Jigsaw (30 page)

‘That’s impossible,’ said Oriane. ‘Madame Mathieu, three times French champion –’

‘
I
am to play against Madame Mathieu?’

‘She must scratch,’ said Oriane, ‘we can smuggle in someone from the other side of the draw.’

‘
That
’s not done,’ Philippe said. He gave a wink, ‘
Not
Wimbledon tradition.’ 

He was enjoying himself, he was also both kind and efficient. ‘Billi will play,’ he said, the childhood abbreviation of my name, which my mother generally and he sometimes used, implying a kind of paternal reassurance. ‘It is the proper thing to do, and she is brave, and she’ll do her best, who can do more? Janette Mathieu is a very nice woman who won’t care two hoots, Oriane, that you haven’t been able to provide her with a Suzanne – in fact she may be relieved that it is
not
Suzanne.’

Oriane looked as though he had been spitting in church.

And so it happened. Philippe was angelic, umpiring the match himself, arranging it to be played, unannounced, in the luncheon hour, with few spectators about. For me there was no known face other than Alessandro and the ball boys. Madame Mathieu appeared with her clutch of rackets, a small woman, feminine rather than athletic, possibly turned thirty (they didn’t reach their peak as early as they do now). It must have been explained to her that I was a beginner who had not arrived at the semi-final by her own efforts; in any case it was clear to her what she was up, or rather not up against from my first return of service. Philippe was right, she was a very nice and a very kind woman. She showed no surprise, dismay or condescension, she carried on for all the world as if she were fighting a plausible opponent. She must have adjusted her play but with no sign of doing so, and she still played magically well, employing her art to draw me into her rhythm; within minutes she had lifted my play. I lost all nervousness, concentrating only on movement and response. She gave me chances to play to the limit and beyond of my ability. It was an intoxicating experience. For once in my life I physically knew good tennis, a sensation of swiftness, heat, engagement, of skimming through air feet above the ground – a suspension of gravity I had known skiing – I wished it would not end. It did soon. A two-setter. Twice I’d got to fifteen, once to thirty – all, and I believe they were honest points, given Madame Mathieu’s lowering her game. When we shook hands, she said,
Bien joué
. Alessandro made approving noises; Philippe got down from the chair, kissed me on both cheeks and said,
Bravo, mon enfant
. (Oriane, who was on the premises, had not come to watch.) I thanked 
Madame Mathieu – who into the bargain was easy to talk to – it was all due to
her
kindness and great skill.

The other semi-final was played that afternoon and won of course by Oriane with such publicity as Sanary afforded, and on the Saturday took place the main event, the final between her and Madame Mathieu, and an exciting as well as a most elegant match it was. Oriane, too, lifted her game to and beyond the limits of her capacity. We saw the top professional (not professional in today’s sense) pitted against the brilliant amateur stretched to the utmost. Madame Mathieu – as had been expected – won; the match went to three sets, and once in the second set Oriane led 4–1. When it was over the loser had an ovation, people crowding round her; Oriane looked pleased with herself and had full reason to be. I queued to say my word, she did not notice me.

The prizes were given at a reception that evening. It was made a formal affair, with the men in dinner-jackets. The La Plage would have been the suitable venue yet something was due to the proprietors of the court, so it was held at the gloomy hotel. Oriane liked a challenge and had devised decorations to transform the restaurant into a pastiche ballroom. Her post was on the platform – decked out with Tricolor and Union Jack – players and public sat at tables arranged in a
semi-circle
below her. (I was with my mother and Alessandro, and had been prevailed upon to wear a pale blue taffeta semi-evening dress my mother had got for me some time ago at the Galeries Lafayette; her choice of unsuitable clothes was not restricted to her own.) Oriane’s deputy, the English captain, called out the names of victors and runners-up, who then walked to the platform, received their trophy – in the men’s singles and Madame Mathieu’s cases, a small silver cup – a hand-shake and, if female, an accolade from Oriane. When it was her turn, she stepped off the platform, Philippe took her place, the captain called out her name, Philippe bestowed the prize, Oriane received it with grace and there was another ovation. She then resumed her place: it was the turn now of the runners-up of the various
semi-finals
to be handed their prizes. I had not foreseen this and was as surprised as the rest of the audience (that semi-final had been played 
in camera as it were, few even knew it had taken place) when my name was called by the captain.

‘Mademoiselle who –?’ Oriane said in a ringing tone.

The captain obligingly repeated my name. Oriane still looked blank.

‘You
must
go,’ Alessandro whispered. I got up and walked forward, heads turning to see what the cat’s brought in.

Oriane handed me a silver stamp-box without looking up, omitting to shake hands. As I walked back, a few baffled people attempted applause.

When we got home that evening the storm broke. I have to use this cliché as no other description serves. My mother was in a whirl of passionate fury; I had forgotten what her temper could be. I will not have
my
daughter humiliated and made a fool of in public, that was the theme.

‘It was disgraceful … Not that you didn’t bring it on your own head … But how
dare
she …’ It was the sound of her voice that made Alessandro and me bow our heads. ‘Who does she think she is …? That … that second-rate Madame Verdurin – well, and so was Madame Verdurin: second-rate.’

At least my mother had not resisted making a literary joke; checking at once that somewhat lighter note, she thundered on, ‘She
is
a monster, I
will not
have my daughter treated in this way. She must be
shown
up.’

It was dumbfounding to see my parent turn into a tiger mother.

Presently she changed the target of her wrath. It was my turn. ‘She’s got to go,’ she said to Alessandro. ‘She must leave the house. I don’t know what she’s been up to, I don’t know what’s been going on – and I don’t want to know. No explanations please. One thing is clear, she’s been given too much freedom. Sanary is no place for her.’ She addressed me directly. ‘You will leave for England at once. Alessandro, you must telegraph to her Nairns, they’ll find her a room or
something
. Tell them she’ll be arriving tomorrow. And now I don’t want to hear another word.’

We had entered the world of anger and telegrams.

Next day was Sunday. Very well, so it would have to be done on Monday morning, and I would leave by the afternoon train. ‘
Meanwhile
you are not to see that woman again.’ It was a very long day, even with a little packing to do. My mother and Alessandro went out for both luncheon and dinner.

‘We shall make excuses; we will also say goodbye for you: you’ve been recalled to London to resume your studies.’

Before leaving next day, my mother made me a short speech, ‘Remember you are a goose and a fool, not a martyr. You are not afflicted by a great love, you are afflicted by a crush. It happens to everyone, though I’d think you are a bit too old for that now. You’re not a schoolgirl, and I never treated you like one. You are very immature. After all the trouble I’ve taken … A disappointment. Come back when you are in a more reasonable mood. And don’t go about thinking of yourself as a doomed Baudelairean pervert burdened by the love that dare not speak its name. I rather suspect you
have
dared.’

Alessandro took me to the station. There had been no time to get hold of my trustees for travel money, so I was sent third class by the Dieppe–Newhaven crossing, and with very little money left on me. In the car we had been too dejected to speak. On the platform Alessandro said, ‘I am very sorry it had to end in this way. It’s not your fault. She is under a strain. It will all blow over.’ Before he left me, he slipped a banknote into one of my pockets.

I
T HAS OFTEN been said that nothing is ever as bad or as good as one thinks. For some time, I thought it was very bad, I felt crushed and in exile. My mind and emotions were confused, having lost trust in myself and people I loved. Who was right? Who was not? One major shock was London, the transition from Mediterranean summer to the bed-sitter in grimy Upper Gloucester Place. The excitement, the sense of freedom of the former years had evaporated entirely – how could I ever have been happy living here? – in every fibre I was missing Sanary, my elective home.

I had not felt weighed down by such stony desolation since the time in my early childhood when it compelled me to run away from my father’s house. I recalled this now and looked back at my own
ruthlessness
in horror –
I
had been unhappy, so I was driven to escape not counting the cost: to him, who had loved me. At least I was no longer capable of that; or so I thought. My father … The life I led in that country, Germany, which I instinctively turned my back on … It was a long time ago. Now there was nowhere to run away to: then I believed I had arrived in an earthly paradise, now I had been returned from one.

The Nairns were good to me, far above my deserts; I told them nothing. The story, so freshly happened, seemed untellable. I should not have known how – with its farcical elements – to put it across. Besides I feared Toni’s disapproval, her sour intolerance. (Here I did her an injustice; later, in the predicaments of my adult life, she often 
gave me the benevolent sympathy she had lacked when dealing with her sister or her husband.) Rosie I should have liked to consult and was held back by the fact that, in spite of the immaturity I stood accused of, I was
her
confidante, a shred of self-esteem I could not afford to give up. All I said was that I had been foolish and been thrown out of the house. Sent away, I put it. They asked no questions.

It was Jamie – a man to whom one did not talk – who brought solace. ‘That girl is in trouble,’ he said to Toni, and set out to find me some work I could do.

I would have thought it impossible that giving lessons in French conversation and translating booksellers’ and auctioneers’ catalogues would assuage my feelings, but in a measure they did. The French lessons were fun, the translating, laborious and exacting, needed disciplined concentration. Earning money proved delightful. For the French I was paid 3/6
d
. an hour – for the unqualified 2/6
d
. was the going rate but Jamie’s connections were generous and rich – the catalogues came to a very small sum per column; it all added up. (If I saved enough, I might be able to return to France on my own some day. That didn’t bear thinking about yet.) One obstacle in my new working life was my atrocious handwriting, due to natural inability or to never having been properly taught. I learned to draw clear figures and wrote words in block letters. A laborious job indeed. It kept me busy.

On weekends the Nairns still took me to their cottage. Visits to Finchingfield were not a source of unmitigated relief, the pastimes and flesh-pots, the atmosphere were too like, and yet not, Sanary. The loss of self-confidence – needed in that milieu – did not help. There were other barriers. I had become aware of the perils of divided loyalties. Toni’s antagonism and passive resistance had borne fruit: A.J. and his wife and friends had come to regard her – and her over-loyal sister – as tiresome nuisances, negligible appendages to Jamie whom they frankly tried to compensate for his dull home-life. In theory the sisters had a standing invitation; they only went as often as required to avoid an open breach. Jamie did not go to Finchingfield for every meal, when he missed one he usually went immediately after. When he did this 
again one Sunday after lunch (out of tins ‘prepared’ by Toni – I was too depressed to cook) there was an outburst.
I
had heard bigger and better; judged on its own it had substance and volume, variations –
molto agitato, tempestuoso
– on the theme of being a man’s kitchen drudge. When she had stumped upstairs for her afternoon rest, Jamie and I crept about, quietly washing up, scrubbing the kitchen floor, laying a careful table for tea. In whispers he asked me to bicycle over to Finchingfield for the loan of some cake or petits fours, and himself stayed at home for the rest of the day.

Jamie was
very
fond of his wife; he was just not, as I must have made clear, a demonstrative or – domestically – a very noticing man. He liked being with her, eating the food she put before him, listening to the gramophone; he also liked his masculine life at his book business and among his bookish Finchingfield friends. What I – and probably he himself – was less aware of was that he had come to feel at ease with the Finchingfield women who paid him much attention without making any apparent demands. It struck me that he used less often the German diminutives taught him by Toni, and that the best stories he brought home from work were saved for his weekend parties.

Toni during those months
was
left a good deal on her own. (Rosie could not be counted on, the Judge was spending more weekends in London.) My company was welcome for which I was grateful in turn; I was bound to join Jamie less and less at Finchingfield. When the weather turned bad in November with fog on the roads and the cottage colder, Toni stayed put in London while Jamie would be given a bed from Saturday to Monday by A.J. Naturally, I could not go with him.

Finchingfield friendships flourished on propinquity, shared days, shared games, shared jokes; there was no real place for the outsider or occasional guest. My contact with them slackened during that autumn – subsequent events cut it off altogether – as it happened it was not renewed in later life. I lost little Garsington and, perhaps, vistas, opportunities …

My time in London was tied to the convenience of my pupils, not laggard children for the most part but busy bright young men preparing for service or commerce abroad. I discovered that I enjoyed 
teaching – modulating my accent from French-French to
Anglo-French
according to requirements – and found that I had some aptitude for it. Other hours were filled grappling with the catalogues, learning trade terms, converting inches into metric sense and back again. I no longer went to galleries, law courts or museums. For the rest I was back in the old insulated life of afternoons with Rosie and evenings with Toni.

Rosie was well; her equable contented self. Jack’s worries, she told me, had receded. He seemed less troubled. She did not know what it had been about. Once he had said, I’ve been lucky.

‘You can’t mean –?’

‘Oh no. Not that. He has not been near a bookie or a gaming club. When a man like him gives his word …’

I took hers for it.

There had been no communication with Sanary. This was ordinary, letters in my family were a matter of good intentions. Had I any? Ought I to make the first move? What should I, what could I, say?
No
explanations please
, was still ringing in my ears. On some days I felt mutinous. And let down: I had seen a side of my mother that I wished did not exist. Most days I was only unhappy. I felt much guilt about Cécile (the whole thing), none whatsoever about Oriane. How I wished though that she had remained my secret. (Ah yes, discretion …) Oriane did not bear thinking about. And her, too, I wished to see perfect. Actual absence was not so painful as I felt it ought to be; it was almost a relief. I shrivelled at the thought of how she’d look at me in my present dingy circumstances. My one emotional extravagance was persuading Toni to sing Mozart, a sweet sad indulgence I should not have liked to hear my mother’s comments on.

I cannot say that time flew. It passed. Three months had gone when the olive branch arrived. It came in the form of a letter from my mother in her own hand. It had a beginning, a middle and some postscripts. This I learned after I opened it which was not at once. It had come by the second post; when I saw the envelope I began to shake. I bolted out to Rosie’s next door. She had just come in.

‘What
is
the matter?’ she said when she saw me.

I began to stammer, then brought it out, ‘I got a letter from my mother.’

‘Yes –?’

I had to explain that it was the first … well, the
first
… Without a further word Rosie did a sensible and unexpected thing – she behaved like a man – she took me to the pub up the road and ordered me a small whisky and soda. It did wonders.

After that I was able to open the letter, in my room, by myself. It began, ‘Dear wayward daughter, why don’t you come to us for Christmas?’

She had also forgotten to sign it, the letter went straight on into postscripts.

My feelings were mixed. Relief, tears, exasperation, rage, fond laughter. In the end, relief won and fond laughter.

Ma mère est une femme impossible
, I said to myself in French, I must try it out on my pupils. I giggled. It was a long time since I had.

Well, and so I was back. No longer exiled. The whole of that stay, as she had wished, was civilised and very very pleasant (with a residue of unease, I think, only in me). All as before between us, or so we tried to make it. Alessandro’s converted villa was finished, turned into a liveable house, delivered. Its new owner was pleased enough with it to have got him another commission, a ruin of a
mas
in the back country between Bandol and La Cadière. My mother was to do the furnishing, not this time in rustic Provençal. So the Peugeot had outlived its utility, there was now a brand-new Ford convertible, American-built. It was black, a smart colour then. Alessandro let me drive it. We went 
to the midnight mass at Les Baux – which was a touch for
les touristes
, and the lamb was led out alive – slept at Arles and walked next morning in the Cloister of St-Trophime, then on the Pont-du-Gard and to Le Nôtre’s Garden and the arenas at Nîmes – the three of us happy in places we loved. On the third day we went down into the Rhône delta to Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Aigues-Mortes, and felt subdued by an eerie emptiness of winter. On our way to Sanary we were basking again, eating lunch on the Cours Mirabeau at Aix, sitting outside in the Café Les Deux Garçons in the mid-December sun. At Les Cyprès, Emilia had laid a fire of olive logs, which my mother lit. For kindling there were cypress cuttings, the chimney smoked a little but the smell was delicious.

Social life was in abeyance, the Kislings as well as the Desmirails had gone skiing. Sister Annette, the youngest Panigon, told me when I ran into her on the port, that Frédéric was away doing his
service militaire
. New Year’s Eve we spent at home on our own, eating oysters from la
mère
Dédée, followed by
boudin blanc
, drinking Cassis which was then the liveliest, most aromatic dry white wine to be had in Provence. At midnight Emilia joined us, and my mother made us perform superstitious rituals recalled from her diverse origins, ending as the Romans do by breaking some glass. We each made a wish (undisclosed). My mother said, ‘May we all live happily ever after.’

On New Year’s Day – which in France was
the
day of the Christmas season for eating as well as presents – we were bidden to a large déjeuner the Panigons were giving for their cronies. The long menu was well composed and far less heavy and indigestible than what would have been unavoidably put before us in Britain. We began with a platter of
fruits de mer: palourdes, claires, écrevisses, oursins
, followed by
quenelles de brochet
as light as feathers, then some
dindonneaux
, small young turkeys, roasted unstuffed in butter, served with their own unthickened roasting juices and accompanied only by a creamy chestnut purée and a sharp salad of watercress; some carefully chosen cheeses and a
bombe à glace
. We drank Cassis with the shellfish, Pouilly-Fuissé with the
quenelles
, Bordeaux with the roast birds, burgundy with the cheese, and champagne (sec not brut) 
with the ice pudding. Brandy,
eaux-de-vie
and liqueurs – how not? – with the coffee. My mother and Monsieur Panigon fenced politics, from opposite viewpoints, with light-handed give and take, never clashing, never conceding. Cécile’s continued absence from home was much commented on.