The BMW, incidentally, was a gift to my mother from her husband. It was the third such gift. I was there when the first happened. My mother and stepfather never lived together, after trying for a few weeks early on. He used to go out at night chasing other women and would come back smelling of perfume. My mother nearly went insane, not least because she had broken up a serviceable marriage to run off with him. So he lived in Geneva, she in Milan. He would come visit us most weekends, a five-hour drive. One day he turned up in a beautiful 2002 BMW in Inka Orange. My mother said, “Nice car,” and he immediately handed her the keys, memorably adding, “Ça fait toujours une voiture de moins,” meaning it would be one car fewer to worry about. Then came two more BMWs, the last of which I forgot in Paris.
Looking back, I probably should have asked myself why my famously proud mother was accepting gifts on that scale without a murmur, and why my stepfather was acting as if it were perfectly normal. At the time, I put it down to both of them being rather grand, though there was a definite undercurrent of you owe me coming from my mother. The weekends were invariably dismal. My stepfather hated me, he and my mother did not get on, and they had tremendous fights. She had a talent for driving him nuts, and on one occasion he got so angry he punched the bathroom wall and ended up with four bones on the back of his hand sticking out through the skin. He unquestionably loved her, and she unquestionably did not love him. Eventually she found a much better man and he stopped coming at weekends.
My stepfather’s love for cars was in some ways similar to his interest in women. True Lotharios do not have a type and will hunt anything female that breathes. His specialty was friends’ wives and daughters. My father had fatefully been his friend. As for cars, he, like most petrolheads, liked all cars. He changed cars all the time. At one point he owned an E-type V12, generally reckoned a lovely car despite an oddly vertical windscreen. The thing was, by my mother’s lights, so phallic that she used to ask him to drop her off two streets away when she went to feminist meetings.
So you could say that cars were his love language, and that my mother just tagged along. But there was one car he would never had handed over to her, a 1954 Bentley Type R in silver, with pearl grey leather inside. We used to go on holiday in it, with me toying with the fold-down mahogany table set in the back of the front seat. Truth be told, this was the runtiest Bentley of all time, designed for shrunken post-war wallets and appetites. Nevertheless, it was a Bentley, and a thing of beauty. My fondness for Cuir de Russie dates back to the smell of that car. When my stepfather dinged it in slow traffic in Geneva, the radiator grille turned out to cost six months of his salary. The Bentley was sold.
Three years before my mother died, I found out the truth, casually delivered in conversation. It turned out the Bentley had been a gift from her. She sold a flat in Paris when she first moved to Milan, when I was 12, and blew most of the proceeds on buying him this Bentley. The flat was her only possession at the time. I have no idea what prompted this, aside from the usual desire to throw good money after bad. The Bentley had been a mechanical embodiment of everything that was heroically wrong between them. She resented herself for having done it. He hated himself for having acted like a gigolo.
At the then-current exchange rate, three BMWs were roughly worth one Bentley. It was all a debt, and I trashed the last instalment. Toxic as he was, my stepfather had brought glamor into our lives. Until they got together, my mother had been trying hard to fit into a normal, middle-class life, married to my father, a brilliant guy with austere, often pedestrian tastes. She left him for glamor. And for me in the end, my dream about the car is not about these fucked-up people and their fucked-up relationship. It’s not about the damage they did to all of us. It’s about the car, the beautiful car, the glamorous car.
You write beautifully
Great intersection of memoir and dream interpretation held together by an almost mystical imponderable, the indelible glamour of the pre-1970s Rolls/Bentleys.