Jigsaw (13 page)

How did one connect those spurts of
à la lanterne
, of heroism, endurance, the reeling between the excesses of revolution and bureaucracy, the intellectual rigour and the rhetorical platitudes, the elegance, the arrogance, the exquisite domestic sensuality, the
petit 
train-train de la vie
and all the niceness and avarice that went with it? Not leaving out the horrors of French bourgeois life – ‘They
are
horrors and I’m sure they still go on … They are a perplexing people!’

But then civilisation was always a mixed bag. National character? How far did it exist? Once you looked closely, up came the paradoxes. ‘Try to pin down the English … Try to think of the Germans without parti pris … As for the Chinese, you and I can’t even begin to think about the Chinese.’

And yet to relate, to interpret, to extrapolate, she would go on, was necessary. To what end? Perhaps it was incumbent on one, on every one of us to take part – oh
indirectly
– in making the world a more tolerable place. ‘Besides the human mind craves cohesion, patterns … Order. It longs for it all to hang together.’

‘I think
I
do,’ I said. ‘Is that wrong?’

She thought there never had been a civilisation without a deliberately created order as an underpinning; what mattered was the nature of the pattern and how far it would be open to doubt, second thoughts, eventual change … ‘All’s well as long as no one thinks they’ve got the whole pattern, and that theirs and theirs alone is the right one. No great final answers! Trouble starts when the prophet comes along, the revolutionary, the very clever man, the inspired general …’

‘Would we have been better off then without great men?’

‘Very possibly. If we wanted to live happy. But that, I dare say, is a relatively recent aspiration. Nor does it always have to be a
great
man; look at our plump ranter across the border. When conditions are too bad for too many – and how seldom were they not – there is fertile ground for the likes of Musso. For a herd creed, a cruel idiots’ creed. And when the herd wakes up and the orgy’s over, the damage has been done. People have died or had their lives spoilt.’

‘The Greeks …’ I said. ‘Didn’t they … didn’t they find a good pattern?’

‘Still a part of
our
underpinning. Yes: one likes looking back to the classical world … the great spell of the Mediterranean light … But mind
they
didn’t believe in the greatest good for the greatest number – 
think of a slave’s life and up to a point a woman’s – one’s lot depended on having been born in the right place and sex.’

Is pessimism then the only realistic attitude? I asked, and remembered I had read
Candide
.

There have been some pretty rum patterns, she said, and some downright diabolical ones. Blood sacrifices, judicial torture, trench warfare, the infinitely varied ways of men doing harm to men.
Quetzalcoatl
, free-born Athenians, Roman chauvinism,
all
chauvinism, Holy Islam, Holy Inquisition, Cromwell’s armies, Napoleon’s armies, nationalism, imperialism – patterns clashing with other patterns. ‘Each providing rationalisations for your right, and rather pleasant, duty to do the equivalent of putting members of the other tribe into your pot and cook them.’

‘Mummy,’ I said, ‘are we talking about history or human nature?’

‘Both. They do hang together.’

‘What would have happened … how would it be if some of the big clashes hadn’t happened? The French Revolution? Russia? If the changes had come as they did in England …?’

‘Not entirely bloodless either – looking at the whole process. But, oh yes, better, no doubt better: a lesser sum of individual loss. I shall always believe in seeing it that way. As to whether anything that happened might not have happened? By a bit of give at one point, a bit of luck? Who can tell? What was inevitable? What was touch and go? One spends much time speculating about just that in one’s own life; when it comes to collectives, whether we call them nations or masses or movements, there are so many factors in play at every stage – too many for any single hand,
if
there were one, to guide or manipulate – and so much chance as well.’

‘If Lenin hadn’t been put on that sealed train?’

‘Quite. But there’s also the weight of what has gone on before, not forgiven, not forgotten, the chain of reaction to reaction, revenge on revenge on revenge, the avalanche momentum. One can start almost anything; it would appear that nothing can ever be turned back.’

Then there would come the point in the evening’s talk, in all our evening talks, when she would throw up her hands, dismissing what 
she’d been saying. One thing
had
changed, would remain changed: war. Collective attitude to war. There could not be, there
must
not be another war in Europe.

Something
can
be learned if the lesson was hard enough. Up till now every war had led to the next war, a bigger, more catastrophic war; the horror of 1914–18 was on such a scale that the Western world at least is coming to pity and reason.

One day when the histories are written and re-written there’ll still be the Kaiser and the Habsburgs and German militarism and French bellicosity, naval rivalry and the fortuitous train of events at Sarajevo, but it may also be seen that there was another, perhaps ultimately decisive, element: people. That war could be launched into because men and women light-mindedly – often unselfishly, I give you, sacrificingly – believed that war was permissible, controllable,
sometimes
right
; so war – one more attempt at resolving conflicts by killings and destruction – became possible because nearly everyone believed that it
was
possible.

She sat up straight. ‘They no longer do. Something has seeped into European consciousness.
You and I shall see no war between France and Germany in our lifetime
. That means peace for England and all the rest.’ On another tone she added, ‘A wish; of course it’s a wish.’ Then, ‘It goes beyond that – I believe, I almost believe, it’s true.’

I took it in.

And what of Alessandro?
He
was no letter-writer, meaning that he wrote regularly enough but briefly, giving his news (moderately good) without describing it or taking up her points. She scribbled to him as often as not but these loose sheaves were seldom finished and randomly posted. The ball, she firmly said, needs returning. ‘Unless one is one of those unfortunate women, you know, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse …’ She liked good concrete masculine stuff from her correspondent, life, wit, refreshment (a volume of Byron’s Letters was often by her hand); not sentiments, ‘Well, a small percentage of sentiment. Anyway, talking is easier (alas) and one needs a public.
You
’re serving quite nicely.’

I grinned. 

What came from him was reassuring. Contacts had proved hopeful, steps been taken. There were prospects, even results; the small working capital had materialised. He now owns a sixteenth of a Vlaminck, my mother told me, and he thinks he can get a share in a Juan Gris. ‘The art
market
! Well named. And he’s such an amateur.’

I think, I said slowly (I had a slight stammer and never quite knew whether it was involuntary or put on), ‘that he is … a very capable man … inventive.’

‘Improvising. He’s flexible. He can’t make a career of this – or anything else. We
are
amateurs. I suppose we won’t change. It’s the way things turned out.’

I was pleased by her insouciance over the Vlaminck; all these weeks, there had been none of the constraint I had felt last summer, the fear of some drastic change impending; I would not break her mood. Perhaps undercurrents, situations, were seldom as one read them?

Eventually she left it to me to keep up mutual reassurance. I managed regular short letters – concrete, I hoped, if nothing more – saying how well she was doing. From him came picture postcards of Dutch landscapes nicely chosen, saying such things as, I know you’re looking after her, you would have enjoyed that huge lobster on spiced rice I had today, sending love, A.

Did she miss him? (
I
had not forgotten Sorrento.) In a complacent way, I think she did. Absence, if reasonably short, can be a very charming thing, she told me once. One noon we were standing in Benech’s queue waiting our turn. That shop was always full. She sent me off – I know you hate waiting – so I’d had a nip into the bookshop. When I got back she was still standing, holding her basket. I’ve just been telling myself, she said, that I am a happily married woman. It is rather odd. (She meant what had long been clear between us that she had not been
happy
with my father and not been
married
to the others.) ‘I have a husband … and daughter,’ her tone sustained astonishment. ‘It feels rather nice queueing to get dinner for one’s family …well not for my husband at this minute – but I shall. A
very
nice feeling.’

Sanary had a cinematographic theatre, if one can call it that,
converted
from a garage, and it showed a film on Sunday nights. The seating was hierarchical: below was crammed with local youths, stamping, whistling, cracking
cacahuètes
, holding their girls, filling the air with stinging fumes of
caporal bleu
; the ramshackle balcony, up the uncertain stairs, was sparsely occupied by families of
middle-aged
tradesmen and notables none of whom we knew or were likely to want to know us. Our café friends looked down on this
establishment
preferring to drive to Toulon for more recent offerings. My mother and I went. We rather enjoyed the routine of another weekly outing. The screen was bad, the piano lively; the films cannot have been very new but they were good. Movies: black and white, silent. American mostly, as far as I remember, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd.

One night there walked into that cinema hall a couple of strangers. They were slim like cats’ shadows, matched in size, quietly, gracefully moving side by side. They bore themselves well; we could see their profiles – sharply cut, fastidious, austere, like profiles in the portraits of a Piero or Pisano. They wore berets, and their clothes, elegant beyond daylight reality, were versions of French workmen’s dress. Stylish and aloof, they seemed apparitions stepped from the vanguard of some coming world.

Can they be the stuck-up snobs from Paris? My mother whispered to me. The stuck-up snobs from Paris, unknown to all, glimpsed by a few, gliding by in a high long old car so unlike their own beloved new boxes, were the subjects of much adverse speculation at the Café de la Marine. Little, in fact nothing, was known about them to our friends – which was indeed the very thing held against them – except that they had rented a villa – oh no better or no larger than another – on the westward bay. They were an incestuous couple, twins, well at least brother and sister, and if not you could be sure that they were not married – to each other that was: adultery certainly came into it; that’s why they had to leave Paris – undoubtedly their native habitat – going South for their health, consumptives, very likely. It was noted that they had not made the slightest attempt to meet anyone; had one ever seen them enter a 
café? They hadn’t as much as acknowledged anyone else’s existence.

It must be
them
, my mother said. To me they were the most beautiful pair of human beings I had ever seen.

From then on they, like us, came every Sunday night.

At one point in spring Alessandro returned. He came announced by telegram and carried a briefcase, looking pleased with it and himself. In due course he and I embraced; he touched my shoulder, You
have
looked after her. It was like changing guard.

The three of us spent some pleasant days, my ticket was getting booked, I looked forward to resuming … resuming what? I had no words, only felt ready for the life ahead.

My last night but one was a Sunday night, film night. Alessandro decided not to go, he’d been to a good many cinematographic theatres during the winter, he would try to get to grips with some
commercial
papers (he had also brought a typewriter, a neat light portable, which he and I had been practising, racing each other). My mother and I went to see one more Charlot or was it Harold Lloyd? As we were about to leave, the pair of strangers passed us in the aisle. He gave my mother a slight bow; she sketched a smile.

Victoria station in early afternoon. Grey; not very crowded; somewhat dishevelled though nothing to what it is now. Hot. Very hot. It was a day in April and one of those untimely heat waves had struck London. If people hadn’t actually taken their shirts off, they looked as if they’d like to. Not for relief, for celebration.

Urban railway stations, for those not inured by daily use, are places of angst and trauma. For me they had been so early (the sight of wounded German soldiers helped into the trains in 1915, my mother’s leaving me behind on platforms); on the present occasion I had come out of France replete and adventurous enough to keep it all at bay. I stepped on to the relatively sizzling pavements outside and took a bus, top of a bus not the tube, to Belsize Park.

Susan and Jack were as friendly and unconcerned as ever. Marmite flowed. Better than that: special food was fetched, drink too.

The let-down came the day after. What next? A structure was called for. Up to me again. Another pile of books in my bedroom to be gnawed through (my mother had recommended a go at the Victorians), talked over perhaps with bookish friends in the evenings? Now there I was faced with an awkwardness: would I ever see them again? Rosie, Toni and Jamie. The Nairns had been much in my mind during the months in France, daily I’d revved up to tell them what I was living, recounting stories while they were happening, repeating my mother’s ideas; in fact I had been pouring out letters to the Nairns in my mind. In colder fact I had not sent them a single postcard. Over and over I had put off the quick word due for the long letter, the letter longer and longer as time went on with preliminary excuses. Four months! (Rosie, I recalled, had seen me off.)
How could I?
It seemed so easy now to have acted otherwise. A horrible cloud of guilt bore down.