Behind this exquisite pavilion was a courtyard containing a long house that had at one point been where beer had been brewed for all the servants employed in the main house. In this house lived Graham C. Greene and his family, including at one point his mother Helga, with whom Raymond Chandler had been in love. Quite briefly, Clarissa Dickson-Wright was his housekeeper, and once she babysat for me. At this point she and I were both what is called ‘practising alcoholics’. I had no idea.
Every day when I woke up at Wotton, I was glad to do so. I suppose that means that one has found a place in the world. Once I saw fox cubs playing leapfrog on the back lawn. I so loved being there and when the children were with me it felt as though beauty in itself might feed them the things that disunity was taking from them. It was a hopelessly over-aestheticised view, I can see. But to this day, I like it when I know that they are in the places where there is beauty.
Mrs Brunner met and charmed my father; they were exactly each other’s sort of thing. Daddy, possessed by architecture, crazy about Soane and handsome; and Mrs Brunner, obsessed by her great charge, her house, and very fond of flirting. Mrs Brunner welcomed other friends as well, though she was a great one for taking what the Scots call scunners. She was absolutely beastly to the boyfriend of one of my best friends whom she regarded, quite correctly, as treating my friend unkindly. If not a witch, she was an advanced telepath. She could also dismiss people simply on the unfair grounds of their want of physical attractiveness, and she was extremely fussy about fairness between the children so that if someone bought a present for just one of them, there would be a note requesting the presence of the giftless child in Mrs Brunner’s drawing room where would be laid out a fairy feast and some compensatory present.
It is quite a feat for a mother of an only child to think in this way. She had at some level remained not childish but fierce as children are, and we were all her cubs and felt it. I hope that it is no shadow to Mrs Brunner’s own daughter to say that Mrs Brunner made me feel, if not mothered, protected.
My friend Rosa was a fellow of Brasenose. My friend Fram Dinshaw, whom I’d known since I was less than twenty, was a fellow at St Catherine’s College. My friend James Fergusson was working at an antiquarian bookshop in Oxford. Jamie and the children and I would meet in Oxford for greedy Chinese lunches at a restaurant where in the fish tank were those carp whose eyes stick out and who seem to be dancing with their floating veils of fin.
Long before my first marriage, Fram had, outside Rosa’s house in Oxford, given me a kiss. Shortly afterwards he wrote to me. I read the letter standing up on the Bakerloo Line between Warwick Avenue and Oxford Circus, on my way to Vogue. In it, he adumbrated that if I did not smell so horribly of smoke he might conceivably take an interest in me and that there was something about me that reminded him of blackberries and that we might, if I calmed down, end up together.
But by now, many years later, I was a vessel with cargo, my children. All the smelling of blackberries in the world doesn’t mean that you can be careless with human souls.
Our first date, or rather what reveals itself to have been, retrospectively, a date, was to Rycote Chapel. In the car Fram put on ‘Soave sia il vento’. Later he made me a tape recording of some Larkin poems. I found myself playing them when he was not there. I listened again and again to ‘The Trees’:
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Once, when the children were with Quentin, I agreed to go and stay with Fram at his family’s house outside Cortona. It was to be reached by a dirt road cut into the hillside. Opposite lived a couple called Gina and Nino Franchina. She was the daughter of the artist Gino Severini and granddaughter of the poet Paul Fort. Nino made tree-sized helical metal sculptures. Further along lived a family who would prove to contain the novelist Amanda Craig, though I’ve not met her.
Early one morning, taking a walk up the lane and between the strawberry trees, I looked in the damper gullies at the edge of the dry thin path. I couldn’t believe what I saw. There they were, growing wild, those black velvet irises that I love. They were everywhere at that spot, and beyond them red tulips, with reflexed petals and thin stems like veins, which preferred to be on flatter tilth, as though they knew that they were a motif on a million Turkish carpets.
The house at Cortona was simple, two storeyed, whitewashed within and then decorated by Fram’s mother, who had a gift for drawing that had won her a place, that she did not take up, at the Slade. The house smelt of woodsmoke, lemons and basil and was set amid olive groves. It had a particularly non-Italian garden because the whole family had that passion for flowers that may have come from living beside a desert in Karachi. Outside the house was a large Magnolia grandiflora, crinum lilies grew along the front and a catalpa shaded the terrace where, in good weather, we ate outside. Troughs of basil were everywhere and ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glory twined around the kitchen door. The rose that changes in colour, Rosa chinensis mutabilis, grew around the front door. At Easter peonies we never identified, which had come from the villa below, would flower with pink heads considerably bigger than my own children’s. The bottom of the garden was hedged with a vine of that most fragrant and intoxicating grape the uva di fragola, the grape whose taste and scent is that of a strawberry and makes a wine that for some reason the European authorities disapprove of, so it is drunk in secret among friends. Rosemary and sage and all the herbs that flourish in dryness lent their oil to the air. By the well stood a fig tree and another deeper down the garden. At the side of the house was the kitchen garden, or orto.
The family who originally lived just below and later moved into the local town still came up to work for gli indiani on the hill. Franca, the wife, worked in the orto and as cook, and her husband Guido came and fixed emergencies such as wild boar in the garden or a plumbing disaster.
Negotiations between a Tuscan peasant and a fastidious Zoroastrian, as Fram’s mother Mehroo temperamentally as well as religiously was, were nothing like as difficult as they might have been had the two women not decided that they liked one another. Franca therefore simply fitted in with what she was told, that only napkins with a person’s initial on might be given to that person, that never must bedspreads be put on a bed with the foot part at the top, that all sudsing had to be done before all rinsing when washing up, and that the rinsing must be under flowing water, that dirty utensils must never be laid down on the side but on a dish and so on. Much of it was common sense and the rest she took as part of the charm of this little family who had decided for part of their year to move into the house that had proven such hard work for her own family.
Out in the orto, copper sulphate was sprayed and dried to a high abstract blue on the tomatoes, grapes, aubergines, peppers and zucchini, whose flowers Franca would fry and scatter with salt.
To watch Fram’s mother cook was to watch an artist at work. Her fine, beautiful hands had nails like almonds with that natural line of white seen in some Madonnas. To take the bitterness from a cucumber, she would cut off the narrower end and — often gently telling one a story and meeting one’s eyes with her own — turn and turn and turn the cut piece of cucumber until it had drawn out all the bitter white milk. Then, and then only, would the cucumber be ready for peeling and for slicing into lenses as cool as ice for hot eyes, cut not with a mandolin but with a little knife. She did everything domestic beautifully so that it must have been, for her family, like living with a ballerina or an antelope, something incapable of ungrace or disgrace. She was lovely to behold. It was a quality that resided in tempo as much as in address and gave each act its own dignity. She made, rather than took, time.