Jigsaw (43 page)

‘I didn’t look. You told me not to, I had to give you my word.’

‘Good God! What a fool you are, schoolboy’s honour again. What
have
I brought into the world?’

‘Mummy, what
was
in it?’ I asked, really curious now.

There she hung fire. ‘A scrap of paper,’ she said at last.

…?

‘A receipt.’

‘Oh that’s why the tube was so light and made no noise. A receipt for what?’

‘From the Mont-de-Piété at Toulon.’ The pawn shop.

I thought I saw light. ‘Did you pawn something, Mummy? The family silver? There isn’t any.’

‘It
was
family in a way – it was your father’s … it was your gold 
cigarette case. Didn’t you miss it?’

…

‘I did it last summer, you see,’ she said hurriedly, ‘I needed some money, I don’t remember what for, but I needed it. And you never used it. Well, I took it to the Mont-de-Piété and a miserable sum they gave me for it, those French misers, I forget how much, but it was miserable, such good solid gold too. I was going to redeem it of course before you found out. But then I had to leave, so I hid the receipt in the tube and entrusted it to you. See what that led to!’

My father’s cigarette case. I had put it away carefully in a drawer with some sweaters I hadn’t worn for some time.

‘What would you have done if I
had
missed it?’

‘We’d all have thought that La Grosse Hélène or someone …’

‘La Grosse Hélène wasn’t with us then,’ I said furiously, ‘we still had Emilia. No such hideous thought about her would have occurred to any of us.’

‘No recriminations, please. You say it wouldn’t occur to you that Emilia stole your gold case, but it can occur to you that your mother did?’

‘My mother did steal my case,’ I said. And then we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘You are the most impossible woman in the world.’

‘Maybe so. Darling girl, I see you really mind.’

‘It has been pawned before,’ I said.

‘
Has
it?’ She brightened. ‘
You
did?’

‘Well, not exactly.’

‘Tell me.’

So I told her how in the age of innocence it used to be pawned by Susan Robbins to help make ends meet at the end of the month.

‘Strike me pink,’ said my mother, ‘that isn’t at all what I imagined your life with the Robbinses to be.’

‘You imagined what I let you imagine,’ I said.

‘You mean you deceived me?’

‘I did not strive to enlighten you. And you made it easy.’

She laughed. ‘Not all schoolboy’s honour – perhaps a chip off the 
old block after all? But why? Why didn’t you let me have the full picture?’

Yes, why? ‘Fear of change. I was all right with them. I used to be afraid of being with you at times, life with you could be incalculable.’

‘Wasn’t it that with the Robbinses, dashing from pillar to post to escape creditors?’

‘Calculably incalculable. I wasn’t involved with them; I felt free.’

‘Curious truths seem to be coming out this morning,’ my mother said. ‘Perhaps we had better address ourselves to the task of getting your cigarette case back, now that you lost the receipt.’

That proved a sleeveless errand. My mother didn’t remember the expiry date, six months? a year after taking it in? and she didn’t remember that date either. She wanted me to engage Philippe – or the Kislings or somebody – to pull strings. I finally told Oriane, as the least shockable. She tried to get some bureaucratic process going; the ramifications were endless, we had no proof of any kind, none of us including myself tried very hard: it was just one of those things one has to learn to let go.

It was soon after that disclosure – connected with it or not – that my mother’s upper hand was evidently slipping. The rationing had become slacker, she was resorting to her secret every day now, possibly more than once.

She loved talking about it – as she must have with her Russian – describing it as one might poetic dreams (these were the days before LSD). She told me that the effect was different now from the first time when she took it to overcome jealousy and rage; now she was taking it for itself, a purer aim. She wanted me to try. Just once so that I would know the nature of the experience.

One afternoon she handed me an ampoule; when I shrank from it she told me that there was no need for a hypodermic, not for a first time; I would probably reach something if I just drank it and stayed quiet. (Once I had seen her let Uley lick a drop from the syringe off her finger; Uley gave a little sneeze, then spat.) I took the ampoule to my room and lay down on my bed. (Alessandro was out of the house.) I
held this tiny glass thing in my hand. Yes or No? There could not be the remotest chance of my getting caught by it, not by one small dose, but there was a revulsion. Yet I was curious. I would get to know what it was like, what it was like for her. What
was
it like? At the same time I felt a strong resistance, and a voice saying it was wicked to play with such a thing. For a long time I lay undecided, with the sun coming in through the half-closed shutters. In the end it was No.

When I returned the ampoule to her, she said, ‘Not enough courage?’

My mother’s action that afternoon brought me a plausible insight into the enigma of Docteur Joyeu. Proselytism.

My mother became convinced that La Grosse Hélène was spying on her – there was no
need
for spying – and took to locking her door whenever she went out. Hers was the only room in the house that had lock and key. Of course that key got lost soon. One day we came in together. ‘Where is it? My key?’ Nowhere. What to do – a locksmith? My mother with quick resource fetched a flat-iron and smashed one of the lower panels of the door. It gave easily – ‘Flimsy,’ she said – leaving an opening roughly the size and shape of that of an average dog-kennel. My mother got down on the floor and wriggled through this aperture with astonishing agility and invited me to follow her. I declined to be a snake woman.

‘It’s easy,’ she cried from within, ‘do come.’ I remained obstinate. Her head appeared near floor-level. ‘Then we must talk from where we are. Bring a cushion, I’ve got one.’

I fetched a cushion and we soon began talking quite normally, each crouching by one side of the hole. She reminded me how, when we were living in that villa on the hill, she used to eat her dinner on a stool by the fire off a tray while I insisted on having mine upright at a proper table. ‘You’re still pompous and bourgeois.’

When Alessandro came in and saw us, he swore – most rare – and slammed the passage door on what to him must have appeared the ultimate in disorder. 

For some reason this situation continued for several days, my mother wriggling in and out of her room (quite inaccessible now to La Grosse Hélène) utterly, as it were, in her stride. Maria, too, caught us talking from our respective positions by the kennel, and must have reported it to Aldous. Years later I found the incident related in
Eyeless in Gaza
. Here also, it is the daughter (bearing not the slightest resemblance to me) who converses through the dog-hole with Mrs Amberley, the narrator’s ex-mistress who has fallen into deplorable ways. There are embroideries and inaccuracies (to
my
mind) – novelist’s licence – and of course Mary Amberley is no more, or less, my mother than she is the other one or two women Aldous was supposed by critics, friends and gossips to have used as a model for her character and conduct. There remains, however, a good deal of analogy. Huxley makes that mother and daughter scene – much play with a hypodermic – very distressing, including sordid detail. Invented? Observed by Maria and erased by me from memory? I would not like to tell. Rereading that chapter – buried in that
over-long
, chronologically jumbled novel – I am struck how
much
Aldous and Maria must have seen and interpreted at the time.

When the book first came out (in 1937), I was horror-struck – unmentionables disclosed (and distorted). When I remonstrated, Maria told me that he would put anything he got hold of into a book; sooner or later and in his own way. So if I had a story I didn’t want to see in print, ‘Don’t tell Aldous.’ (Perhaps I
had
told him a good deal.)

I received a communication from England advising me that the date for sitting that interpreter’s exam had come. I’d forgotten nearly all about it, but jumped at the opportunity. It could be stretched into a week, ten days, in London; I had not been back for over a year.

My mother said, Oh yes, your education – You’ll pass it with flying colours no doubt. I was less certain of that. (With reason.) Alessandro conceived a different hope – looking after her on his own, might it not, just possibly, soften her view of him? Help to mend? My own fear was that this could no longer happen – the springs of his present love 
were anxiety and guilt while the one thing that might still bring her about would be his desiring her as a woman. This, I knew instinctively, he did not, and when that is so the opposite will take its place. (I had learned a few things lately.) She had, irretrievably it would seem, impaired her looks; there was the disorder, the lack of care for her own person …

All
I
had in mind was to turn my back on it all for a space of time.

I said I did not know where I would be. I didn’t want to stay cooped up at the flat on Parliament Hill. Toni found me a cheap room near the British Museum in what turned out to be a temperance hotel. I went to see the sisters at once and had a cheerful welcome from Toni. I found her coping, coping well; she had made her bed, she had chosen her future life, she had
done right
– she was going to get on with it. No complaining. The divorce was through and, although the decree had not yet been made absolute, Toni regarded this as sufficient to enable her to do what she had been looking forward to: seeing Jamie occasionally. He would come of an afternoon, they would walk the dog – who needed male company – come back to the flat for tea, with or without Rosie. The sisters would ask his advice about this and that; he was anxious that they should install a telephone, offering to pay the initial cost.

Toni refused. ‘A telephone for what? For Rosie to call that man (the Judge) in comfort?’

About the fact that Jamie had incontestably moved in with Cynthia, she was unexpectedly tolerant. ‘It’s his business now, isn’t it?’

Her present aim was finding a job to supplement her alimony, and Jamie was about to get her one; she was concentrating on saving enough money to go to Italy – she knew exactly where and when, La Scala, San Carlo, Rome – to hear a certain (very great) opera singer. Wayward or not, I was delighted by this recovery of her spirit; she asked what had been happening to
me
. I found it wrong to leave her and Rosie any longer in the dark. (I reflected that my mother knew
their
stories.) I tried to understate ours and to make it sound as undistressing as I could. They were distressed, and found it difficult to take in. One of Toni’s reactions was to deplore what she called my 
environment; her duty was to write to my German guardians to inform them. The old threat from a new quarter.

I could not resist teasing her by telling her something of my own goings-on. ‘Now you can think of me as badly as you liked to think of the Finchingfield women.’

‘I refuse to think badly of you. I always treated you as an exception.’

‘To what? To your rules?’

‘They are
my
rules,’ she said stiffly. I felt moved and a little flattered. Toni added sternly, ‘I don’t know why I do.’

Rosie was not buoyant; tense instead and unlike herself, when I was finally able to see her alone – not easy, but on my second afternoon Toni went off to a singing lesson – she told me point-blank that the Judge was in terrible trouble. Worse trouble than ever before. Not
gambling
? A form of gambling, the most perilous there was. I probably hadn’t even heard of it.

Hadn’t he given his word?

It wasn’t horses or cards, this was not covered by his promise. He was speculating on the Stock Exchange, real hard speculation, taking risks on purpose – that was the essence of it, that was the thrill. Buying on margin, staking large sums one has not got on long odds of a stock falling or rising. It had gone well for him several times and he loved, he craved the excitement. Now it was not going well at all. He was in desperate danger.

‘I didn’t know anything about it for a long time. He didn’t tell me what the trouble was two summers ago when we couldn’t get to Sanary. Then some shares turned and did what he had staked them to do and he was saved. Just in time.’

And now, a few weeks ago, he
had
told her. He was in so deep that his friends – whom he had not told – would not or even could not bail him out. He sold the few pictures he had inherited, had a huge
overdraft
at his bank, owed more, much more, to his broker. Nothing very short of a miracle could save him.

‘
Is
there a chance of a miracle?’

‘He says there is.’ 

‘And if not …?’

‘He will have to go bankrupt,’ Rosie said. ‘Resign from the Bench. And
that
is his life. The gambling is a kind of fantasy, perhaps because all the rest came to him so easy.’

It sank in – the uproar, the scandal. Poor man! But then I saw that he was not a man of whom one should say ‘poor man’.

We sat silent for a while, in stony despair. Life is not tolerable, I thought; it is not what one feels when one sits in the shade, wine in one’s glass, friends by one’s side, looking at leaves and a sun-drenched column.

Presently, when I heard her key in the door, I asked, ‘Does Toni know about this?’

‘She does not. Nobody knows. It will come soon enough. Don’t look so worried. It will be a bad time. Jack will rise above it. He says we’ll live abroad. Perhaps we’ll go to Australia or somewhere.’