“He’s watched his mother and the extraordinary service she gave.” Her childhood was peripatetic: in the library, where a bust of a former governor of Connecticut glares across the room, she keeps a group of silver animal figurines her parents brought back from Thailand when they were stationed in Laos in the ’70s. “I think Charles is going to be a good king,” she reassures me. The study, with some of Carter’s flea-market finds © William WaldronĪnna learned diplomacy from her father, who was the British ambassador to Yugoslavia before becoming Queen Elizabeth’s deputy private secretary in 1985. “Ah, too late now!” she recalls of her reaction, giggling at the memory. A New York Police Department pipe band came up for the occasion and, to the Scottish bride’s chagrin, played Irish Republican Army songs. It was her second marriage and his third. The Carters were married in 2005 at a white church a literal stone’s throw from the house. Boyish whimsy abounds, from the model Air France Concorde parked on a bookshelf to the Tintin rocket ship standing behind Carter’s office desk, ready for lift-off. A wooden refrigerator has been repurposed as a cabinet for board games. A French butcher’s chalkboard hangs in the Carters’ kitchen, listing pork prices. Wes Anderson might find solace among the vintage leather suitcases, the model sailing boats, the typewriters and the taxidermy. The couple have been to Clignancourt many times – and seem to have hauled much of it back to Connecticut. “The most French thing you can do in Paris is go to Clignancourt.” He is smooth and loquacious: his trademark double-breasted suit has been ditched for shorts and trainers, though his familiar bon vivant’s paunch and swoosh of white hair are still reassuringly in place. She is adept at manoeuvring Graydon toward his better anecdotes, and gives the impression of never putting a foot wrong. Anna is petite – even more so beside her expansive husband – and laughs readily. “Flea markets are my favourite things in life,” Carter tells me when we meet one afternoon as summer is just beginning to fade into autumn. Carter in his study with the ink-on-paper sketches he drew after he left Vanity Fair © William Waldron
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