Bodior
Visited
Hello hello,
We went away last Sunday. Following Tom’s funeral, and then wake at Daphnes on Saturday, it felt like necessary and prompt medicine. The sea, that most narrative device of convalescence, was offered to us at the perfect moment by some friends. I feel any more introduction will detract from the revery so I’ll begin:
The estate, called Bodior, is reached via a long grey drive flanked by greenery and leading to a rusty gate once set in white enamel, now overtaken by giant climbing blooms of rhododendron. Some minutes earlier we had felt slightly lost, but the nature of this kind of drive, leading obviously forward to the mouth of a grand house, insures you will, if you keep going, eventually arrive. The sign on the gate, rectangular and rusty-white reads in nice royal blue capitals BODIOR. Even the name, on first glance, rolls around in my mouth. Bo-di-or. Sea-foamy blueish green, with watery glints of light above the deep.
The pebbled courtyard contains three cars, and then the house emerges in seemingly sun-bleached grey and blue. Imposing, large, but also somehow, casual. The shutters all cheerily light blue, a mixture of powder and slate. The diamond carved above the front entrance reads 1848 (the last time the building was heavily remodeled, though it is believed to have been first built in the 16th century), and all over there is more green, shrubs and ivy climbing and reaching towards the entrance, as if the outside wants in.
Will answers the door, tall and golden-hued, we’ve met before, but not really, which is an excellent way to start. Seonaid appears on the carved staircase, just out of the shower, hair still damp. You made good time! she exclaims and hugs us, and then I’m just finishing getting ready. We start to bring things inside, baskets full of eggs and spinach and fat purple asparagus and milk and cheese and wine. Potato chips, coffee, coffee filters, salami, canvas bags of bedding and beach towels and soft summer clothes. We’ve packed for a month at least, I joke, and Seonaid laughs, and says, thank god! Another woman has arrived and brought food!
A tour commences, everything is a long hallway, rooms on either side. Two staircases letting out in different parts of the house. Over and over again I accidentally walk past the bathroom, have to remember which end is our bedroom, or miss someone as they go up one staircase and I go down the other. This mild persistent lostness makes me feel bouncy and comedic. There is talk of gin and tonics, a walk to the beach. Theo is out sailing with the kids, and G, who I haven’t yet met. We are standing in a doorway when they appear. First, the kids shyly, though I put my arms out and and the eldest jumps into them, wrapping her whole little body around me and saying You’re here! Then the two men appear, both red and brown with sun, looking seaworthy. There’s flashes of chambray, a red neckerchief, and canvas shoes. I like your scarf, the man I don’t know yet says, just before we are formally introduced.
Now picture everything yellow. The momentum, if you will, begins in a large yellow room. The last strong sunlight of the day streams in through french doors bordered in more windows and flung open to reveal a perfect lawn. A haha, I discover, is the name of this invisible ledge, inset in rolling green, meant to provide an illusion of un-broken continuity while actually acting as a boundary for grazing livestock. But there is no livestock now. Just children rolling somersaults and Seonaid’s voice admonishing them to be careful with the pampas grass. It fans out like a shaggy creature or armored hideaway. Gallant, wheat-like stocks, 7 feet high at least.
The man slips a photograph between my right arm and torso. Keep this warm, he says. I stand, slightly startled, at the threshold, but immediately grip the unknown image with my elbow, arm glued down obediently while it develops. I have to decide in a split second if I find this affected and ridiculous, or, charming. An ongoing battle, the dualistic but overlapping appeal of artifice and naturalism, ping-pongs, once again, in my heart.
In the time the photo takes to appear, I surrender. Quite entirely. Allowing myself to be charmed. This was the intention and sometimes we have to let people achieve their intentions.
Rosy-hued and scented gin and tonics are passed around. Their pinkishness seems innocent, the lemon peel tastes clean. There are lobsters flushed red on trays in the refrigerator, having met their end somewhat fretfully for Seonaid, who froze them to sedation and cooked them early, troubled by their apparent unease. Theo and G laugh, the kitchen they suggest, has been in a state of existential dread.
Seonaid and I exchange conspiratorial older-sisterly glances while I open the Puligny-Montrachet. To dole this out between six means a rapid disappearance, but a feeling of benevolence wins out in me and it is worth it. The electricity is recognizable to everyone, savored in the dappled light of the kitchen while we unpack everything and tuck more bottles away to chill.
G takes pictures of everything. At first I feel anxious, as typically I find pictures of myself somewhere between bad for the ego and completely excruciating. It’s not that I don’t want them to exist, I do. But they don’t exist quite right and so I am depressed. On this trip I am reminded of a fact of life which is that it is actually a miracle when someone compulsively documents. Documents without feigned casualty or true bashfulness, wishing only to capture. In this style, after all, after so many, there is more likely to be at least a few good ones.
On the first morning we wake up, in our verdigris room at the end of a hall, I keep my silk robe on because it seems appropriate and go downstairs for coffee. I dare not disturb the languorous attitude and get ready too quickly. The level of removal is perfect, for we are all, to varying degrees, slight mysteries to each other. Coming down the stairs that morning is like re-learning object constancy. Had we remembered each other’s faces quite right from the night before? Fixed them in our minds without additions or subtractions brought on by candlelight and wine.
How are you doing? I ask. Seonaid, who, despite looking dewy, groans, A bit jaded. G, dressed all in white, is searching endlessly in his pockets for things he cannot find. Not well! Not very well at all! He opines. Pulling a set of measuring spoons inexplicably from his inside his jacket, before grumbling about needing to find his keys. I chuckle at their glamorous hungover displeasure, performed just right, and head into the kitchen to make quiche.
At four, Gwendoline has a better attention span than most of my friends. We spend the morning together making pie dough with a coarse slightly unruly wholegrain flour. She cracks a dozen eggs, relents and tastes a sliver of leek softened by butter. She kneads the dough and begins her campaign for making a pie with raisins, which we do next, along with pears and apricots. Our creations come out wholesome and bronzed, if a bit dense, but such is the risk of experimenting with new flour.
We head upstairs together to get dressed at last. I pick out an emerald green silk camisole and a long white skirt, and she selects a little orange corduroy shift dress. While lotion dries on my face, I braid her hair and tie the plaits around her head like a crown. She watches me closely while I apply mascara and lipstick in the mirror.
Order and discipline are nice in moderation. In this lays some of the delight of children. The ideal foil to total adult freedom, they bring with them a tender grounding, punctuating the day with rituals and routines and consciousness. Make sure Bernie doesn’t try to crawl out the window again, brush Gwen’s hair, soothe the beginning of a meltdown. Sing to them and they will stand, eyes fixed and bright and clear, at rapt attention. There is no destruction in these kids, they want mostly to participate in the adult world and as such, they respect it. Each morning as they dash to hug me I swoon for them entirely, and each evening, at exactly 7 o’clock after I help with bath time and stories, I delight in the adult universe that becomes more syrupy and concentrated. As if the lens has blurred around the edges, to make that much more clear and defined, the outline of the six of us left, at the dinner table, attention no longer divided.
We stay an extra day, and thank god, because it is on the third day that the whole thing threatens to swirl into cloudless gladness forever. I was lying on a grey stone step set into the grass, and smoking, which I never do anymore, and drinking champagne.
Theo was sat beside looking slyly content with his high serene cheekbones and Will was glowing away matching the yellow dining room, and G was snapping photographs and making everything feel special and noteworthy like it would appear in our own private newspaper tomorrow. The headline being that Seonaid and Dani had become beautiful grass stained Italian siblings wrestling a purple soccer ball on the lawn.
My elation had reached a fine crystalline pitch, possibly inaudible to anyone not listening for the chiming hum of fingertips on the rims of well-made goblets. It was verging on religious, or at very least, devotional. So pure and melodic was the sound of the passing seconds which I already realized I would never have again.
We had abandoned the oysters, which were giant monsters filled with questionable teal colored brine. Left them to grow smelly on a garden table littered with tennis or badminton rackets. I cherished this low-stakes disappointment and alternately, the low-stakes triumph, or best of all the two in tandem—the Béarnaise sauce has split! The horror! But wait it can be saved! So goes our communal wave of emotion, gripped as we all are, by the presence of an egg yolk that will determine our whole future.
The table is set with candlesticks whether it is daytime or night. As dusk makes the dining room pearlescent, their glow appears more pronounced. This transitional time, so pretty and brief, marks our return to each other, to the dining table, or at least, nearby it. Throughout the day there are separate tasks and impulses to attend to, but as the day begins its sunlit finale, a drink is proffered, and we drift back to the center.
We tease G for being too distracted to chop the potatoes, I slice them up for Seonaid’s dauphinois. Everything is very simple and good. Once the potatoes are in the oven and the garlic and onions are chopped and sweated down for green beans, we have achieved all we really need to for a while. The summer pudding, which I had never made before, is already chilling, like a very dressed up child, in the fridge.
At this time of day everyone distills for me, as if their personalities were archetypes in ancient myth or characters in books I’ve loved for years.
Will’s is a comfortable elegance, like freshly laundered clothes and tawny swimming boys full of calcium and good health. He appears very aware, but also unbothered, like his innate kindness allows him to recognize bullshit from a hundred miles but also have the manners not to mind.
Seonaid with her new 90’s supermodel hair and demeanor like an iris—lovely long limbs, all tan, and wearing gingham. I enjoy her quick changeability, the conversational and atmospheric leaps. Her mind is on a thousand things, but I like to watch it flash suddenly, present, in copper-resolute. In fact, everything about her is copper-hued and warm, a polished edge, intentional and bright, but not too fussy. I can tell she is at home in a variety of environments, a multitude of possible lives. This endears her to me, makes us kindred.
G’s eyes are striking and nervously blue, I like them. He lends an air of old world princetonian angst and cleanliness and struck me as a person who did not worry about things like sunscreen. As I said before, his constant photographs made everything feel special, but actually it wasn’t just the camera, it was him. Suddenly all mundanity felt non-threatening, maybe camp-ly dissatisfying, but mostly just replaced by the thrall of his gaze.
I watch my husband on the lawn and think how funny to have a handsome husband on a lawn. His ease was apparent almost as soon as we got in the car, going somewhere, going somewhere beautiful. Every few hours I look up to find him, it’s nice to catch each others’ eye.
Theo, possibly the quietest among us, seems to derive pleasure from watching others experience and enjoy things, that are to him of great familiarity. His undertow of faint perpetual amusement is comforting and crackles out occasionally into full laughter. A kind of mirthful transference takes place and he begins to cook the fillet steaks expertly. Seared but rosy, so tender you could eat them with a spoon.
Our final dinner becomes the kind of meal that will inform future meals for a long time to come, possibly forever. In the days to follow you will find yourself thinking, I must go to the butcher and buy some beef tenderloin, as the idea is now gold-standard and salient. After having zero interest in dauphinois potatoes, you might tuck it into your repertoire as actually a perfect hearty dish, destined for leftovers the-morning-after with fried eggs and hungover overnight guests. You will watch your french bean plants grow eagerly, imagining them young and spindly and trimmed. What a nice vegetable, you’ll think, the lemon-garlic zing with toothsome give alive in memory.
The taste of Nicole Tapon’s 2014 Saint Emilion Grand Cru will also become a vibrant ghosty specter to be chased. While sipping it, between bites of steak, in total communion of flavor, you will fervently try to hold onto its expression. Try to situate its harmonious echo-back to the meal in your palate and your mind. As days pass however, you will, try as you might, recall only that its aliveness sallied forth in sanguine bursts that drifted back to immaculent earth. That it was absolutely right.
We stay up until four in the morning, so the large room becomes shadowy, its yellows transformed into moody opalescent grays, like a picture of daffodils, done in charcoal. At 3am G and I start to tidy, offering the morning more grace. It’s nice to have my hands in the hot water, to make way for another day.
By the beach before we go, Theo lights a fire on the sand and cooks bacon. We walked here, through the marram grass. Such majesty, a grassy beach, I never knew. Seonaid checks the samphire on the way, but it’s just beginning. Later in the season she will pan fry it with lots of sweet butter, its briny character needing no additional salt. I picture a big white plate, piled high with delicate green halophytes, a few spare floating above the ice cubes of everybody’s drinks. It will all taste like the ocean, and like July. Like the middle of things, safe and salty and ephemeral.
We eat bacon sandwiches with ketchup while the sky threatens to rain and jet planes whir overhead in practicing whines. Just two curls of hot bacon and some ketchup on a soft bun, nothing more. Good used-up tiredness and imminent departure have rendered us quieter, with only murmured half-conversations emerging. The tide is low, the children are on our laps, warm and sleepy and still. In the course of three days our usual lives have been both paused and excavated. Bodior, through all its centuries, remains, and our sorrows and secrets, which really were not so very unusual, could not kill us here, nor make us less charming, nor ruin the afternoon.
xxx