Jigsaw (21 page)

Not so timorous and girlish though that he would not have enjoyed a go at the war game when the fun began (the Finchingfield dogs got kicked out of the way, only the Pekinese held its sofa place). Toni absolutely forbade Tommy’s taking part, the noise would be bad for him. So she and Rosie would crouch in the back-room with the wretched dog, trying to stop his ears.

It made them all look ludicrous. I was irritated and unwise enough to try to get this point of view across to Toni. I was not in her best books at the time; she was displeased about my rushing off to
Finchingfield
at every opportunity, hinting even that it must soon be time for me to go back to France (this reminded me that I was their guest in Essex and that this might cease). After Rosie’s stay at Sanary, Toni had tried to turn me into
her
friend first and foremost, something I had to treat with tact, particularly as Rosie, considering herself the lucky one 
in the major aspects of her life, was prone to give way to her sister in all else. Then Toni, smouldering, was confronted with my infatuation with Finchingfield which I conducted without any tact at all. So when now I criticised her comportment there, she told me that they were superficial literati, not artists, spoilt into the bargain, that the men gossiped like washerwomen (they gossiped) and that anyway the place was not at all suitable for
me
; she felt like writing to my mother.

What about?

For one thing, they drink far too much.

They do, I said, and I love it. What else?

Immorality, she said in a clipped tone, and would not say further.

Perhaps I was right about their having affairs? I thought. There was an aura of eroticism at Finchingfield, not all the time, not when the more austere men held the talk, but when the lights were off and the game was on there was a whiff.

Unsuitable
, she said again.

I shall be eighteen next year, I thought, but did not say.

I saw them again! In bright sunlight, less than ten yards from me on the port in early summer, my first days back at Sanary. It was not the long high car that had aroused such disapproval among our café friends, it was a dwarf-size, improbably antiquated three-seater, one might have said three-wheeler, looking like a cross between a
sundulled
black beetle and a hip-bath. They stepped out of it with the utmost grace.

I was standing outside Chez Schwob, where I’d left a vegetable basket, sheltered to see without being seen. She had been at the wheel, now she stood up. She wore a short blue linen skirt and a little faded cotton top, a beret clung to a side of the narrow well-shaped head; in full day too, the structure of the face, all profile, evoked the paintings of the Florentine Renaissance; the colouring was matt olive set off by a brilliant splash of lipstick, the hair cut very short was sleeked and darkened by the application of a transparent substance then the rage 
sold as (Josephine) Baker-Fix. His head was bare, the hair brown and straight, he was in canvas trousers and an open short-sleeved shirt. They wore their rudimentary clothes with incomparable elegance and neatness. At close range, they looked akin rather than alike: his profile was equally clear-cut, smooth-textured, yet, although still youthful – they were both approaching thirty – it was stronger (and became
pronouncedly
so in middle and old age), some Frenchness had modified the Piero della Francesca look; in him there was much Clouet – and a great distinction; unlike Clouet’s sitters he was extremely slender and moved with feather lightness; together they projected a dreamlike amalgam of an historical past with an ultra post-war modernity.

And now they were three: from the back of the hip-bath there arose a young man like a hunk of Greek sculpture from the sea. He was of more solid clay: compact, bronzed, muscled, an unambiguous
Mediterranean
archetype; and beautiful in the way of the very young. He was in bathing shorts and a narrow singlet that left his torso almost bare. All three wore true Basque espadrilles, close-fitting like
ballet-shoes
, stiff with dazzling whiteness.

I think I must have run most of the way home to Les Cyprès. Mummy – they’re back. Who? She began, and relented.

‘I’ve seen them too … the mysterious strangers of the cinema, your Heavenly Twins.’

Who are they
?
I said.

We did not find out in a day. We did not find out in a year, the years; some of it is taking a lifetime. To begin with, though, we met them. Quite soon.

At first impact, people convey no more than their present
face-value
; more is revealed as one begins doing things together: pieces of their past – what may have shaped them, what they have lived – become known gradually, a remark here, a statement there, supplied by themselves, by third persons, by gossip, imagination, deduction. Of the sequence, the future: what will become of them, what
they will
become
, new friends know nothing. 

One thing was true, so much my mother could tell me, they
were
going to settle here, they’d begun building a house in an olive grove a few hundred yards up the road from us. Walls could already be seen beyond the trees. They looked, she said, as if they
were
going to do, God forbid, a Le Corbusier.

One afternoon a few days on, the Peugeot stopped halfway between Sanary and our house. It was not a good car. Alessandro and I had been up the hill encouraging the conversion of his client’s villa that was going into its tenth month by then. We got out, Alessandro opened the bonnet, set to fiddling with carburettor feeds and sparking plugs to no effect. A car drew up behind us. It was not the black beetle hip-bath, it was the low, high, clean-lined vintage car, and the man who got out of it was one of what my mother so annoyingly persisted in calling my Heavenly Twins. He approached us, made a slight bow and introduced himself. Of course we failed to catch the name. ‘
Je crois
,’ he said in light pensive tone, ‘
que nous soyons un peu voisins
.’ It struck me as charming shorthand for: We shall be practically
neighbours
once our house is finished and we’ve moved in. (There was also the subjunctive.) ‘
Vous permettez
?’ he enquired of Alessandro, and plunged long clean hands into the Peugeot’s belly.

Eh bien non
, it was not the petrol flow nor the
allumage
, it was, he feared, something – spelt out to Alessandro – that would have to be dealt with at some length. For the moment though,
je peux vous dépanner
. Alessandro proffered tools, he waved them aside, went over to his car and brought back an impressive kit. (Is he a mechanic then? I thought.) Quite soon the Peugeot guttered into faltering life. He took charge: if you’re quick it’ll take you to the nearest garage – they are robbers but no worse than the other lot, and not bad at the job. He’d follow in case the Peugeot stopped again as well it might. Then he would give us a lift home. Perhaps
la petite
– that was me – would like to come in his car now.

At the garage, he negotiated with the patron (whom he addressed with
tu
not
vous
), we learnt that spare parts were likely to cause trouble; our still nameless rescuer proposed telegraphing to someone in Paris who would put the
pièce
on the next train. All this was executed with 
calm and rational competence, as though his own time were of small account and helping strangers out the most natural thing in the world.

On our way home, riding high, first relief gave way to a new dismay. The Peugeot, however special its treatment, would be out of action for more than a matter of hours.
Tonight
? Alessandro and I cried simultaneously, looking at each other.

Ah, said our friend, you too are going to see
Topaze
.

We were. Toulon has a municipal theatre of respectable size and attainment. That night a guest company was performing the comedy, now a classic, about administrative goings on in Marseille by Marcel Pagnol (author of
Marius, Fanny, César, Jean de Florette
…
). How were we going to get to
Topaze
? (Toulon was unreachable, worse, unreturnable from, by public transport in the evening.)

He would have proposed to offer us a lift, he said, as he and his wife were going (
that
put paid to the Heavenly Twins and the incest gossip in one swoop), were it not (more subjunctives) that he had promised to take his mason and family – Marcel Pagnol had huge popular appeal, more than half of Sanary were going. We shall have to think of something. He left us at the gate of Les Cyprès, getting out of the car to shake hands. Something must be arranged, I shall let you know. There is not much time.

Hurry or not, I could not forbear to ask, ‘What is the name of your motor car?’ ‘It was designed by De Dion-Bouton in 1911,’ he said. ‘The
carrosserie
is by Gallet.’ I all but bowed.

An hour later he was back. My wife thinks it might be ‘amusing’, he uttered the word as if he were slightly distancing himself from it, if we took everyone to Toulon in a private bus. He happened to have a bus. She was arranging to invite the
commerçants
and anyone else who wished to see
Topaze
to go in our bus. He would not come in now, there were things to organise, but we could count on the bus being outside Les Cyprès at a quarter to eight tonight, and he hoped that Madame votre Mère – whom he had not met but had the pleasure of having seen before – would do them the honour … he was off.

And so it happened. The bus appeared, a long, narrow, open-roofed thing, painted tarnished green, a crocodile of a bus, far from new – all 
their vehicles, I was to learn, were idiosyncratic. It was still daylight. He – in overalls – was at the wheel, she had the seat beside him – in a white off-the-shoulders dress – doing the honours. The bus was already half-filled with miscellaneous Sanary figures. We recognised Monsieur and Madame Schwob with a glowingly nubile daughter, the Benechs of the wheel-of-gruyère shop with son and aunt, and surprise – how had she come to consort with those snobs from Paris? – Madame Panigon with her two girls and their brother Frédéric who looked grown-up and not unsmart in a dark suit. No one of the Kisling crowd appeared. The Third Man, the young god seen on the port, was there, making himself useful finding seats for elderly Sanaryans at the further stops.

A genial hilarity had been generated; we sat in the row next to the driver’s, and from behind us came the flow and thrust of animated French cross-conversations. The crocodile was on its way. Young male members of the outing began by shouting jocular encouragement which changed to sighs of appreciation as our speed increased. Never have I sat in bus so smoothly and adroitly driven, and so fast.

We alighted in the Place du Théâtre, our host drove off to park and reappeared ten minutes later in the stalls having taken off his overalls.

Topaze
, the play, was a tremendous success, we all laughed till we ached, not least of all my mother. Well after one a.m. – French plays even in the provinces do not begin nor finish early – we made our way in several groups on foot up to the boulevard. Word had gone round:
Rendez-vous à la Brasserie de Strasbourg
. It was
the
after-theatre supper place in Toulon, and renowned for its choucroute garnie. There we assembled, happy and hungry, at one long table pulled together for our party running along an entire wall. There was no placement. I noted that our host, who came in late, put himself next to my mama. I, for my sins, found myself next to Frédéric Panigon, Cécile and Annette’s elder brother (the boy to whom it didn’t occur to dance with us at the Café de la Marine – that was three years ago) who was usually away beavering at his
lycée
. Apparently no longer so, he had entered university reading law at his father’s wish, as he was trying to tell me.
He
wanted to be a painter, did I think …? My mind wasn’t on 
it.
Peintre-artiste
, he said. I was trying to watch our maîtres-de-plaisir even though I couldn’t catch what they were saying. He was talking quietly to my mother; she, though she sat next to the young god – who kept performing small services such as filling her glass, with nothing more than Evian water I noted – was talking rather insistently across people and table, acting very much, a touch too much, the
animatrice
of the occasion. (I would have liked looking at her in repose, which I imagined most became her face. She was high-pitched when she ought to have been still. Then I scolded myself for such carping.) At any rate, a good time was being had by all.

The ride home, under the open roof, through the cool air and early dawn was an enchantment.

Well, my mother said next morning, well …! It was splendid, I said.
Topaze
was, and extremely well acted, she said, but the whole thing … Yes, that was splendid too … A shade too much so.

‘You enjoyed it?’

‘Oh yes. Everybody enjoyed it. Madame Panigon seemed quite won over.’

‘So?’

‘There was something of a stunt about it, contrived – the bus out of nowhere, the wholesale seduction of the populace … Too literary to be true, like a charade out of
Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel – gens du monde
coming down from heaven.’

‘I’ve read it.’

‘
You would
,’ my mother said. ‘But did you
understand
it?’

‘He was not much more than my age when he wrote
Le Bal
.’

‘And died almost at once. He, my dear, was a genius.’

‘I haven’t …’ Alessandro said.

‘Heard of Raymond Radiguet,’ my mother cut him short, making dishonours even. Then she said very sweetly, ‘Believe me, both of you, there was a
Comte d’Orgel
flavour about last night …. It must have been all
her
doing. I’m sure she dreamt up the whole thing. He’s a quiet man; probably very patient.’