'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  One evening, the Pols gave a cocktail party. Among the guests was a woman disparagingly named Virginia Creeper, who ran an estate agent in St Tropez. Derek had mentioned how much he enjoyed the sight of vineyards, so when he rushed back to Paris, I spent the rest of the honeymoon viewing suitably vineyardy properties for sale; we had decided to buy one in the Midi.

  Although I would have preferred a house in a remoter region, we finally decided on an old mas in the forest behind Grimaud. A lawyer flew down from Lausanne, bringing a wad of notes in a briefcase. In those days, to avoid paying property tax, the seller liked to be paid partly in cash so that the total sum of the property never got declared.

  Every summer, Derek went to Deauville for the racing season, a suite being booked a year in advance in the luxurious Hôtel Normandy, which resembled a prison. Though Derek usually had a horse running, he never bet. When not sitting in the grandstand, he roamed the paddock chatting with his trainer. And I am no gambler, even if I have money to lose, so, rather than attend the races, I preferred to have a lesson with the hotel tennis pro or swim from a crowded Deauville beach. The afternoon Derek bought six yearlings for £12,000, I happened to wander into Van Cleef. The vendeuse was a close friend of Derek’s. She greeted me warmly and brought out a tray of jewellery on which lay a magnificent square-cut emerald. Used to dealing with rich men’s wives and seeing my approbation, she intimated that the jewel could be put down on Derek’s account. Perhaps wrongly, I decided on the setting of a man’s gold signet ring. A month later, I remember so well going to the Place Vendôme to collect the emerald and walking away from Van Cleef with this beautiful ring on my finger to board a crowded bus, and wondering whether, should my hand strike the handrail, the stone would crack. Then Derek and I set about finding a less dark and damp house. But we had totally opposing tastes. There was one lovely apartment with a terrace looking on to the Seine for a million francs. Derek thought the price outrageous. It also had a view of Nôtre-Dame, the epitome of all God Boxes. So when the Louis-David house was sold for double Derek had paid five years before, we had nowhere to live and we moved into a suite at the Ritz. A salon separated our rooms. A British cat breeder sent over another Abyssinian and I collected Melanie from the airport. One day, passing a pet shop on the Quai des Fleurs, I saw a baby coati shut up in a box and bought Folie, so named after Georges Bernier’s prophecy, on hearing of my marriage to W., ‘C’est de la folie totale.’ Though Folie did once get on to the roof and frighten an elderly lady by entering her bedroom window, and Mell kept running into the corridor and entering other people’s suites, the animals settled down well to a life of luxury.

  One day I went into the Bois de Boulogne with the floor waiter who helped me give Folie a run, but when we put her up a tree, she turned out to be retarded and could not climb down, and this handicap eventually led to her undoing.

  The Ritz breakfast, oddly enough, was always a disappointment. The coffee never tasted freshly ground. So I bought a gas ring and grinder, and made my own. Derek had, as I have mentioned, his eccentricities. Instead of ringing for the floor waiter at drinks time, he preferred to buy a bottle of whisky, bring it in and only rang when he wanted some ice to be brought.

  One evening, we took Jim and Larry to dinner at Maxim’s. Afterwards we all went to a nightclub. Jim and I were rudely chattering across Derek who lost his temper, grabbed our two heads and cracked them together like a pair of walnuts. Whereupon I took Derek’s hand and bit into his thumb. The next tiff took place at the Ritz. This time I snapped at my husband’s lip. A doctor had to be summoned and Derek went about with a bandaged chin so that his loyal ex-wife, Janetta, assuming Folie to be the culprit, said to him, ‘You ought to have that vicious animal put down.’

  I wrote to Cyril: ‘Tell Janetta from me she’s a silly bitch. People who talk of putting animals down ought to be put down themselves. The coati is a sweet, docile little animal who hardly dares bite into a banana, let alone a pair of thin lips, and prefers snails, anyway.’

  Mummy wrote to say that a friend of hers had read in a paper that ‘Derek had been bitten by your coati and he was going about with a patch on his mouth. I hope it is nothing serious …’

  I then decided I would like to own a Balthus and, with Derek’s approval, I went to the Balthus Gallery in Paris, but there were none for sale. A Balthus, they said, was always bought in advance by some collector. It was Jim who finally found one for sale in New York – one of those sensual young ladies wearing a négligé and bright red slippers, reclining on a Récamier. Although I had seen a photograph of the painting before it was shipped over, when the young lady arrived she bore such a strong resemblance to a youthful Yvonne Hamilton that a month later, leaving Folie in the care of Peter the floor waiter who lived in a squalid hotel off the Champs-Elysées, I had to traipse with the picture all the way back to New York, travelling first class on La France, a gigantic new liner with so many bars and elevators I could never find my cabin. (It was later transformed into a Caribbean cruise ship.) The same New York gallery took back the Balthus and gave me $24,000. It would now be worth a fortune.

  Dressed by Dior and Cardin, I found I had become far more popular in New York and got taken on a round of parties. Charlie took me to a party given by Drue Heintz where one saw Sagan sitting dolefully alone without anyone to talk to and Norman Mailer went round shadow-boxing. Bowden took me to the Rolos. Earl Macgrath gave a party. Bob included me in a dinner for Isaiah Berlin and Nelson Aldrich. Then I flew to Palm Beach for the weekend and got back to Paris exhausted.

  I may be wrong but I got the impression that ‘mon ami’ Jim had expected to be given a commission on the first Balthus deal, but I do not think it was the reason that, apart from a brief encounter in the Deux Magots, we did not meet for fifteen years, when I was living in Seine-et-Marne and Jim drove down for dinner. As soon as he entered the walled garden, he asked, on seeing a superb cherry tree dripping with fruit, for a ladder, which he mounted, and the tree was summarily stripped. Teeny Duchamp, the painter’s wife, also came to dinner. Afterwards Jim drove her home to see her collection of surrealist paintings. The next day he rang to thank me, adding that he had given the cherries to his housekeeper.

  Derek and I went on living in the Ritz with the animals and Tristan und Isolde blaring away on the stereo, even after the management had retaliated, and not even Derek’s rages would rid our suite of the sound of clogs overhead.

  Then, having arranged with him that Mummy and Aunty Greta be relieved of any further money worries, and that each should receive a life settlement, I packed my offspring into the car and drove to the Midi to install myself with an oil lamp, a bed, a gas stove and fridge in the mas, and set about finding a builder to raise the roof on one side and build on a bedroom that would have a view of the surrounding valley. Derek flew down at weekends and stayed either in Grimaud or in the residence de la Pinède, a luxury hotel in St Tropez, until one day he broke a leg running into the Place Vendôme to hail a taxi, and I returned to Paris, when my diary callously notes: ‘Alone at the Ritz. What bliss!’

  While Derek was in hospital with his leg in plaster, Eileen introduced me to the Marquis de Ségur who invited me out to dinner. When we left the restaurant, the Marquis asked me back to his apartment for coffee and a liqueur for the sole purpose, it turned out, of seducing me on his sofa. Alas, he was not exactly an ‘homme fatal’ and, after a lengthy struggle with my black Cardin boots that reached up to the thighs, panting with exhaustion, he gave up.

  When Derek came out of hospital we both agreed on an apartment in the rue Jean-Goujon, off the Avenue Montaigne. Derek bought it, whereupon, to his horror, I found a decorator who set about distempering the walls in violent colours; for apart from a tiny Corot, he owned a rather dull collection of Impressionist paintings that would admittedly have looked more remarkable when seen against a muted background. But we were never to live together in the rue Jean-Goujon. By then, to quote Cyril, Derek had found his Katharine Parr. The
re is no doubt that a lot of money can be deleterious. It can cause those who own a great deal to feel slightly superior and a world apart from the menial side of existence. Though I sometimes regret it, I escaped this fate. For once the apartment was furnished and ready for habitation, Derek and I agreed to an amicable separation which led to a divorce. I was bequeathed the mas and Derek took a sixth wife, Marie-Christine Reille, who remained with him for the rest of his life.

  Two years later, I received a letter from out of the blue:

  *

  It might come to you as a surprise to hear from me … a lot of time has passed since we met in Paris at the Ritz. At the moment I am travelling with some English friends from London to Bangkok and I can assure you it is a long drive. It gives me plenty of time to think and I think quite often. I’ll be going back to Japan after Bangkok. Who would have thought I was going to end up in such a remote country…? Sometimes I ask myself what you are doing and your last book, A Love Match, just gave me an idea what is going on in your country house. I also counted how often you used words like ‘disgusting’ or ‘ridiculous’. It’s quite funny and an experience to read a book by a person I know. Also you might not know that I worked two years at Claridge’s as a floor waiter and I liked the place very much. I saw your former husband occasionally but we didn’t have much to say to each other. I wonder if he even remembered me. It didn’t sound like it! I also bought Born Losers and I prefer it to the other one. Your coatis are mentioned and I would very much like to know how they are doing …

  Let me hope your sense of humour is still the same and you have forgiven me for these unfortunate mistakes I made. Peter.

  Chapter XVI

  Grimaud

  The Mas de Colombier was a typical Provençal farmhouse, elongated and built of blocks of pinkish sandstone. The ceilings were low and oak-beamed, and the walls were whitewashed. The floors had octagonal tiles. As it was high up, water came from an abundant source. Then, there was no electricity and it was lit by oil lamps. The bourgeois French can be very helpful when new occupants take over their property. The previous owners had moved down into the valley, and I remember so well that first, cold month of March their driving up in a raging mistral in order to bring me a paraffin stove to heat the bedroom and literally battling their way across the terrace. Since then much has changed in the Midi, including the climate. The mistral rarely lasts long enough to drive away the clouds. Instead, a cold Tramontin wind blows, there is incessant rain and in summer it is no longer necessary to water the garden every evening, as one did in those light-hearted days.

  Being isolated high up in the forest, they advised me to keep a gun in the bedroom, as they had done, in case of night prowlers.

  The Colombier looked on to a valley and had an extensive view of vineyards surrounded by low, overlapping mountains. At dusk, when the sun set behind the mountains, the entire horizon glowed. The terrace was bordered by a rosemary hedge and on one side stretched a line of cypresses as protection against the mistral. There were six hectares of land, most of it forest.

  We took our meals at a bistro table beneath a eucalyptus tree or in the shade of a mulberry, and dotted about were clumps of lavender, sweet-smelling verbena, white clumps of marguerites and little yellow flowers whose petals closed at dusk. A steep, winding dust road led up to the mas. And at the back rose the forest. Those prepared for a steep climb could reach the summit and glimpse the Mediterranean. The surroundings were so peaceful that all one ever heard was an occasional tractor tilling the vines, and myriad birds the moment the shutters were opened in the morning. There was one I called the Woof-Woof bird; another made a strange guttural sound, like the creaking of a limb. There were red-crested speckled woodpeckers, merles, pheasants and cuckoos. In spring, the silence of the night would be broken by the magical sound of nightingales calling to one another.

  The only other dwelling to be seen in the far distance was a large property inhabited by an old peasant (always clad in black), her sluttish daughter and drunken son-in-law, who owned the surrounding vineyards; from them, for seventy-five francs a year, I rented a meadow where the laundry got hung between two mulberry trees. In fact, the first person to come up to the mas one Sunday was the drunken son-in-law to show me the red bornes separating our properties. He led the way into the forest. I followed with Mell and Folie. Suddenly, he stopped and suggested we lie down on a pile of bracken. When rejected, he said oafishly, ‘So, you’re indisposée today, Madame. Some other time, perhaps,’ and left me to follow a trail of alcohol back to the house.

  The mas was still barely furnished, when at dawn one morning I was awoken by the sound of pebbles striking the shutters of my bedroom window. Pulling on a blue kaftan, I went downstairs with Folie draped round me like a stole, her paws clinging to my hair, and opened the door to see Bernard Frank dressed in a dinner jacket, standing on the terrace. He had just come from a nightclub, where he had been carousing with Françoise Sagan and her faithful ‘bande’ of which, at that time, he was the principal jester. He must have been well received, for he dismissed the car he had come in and entered the mas, where he remained on and off for the next thirteen years, using it as his résidence secondaire.

  I have had the good fortune to have loved and lived with two exceptionally talented and witty writers. Though neither of them could have been described as an Adonis, they both had immense success with women and were difficult to live with. Both had had traumatic childhoods. Cyril’s mother had abandoned her ‘sprat’ to join the man she loved in South Africa and Bernard had to flee Paris with his parents, during the German occupation, and seek refuge in the Auvergne.

  I had first met Bernard with Eileen Geist. Dropping into the rue du Bac before or after luncheon one day, there was Bernard lying dressed, corpulent and flushed, a cigar in his mouth, stretched out on Eileen’s quilt. Should she say, ‘Another whisky?’ the response was immediate: ‘Volontiers!’ Eileen assiduously gave him all her attention and when not refilling his glass, she held out an ashtray at arm’s length to catch the cigar ash before it hit her quilt. Bernard was then very teddy-bear like; even his hair seemed woolly. He had written six books and all of them lay on the bedside table. He was living round the corner from Eileen and Françoise Sagan, and he and Eileen were discussing all the fascinating people who had been at Sagan’s party the previous evening. Suddenly, as though noticing me for the first time, Eileen turned and said, ‘What are you doing this evening? I’m busy and Bernard hates having to spend an evening alone.’ In those days, being far more puritanical, I did not relish sitting perched up half the night on one of Régine’s bar stools. ‘What a pity,’ said Eileen, ‘then you won’t do.’ And they went on discussing the party.

  When Bernard turned up on the terrace he was staying with Sagan in a villa she had rented in the Pare St Tropez. Her sister was there, an actor and a film director’s wife, and a few days later there was a big party given for Franchise’s birthday on Madame Hélène Rochas’s yacht, where the dancer, Jacques Chazot, was the most amusing invité.

  At that time, Bernard was drinking a lot and constantly falling over. He suffered from slight aphasia and sometimes his conversation became so garbled he made practically no sense. Once, after an evening in a nightclub with Sagan, he got a taxi to bring him back and was dropped off at the bottom of the hill; I looked out of the window at dawn to see him climbing up to the mas à quatre pattes. The first time Françoise came up, I remember her doing a funny imitation of a cripple, hobbling about the tiles with the aid of a stick. There was no hint of reproach, she was merely trying to warn ‘dear Bernie’ of what might happen, if he did not sober up. And in fact, some months later, he did have a serious stroke and was taken into St Tropez hospital.

  Both Sagan and Bernard had tremendous charm. Seeing them seated side by side, like siblings, they reminded me of a pair of oddly matched perroquets, one a slight blonde and chirrupy, the other a big, brown, ponderous bird. Bernard had many conflicting sides to his character.
Though not always courteous, he was nevertheless still then an ardent handkisser. He could also be very paternal and give sound advice. He was surprisingly uncritical and loyal to his friends, and should you condemn anyone, he’d retaliate by picking on your own hideous faults. His main interests were politics and literature. He was singularly lacking in curiosity about anything else, unless it directly concerned himself. He was a terrible spendthrift. Whenever he had earned a little money writing articles for magazines he would immediately take one to an expensive restaurant.

  I had always found flattery suspect. No problem there. It was soon taken for granted that I was merely a ‘connasse’ and that a lot of the time my eyes resembled ‘glaring prairie oysters’. I had never been able to tolerate a bore. One thing he taught me, there can be far worse handicaps than being a bore, particularly when he was indulging in his poltergeist act, skimming plates across the terrace. Afterwards, he would simply say, ‘I am a coléreux, but my rages quickly blow over…’ – like the crockery is all I can say. Bernard had what is known as un bon coeur. He was a very lovable man, but when with a woman he cared about, he could be very sadistic.

  The morning of his arrival on the terrace, I went into the village to telephone Eileen, who gave the impression then of having some kind of ownership and having taken on a motherly role with regard to Bernard. When I related that he had turned up in the early hours blotto and was now asleep in my bed, she said, ‘Poor Bernard, when he comes to, he won’t know where he is or who you are!’ But when I got back, he related that ever since our first meeting on Eileen’s quilt, he had had me in mind as a possible future mistress. What could it have been? My woollies? A waning, come-hither look? The fact that I was Eileen’s friend? What is a friend, after all? One joined to another in mutual intimacy and benevolence, according to the dictionary. Not an enemy. Well, that applied. Eileen was not likely to visit you, should you be very ill, as Jocelyn would, bringing you some home-cooked dish to revive your appetite. But Eileen would certainly call up after an operation to find out if you had pulled through. Her mornings were spent on the telephone. Let’s say she was a delightful fair-weather friend.