Jigsaw (15 page)

When I am trying to think of those years in NW1, and I haven’t thought of them for a very long time, they seem to have been all of a piece, a uniform round. It can’t have been wholly like that. There 
must have been some process of growing up, at whatever rate; life does widen and not only by visits to the British Museum, the Tate and Winchester Cathedral. Yet the only thing that remains vivid is the physical feel of living in London, young and on very little though sufficient money. The buses – one was always running after, catching or just missing a last bus; the queueing for a play in Shaftesbury Avenue; the Lyons’ Corner House afterwards (poached egg on toast); Bovril at a coffee stall very late at night; the elegance of Mayfair streets at lunchtime; how splendid the men, how pretty the girls, how well dressed everyone was, how en fête; the smell of the cheaper Soho restaurants (upholstery, grease, spice, trapped air); my digs.

A strip of a room, a strip of none too appetising carpet, a sash window (rather awful curtain), the whole reasonably clean: a respectably kept bed and breakfast place. I had a gas ring (used to good purpose with a pot and a pan I got at Woolworth’s), a basin with hot and cold; breakfast was in bed, brought up on a tray, English breakfast, not very well cooked, plentiful, welcome. It was a far cry from the whitewashed space I associated with living in Italy and Provence, but it could do, and it did. One great boon was the bath – half-landing down – generally vacant, with an abundant supply of steaming hot water (our southern abodes depended on rainfall and cisterns, seldom satisfactorily filled, and capricious wood-burning contraptions to warm the trickle).

Part of the day and the late night walks were my own, a solitariness I needed and enjoyed, the rest I played satellite to the Nairns. And it is they rather than what happened to my younger self who occupy my memory of those years: their daily life, their lives, their story. It got to me piecemeal. I never knew it all, but I got to know a good deal.
The Two Sisters
. That would be the title had it been a play (Jamie’s role – though this was not evident to me for some time – was not a principal’s). Some of it puzzles me still; I never fathomed Toni. Although she remained a great friend; she died in the
nineteen-seventies
, the result of an accident brought about by her own obstinacy.

In the late Twenties when I shared so much of their London life, Toni and Jamie must have been married for some years. They had met in Berlin (where the Falkenheims came from). Their father had been a 
doctor who died early leaving his widow – a somewhat over-cosseted woman – comfortably off. They lived in a large, properly staffed, rented flat in the Kurfürstendamm district. There were no brothers. The male element was an uncle, a bachelor who lived well, doted on Toni (said to have looked enchanting in a fragile way when a young girl). He encouraged her singing, took her to the opera, to the great
performances
of the time, and to suppers at places like Horcher’s and Kempinsky’s where he gave her caviar (literally), delicate little ragouts and sips of Château Yquem (again literally). This uncle had less time for Rosie, older, more independent and, as I said before, just scraping home as a
jolie laide
.

The girls grew up in that cultivated, liberal society which flourished in Berlin in the decade before the Kaiser’s War: professional men, artists, actors, journalists and musicians, bankers and aristocrats with a large but by no means exclusive element of Jews. Under the Weimar Republic, that society, as we know, became even more liberal, talented and mixed. The Weimar Republic (and a concatenation of the economic ravages of the late war, the Versailles Treaty, Allied expectancy of Reparation Payments) also brought inflation of devastating speed and scale. The mark in their pockets became devalued by a hundred per cent, a thousand, a million, a thousand million … Paper money – wages were paid daily more than once – was carried about in laundry baskets; what bought a piano last week and a loaf that morning barely ran to the evening newspaper. People in work or who owned and contrived to hang on to real property were able to scrape along; the rentier class was wiped out. Their comfortable income melted to nothing at all, the Falkenheims were left with little besides the family silver. The uncle was dead, his estate vanished. Frau Falkenheim became more idle and difficult, finding refuge in sleeping pills, complaints and neurasthenia; the girls, young women by then, took jobs. They had not been brought up to work, they had been encouraged as was the wont of females in their milieu to put their feet up after luncheon. They were, however, well educated (and connected). They got
good
jobs: Rosie in an art gallery, Toni in a
well-known
auction house, a Berlin equivalent of Sotheby’s. Both women 
unexpectedly turned out competent. Toni’s lot was not made easier by a morbid conscientiousness combined with the double burden of an invincible shyness that covered up an arrogance she had no real wish to conceal. Rosie liked and got on well with her male colleagues.

They managed to keep on the flat – letting go the staff, taking a lodger or two – and to look after their mother and her increasing demands. And it was at that auction house that Jamie, having come over to bid, met Toni and found her charming.

So far so clear. What would follow followed: proposal, engagement, some day Toni marries, leaves for England; some day at some point the mother dies, Rosie in her turn gives up her job, packs up and goes to join her sister and brother-in-law. And so here they are, the three of them, in London. (Rosie, incidentally, without a visible occupation – she only ‘helped out’ at Jamie’s shop the odd afternoon.)

Now and then remarks came out inconsistent with this sequence: dates or events that would not fit, such as Rosie talking about a play she remembered seeing in the West End: so had I, with the Robbinses, surely many years ago? Gradually it emerged that it must have been Toni on her own who held the job in Berlin, and looked after the increasingly unmanageable mother until she died (an overdose?). When Jamie met Toni and Toni accepted him, Rosie had already gone to live – a year ago, several years ago? – in England.

I should now say something about their daily lives. That Toni was discontented with hers was obvious. She missed, she longed for, she glorified Berlin – the theatre, her friends, the life … She was fond of Jamie, very fond, that too was evident. (Their bouts of big-man
small-woman
exchanges made Rosie look very distant.) She was serious about his work, giving advice (sound), doing the bookkeeping, another unexpected skill; the shop was doing well. All the same they were hard up, though living rent free; Jamie, intent on paying back the capital he’d been lent, insisted on a meagre budget. Toni’s singing lessons, by a far from top-class teacher, were their one extravagance.

That capital, by the way, came from Toni’s ex-boss, P.G., the founder of the Berlin auction house. He had a high opinion of Jamie’s abilities and integrity; the money, I understood, had been lent free of interest 
as a wedding present for Toni. Hence Jamie’s determination to repay it as soon, or sooner than they could.

P.G. was an exacting and a complex man, self-made, courageous (fighting a bone disease), witty, generous, a martinet and, on occasions, a charmer. He had the misfortune (one of his least) to become my pupil. That was in the Thirties when he and his family arrived in England as refugees. (I advertised language lessons in
The Times
agony column, though that particular job came to me by way of the Nairns.) I say misfortune because I cannot spell, at least not well enough to teach. He trusted me. Years later the poor man nearly sacked his American secretary because she didn’t spell harassment my way. (Not enough r’s
he
believed.) I also coached his son – an exceedingly handsome boy – on God knows what pretences! – and actually helped him, with the assistance of Brian Howard of all people, to get into an Oxford college. I often wish I had achieved as much for myself.

Back to Toni. She took being hard up well enough, though Jamie’s Scottish little household sums lacked the panache of the German débâcle. What she minded dreadfully was the housework – even at the worst in Berlin they’d had a
Putzfrau
, a daily, doing for them – it bored and repelled her. The mews was decently kept down to the unloved kitchen: but oh, the gloves for scrubbing and the gloves for dusting, the sighs and the lack of interest in her husband’s food – man’s food, Englishman’s food. Well, she gave him his breakfast and his supper. He had his lunches near the shop – somewhere behind Bond Street or Oxford Street – how nice for him, I thought, with a colleague or a customer, the men he brought back the anecdotes from. The sisters had their main meal at Schmidt’s, the German restaurant in Charlotte Street, where they met every day at one o’clock. I had been expected to join them; got out of it, couldn’t afford it for one thing though it was fairly inexpensive then and a good place of its kind. A sandwich, an apple or, after I reached eighteen, a couple of sausages at a pub were my range, not
Kalbsfleisch
and chocolate cake.

Suppers at the mews were segregated, a bought pie, baked beans warmed up for Jamie, something cold for the women: dark bread 
and butter, one of the more refined products of
charcuterie
such as
Teewurst
or liver pâté, an assortment of cream cakes – everything from Schmidt’s – followed by chocolates and cigarettes. They never cooked, and I dare say rarely ate, a fresh vegetable. We all drank tea. Jamie smoked a pipe.

Goodness, it sounds dreary. It was not. There was much to make it not so: Jamie’s friendliness, the flow of talk – books and their authors, music and musicians, art and its collectors – all coming naturally, pell-mell, not argumentative though each had different bents. Jamie might quote Tennyson, Toni would tell me to read
Buddenbrooks
and (curious choice for her)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
. Rosie picked up
Decline and Fall
the week it came out. Another first I owe to her: Evelyn Waugh. I posted a copy to my mother next day.

Then there was the gramophone. When Rosie wasn’t there;
she
really disliked music. Jamie played his Elgar and his Bach and Handel, Toni chose
Rosenkavalier
. What really sent her, as we would now, not inaptly, put it, were the voices of great singers. Once she got lured into putting on Caruso and a rare recording of Emmy Destinn, a soprano she revered. It sounded ghostly, remote and cracked, with some beauty coming through. For Toni it was an ecstasy she ought to have been allowed to have in private.

They were good, those evenings in the mews at Regent’s Park. Not just for me. In spite of the smouldering discontent, Toni was stimulated; in Rosie, whatever she was doing, one was aware of something quietly purring away; Jamie was just
quiet
. Not on the surface only, I feel sure he liked his home life.

Rosie and I did things together: afternoons at the National Portrait Gallery, the Wallace Collection, Dulwich (on top of my own, at one time almost daily, hour at the National Gallery). The plays she chose for us would be anything good between Shakespeare and Coward. – She greatly admired the actor Gerald Du Maurier. – We took train day trips to Canterbury, to Ely …

On Sundays, when the weather wasn’t too vile, we drove into the country, the four of us in Jamie’s Morris-Cowley, Rosie and I stuck in the open dickey with a square of oilcloth rigged above our heads in 
case of rain. Jamie liked country walks, and so did I. The sisters chose to stay in the car, smoking, nibbling chocolates. These outings, picnic and all, were one of Toni’s concessions to being a good wife. (How
little
she liked those Sundays, she later told me.) On the way back, as a reward, Jamie would stop at a tea-shop.

About once a month Toni and Jamie went to his mother’s for Sunday dinner. I believe she lived in Surbiton. (Jamie took his mending.) Hardly a word was said about these visits – Toni
was
loyal – yet one gathered that mother and daughter-in-law were poles apart in every respect. I never learned much about Jamie’s background or early life – though he and I remained on affectionate, if casual, terms for some fifty years. (As Toni so often said: a taciturn Scot.) I knew vaguely that he had been something of a wanderer, that his father was a lay preacher at some time, that Jamie had not gone to university, that there was no family money. A brother somewhere, I think; no sisters. Mrs Nairn’s home, Toni’s first in England – after their marriage, she and Jamie lived at his mother’s for about a year – was the epitome of an English way of life she shuddered from and feared: cosy-spartan England of parlours, yellow soap in the bath and no warmth in the bedrooms, where dad was served first and had his chair by the fire (a cut or two below my own first English experience with the Robbinses’ people). That year in Surbiton, if it was Surbiton, must have been a great trial; the more so as it was utterly unexpected: Jamie the happy suitor in Berlin had given her no indications. If anyone was inept at living down being the foreigner-married-to-the-son it was Toni.

Disassociation from her husband’s family goes some way to explain the social isolation in which Toni lived during those years. Why no new friends of her own? deigned not? could not? Lack of opportunity I suppose, compounded by shyness, choosiness and pride; in her disillusion with the English she looked rather too often down her small nose. Then there was Jamie failing to bring home his professional friends (pretty glamorous – by which I meant articulate and bright – from what I absorbed on visits to the shop). A simple instinct to keep his masculine world apart? Brief exceptions were attempted once or twice, not doomed to success – Toni’s unadjustable attitudes, her 
housekeeping, their slender means. (At that period no drink was kept in the house.)

Yes, but Rosie.
She
was not shy;
she
loved the English; her feelings about London were much those of Dr Johnson, yet she too appeared to know nobody besides myself and a woman schoolteacher from Watford who faithfully came to tea once a fortnight on her
half-holiday
. They’d met on some trip. A nice woman, though hardly, I felt, a congruous friend for Rosie.