Jigsaw (34 page)

At Les Cyprès my mother and Alessandro were both standing and there was an atmosphere in the room that seemed to speak. My mother greeted me with affection, Alessandro was tense and mute; as Emilia came in and we embraced, they stood apart and still, not looking at each other. I became tongue-tied. At last Alessandro said, Perhaps you would like to wash and unpack first. My mother said vaguely, Doesn’t she want some lunch? Lunch wouldn’t be for another three quarters of an hour, Emilia informed her. I went out with her and did as I was bid. Perhaps I was dreaming; transitions, arrival, make things feel strange.

Later at table they had little to say then would ask about London in spurts. ‘Quite a tale to unfold,’ I said and there was another silence. When I had given her the Compton-Burnett, my mother fingered it like an unfamiliar object – very nice – and put it down. Now she seemed restless, shoving the food about her plate. What time is it? she asked. Alessandro told her. Oh, she said. Soon she asked again. I remember that luncheon, sitting at that table, in that room, with the minutes ticking away and the silent voices. I am still there at times. Of what we were given to eat I have not the slightest recollection, the first meal back in the South of France with Emilia’s house dishes.

They didn’t seem to want to bring it to an end, my mother drinking an unusual amount of espresso coffee. ‘Will
you
tell her?’ Alessandro said.

‘I will tell her.’ She rose, so did I. ‘In about ten minutes,’ she said and went out, Alessandro following her.

When I went, she was alone, lying on her bed. ‘Sit by me,’ she said, ‘as we used to, discussing peace and war late at night.’ There was animation again in her voice, a degree of eagerness. Her eyes looked different, fixed somehow, and shone – might she have a fever? She spoke.

‘Alessandro has fallen in love with Doris.’

…

‘Poor Alessandro. He didn’t mean to. It happened.’

…

‘It does.
I
should know.’

…

‘
And
I should have known better – that time with him. Then I knew this was bound to happen … Some day … These fifteen (let’s say) years’ gap in age. Later I forgot about it. It was all so daily, so solid … Wasn’t it?’

…

‘Now they are home to roost, the fifteen years.’

…

‘Don’t look so stricken. He’s not going to leave me. He told me so. It’s going to pass. It’s just a thing that struck him –
them
. She’s madly in love with him.’

…

‘We shall have to live through it – all of us.’

…

‘I am doing
my
bit.’

…

‘No, he didn’t tell me. He’s wise. Not my own intuition either. I think of her as about your age, I like her, it never entered my head. Curious, I had some suspicion about that Panigon girl last year. How did I find out? My own fault – you know me, I haven’t got your scruples, I read other people’s letters – curiosity: they’re so revealing – the fool girl wrote him a note, I’ll spare you the details, the kind of note we all write in the circumstances, My darling, so wonderful being with you this afternoon, I want you to think of me etc. etc. The fool Alessandro left it in his pocket.’

…

‘No, round-eyes, I did not go through his pockets, the note happened to fall out of his jacket.’

…

‘What did I do? What did it do to
me
… Shock, then raging pain. I made the most appalling scene – if you think you know my temper, you don’t, nor did
I
– it shook the house, I howled at him, the things I 
called him … And all the time the fury and the pain. You don’t know what it’s like when someone who you thought loved one, goes away and does the same things with somebody else.
You
wouldn’t know – you didn’t get anywhere with your Oriane, poor child. Take it from me, unfulfilled love – not that I’ve known much of that – is a hundred times less painful than abandonment, replacement …’

…

On a calmer note, she went on, ‘I am not abandoned, I am not replaced. He tells me again and again. (And I ask him again and again, as I know I should not.) He will give her up, he’s trying to give her up. Poor little Doris.’

…

‘No. Even when I am furious, it’s only with him. She is a good girl – if feckless – a brave girl, uncomfortably whole-hearted. That doesn’t make it easier.’

…

‘Where is Doris? She left. They’re trying absence. Never a good idea. At the moment it’s a relief. The situation here was impossible – her down at that hotel, my knowing and not knowing when he was seeing her. Having dinner the three of us here, his seeing her home. He put her on a train to Berlin a few days ago. (He won’t let her drive that car across Europe on her own. It’s still sitting here.)’

…

‘Paul. Yes, poor Paul. She’s going to tell him. Thinks it’s more honourable and all that. I have a feeling he’ll be both heart-broken
and
very nice about it.’

…

‘You think
I
’m being nice about it. Oh my dear! I wish I could be. Consistently. I’d like to be on principle, by temperament I cannot. Not unaided. There is something else I have to tell you.’

…

‘Bad? I don’t quite know. Well; I’m sounding so reasonable – so forgiving as you touchingly put it – on Dutch courage.’

…

‘I’ve not taken to the bottle. When it all began – that must have 
been early February, shortly after you left – when it began for me with the note falling on the floor a week or so later, I was in such despair – even if this blew over it might be just the beginning: you see, age, getting older, is irreversible – I made scenes day and night, especially at night. I couldn’t sleep, I wouldn’t let
him
sleep; I was like the proverbial wounded animal: uncontrollable. Fortunately a remnant of the intelligence the gods gave me told me that this must not go on, this
was
the way to lose him – Alessandro is not of tough clay – I was destroying him and myself.’

…

‘Indeed,
you
knew nothing, innocently trotting about London. We seldom know how the other half live. I went to that pharmacist who likes me, I told him,
J’ai du chagrin
, there’s some trouble in our
ménage
– I didn’t have to say more, the French understand about such things – I need something to calm my nerves. He gave me a bottle of a stuff called Paciflorine, and of course some more veronal. The Paciflorine smells as if it had valerian in it – isn’t that what they give to cats to calm them down? – well, it didn’t me. It made me drowsy that’s all. It didn’t touch the fury and the pain.’

…

‘Yes, it was horrible. You’re a kind-hearted girl. I went back to my pharmacist friend who said he couldn’t do anything more for me but if I really needed help, I might try le Docteur Joyeu. Remember? He came to this house once. I went to see him, he lives in what looks like a half-empty house – no apparent wife, just a creepy little servant who opens the door – in that pine-wood behind the tennis court. I told him,
Docteur, mon mari me trompe
– pure French farce – my husband is unfaithful, I can’t take it and make scenes day and night. He made no comment except saying that he could give me something that might save my marriage. He produced a syringe and asked me to pull up my sleeve, and gave me a hypodermic injection. It took just a few seconds. I was to go home and report next day.’

…

‘In no time at all I had an extraordinary sense of lightness, I felt like floating in body and even more so in mind – lucid, serene, aloof. I 
could think about Alessandro and Doris and it seemed small and remote, everything was easy – one would just love everyone and be good and it would be all right. The universe is
All Right
. It’s the most wonderful feeling – one is no longer vulnerable or human: all sorrow dissolved, filled with an extraordinary sensation of well-being.’

…

‘Perhaps that’s what the saints mean when they are talking of ecstasy.’

…

‘No, it does not last.’

…

‘Next day I went back to Docteur Joyeu. I told him about the effect. He seemed pleased – if that man can ever look pleased – he said I was a very good subject, and did I think that with this treatment I would be able to keep the peace? I could stop a world war, I told him. He gave me another injection, and wrote out a prescription to last a week. One in the morning, one in the late afternoon. Would I be able to do it? Give myself a hypodermic injection? with a needle? Of course not! It’s quite easy, he said. I dare say. Nor did I fancy coming to the Villa Joyeu morning, noon and night. Perhaps my husband could do it? He will, I told him, he’s very good with his hands. Tell him he must sterilise the syringe. Each time, he said.’

…

‘So Alessandro gives it to me. You had better learn how to do it, in case Alessandro isn’t here. Because I have to have it three times a day now. Sometimes four. But the good doctor is getting stingy with the prescriptions, he tells me I must try to manage not to take the treatment more than three times a day maximum.’

…

‘Now? That wonderful feeling? No, not like the first times; it’s not as intense any longer, and it fades away more quickly. You can feel it leaving …’

…

‘What happens then? when the effect wears off? I become raging and frightened again, and very very nasty to Alessandro. You see, I am two 
people now. And I don’t want to be the other one, I want to be as you find me now. That’s why I must go on with the treatment.’

Very gently I said, ‘Mummy, what is it … this thing that helps … this thing Alessandro gives you?’

‘Morphine.’

If Alessandro (and I) lived from day to day, my mother had to live from hour to hour. During the good ones, distractions were welcome. Friends of hers, the Roy Campbells, proposed to come and stay for a couple of nights. Roy, she explained to Alessandro, was a South African poet of some power and eccentric habits who wrote, she insisted, in English and in Zulu. He and his wife lived in great discomfort at Martigues, the fishing port on the other side of Marseille.

They arrived one morning. Roy handsome in his wild and unkempt way; Mary, strikingly Welsh and gypsy. I shall not go into much description of them: Roy Campbell has written quite enough fiction about himself. His luggage consisted of a marketing bag sagging with a weight of bottles – litre-bottles of red wine 12% proof (it went up to their room). As he came in, I am almost certain that I saw him raise his foot at our bitch Chumi who was about to inspect him. A horrified look from Alessandro prevented the kick (if kick it was meant to be). After this Roy glared at the dog.

In due course the five of us sat down to luncheon. All went well on our part (my mother had been given her treatment earlier), Roy drank a great deal of red wine (ours), there was no lack of conversation. Afterwards he dropped what was for me a bombshell: he casually asked to be taken to make a call on Aldous Huxley. I thought he was raving. (He often was.) He persisted; his old Oxford friend had bought a house at Sanary.

It was a shock because I had been hoping to meet this writer whose work I idolised some day.
Some day – not now
. When I could hold my own, when I had become a writer myself (if ever?). All the same, when Alessandro agreed to take the Campbells on a search for this author 
he had heard my mother and me talk so much of, I did not stay behind. My mother did (‘Writers should be read not seen’). It was a hot early afternoon in spring. I felt like some girls are said to feel when taken to their first dance before they are old enough to wear the clothes they like.

We knew nothing about Huxley, his age, his life, married or not (one presumed not), what he looked like, publishing being more reticent and impersonal in those days.

We set out. Mary Campbell next to Alessandro; Roy, clutching his clinking marketing bag, with me in the dickey. En route a labourer who did not keep siesta, thought he’d heard an English
homme de lettres
was converting a house he had bought on La Gorguette (a promontory between Sanary and Bandol). We found it. The Villa Uley existed. Sanary had not been talking about this; it was typical of Aldous and Maria that wherever they lived they were far less touched by common gossip than most people are. (Because of the dignity and friendliness with which they comported themselves?) Again, I shall describe neither their appearance nor their house – and only a little of that slightly farcical afternoon of our first encounter – I have written enough about Aldous Huxley (
not
fiction). Here I shall bring in him and Maria only in so far as they touched on our daily lives, our story and myself.

What I have to repeat is that Alessandro after five minutes of looking at Aldous, all the six-foot-two of him, sitting on the floor covered with builders’ dust sorting books, slid out of the house again, turned the car and sped off to fetch my mother. (Maria who had observed his vanishing – little ever escaped her – surmised that she and Aldous had displeased in some marked way.) Presently my mother appeared. (In her benign and animated incarnation, looking only faintly ravaged.) She and Aldous struck talk at once and did not stop for the rest of the afternoon (we were asked to stay for tea), taking evident pleasure in the discovery of each other. None of Aldous’s redoubtable silences, dreaded by his family and friends, that day. My mother instantly took to Maria as well; the rest of us sat back with enjoyable attention. Roy fidgeted a bit, his old Oxford friend proved a less convivial figure than 
he had imagined, he did not dare to fetch his marketing bag and contents from the car. Not that any of us had much refreshment, my mother had seized the teapot as it reached the table and held on to it firmly while engaged with Aldous. She had forgotten she was not in her own house, in turn forgot to do any pouring out: cups remained empty. This was standard absent-minded behaviour. To us, not so to the Huxleys. Maria did not intervene because she was convinced that my mother had found something dreadful inside the teapot (my mother had lifted the lid and gazed abstractedly inside). Meanwhile, with her free hand, she ate all the bread and butter, remarking how delicious it was and why did we never have such a thing in our house. In fact, she was herself. No undercurrents were apparent (not even to Maria then); I would like to think that during those hours she had forgotten them herself, lulled and seduced by Aldous’s effortless intelligence and calm, the beauty of his voice, Maria’s
gentilezza
. (One’s mood, and behaviour, always lifted to a better plane in the Huxleys’ presence as I was to learn quite soon.) My mother looked absorbed, Aldous and Maria, too, showed signs of fascination – Roy Campbell, it would seem, had brought them a rare bird. A friendship began.