Ivan Moffat File Life Among the Beautiful and the Damned in London, Paris, New York, and Hollywood

As a child, my parents and the parents of other children I met were part of the same social group; and every time anyone came back from a party in Paris, or wherever, we asked, "How was it?" And they answered, "It was absolute heaven, my dear, absolute heaven." It was the phrase ringing in one's ears. And I thought of calling this book Absolute Heaven, even though a lot of life in the 1920s and '30s in England wasn't heaven, but the opposite, some difficult and bad times in the rotten years leading up to World War II. I haven't finally decided on that title yet, it'll be a long time before I have to. I'm lazy. Tomorrow was often a day to be afraid of, because my grandmother, with whom I lived, although witty and whimsical, was also unpredictable and sometimes became fearfully angry. What would be expected of one tomorrow night might not be made known until it was nearly over, and by then one could have become, yet again, a disappointing and even a wicked boy. On this particular tomorrow I had become wicked before it was even half over. Exiled and in disgrace, still shocked by her reaction to what I had said to her at lunch, I stood alone in the dank greenhouse, watching the tunnels at the back of the spiders' webs. The webs were horizontal, thick and dusty. The tunnels were dark. To make happen there what I was about to make happen, was to ward off anxiety. Much that I did alone had become secret. Today I was alone in a sense more than usual. My mother and father were indeed alive and about-my mother vividly so-and sometimes came to see me, usually from America or France. Otherwise, except when my cousin Virginia came to stay, I was alone with my grandmother and my governess, Constance. I was eight years old. My grandmother's house was the only one I could think of as somewhere I "belonged"-and even that involved a question. On that day, because of what I had said at lunch-and because, for a child, of the uninformed disquiet that lay between fear and curiosity-the question loomed larger. I should have known better, of course, but even on the warmest of summer days one was never quite sure of what was going to happen. This was winter. During lunch I had told my grandmother, Lady Tree, that she was ugly. We called her "Mameena," and-meaning to compliment her when, as I supposed, she contorted her face because she was about to imitate somebody-I had said, "Oh, Mameena, you are ugly!" I had said it with a smile and was therefore all the more shocked at being ordered in a voice thundering with rage, which I had seldom heard before, to go out into the garden and stay there. "And then, may I come back?" I asked. "Perhaps never!" she said with another crack of thunder. My grandmother, widow of the famous actor-manager, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, had been a schoolteacher; and then, through him, had become an actress of no great fame. But she was famous all the same, as a wit, a mimic, a woman on constant display. In a moment of silence during lunch, she had momentarily lifted her chin, jutted it forward and scratched at the stretched folds of her neck. Then she happened to catch my eye. I had naturally seen this as a performance, a grotesque imitation or ridicule of some famous figure, or friend, or both. Her imitation of Margot Asquith (wife of the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, until recently our prime minister), involved grimaces not unlike those she had just made. Even Constance, my governess, so usually reasonable and on my side, had failed to see the matter as I saw it when she came to the greenhouse some forty minutes later, in search of repentance. "Will you go indoors now and ask Mameena, very kindly, to forgive you?" "Yes, but I want her to know why I said it. Then she won't have to forgive me, because I thought she was just being funny." Constance shook herMoffat, Ivan is the author of 'Ivan Moffat File Life Among the Beautiful and the Damned in London, Paris, New York, and Hollywood', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375422478 and ISBN 0375422471.