Songs of Blue and Gold

by Deborah Lawrenson

  Adie’s plight was reported in much the same terms by a journalist and photographer sent by the London Sunday Times when they went to see him in November 1968. The celebrated writer was withdrawn yet prone to sudden rages. He indulged in forensic examination of his own character and motives where previously he had always been more interested in abstracts and other people. He objected vehemently to the suggestion that he spend more time in the company of trusted friends, retorting that he was all the company he needed, and when he was bored of himself he drove down to Aigues Mortes and picked up ‘the saddest fishiest-smelling whore’ he could find. It was impossible to tell if he was telling the truth or deliberately trying to strike a bum note.

  Julian Adie was a survivor, though. So long as he had a sunny landscape away from the prison island of Britain, with a passionate effort he could ride out the bad times. He professed that his love for France was in inverse proportion to his hatred of the old country. If anyone dared to point out that France suffered just as much industrial unrest, and paralysis of the state system, he would narrow his eyes, their colour changed to stainless steel, and decree, ‘It’s completely different. The British worker downs tools because his life is unbearable – well, he’s right there. Only he thinks it’s about money and factory hours, not seeing it’s the whole grinding wretchedness of the country. The French strike for a philosophy.’

  Superficially these were good years for him. He had achieved fame, and the books supported him without the necessity of having to find other employment. His gift for making enduring friendships sustained him; there is no doubt his company was relished by a host of fond individuals, from writers and intellectuals to the dustman with whom he enjoyed fruitful discussions of existentialism. Wine was plentiful and cheap. He soaked it up, along with the light, the heat and the respect accorded him.

  - 1973 -

  When Elizabeth saw Julian Adie again, she was a married woman with a small child.

  She and my father Edward were idling in the south-west of France under a benign September sun. Edward was trying to set up an appointment to view a renowned collection of Byzantine art at a private house in Nîmes. Through an ex-colleague at the Courtauld, he had arranged a fortnight’s rental of a cottage not far from Uzès, and combined it with a lazy holiday before the start of his college term.

  Edward Norden was a lecturer and art historian fifteen years older than Elizabeth. They had met at a private dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club in early 1970 when she was drawn to his self-assurance and wit, as much as his sandy, bluff good looks. Occasionally he wrote pieces of journalism, he said, and he would very much like to interview her for a feature on up-and-coming female painters. He adored the seascapes. The resulting article was less a newspaper interview than a whirlwind romance.

  He always claimed that he made Elizabeth’s name in more ways than one. He had promoted her paintings in a series of serious studies and continued to do so. Even that was beginning to look like selfishness. He loved telling people his wife was Elizabeth Norden, although that marital fact never stopped him pursuing other artists, invariably attractive female ones.

  That day, in late September 1973, I would have been two years old.

  Elizabeth was enervated, not knowing quite why – or at least not admitting the reason to the diary she kept. ‘I wanted – I needed – some small escape that morning,’ she wrote. ‘I wanted to let him see for himself what it was like.’ By this, I assume she meant her husband, and his propensity even after less than three years of marriage for leaving her to her own devices (and a demanding toddler) while he pursued his own interests both at work and play.

  This time, though, Elizabeth, usually so resigned to his behaviour, rebelled. She walked out leaving me with him for once.

  She took the car and drove west, aiming on a whim for Carcassonne. But she had misjudged the distance – it was much further than she thought. She was stopped, forcibly, in a tiny fortified village where a market blocked the road. St Martin de Londres, read the scratchy sign. Why go on, she reasoned, if she did not feel like it?

  She managed to squeeze the car into a parking space among battered vans and ancient Peugeots, and went in on foot.

  The casual artistry of the fruit and vegetable stalls entranced her: the polished red peppers like grotesquely oversized plastic lips, the smiles of split watermelon, the sensuous pink of the fig she pulled apart in her fingers.

  An old woman in black sat in a doorway with a single tray of fungi. Stunted men swayed past with rolling gait and the wide chests of fighting cocks.

  Elizabeth was dizzy with the colours and textures. She sat down at one end of a café table whose other occupants were a group of middle-aged women discussing their ailments, and those of their families, with the competitive concentration of a contract bridge party. She gave in to her own thoughts, let the scene pass like a film in front of her.

  She noticed his hair first. The tanned paysan with blond hair. Perhaps there were touches of grey in it. Short and stocky, that expression of secret satisfaction playing about the lips, in the flow of market shoppers but apart from it. The confident swagger, chin jutting up.

  It was Julian Adie.

  He was poking beadily about the cascades of vegetables; a mean string bag dangling from his wrist contained a few small lumpy parcels.

  Her heart was pounding. What should she say? She rose unsteadily to her feet, but hesitated for too long. He had gone past before she had decided what she was going to do. She stood up and called his name, meaning only to be friendly, but he was disappearing into an aisle of stalls, his tracks closed by the other shoppers and browsers.

  ‘And that is when I began to think of him again. Just that glimpse. It brought it all back when I had almost succeeded in forgetting about him.’

  When Edward suggested buying a property in France, spending summers under unbroken sunshine, eating good food and surrounded by the true colours of the south, she surprised him with her keenness. If she realised that his motives were as much concerned with the buying of a slice of freedom for himself as much as a plot of foreign soil, then she kept her reservations to herself.

  He travelled to France by himself several times over the next year, for academic as well as house-hunting reasons. In 1974 they bought the tumbledown bergerie at St Cyrice.

  It was Elizabeth who made it her choice, finally. ‘It was nothing to do with Julian Adie, and it was everything,’ she wrote.

  After the first few years, it was just as well she was happy there. She and I were spending most of the summers there alone while Edward pursued his own interests. Gradually they pulled further apart until they were effectively separated. For my sake, I think, they maintained the decencies.

  We saw less and less of him. He died before I had a chance to know him as an adult. He was fifty-five when he had a heart attack. A twenty-four-year-old classical violinist was with him in the hotel room in Milan.

  - 1974 -

  Julian Adie wrote that the past is not fixed. It is always at the mercy of perception, a perspective which changes with deepened knowledge and experience. The act cannot change, but the understanding of how it happened can.

  In the Languedoc, Elizabeth tried again to contact him.

  ‘All the questions had rushed back. I needed to know what had really happened, that night in Corfu,’ she wrote in her diary.

  But Elizabeth was snatching at air. Adie would have none of it. Several letters survive from this time, rough drafts, or nearly good copies which were spoiled by a nervous mistake. It was important to her to get the words right, especially to him. Desperate for a response, she was ‘willing someone to say something that chimes with my own understanding, someone who understands my reference points’. Again she writes, ‘The mind locks – taking pictures one after the other, painting pictures one after the other, hoping to transform it into what one hopes to see. Romance over reason, desperation over reason.’

  Finally there is the letter sent, but returned.
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br />   Several times she wandered around Sommières in the hope of bumping into him. But perhaps the Julian she had known on Corfu already no longer existed, just as the adventurous blond youth of The Gates of Paradise had long since slipped away to be superseded by the older man. In a newspaper photograph she kept, dated 1976, he was almost unrecognisable. He was drinking so much that his nose had developed into a lumpy purple protrusion, his bright blue eyes were sunk in fatty folds. He was stout, and apparently in disguise under a woollen hat of the type worn by French countrymen.

  Finally, she steeled herself and went to his house. She found the only inhabitants were two very young Swiss women in his swimming pool. Adie was not there, they informed her.

  Adie was elsewhere a great deal, at this time. He had begun placing advertisements in the personal columns of the newspapers, hoping to meet as many women as possible. This he defined as creative endeavour (and admitted it in a forthright interview in Midi Libre): not only was there a good chance of finding some uncomplicated sex, but he was on the look-out for new characters for dissection in his ambitious new sequence of novels.

  When Elizabeth found out about this, she wrote: ‘He is making a stupid spectacle of himself, but hardly seems to care. It is the talk of the cafés and bars of Sommières.’ The news hurt her; her attitude seems that of a discarded wife (which in reality she was, though not Julian Adie’s), a woman who had a vested interest in keeping a scandal at bay that might taint her by association.

  She left her telephone number with the Swiss girls at his pool, and again on the notepad by the telephone in the kitchen as she left (in case they forgot or were too high on dope to remember), but received no call. She wrote at least one more letter which was similarly ignored.

  Was there an element of deluded romance about her chase? Her own words hold nothing to suggest she would have liked to resurrect the affair at that stage. The romance was all in the past. And why would she have wanted to, given his current activities? For what it is worth, I am sure that was not in her mind, not even to have her revenge on my father.

  My mother was an elegant woman not only in her appearance but in the sense that she always behaved with dignity, having been unable to escape the creed of good behaviour ingrained in her since childhood, despite her few notable rebellions. She was self-contained, and averse to taking risks. Adie’s behaviour would have horrified her. No, by that stage, I am sure she would not have been interested romantically in Julian Adie.

  Yet each Saturday in summer she would take me – at least until I was old enough to want to stay with friends in the village – to the market at St Martin de Londres. There we would sit in the café by the fountain, and we would watch the faces as they passed. It was our game, or so I thought.

  She never saw him there again, but the hope persisted that she might.

  The following excerpt from her diary shows that her sense of guilt was hardening, compounded rather than eased by the years. Julian Adie was the only person she could talk to about it, but he would not.

  She began to blame herself, although not without an appreciation of the irony.

  ‘We were all playing games that summer in Corfu, and they knew better than I did what the score was. But this one was my game. Did I regret falling for him? Not in the beginning, when it was happening. He was exciting, and generous and kind. I came back into myself under his touch. He was like a healer to me and I will never forget that. But afterwards, yes. In retrospect I understand much better. Perhaps I was stuck with a lingering infatuation, but I accepted that was all it was. That was for Julian as he was in my mind, not as he became.’

  It must be right to see her continuing interest in Julian Adie as obsessive. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the reason behind it remained unchanged. In any case, she would see Julian Adie again, although it would be several more years before they finally spoke.

  - 1975 and after -

  When Julian Adie met Annick Plazy on the banks of the Vidourle in 1975, she was twenty-three and recently married. From their first shared pastis at the Bar Vidourle, they had an understanding. They began an eight-year affair which suited them both: in Annick’s own words ‘no commitment, only pleasure’. It was his ideal made real, and did not preclude another marriage for him, this time to Marie Basselin.

  Marie was the only one of his wives who knew of him by reputation before they met in Paris; she should have been prepared.

  Sophisticated and cultured, she was a green-eyed russet-haired beauty from a wealthy family. He met her through the daughter of a long-time friend. She was only in her thirties, a fashion model and latterly a designer. Excelling himself with his own self-regard, Julian Adie was unfaithful to her the day after their wedding with a tourist he picked up at the Bar Vidourle.

  There was no honeymoon. According to Marie, in conversation with Adie’s first biographer Stephen Mason, disillusionment was almost immediate. Adie was suffering blackouts triggered by alcohol abuse. ‘Like many who take refuge in drink, he was mean and embittered. But he was still clever. He used his words and actions to destroy me. No, I am not exaggerating. He had always to gain the upper hand, to outwit you, to blame you for everything so that he could be absolved. You could not reason with him. It would all be twisted back at you.

  ‘He got angry because here was a woman not falling in with his plan of how life should be and what should happen next! He did not realise how strong I was, and he did not like it!

  ‘But it was hard, because there were times when I would have to question my own judgement, when he justified his behaviour with crazy fabrications: once I refused to come out in the car and collect him from a nightclub in Nîmes at four o’clock in the morning, so it was my fault that he went off with a tart he picked up when they were both too drunk to see. And after a while I would start to feel, even though I knew it was not logical, that it was my fault, that I had made him do it.’

  If his writing is any indication, his moods were dark during this time. His playfulness is edged with cruelty, and his creations obscene – sadistic, even. Self-destructive despite his continuing success with a harem of local women, who seemed to care for him beyond all reasonable expectation, he would rage at Marie when she tried to moderate his intake. Construed as criticism, her efforts would make him more determined to drink as much as his body would take.

  She would leave for Paris, return, only to repeat the process. He manipulated her. She retaliated. They fought – violently at times.

  ‘It was a mad time in my life,’ said Marie. ‘He did manipulate my mind, because I loved him and I feared losing him, having to admit the marriage was a disaster. It was only when I woke up and realised he had lost me, not the other way round, that I could regain my self-respect. Now I look back and wonder how it took me so long. But at the time . . . I was too close. I could not see it.’

  The shortest and most disastrous of Julian Adie’s marriages was over in a storm of recriminations over his women, his drinking and her spending of his money.

  The novel he published in 1977, written during the stormy year of their marriage, is even darker and edgier than the previous offering in The Carcassonne Quartet. The lyricism is tainted with obscenity. In a radio interview to mark its appearance, Adie sounds short-tempered and sour.

  Asked about himself, he growls, ‘My life? It’s all there in the books. Read them or don’t read them. I don’t care.’ When asked whether his much vaunted theories of ‘modern love’, sex and marriage brought him, or anyone else, as much pleasure as they were supposed to, he declines to answer.

  ‘He did not age well. There was a suppressed rage all the time, I always felt,’ said Sally Commin, second wife of his old friend and bibliographer Peter. ‘No one enjoys getting older, but he found it harder than most to adapt.’

  He thought of himself as a romantic and a force of nature. Others thought him a self-centred egotist, raging against the serial failures of his marriages and the lack of any genuine appreciation (as he saw
it) of his literary gifts in the home country he had always dismissed so vituperatively. He was mired in the kind of bored, dissolute expatriatism that he vigorously despised.

  Newly divorced, Adie could be as affably garrulous, intelligent and amusing as ever. He was fizzing with new ideas. But there was a new hardness that was all too easily polished to a gleam by drink. In repose, one newspaper interviewer reported, he had the blank stare of a lizard waiting to strike.

  And it is true that his work became progressively darker, more cruel and perverted. Friends who had previously only glimpsed Adie’s black side were now offered novel-sized vistas of the inner workings of his mind, and had found themselves shocked as each successive volume of The Carcassonne Quartet appeared.

  According to Dr Braxton, The Carcassonne Quartet contains Julian Adie’s ‘confession’. Braxton is jubilant to find what he calls the final piece of the puzzle in Adele, the third novel in the sequence, published in 1979.

  I found Elizabeth’s copy of Adele in the room at the bergerie where I discovered the diaries.

  A page was turned down, and a passage marked, or rather roughly scored with red ballpoint pen until the paper had torn.

  Within these furious etches, the narrator is describing how he is young again in the water, released from the poisoned watch of advancing age. The sea is black and cold but his limbs move smoothly, porpoise-supple. Under her gleaming fish-scale dress the woman is naked on the rock above, thighs parted, taunting him with the scarlet slash between her legs. He sinks his teeth deep into her, hard enough to draw fresh blood, rejoicing in the viscous oyster taste. His hands are spiny starfish on her white thighs. He looks up, breathless. Then he pulls her abruptly down, deliciously conscious of her pain as the sharp stones rip into her. She cries out as salt attacks the gashes in her flesh. She struggles, protests she cannot swim. He tows her by the hair, wedges her into the angle of a rock and leaves her gasping as he swims back, sleek as a water rat, Poseidon to her Medusa.