1978-79

I met Olivier when I was eighteen. I think we were up for the weekend at Marnie and David’s cottage in Suffolk. At the time Olivier had been doing some film work for David’s company. He was thirty-two. I don’t think anything happened at the time. I was with Joel and T, and he was definitely with Joel’s parents and their friends. We’d meet at meals, for drinks in the garden and so on, but we were otherwise separate. The three of us were still young enough to be excused the rest of the time. It was ok to be in a huddle, whispering and laughing.

I wish I could remember how it started. I think it was Joel’s fault. He was forever passing on bits of gossip he’d overheard. This time it was “Olivier fancies you”. I was astonished, and very flattered. For a start, he was old enough to seem incredibly sophisticated in my eyes, but not so old as to be completely unapproachably ancient, with wrinkles, like Joel’s parents. He wore velvet, not denim, jackets and he didn’t look like he nicked motorbikes for fun either. Whenever he walked past, he would leave a little trail of Eau Sauvage. He did impossibly glamorous things - like recording soundtracks on Caribbean islands and making films. I knew he’d managed a famous band until fairly recently. His father made cult documentaries in Europe. He wasn’t exactly conventionally good-looking, he was more exotic than that, but he was definitely attractive.

My attempts to ask casual questions about him didn’t fool Joel and T for one minute. They knew me too well. They teased me mercilessly until I launched myself at them and we ended up in a giggling heap on the floor. One of them held me down and the other tickled me while I desperately tried to stop laughing long enough to hit them. We were always doing that, and because there were three of us, it was exactly the right number of people for it to stay good-natured.

The message must have been passed along somehow. Olivier left shortly after that to do a film in Australia – but I think he called me before, and asked if I would like to go out for drinks when he got back. I was so impressed. None of my previous boyfriends had ever asked me to go out for drinks. We all moved in a crowd and every now and then, one person would somehow end up with another person at the end of an evening – it just kind of happened. I hoped I didn’t come across as too tongue-tied when I accepted - I wanted to try to sound as if it wasn’t such a big deal.

He was away for quite a few months, and during that time he would send me thrilling letters. I’d keep them in my bag until they almost fell to pieces. I have no memory of what he actually wrote, but I remember his handwriting was excitingly un-English, and I was just so flattered that someone so much older would want to write to me. By the time he got back to England it was more or less a foregone conclusion what would happen.

For a while I lived this odd double-life. I remember being in Lille, on an A level trip with other people my age from Kingsway, sharing a room with four other girls, sitting up all night laughing and talking – and then going back home to his flat in Camden Town – the big bedroom, with Bryan Ferry’s old piano painted white at one end, the dinner parties he’d have, where people would talk about films they were making, budget deals, tours. It felt quite strange changing from one world to the other.

Gradually I spent more and more time with Olivier. I just scraped enough grades to get onto my degree course and it was only a short walk from Olivier’s so I lived there most of the time.

Many of the first year students at North London Polytechnic seemed so much younger than me. Because it had a reputation for being liberal and very accepting of different people, there were quite a few eighteen year olds – painfully shy – who escaped their small towns in other parts of the country and launched themselves into the unknown of Kentish Town. They’d heard you wouldn’t get beaten up there if you were gay, or if you liked having green hair and dressing differently.

There were also people like me who already had lives in London, and who didn’t join in with the freshers’ events, and lastly, there were many mature students with families and other responsibilities.

I enjoyed a lot of the work we did but I was dreadfully lazy about learning French . It was so easy to be lazy with Olivier – he knew everything – I’d even get him to do my English-French translations for me. He could knock them off in half the time it would have taken me. He’d been at the Lycee in London and was completely bilingual.

I was also able – encouraged even – to continue to be completely irresponsible with money. If I ran out, Olivier would just give me some more. I blew my entire first grant cheque at Joseph in Knightsbridge. He didn’t mind. So long as he didn’t actually have to come along, Olivier was happy to sub me when I wanted to go out shopping.

We ate out all the time – little intimate French restaurants with chequered tablecloths, big expensive Italian ones where people sat near the window so everyone could see they were there. Everyone air-kissed, and I learned to swirl hideously expensive brandy round the huge glasses, warming it in my hands before drinking it.

I'm not sure if he was ever genuinely in love with me. I don't think I was – not really. I loved being with him. It was very overwhelming and exciting and I got kind of swept away by it all. It was so easy to just sit back and let it happen.

I knew I was also an ego trip for him – I could see by the looks on his friends’ faces when they met me – it gave him kudos that he could pull a nineteen year old. At first, when people asked him how it was going, and he didn’t think I was near enough to hear, he would laugh and say, “exhausting”.

Some of his friends were really nice. Soon after we started living together, the lead singer of the band he used to manage got married, and Olivier was best man. We went up to their house in the country for the weekend. I was terrified. I’d met other members of the band in London and they were ok, but the singer was supposed to be quite eccentric and he was also very famous- not Mick Jagger famous – more of a cult fame than that, but still a legend.

I’d met lots of famous people before, but always as a child, or as Joel’s friend where I was allowed to be invisible most of the time. In the end he was the nicest person there. It must have been so obvious I was petrified, but he was incredibly kind and spent the whole evening before his wedding sitting next to me, teaching me how to play Mahjong, cheating furiously on my behalf to make sure I didn’t look stupid. His girlfriend was lovely too – she was about 26 and pregnant. I don’t think she’d known him very long. Like me, she wasn’t one of the inner circle of these men who’d spent the past decade on the road together.

Another of Olivier’s friends worked in television and it was through him that I went to possibly the weirdest party I have ever been to. There was a programme for children – it had been going for years and years and I had actually watched it as a child myself. Olivier’s friend, Mark, was the director at the time I think, and they had a private party one night that Olivier and I were invited to. It was fancy dress – the theme was “schoolchildren” of course.

My friends and I didn’t do fancy dress. I hadn’t a clue. I just dug out my old school uniform, with my cherry red blazer, striped tie, hat, and navy blue skirt, put it on, and we left. I had no idea until we walked in that I ‘d taken it too literally. All the other women there were in their thirties and they were dressed as if they’d stepped off the set for a St. Trinian’s Film. Tight shirts, tied around their midriffs, short, short skirts, fishnet stockings and high stilettos. They’d scraped their hair up into high ponytails and they were all wearing masses of lipstick. I’d taken all my makeup off which made me look even younger than I really was.

I think I made the entire room really uncomfortable – as if I’d spoiled their game or something. It was also very weird for me, seeing the happy smiley faces of my childhood memories, doing lines of coke off a mirror and later, staggering off blind drunk into bedrooms with each other.

Olivier’s sister, Cecile, was lovely and very kind to me. She was twenty-six and she lived with a frighteningly distant architect in a strange little private road in Islington. A group of them had bought the land in the early seventies and had designed and built their own houses there, Each one was an experiment. Some of them looked really ugly. Everyone on that road was obsessed with style.

There was a man who wore nothing but black and lived with a Japanese woman who never smiled. Olivier’s sister would take all her Levis to have the back pockets altered before wearing them – having them slightly moved so her arse looked smaller. She would give me bags full of clothes that she had only worn once or twice.

Her boyfriend never said a single word to me. I thought he was horrible. Cecile said there was a light outside the front door, and if it was lit when she came home, it would mean he was entertaining someone else and she would have to go elsewhere. He was very controlling. When they went out together, he would make her wear the same thing each time – a cheongsam dress – so tight she could hardly walk. It seemed odd to me – I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just leave.

After about a year it was obvious that we’d both had enough. We slipped into a kind of torpor where we were just together out of habit. I think Olivier got bored. I know I did. One night we were at an awards party at the Music Machine. I spotted a band there who I used to go drinking with in Hampstead – they were my age – and I could see Matt in the crowd.

Suddenly I missed my real friends so much. It was like fresh air to me, hearing Matt whispering funny, sarcastic things in my ear. I drank six tequila sunrises and went home with him on the back of his motorbike.