Jigsaw (11 page)

Presently a heavy tread on the flimsy steep stairs, Mr Nairn coming home from work: a big, slow-moving, handsome man who filled the tiny room. He gave his wife an affectionate pat, nodded to his
sister-in-law
, shook hands with me. A good face – brown hair, grey eyes, strong teeth – with a calm and humorous expression; I liked him at once.

Room was made for him at the table, the cream-puffs cleared away, a meal of a kind, not quite fish and chips but of that nature, was placed before her husband by Toni with, I thought I discerned, faint distaste. The sisters lit cigarettes. Jamie Nairn spoke little; when he did it was in a deliberate, unhurried voice, a baritone voice (he sang in a choir), dropping some clear declarative sentences into our minds. ‘That man came back and paid four guineas for the Meredith.’ ‘Bob thinks the Browning is a fake.’ The sisters, who sometimes helped out in the shop, knew how to take this up; I listened. In the course of this and other, soon becoming frequent, visits I picked up a number of things about the Nairns without being able to sort them out as yet into a coherent whole.

It was evident, for one, that Rosie and Toni had been bred to the customs of another country: urban Germany and unmistakably Berlin. There was still a whiff about them of the intellectually alert, materially indulgent Jewish upper bourgeoisie of that city as they scampered after a bus – they would not walk – to take them two hundred yards up Baker Street. While Toni’s transplantation to a London mews was explained by her having got married to a taciturn Scot for her sins (her words), Rosie’s must have been due to choice. She was not a premature refugee; this was 1926, if Hitler was already ranting in the wings, he was ridiculed and discounted by the few who had heard of him, not feared. Had Rosie come to England then to hold her sister’s hand? Permanently? (She had applied for British 
nationality.) The sisters did live in each other’s pocket, mutually solicitous about sleep and feet and health – Did you get your rest today, dear? – yet also often snapping. Rosie seemed to thrive in England, loving it, loving London, everything English, while Toni was apt to be dismissive. Both showed concern for Jamie’s bookshop – founded on a little capital lent by friends. Jamie Nairn, I realised (not through him: he was a modest as well as a silent man) was already regarded as an authority on nineteenth-century manuscripts and modern first editions. He still was, and looked, a young man, in his early thirties, say, his wife probably older by a couple of years. He, too, lent books to me.

I was asked to the Nairns’ about twice a week now, tea extending into supper; Saturday afternoons spent keeping Jamie company in the garage as he tinkered with their Morris-Cowley with me being only too pleased to help. (Toni thought I was mad getting oil on my hands when I didn’t need to, and made us wash in the kitchen.) With Rosie I had tea only, or a matinée at the Old Vic; Rosie in the evenings was not available. Had I ever been to a Court of Law? she asked me one day, I might find it of interest. So I went to the Strand – she seemed
well-informed
as to how and when – sat in the public gallery and got hooked from the first May-it-please-your-Lordship. It was a libel case, involving the leader of a well-known band; I don’t remember names, or who heard the case, only that the standard of advocacy must have been high. I went again and again (with help from Rosie over the case list), more readily than to a play or film. Everything captivated: the voices, the casuistries of the arguments, the rigidities and drama of that formalised man’s world. It was fascinating to watch the chase for the elusive truth, the attempts at getting justice done; watching the wheels of that clockwork being driven on was both food for thought and supreme entertainment.

I only went to civil cases heard before the High Court – libel, disputed wills, divorce; my days in Magistrates’ Courts, the Old Bailey, in European and American Courts came much later. At sixteen, not in my wildest dreams – and I had dreams – would I have seen myself reporting a murder or a great political trial. Now that I 
have, I rather regret that I did not sign those – oh, highly serious – efforts Bill the Lizard.

I owe much of that to Rosie Nairn (she eventually had to take her brother-in-law’s name). Meanwhile I had read
Antic Hay
and got hold of everything else by Aldous Huxley,
Crome Yellow, Limbo
, the early essays; they seemed to bring to me everything I would then have liked to know and think. That, too, I owe to the Nairns. I never quite knew why they befriended me, a stranger, a girl twenty years their junior. When I had known them long enough to ask – towards the end of their lives – they couldn’t remember. Their taking me in may have had something to do with the curious isolation in which the two women – not Jamie – seemed to live then. Rosie had no visible friends; Jamie never brought his men friends home to the mews. Anyway, befriend me they did, and so began what became a pattern in my life: friendships, attachments to a group, a couple, a family not my own, friendships that lasted through the changing stages. That autumn in London was a kind of turning point. I had not been unhappy before; now I was consciously, buoyantly happy, looking forward to
something
new, something good every day.

I did not mind the Christmas stay – which it was supposed to be – at Sanary with my mother and stepfather. I rather enjoyed it. It is nice to go away when one has something to come back to. After the New Year came a development in my mother’s sporadic plans to find employment for Alessandro as a middleman’s middleman in the art world. She still had connections with the circle of O, the painter, the man she had jilted. Now someone had come forward offering to show Alessandro the ropes. It meant Paris, Amsterdam, weeks, possibly months … Should she go with him? There was the expense, a single man more lightly slips by. Delicacy of feelings was also involved – perhaps it
was
better for Alessandro to go as his own man? And there were the dogs, the puppies were gone, but there were still three Japanese spaniels. All in all, she had better stay put … Here at Sanary, in the sun. I like it here … There is much to explore. She 
turned to me, Will you explore with me? Will you stay on? Will you keep me company? She said it most charmingly; I said that I would.

Though an improvement that next villa too left much to be desired. It was new, clean, spacious: a salon, four bedrooms, and everything in it and about it hideous. Mercifully it was sparsely furnished. Brass bedsteads,
armoires à glace
, hard chairs, a large buffet stacked with patterned
services de table
which we did not use; we ate off the kitchen plates. There was nothing we could do about the floor tiles – a mustard and violet design – and very cold on the feet. The villa stood at the end of the road that winds along the hill above the bay, the last in a row, empty and shuttered now against winter. It was exceedingly draughty, with rattling doors and numerous badly fitting French windows; we were attacked by cold blasts whenever the mistral blew which it did often, leaving beautiful clear blue-swept skies and a sense of exhilaration. Out in the open that was: the house was unheatable in any contemporary sense, but then we were used to being cold indoors in southern winters. One retreated. Thick sweaters, bed for my mother during the chillier hours. We didn’t use the salon at all, and the salle à manger rarely; we made camp in our bedrooms keeping a couple of sturdy little wood-stoves going as well as a minute electric fire. A
femme de ménage
– a nicer one – came early, bearing provisions, lighting the kitchen-stove, knocking at my door as she took the tray with café au lait and two bowls into my mother’s room.

Our day began. In the long mornings it was concentrated plunges into
la lecture
. In France backwaters have bookshops; if Sanary did not run to a full-sized
librairie
, it had some well stocked shelves in an artists’ supply shop by name Au Grand Tube, run by a charming
non-local
couple. Here we found what is surely the ultimate in paperbacks: classics of French fiction at one franc twenty-five – three pence. New French books, then as now, did not come out in hardback – how I liked those light white volumes, beautifully produced by the NRF or Bernard Grasset, with their plain covers elegantly lettered like the 
labels of a first grand cru. That threepenny library was something quite else. Decades before Penguins, and also unlike the present French
livres de poche
, those books didn’t even look like books: they were flat, the shape of large notebooks, the paper was cheap and the print was smudgy – what matter, they were treasures; carrying an armful up our hill, I felt rich. I must have read (with earnest marginal notes) and my mother re-read half of Balzac, most of Maupassant, some Zola, Alfred de Vigny, Chateaubriand, George Sand, the Goncourts … All essential in their so various ways, my mother told me firmly, if I were to begin to understand something about the country I was in. Flaubert and, prematurely no doubt, Constant’s
Adolphe
I had absorbed earlier, at my mother’s knee as it were, and however little of their substance I had been capable of extracting, it was a foundation. Stendhal, too, had no part in our reconnaissance at that stage; Stendhal, a sincere and early passion, I felt to be both Italianate and a great writer
hors nation.
By noon we had shut our books, ready to stroll down, baskets over arm, into Sanary. Our bitch, Chumi, went with us. The few errands done, we would seek a sheltered table on the terrace of Chez Schwob, one of the
bars tabacs
. Schwob was a large and erudite Alsatian, married to a large and placidly competent black woman who nursed an out-sized baby while he spouted Heine and Descartes as they sold cigarettes and stamps and poured bright drinks from behind the zinc. Theirs was a steady clientèle of fishermen, masons, sailors, interspersed in the morning by artists, foreigners, French from other parts, and some of the larger-minded notables. In the evenings all these latter went to the more expensive Café de la Marine next door, the day resort of local professionals and
retraités
. The Café de Lyon and the other
tabac
must have been strictly other ranks, in all the years we never saw anyone we knew set foot in them.

So there we sat Chez Schwob, my mother and I, sun-warmed, looking at the sea and tossing boats, drinking a modest apéritif, saluted, addressed, often joined – chairs pulled out, shopping net or newspaper put down – by a miscellany of men and women. My mother, too, had struck up some acquaintances during the autumn months (by way of Madame Panigon, who else?).

We walked up the hill again for our lunch, having been preceded by la Mère Dédée who cooked it. She’d find the key under the geranium pot as was the custom of the country. She ran a fish stall, not among the market hoi polloi but smack in front of La Marine; she shut up at twelve: my mother had persuaded her to devote l’heure du déjeuner to us. My mother was being appreciated, I had noted, by the French of various kinds; that speed of mind which could bewilder or antagonise the English and Italians was taken in their stride. La Mère Dédée (for Désirée) was Dédée
tout court
then, the adjunct eventually came not because of maturity or offspring but because the fish stall having prospered and expanded she became patronne of a restaurant that at one point found itself, if unstarred, in the
Guide Michelin
. She was a proper Provençale and knew how to deal with aubergines, tomatoes, crustaceans, olive oil and garlic. What we ate – spicy fish stews, vegetable messes – was local, authentic and delicious. My mother made coffee for all three, pure black droplets from a miniature espresso machine, one of the first made, given to Alessandro by a Milanese friend. Afterwards no sleep for the virtuous: we went back to our books. I into my bedroom rigged as a study, card-table for desk by the window; my mother reading and scribbling in her bed, warmed by such dogs as chose to stay in.

Animals in my family lived beside rather than dependent on us (though Chumi, self-contained and calm, did not always conceal her devotion to Alessandro). Her young, males, were a tough lot quite unlike their over-bred mama; there was, as in all her litters –
her
choice,
our
casual ways – a good deal of mongrel in them. They roamed the hillside as they pleased (cars were few); perhaps dogs used to grow and thrive more easily, I can’t remember ever taking them to a vet or their having shots for this and that; fleas and ticks were all we had to worry about.

Early evening: early dark. I would walk down again with napkin, bowl and torch to fetch our dinner. From the same cook-shop the Cyril Connollys used to get theirs a few years on. I am still moved by his passage about this simple act in
The Unquiet Grave
, and tempted to quote from it once again. 

I did not carry a graceful lemur, I might have one of Chumi’s pups following me on a string, nor did I use a bicycle as our hill was steep (the Connollys, Cyril and Jean, lived on the flat side of Sanary), the wind though, the smells, the sense of moving through the hibernal Mediterranean night bound for home, companionship, a fire, were the same.

We too ate the dinner I brought back in happy domesticity. My mother, for all her apparent volatility, had a talent for contentment. I have met few women who made so little demand on distractions or entertainment: she made her own with whatever was at hand. If she had lived a life of frequent changes, it was imposed on her by
circumstances
and perhaps too often by the conflagrations of her feelings, never by a wish for change. I believe that she would have liked permanence; whenever things were good she wanted to stay still (‘then the gods won’t mind you’); she did
not
like, nor was she skilled, to face or shape the future. When there was no immediate menace, she ignored it.
Carpe diem.