

One day a vision entered the lecture theatre. Of course I had seen beauties before and there were even two at Girton, but this was different. She was attired in a coat of a red fox and it was clear that her electrical and crackling head of hair weighed more than her etiolated and fashionably attired body, from her Manolo Blahnik boots to her Joseph jeans and her Sonia Rykiel jersey (I was a
Vogue
reader and could do the semiotics). We had a catwalk model among us and she was one big cat: Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Tamasin was at King's, a college full of interesting people who were not Girtonians. They included descendants of old Bloomsbury, precociously brilliant philosophers, a girl who lived with a man who had already sired children, and my beloved friend Rupert Christiansen, who allowed himself four minutes off work between breakfast and lunch and five in the afternoon for the ingestion of a cheese scone. Every vacation Rupert worked in the Arts Council bookshop in Sackville Street. He had one, orange needlecord, suit. Rupert is colour blind. He saved up every penny to go and stand in the gods at Covent Garden.

It says much for Rupert that he took me out to see the ballet
La Bayadère
. After three days' thought I dressed for this occasion in eight-inch cork platforms, white tights, a wraparound white cheesecloth skirt, a scarf tied across my by now ultra-skinny chest and an enticing new bubble perm inspired by the film of
The Great Gatsby
with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. Rupert is a good six foot two and he weathered this fearful first date to become my daily correspondent, my test of decency, my measure of honour.

It was during Prelims that I realised that I could speak in tongues, or rather that I could do so if drunk enough and if the drink were whisky. Today I do not drink at all or I would be dead, and when people ask, ‘Do you miss anything about drinking?' I can with perfect truth say no. But I do miss the smell of those island malts, that are nothing more or less than the smells of the islands themselves, of sea, of kelp, of heather, of peat, of wrack, of mist, of slow, slow burning.

I gave a party at the end of Cambridge, for my twenty-first birthday, for the friends I had somehow made. I sent out invitations on which I had drawn a bough with golden apples. The words written below invited each recipient to help me take my golden bow. The house in which the party took place belonged to none other than my present landlord, to whom, that first time, I was a lousy lodger, borrowing his tank tops, sending telegrams via his phone bill and continually introducing cats into the ménage. I remember Peggotty and Portnoy, who was a Siamese and therefore always complaining. In this may be glimpsed something of the golden character of Niall Hobhouse, who was Anthony Appiah's cousin. To my twenty-first birthday party, the golden bow, I wore a jumpsuit made of paper that I had sprayed gold, and gold cowboy boots. I had not neglected to spray my hair gold.

For some reason, just as the party got going, Katie told me to cook some crumpets. She talks so quickly that I frequently mishear. I have before now jumped out of a boat when she was just telling me to ‘go about'. I set to with the crumpets and continued being my entertaining self, welcoming my friends and no doubt swigging along. For the record, Katie tells me that she was in Singapore on this occasion; so memory casts its dramas.

The grill began to send out little flames. I bent to attend to it. There was a thick smell of burning hair. The paint with which I had sprayed my hair and dungarees was gold car paint, highly flammable. I rushed upstairs dressed in flames, a zip, underwear and cowboy boots, drenched myself in the bath and returned later to my own
party re-attired in some no doubt fearful ensemble, maybe even the £2.99 pink rubber dress from Sex on the King's Road.

At the party was my very quiet friend Amschel Rothschild. He wore a navy blue velvet suit, an expression of amusement on his face, one that might have been painted by El Greco, and a cymbidium from his hothouse in his buttonhole. He had neatly sprayed the orchid gold.

But for him, who took me out of Cambridge for the last weeks before Finals and set me to my books as you might set an animal to exercise, I should have had no kind of a degree, let alone the pleasure of discovering what it means really to work at a subject and how that pleasure has no end. While it may be solitary, it is, at its best, love and sight, or, rather, vision. A love in which there is no doubt that you wish to do the best you can, not for your own but for its sake. Amschel died far too young and I shall miss him till I die. So I owe him my ‘good' degree and many more degrees of gratitude.

I
n the summer of 1976, there was a heat that dried the green out of England. It was possible to faint away when you stood up. Water was rationed. There was even, I believe, a Minister for Water, or perhaps he was a Minister for Drought. During that summer, I fainted on a train that was crossing Suffolk and woke up with words branded on my arm in sunburn: Second-Class. I had seldom travelled far; after all, England was quite far away from my first home in Edinburgh and Colonsay was in itself both domestic and utterly exotic. There had been Holland, Italy, Switzerland; nowhere outwith Europe.

Amschel had at the time the use of his parents' house in St James's on Barbados. The house was reminiscent of Caribbean life as it's not often advertised, a life of conversation, books and ideas. Amschel invited Tamasin and me to stay at the house and then to travel with him to Cape Cod to join his sister Emma.

Two days before travelling on this, to me, unimaginably complicated journey, I was on the tube on my way to work at
Vogue
. A nice young man called Simon Crow greeted me. I was standing; it was a crowded carriage. Simon was sitting down. He asked me what I was up to and I said that I was going on an aeroplane to Barbados and America. Simon was in the Foreign Office and knew his stuff, clearly.

‘Have you got a passport and a visa?' he asked, still half asleep.

I had neither, but I did have a pair of pink stripy lounging trousers I'd sewn that I considered very suitable for Caribbean nights.

Simon Crow, who I think was at Oxford while I was at Cambridge, got me a passport in one day and stood in line to get me a visa. The sort of man you need in diplomacy.

The reader may not believe the following story. Or rather, it could not happen now, as old people say. Two days before my first wedding,
my husband-to-be asked if I had a passport in my married name, since our honeymoon destination might require one. I really don't know whether I quailed within while looking noncommittal or if I confessed. What I did do was telephone the Passport Office in Petty France. The telephone was answered in those times by a person. I blurted out my story in all its idiotic detail:

‘Getting married in two days; new surname going to be Wallop, yes that's right W-A-L-L-O-P; don't know where I'm going because it's my honeymoon; yes very happy indeed; I have got into a mess like this before and the person that helped me out was called Mr Potts.'

‘This is Potts speaking.'

 

But I'm travelling ahead of myself. In Barbados I learned how delicious are limes, that mace is the web that wraps itself around the nutmeg, that really good manners go all through a person, that Tamasin would be pre-eminent in whatever world she decided to take on, that you must never sunbathe under a manchineel tree or its tannic fruit will drip poison on you. I read all the books save for the esoterica concerning the world of spermatology (Amschel's father Victor Rothschild was a world expert on sperm as well as many other things including Jonathan Swift and the safe defusing of bombs). I sat on the white sand reading books and going blotchy in my Celtic fashion. Only one beach boy tried to pick me up during the whole ten days and he gave up on about day four when I said I was happy reading. ‘You not a woman, you a machine.'

It's the quiet of the luxury of the place that I shall not forget, the white coral walls, the polished white coral floor, the stuffed white sofas and chairs, the delectable shade, the pale, light-lipped sea. In the library, the books were plump with sea salt, hygroscopically swollen. Books literally holding water is an theme for me since so much of my life has been spent at sea or enislanded.

The rain came promptly at siesta time, when Amschel would retire with verbally sophisticated modern authors whose drift he might sometimes explain to me later. Tamasin and I occasionally set out upon adventures, certainly the least bearable of which was a trip on a pirate vessel named the
Jolly Roger.
This vessel pumped out reggae for an hour in the middle of each afternoon, anchored offshore, offered limitless orange petrol to drink, and was operated by a captain with a strong line in innuendo; the voyage's highlight was a mock marriage involving a good deal of crazy foam and rice. I do not mind if I never have that kind of fun again. Tamasin, in her unapproachable beauty, fared rather better than a poiseless Scot absolutely lost without her book. The drink was at this stage of my life too nasty even for me to drink.

We flew to Boston and drove down boulevards of thrilling tackiness; here the Leaning Tower of Pizza, there ‘Dan's Clams: the more you eat the more you get'. The house Emma and her friend Alexander Cockburn had taken for the summer was a silvery clapboard house with verandas, perfect for a reader of Updike. You could walk out along the quay and swim from it through soft yet salt water edged with rushes. Intelligence was again the air of the house, this time fashionably radical and very fast moving. Alexander made us Manhattans to drink. For some reason, although I had in Barbados been soaking up four or five daiquiris a day, that Manhattan did me in. I spoke in tongues, I howled, I went on and on about the things about which drunks go on and on, the things they drink to forget. I remember being excruciatingly boring about Colonsay, and going on too about mothers. I was out of my depth in all senses after two measures of bourbon, a sugar lump and some bitters.

Emma did what she does, which was remain white and cool. Alexander, having much and distinguished Irish blood, must have seen a drunk Celt before but I was terrified to meet anyone's eyes at breakfast, so I stayed upstairs for as long as I could reading
Paradise Lost.
I also found, read and was scared by
Hollywood Babylon
by
Kenneth Anger. Its photographs of dead people in undignified settings, head in the oven, perfect hairdo hanging out of a ruined car, stays with me. It set one register of my bad dreams. Somehow the shamefulness of the book attached itself to my shame about having got so drunk.

I reassembled myself and occurred brightly into the others' normal day at about eleven with the gelatinous acted normality that will be familiar to all who are or know alcoholics.

We progressed to New York, where Emma lived on Central Park West. Again the note in the house was of the Left, of books and the want of show. I discovered that New York was a walkable city, like Edinburgh, and loved it. I was unprepared for its expressive beauty, the variety of shapes, the quality of reciprocated light thrown between the buildings. Amschel fell for a Moholy-Nagy in the Guggenheim and drank gimlets at the Plaza Bar. We visited a bookshop at midnight and called in meals; what could be better?

Years later, when I was just over thirty, my Girtonian friend Miss Montague of Greenwich Village got married. She asked me to be one of her matrons of honour. There were, I believe, eight of us. I was much the tallest and the smallest was a groovy society photographer called Roxanne Lowitt who could look good in a brown bag. Sarah herself was a vision as a bride, lacy, light, frothing. I may have to go into the background of the garments worn by those of us in her train. Her mother was a balletomane and was to be found, as a rule, wherever in the world Nureyev was dancing. Sarah had one precious piece of material designed by Bakst for the
Ballets Russes
. It was a shimmering jungle silk, but there was hardly enough of it to go round eight people, so a plan had been devised. Each of our dresses, cut exactly to fit our disparate measurements, would bear at its neck a lozenge of the precious cloth.

So it was, on the afternoon after Sarah's graceful and affecting wedding ceremony, that I was accosted by Christopher Hitchens, somewhere near Union Square. I did notice that we were surrounded
by people who were not conventionally dressed but, hey, this was the time of club culture and I must hang with it.

Christopher has one of the most compelling voices alive. I confess I bought on CD his book
god Is Not Great
simply in order to hear those tones, so smoothed by cigs, so enriched by the booze, so clever and hardly vain at all, so lubriciously dated and grand.

‘Hi, Claude,' said Christopher. ‘Happy Halloween. And what are you dressed as? A parsnip?'

As we returned to England in the aeroplane in 1976, Amschel asked if I'd like to be his lodger in Warwick Avenue. When I said yes thank you, I had no idea to what I was acceding. I did not know London in any sense at all. I had visited Madame Tussauds, a few antiquarian book-shops, Vogue House which is at number one Hanover Square, and perhaps a handful of fashion boutiques, Biba, Bus Stop and Laurence Corner Military Apparel, whose khaki siren suits were, with gold stiletto-heeled boots, my relaxation wear throughout the nineteen-seventies. I had no idea about the wires that hold a life together. All I knew was that I had that job on
Vogue
.

Warwick Avenue is a boulevard running down from Blomfield Road and the Regent's Canal. Ava Gardner had lived around here. The green cabmen's hut is famous among cabbies for the quality of its fry-ups. Amschel's flat had been lived in before by his sister Emma and Alexander Cockburn and had clearly lain at a nerve centre of sixties radicalism. The journal
Three Weeks
was published from there. The chastity of the décor was something that I have come to think of as a particular form of
le goût Rothschild
. The first flight of stone stairs was bare. At some point a large quantity of serviceable elephant-grey carpet had become available and there it was on the floors of the drawing room, the serious library, all the way up the next flight of stairs and into each bedroom beyond and so right to the very top attic room, which was to be the epicentre of some heartbreaks. Amschel himself was fastidious and exquisitely dressed. His trousers came from Beale & Inman, his suits from Anderson & Sheppard. He was twenty-one, his jeans were ironed,
his shoes from Wildsmith. But he looked like a saint, not a dandy. He was attending the City University. He would return from the country with his clothes for the week beautifully ironed and ready for his week's study. Later he became the circulation manager of Ian Hamilton's
New Review
. No situation could have been more elegantly suited to him in all its minimalism. At weekends he raced classic cars. His room contained his bed and, leaning against the wall, one ormolu-framed mirror that may have come from Mentmore.

The drawing room at Warwick Avenue was furnished with a desk made of a single curve of wood, a sculpture by the Greek artist Takis that when switched on at the wall flashed its alternating yellow, green, purple and blue lights, and an elephantine set of sofa and chairs, comfortably expiring. We did have a telly. I think it sat on a pile of telephone directories. There was a pencil drawing by Léger over the desk. Occasionally, Amschel might visit the kitchen, halve an avocado with a surgeon's care, ease away its stone, and spoon a little Hellman's Mayonnaise into the depression. Once or twice I saw him cut a slice of bread and turn it by various processes into toast and Marmite.

His generosity in having, as lodger, one so improvident and domestically gifted only at cleaning rather than cooking, was typical of the sweetness within the formality of this complicated yet simple-hearted man. I paid no rent. We had no romance. I suppose it was poor Amschel upon whom I learned to cook. I spared him the dish that got me through much of Cambridge, rice cooked with Bovril or tomato ketchup or, when the occasion demanded protein, whelks. I am not sure I could look a whelk in the face now. I am not talking about winkles, but whelks, that have a keratinous front door the size of a thumbnail, a flesh-coloured body that looks like a plastic model of the inner ear, and, tremendously evident khaki digestive arrangements.

Amschel's father, who had mesmerising and often alarming charm, asked me one day whether I could cook Sole Colbert. I liked saying yes to Victor and sometimes his early morning calls demanding, for example, a crested ear trumpet, were challenges that it was amusing
to rise to. I cannot imagine how his tenderly beautiful wife Tess and he got down the astounding brew I had made over three days' reduction of beef bones. I had reinvented Bovril itself. I suppose Tess, as she always did, made it all right.

Meanwhile, I was learning the magazine trade from the bottom up. I am uncoordinated and not good with knives. Layout in those days involved the cutting out of individual letters with a scalpel and their placing at the actual point upon the page demanded by the art director.
Vogue
's art director at the time was the innovative Terry Jones. The really fascinating people in the art room were the retouchers, who did by hand what computers do now, that is, make perfection real, with eyes as minutely observant as those of a jeweller, using brushes as fine as the tip of an ermine's tail. With almost buddhistic patience and only the most cryptic of chat, these quiet, gifted people would lift a face on film from pleasantness into beauty by the application of tiny dots. At least one was a refugee from Austria. I could imagine her retouching for Horst, for Baron de Meyer. I imagine the retouchers spoiled their eyesight, though they did have lenses much like those a watchmaker might use. The rhythm of our weeks was ruled by ‘The Book', which was the magazine itself. Copy dates were long and dictated by the seasons of the couture, so we lived always in an unreal, future time. There was nothing more precious than the dummy of the next issue, which would be full of ‘stories' that had been thought out by the fashion room well in advance and dictated by some shift in collective mood as mysterious as the great annual migrations.

My first summer at
Vogue
was a summer of cream. All the girls in the fashion room had the look. If you didn't understand how to have the look, you couldn't be in the fashion room. The girls in the fashion room were riveting to observe. They had a susceptibility to trend and nuance that is germane to what keeps capitalism rolling round. In some this amounted to pure artistry; I think of Sheila Wetton, who had been Molyneux's house model and who wore gloves to work every
day; of flame-like Grace Coddington who cannot but breathe out new trends as she exhales, yet moves in classicism like the night; of Liz Tilberis, who epitomised for me fresh-faced, freckly, friendly, calico-wearing chic even though she ended a perfect size four for couture, thanks to cancer. The girls in the fashion room hardly spoke to the girls in Copy, or even in Features, where I ended up.