A House in St John's Wood

by Matthew Spender

  Train to Venice, then boat to Athens.

  Lying on the bulbous iron cover of a well behind the Accademia, I noticed that a star in the sky was slowly moving. I looked at it most carefully, and it wasn’t my imagination. It was a Sputnik. I felt it was a good omen. The future had arrived. My life was about to change.

  One afternoon we came back from the beach and found a beautiful girl lying on my bed. She was wearing a white Mexican shirt with large flowers embroidered with black thread, a big black patent-leather belt and a pink, knee-length cotton skirt faded by frequent washing. Her legs were brown. She was propped up on my pillows with her arms behind her head so that her beautiful breasts pointed towards the ceiling. Then she spoke.

  This bed was now hers, she said, because her mother had given Craxton two hundred pounds with which to buy half of the house. She was taking over the room and the rest of us boys would have to go up on to the roof to sleep. (James and I had collected some other Westminster boys along the way, so the house was crowded.) She’d just been walking in the Peloponnese with Beatrice Rothschild and she was exhausted. Beatrice had been flown back to Paris on a chartered Caravelle, because she’d become dehydrated on their walk and she needed to go to hospital. Several very expensive doctors had already looked at her.

  Before she and Beatrice had left Paris to begin their walk, Christian Zervos had taken her to meet Giacometti, and Giacometti had turned to Zervos and said, ‘Que voudriez-vous que je fasse avec une poule comme ça?’ The girl laughed. I thought it was confident of her to tell a story in which she had been snubbed. And note the appropriate use of the conditional tense: ‘What would you expect me to do with a chick like that?’

  I felt the boys behind me drift away. Some went up to the roof to smoke, the others went down to the port to drink. I knew by the way they shuffled, they thought this girl was just name-dropping, but I recognized a quality common to those who in early youth have handed out peanuts to their elders on literary lawns. It wasn’t familiarity. It wasn’t irreverence. It was humour. She hadn’t been offended that Giacometti couldn’t be bothered to talk to her on the grounds that she was ‘une poule’. She merely implied: great painters can be silly, too. So my first thought about Maro Gorky, my future wife, was an odd one for a sixteen-year-old. I thought: this girl is going to be cheerful even when she’s sixty.

  It wasn’t so much love at first sight as instant confidence in the long haul.

  We all went out for supper, she and I and the boys, but already within our separate aura. Then we went for a walk just the two of us. As we left the table one of the Westminster boys said darkly, ‘I think Matthew has been very clever.’ On our walk, awkwardly clutched together, we were chased by two local Greeks on a Vespa, which was disturbing though also exciting; and we ended up sharing that bed. Not that anything sexual happened. We were too shy for anything more than a chaste kiss.

  We must have been unbearable in our selfishness, because after a couple of days the Westminster boys disappeared. The house was much nicer empty. I could listen to the stories that lay behind the throwaway lines of her first speech. How had she managed to meet all these grand people? The Rothschilds, for instance?

  She’d met the French Rothschilds because Jacob Rothschild, of the English Rothschilds, was the son of Barbara Hutchinson by her first marriage and Maro’s mother knew her; and Jacob had introduced Maro to his cousin Beatrice when she, Maro, had gone to Paris to study.

  Barbara was Peggy Ashcroft’s sister-in-law and one of my mother’s oldest friends. This was the first hint that Maro and I belonged to the same world.

  One day, Wolfgang Reinhardt came for drinks at the Rothschild house on the Avenue Marigny. Wolfie was a film producer, said Maro. Her mother had had an affair with him when John Huston was shooting his movie on Freud. When Wolfgang appeared, Beatrice told Maro that unfortunately she couldn’t stay for lunch, because she was wearing trousers. Her parents always insisted that women wear skirts at meals. Wolfgang told Maro: come with me and I’ll give you lunch with Sartre instead.

  Over lunch in a restaurant, Sartre sat Maro beside him. He was amused that the Rothschilds didn’t allow women to wear trousers at lunch. The last of the ‘Grands Bourgeois’, he said. Then he and Wolfgang discussed the changes that had come over Paris since the war. During the war, everyone used to meet at the cafés, and they stayed there all day as it was a way of keeping warm. Ideas, gossip, even writing whole books took place in the cafés. After the war, there was a gradual retreat into private life. Meanwhile a few families tried to revive the salons of pre-war days, but it wasn’t the same thing.

  There was no general pattern to Maro’s stories, and no ulterior motive. No ‘I want to explain to you the upper levels of Paris society.’ No ‘I desperately need to belong, and I think I am doing all right.’ On the contrary, there was an implication that although this recent Parisian phase of her life had been enjoyable, it had come and gone. Fantastic, but unlikely to lead to anything further. This made me feel – and nothing else could have carried such weight – that Maro was grounded in a remarkable way. For if she could create and leave behind such social conquests, surely it implied self-confidence?

  I’d never come across anyone who knew my world better, or was so capable of cutting it down to size.

  We continued to sleep together, knickers on, no sex, as Maro wanted to consult her gynaecologist in London first. Contraceptives were available only from the old man who sold bananas from a cart in the street, but we neither of us dared buy anything from him, not even bananas. So we just lay close in bed, within each other’s frontier.

  It didn’t take long to set up a routine that we’ve kept ever since: paintings, books, conversation. With regard to painting, we disagreed all along the line, then and subsequently. Maro knew more about art than I did, she said firmly. And being two years younger than her, it’s physically impossible for me to catch up.

  21

  MIGHT JUST AS WELL BE MARRIED

  FROM NOW ON, this account of my parents’ relationship involves three other protagonists: myself as a person who was no longer on the same trajectory as the rest of my family; Maro, who was unable to come to terms with my mother; and Maro’s mother Mougouch Phillips (as she was then), a feisty person in her own right, in search of a very different role in London from any that my mother could approve of.

  Because an underlying trust in my relationship with Maro was there from the start, I underestimated the turmoil we caused among the older generation. I thought our affair was none of their business, so I did not take their views seriously. I was sixteen and Maro eighteen, and I did not understand that to accept publicly our identity as a couple was like removing a snail from its shell with a toothpick, where the shell stood for the conventions and the snail was us. The crazy thing was that these conventions were ostensibly liberal, freedom-loving and tolerant towards transgressions of any kind. So what was so hard to accept about our being together? When it came to affection between two people of the opposite sex, no couple ever kept things simpler than Maro and myself.

  I remember meeting Mougouch for the first time as soon as we’d come back from Greece. For some reason I stayed the night at her house in Chapel Street instead of going back to Loudoun Road. As my pyjamas were dirty, I borrowed one of Maro’s nightgowns. This caused a sensation when we came down to breakfast the next morning.

  Mougouch was at this point in her early forties, a beautiful woman, self-confident and extremely social. She was born Agnes Clara Magruder, the elder daughter of a high-ranking officer in the US Navy. On her father’s side she descended from some unruly MacGregors who’d come to America with Lord Baltimore in the 1640s. Her mother’s maiden name was Hosmer. That branch of the family had emigrated even earlier. (There’s a Farmer Hosmer who appears in the lives of Thoreau and Emerson on Walden Pond.)

  Mougouch’s childhood, spent in various naval stations all over the world, had given her an ease with travelling, even a certain restlessness. When
hardly older than twenty, she’d married a penniless Armenian artist called Arshile Gorky, who’d committed suicide in 1948. They’d had two daughters: Maro, and her younger sister, Natasha. Mougouch’s second husband, from whom at this point she was in the process of obtaining a divorce, was Jack Phillips, a Bostonian aristocrat (if America has aristocrats) by whom she’d had two more daughters, Antonia and Susannah.

  Since Gorky’s death, Mougouch’s life had been one of adventure, partly driven by anger against her late husband for having left her so violently. Jack Phillips was everything that Gorky hadn’t been: at ease, confident socially and relaxed about his work, which involved architectural projects with frequent meals out. Maro once described him as an ‘interval’ in her mother’s life. She took down a photograph album of their travels through Europe after Gorky’s death and there was Mougouch, washing pans by a stream, filling the car radiator from a watering can with her children huddled in a corner. She’s by the seaside, stripping, and she doesn’t look up. She comes back from the waves and puts on a shirt, and now she realizes that Jack is taking a photograph. Then she looks at the camera and smiles brilliantly. ‘There,’ said Maro, ‘she’s ready for somebody else.’

  On that morning in Chapel Street, the first thing I noticed at breakfast was the scrubbed oak table beneath the cutlery. It had an indented texture produced by washing with bleach every few days – so they told me. I’d never seen anything like it. Outside the kitchen where we ate (there was no dining room), the hall was freshly carpeted and painted, for the family had only moved in a few months earlier.

  Mougouch had a sense of irony, and seeing me sitting next to her daughter dressed in a nightie certainly made her laugh. In a whispered aside, she checked with Maro about how far we’d ‘gone’, and since the answer was ‘not yet’, she could settle down and watch the development of our harmless friendship; or even participate in it.

  I don’t remember the reverse introduction when Maro met my parents, but from the start it ran into trouble.

  The first thing Maro told Mum was that she’d decided to go to the Slade and study art, not to London University to study French philosophy as she’d originally intended. Since places were usually assigned in June and we were now in September, my mother thought this was sheer arrogance. ‘It’s not so easy to get into the Slade,’ she said. ‘I know that Eliza Hutchinson had to work frightfully hard. You can’t just present yourself expecting the doors to open for you, just like that.’

  But Maro had worked hard in Paris. She had two books filled with drawings she’d made in the room of Tanagra miniatures in the Louvre, plus a portfolio of nude studies made at the Académie Goetz, plus a thirty-page illustrated fairy tale of delicately veiled sexuality. Eduardo Paolozzi, a friend of Mougouch, looked them over and gave her a letter of recommendation. She already had a generic letter of approval from Christian Zervos, the editor of Cahiers d’Art and the publisher of Picasso’s catalogue raisonné, written to help her gain admission to provincial museums when she’d gone to Greece with Beatrice. Off she went and knocked on that door. She was immediately accepted.

  My mother discounted what Maro had actually produced and saw only the machinations of Mougouch, whose progress she’d been following for a couple of years. Hadn’t someone told her that Mougouch had had an affair with Eduardo? Mum should have suppressed this thought, but unfortunately she couldn’t. Maro getting into the Slade soon became evidence of the intrigues of Chapel Street, in contrast to the integrity of Loudoun Road. If you’d told Mum, But your son has been at the Slade for the last two years because Bill Coldstream is an old friend of Stephen’s, she would have said, ‘That’s different.’

  Mum should have asked to see Maro’s work. She couldn’t, because she understood nothing about art. She wouldn’t even have been able to bluff. ‘That’s a particularly fine one,’ would have been beyond her. Besides, this would have encouraged Maro to take a step away from Chapel Street towards Loudoun Road; and, from the first, I think Mum instinctively felt that the two houses represented irreconcilable opposites. Loudoun Road, set in leafy and intellectual St John’s Wood, full of writers and musicians, was serious. Chapel Street, in the lee of the great wall surrounding Her Majesty’s garden at Buckingham Palace, was not.

  St John’s Wood signified intellectual creativity, whereas Belgravia stood for the pedantry of embassies. Once, Susannah and Antonia had a fight, at the end of which they threw each other’s knickers out of the window. A gentle breeze took one pair over to the Embassy on the opposite side of the street, where they landed in front of a policeman. He collected them all and brought them back. ‘Oh, thank you, officer,’ said Mougouch. ‘Can I offer you a slice of cake?’

  Seeing that Maro and Eliza would be starting out at the Slade together, Mougouch gave a tea party at Chapel Street so they could meet. Mum came too. At a certain point she started to hold forth, mainly for the benefit of Eliza, about the virtues of a new pianist who was then all the rage. Mum said that one listened to him with curiosity because his dynamics were ‘counter-intuitive’. He played loud when you expected soft, and vice versa. This was the wrong way of obtaining the attention of the audience, she said.

  Mougouch wandered silently among the tea things and I saw that she was being left out. She had no knowledge of music and she didn’t know what Mum was talking about. And my mother went on and on. Suddenly, Mum realized she’d been excluding Mougouch. This had not been her intention, but she didn’t know how to get out of it. She faltered. When Mougouch changed the subject abruptly, Mum was left high and dry. Mougouch’s choice of a new subject was crushing: the garbage situation in Russia.

  Maro and me shortly after we’d met.

  I thought about this ridiculous incident for ages. Mum was a more serious person than Mougouch, probably. The atmosphere of Chapel Street was elegant rather than hardworking. Mum had been doing her best to be friendly – but there’d also been an element of bluff, of showing off in front of Eliza. And she hadn’t been able to fall back on a joke. She should have said, ‘What IS the garbage situation in Russia?’

  My father couldn’t exactly disapprove of our affair, since he believed that sexual freedom was the first of all freedoms. He took me out for a serious talk, which started by his saying that if he’d met an attractive girl when he was sixteen, his life might have turned out very differently. This was irrelevant, so I let him say whatever he wanted and just murmured, from time to time, ‘Yes.’ He also said, ‘Don’t lose touch with your generation,’ which was a reasonable point to make.

  To my mother, however, the question involved parental authority. I’d come back with a girl one day, and moved in with her – when I wasn’t at school – without waiting for the permission of my parents. There was something wrong somewhere.

  I remember driving down to Bruern with my parents about a month after coming back to England. I watched my mother’s face in the driving mirror over many miles. She was wearing full make-up, including dark-red lipstick that made one side of her mouth curl higher than the other. My mother’s smile was always higher on one side than the other, and to see it backwards in the mirror exaggerated its reproving quality. Evidently she was giving herself a speech, as from time to time she shook her head in tense little tremors. No doubt she thought she was being good, because she wasn’t speaking, but her feelings were as obvious as if she’d shouted at me every inch of the way.

  Michael Astor had heard obliquely that I was with Maro, and he was curious. That seemed odd. Then I remembered there’d been a moment when he’d wanted to marry Mougouch. The first I’d ever heard of Maro’s family was a year before, in Mum’s Jaguar driving to school one Monday morning. When we were outside Caxton Hall, near Telfer’s Hot Meat Pie stand that was always parked there for the cab-drivers, my mother said to Dad, ‘We must do something about Mrs Phillips.’ Mrs Phillips was a new friend of Michael’s; and, one never knew, after his divorce from Barbara, she might end up as the new Mrs Astor.

  On 26 Septemb
er 1961, a mere month after we’d met, Dad wrote to Reynolds: ‘Matthew and his girl keep on turning up. In a way I am a bit worried because although beautiful and perhaps intelligent, she is extremely pretentious.’ He was worried that Maro was telling me too many home truths about my painting. On the other hand, ‘I dare say he could be got out of his self-absorption by someone who attacked him violently and whose problems he had to make his own.’ In the face of Maro’s attacks, ‘Matthew stands up for his views.’ All this chaos was tiresome, however. ‘In fact, they might just as well be married.’

  I didn’t see Maro’s straightforward qualities as pretension. Wasn’t it self-confidence? She spoke three languages and had read extensively in all of them. At the French Lycée, she’d earned her baccalauréat with a ‘Prix d’Encouragement’, which was not bad, considering she’d come from Italy speaking no French at all just three years previously. All this counted as naught, because from my parents’ point of view Maro didn’t treat the older generation with respect. But it was this very quality I most admired. She wasn’t in awe of anyone and she didn’t mind going out on a limb. She had no secrets, nothing was disguised and she always said what she felt.

  If someone had compared the address books of Natasha and Mougouch at the time, 70 per cent of the names would have been common to both. For some reason this divided them rather than bringing them together.

  Mougouch was a woman of style. In that respect, even though the competition was of a high level, Chapel Street won hands down over Loudoun Road. My mother’s William Morris wallpaper couldn’t compete with the crisp eggshell white, top to bottom, of Chapel Street. Mougouch’s bedroom had silk wallpaper, it’s true, but only because Wolfgang Reinhardt had given it to her after their season of love. Apricot silk. Perfect, except for a fist-shaped dent where her husband Jack had punched it during one of their quarrels. Every other wall was white to bring out the paintings. Where Dad had prints from the cancelled plates of Picasso’s etching for Ovid’s Metamorphosis going up the staircase – fabulous, well worth looking at, as the cancellations added to the images – Mougouch had works by Matta and the two highly worked drawings that Giacometti had given her in 1949. And Gorky’s paintings. And more drawings by Gorky, hundreds of them, in fat portfolios under the bed in the basement, with not even a sheet of tissue-paper between them.