Jigsaw (44 page)

I’ll pull him through, was Rosie’s meaning.

From the minute I began sitting my exam, I knew I was in the wrong place. I looked at the other people, the clothes they’d put on – a serious undertaking and I had come entirely unprepared. I carried an old fountain pen and a parcel with a bottle of Fino sherry I had picked up at a wine merchant’s nearby to take back afterwards. I was called in for a viva and that was easy enough; I felt – or perhaps imagined – that I was surprising them favourably. Back with the papers before me, the questions, the task, I knew that it was hopeless and I had been a fool. My handwriting alone would be my undoing. The results, I was told, would be out in three months; they would be forwarded to my address abroad. I was wondering how I could best manage to keep them secret until my majority which was now just under a year off. Was I acting like a crook? Perhaps I was a crook.

Rosie told me that Jamie and Cynthia were going to get married in the autumn. It had not been a design on Cynthia’s part – she’d had no particular desire to marry anyone again – Jamie had been so lost, she 
was doing it out of a sense of obligation. Whatever the original motive may have been, I like to say here – though it goes beyond the
time-span
of this story – that they were happy together: Jamie’s second marriage turned out well, and it brought him the children he had wanted and Toni would not or could not have. He remained a friend to Toni. And to Rosie. When the Second World War came with the threat of a Nazi invasion, he assisted his Jewish ex-sister-in-law to change her name from Falkenheim to his Scottish one. Rosie became Miss Nairn, and the sisters once more shared a name.

A few days after the shameful exam, I went first to the National Gallery then to Parliament Hill to pick up Toni. I was going to treat her to luncheon. Not at Schmidt’s; at Bertorelli’s. At least they were both in Charlotte Street. Toni was getting ready, the front door bell rang. Jamie stood in the passage at twelve o’clock in the morning unannounced. He didn’t see me at first. ‘Is Billi here? Her mother is in London. She telephoned me at the shop. She’s not well, she wants Billi at once.’

I opened my mouth and screamed. I could hear it, it didn’t stop. I knew I could stop it – it was voluntarily involuntary – it went on. I was amazed by the sound. So were Toni and Jamie. He said, ‘What’s wrong?’

I shall not go into all the details of my mother’s escapade. I found her, as she had advised Jamie, at the Tavistock Hotel in Bloomsbury. She was worn out by the journey, and a touch apprehensive about what she had let herself in for. ‘Oh, I wanted to surprise you, I thought it might be fun if I shared your little holiday. I want to go to some exhibitions, look up one or two people …’

She had already done so. Straight from Victoria to the house of a Bloomsbury writer, a one-time admirer (possibly). I gathered it had not been a success: he had called another taxi, taken her to the Tavistock Hotel and booked her in; there had been no mention of any further engagement. That was last night. This morning she remembered the name of the booksellers where Jamie worked, got the number out of the book, and here I was.

‘Does Alessandro know where you are?’ I asked.

‘Of course not. He hasn’t the slightest idea. Probably scouring the opium dens of Toulon for me. I wanted to play him a trick –
he
ran off to Spain, didn’t he?’

…

‘It seemed such a good idea yesterday, or was it the day before yesterday?’ Alessandro was out, she found some money and her
passport
, packed a small bag, took the bus into Toulon and caught an express to Paris. She tipped the guard and he found her a wagon-lit. Well, then the Calais train, the boat, the boat-train. ‘You know the route … tedious.’ She added lamely, ‘Now once I’m here we ought to be enjoying ourselves.’ It transpired that she was getting short of money
and
short of her ampoules.

‘I find I need more with all these exertions, it isn’t at all the same as being peaceful at Les Cyprès with Uley.’

I went downstairs to get a telegram off to Alessandro.

We got to one or two galleries, even a theatre, a shop in the Burlington Arcade where she tried to buy me a scarf – nothing came off; all, like the traffic, the press of people on pavements, was to her both intrusive and remote. Once, seeing her walk into a restaurant: imperious, commanding a decent table, I saw her as others would see her – an apparition, emaciated, with a macabre elegance about her; the lined, intense face still beautiful – not a Giorgione any longer, a Rembrandt woman, an ageing Jewess howling by a wall.

I knew that she was scared, wanted it all undone, get wafted home.
How
?

Jamie arranged the appointment with a GP. He was pompous, distant, shocked. He prescribed what was necessary to see her through on condition that she left the country in twenty-four hours. It was no empty threat.

With her new supply, she became more relaxed. The English stuff was beautiful, far superior to what she could get in France … She urged me to get Jamie to set up a second visit, with another GP of course … Then there was the journey money, the lack of it. I had mine, but she had no return ticket; she would have to travel in 
comfort. I had to ask Rosie. She became flustered, embarrassed, unhappy – she was unable … she didn’t have … ‘Please don’t explain,’ I told her, having become all these things too. She did explain. She wanted to.

She had given what she had to the Judge, her savings and what she got for the bits of jewellery kept from Berlin. ‘I mean I
lent
it to Jack; persuading him to take it wasn’t at all easy.’

‘Was it the Stock Exchange? Bait for the miracle?’

‘No, no.
That
needs other amounts, I had very little. It’s for him – to live. He’s come to the limit of his overdraft, he doesn’t dare cash a cheque at his clubs. With what I could give him, he was able to pay the quarter’s rent, and give money to his clerk to go out for a newspaper or cigars. We have sandwiches sent in now in the evening.’

Jamie again. He paid for my mother’s ticket, helped to get us on the train. The journey back was chaotic. My mother fainted on the boat and had to be carried ashore by a pair of British sailors. In Paris, she refused to go straight on to the Gare de Lyon, we had to make a stopover that lasted more than twenty-four hours, with my patience beyond breaking-point at all times. When we ultimately reached Les Cyprès, she was gratified if exhausted. To Alessandro she said, ‘I hope you are feeling the better for my little absence.’ In fact he looked almost as ill as she did.

After London, I strove to go out every night. Often it was not possible before my mother had gone to sleep. I would sit and watch for every yawn. ‘Isn’t it time for your Paciflorine?’ ‘Oh, time. Very well, you may get it for me now.’ I would mix it – it was a sticky sugary brown liquid – with some lemon juice, a generous, an over-generous dose. It was pretty harmless stuff, supposed to make one drowsy; when it was slow or failed in that effect, I sometimes got away with ‘Wouldn’t you like some Paciflorine?’ ‘Haven’t I just had some?’ ‘I don’t think so.’

Appalled by my ruthlessness? Yes, I was; at the same time straining in every nerve to be out of the house; into night-life.

There was the hazard of my mother waking again and strolling into 
my room. When she found it empty and the hour was very late as it usually was, there would be trouble and a jumble of lies. If I was in, I would often be jumped out of sound sleep and kept from getting back into it for as long as she sat on my bed. How I willed her to go, how I had to fight to give a semblance of being awake. I liked staying up into the night myself yet once asleep nothing could entice me not to stay under – as though it were
I
who’d taken the Paciflorine – for the next nine hours. These nocturnal invasions were agony; I was not gracious about them.

One of my new friends fixed a small bolt on to the inside of my door. Now I was able to lock myself off from the rest of the house, and leave it by the window, less than five feet from the ground. On my returns, at first light or later, it was easy to climb in.

One depth of night though,
I
visited my mother in her room. I had eaten something – an unsound mussel very likely – that was upsetting me badly. I woke her, she saw me shivering, got up, put me back to bed, heated water for a bottle, made a tisane, held my hand, while I lay whimpering and grateful. She sat with me as long as needed. I felt much ashamed and told her so. ‘Ah, people who are not used to feeling ill …’ she said. ‘The sick have learned to look after themselves.’

When I had no engagement, or missed one by being too late, I would make my way to Bandol on my own to find company at an establishment called Chez Suzie, after the raucous, genial, greedy beetle of a patronne (beetle in appearance: she did not sing) who ran it. It aspired to be a
boîte
or a
bar américain
and was really a café where one could dance. One sat and drank outside in the balmy air not many yards from the sea; when the gramophone struck up and one was so inclined, one went inside to dance on a small floor that lit up sultry pink for a tango. It was frequented by people from the hotels and villas, off yachts in harbour, strollers-in when the casino closed. Suzie kept open till four a.m. or even five, quite legitimately. I became an habituée; meeting diverse and curious characters, who stood me drinks, most of them English or American (the ones still able to come in spite of the slump), they might be anything from an 
expatriate poet, or a Chelsea antique dealer to the spinster daughters of fathers who owned chains of Midland stores.

I drank
fine à l’eau
– not as watery as it sounds: brandy and soda – danced, went for strolls
à deux
under the night sky, heard some life stories. These appealed to Aldous and Maria. Aldous was fascinated by every aspect of my night-life and wanted full descriptions. He disapproved of what he called the night-club part of it, and would not take Suzie’s as the harmless French café that it was. ‘Have you been to your circle of hell again?’ he would ask; then insist on hearing about it.

Alessandro did not have these outlets; his life had become lonely. When he left the house it was to walk the dogs or get some cigarettes. Liked by all, liking most, he had not come close to anyone at Sanary. Men he did business with were apt to treat him as a kind of younger brother; he did not himself enjoy the company of men; he liked to be with women. Now he shunned them.

I did not know how far my mother was aware of the destruction that was going on around her. The pitilessness she could show Alessandro repelled me. I did little to oppose it. What would become of us if I, too, became an object of hate in her eyes?

Meeting Toni (oh yes, they met in London – an unpropitious encounter) had turned my mother’s thoughts on divorce. She
remembered
that her own marriage – Italian – was indissoluble, and used it as a new taunt. ‘You
are
aware that you are irrevocably bound to me,’ she would hurl at Alessandro, ‘by religion, law and duty, or were you thinking of an
annulment
? Who would accord you one? The College of Cardinals? The Pope? Who would pay for it? What grounds do you have? They would laugh at you.’

To me he said, ‘I never thought of divorce, I don’t want to marry anyone else, I never thought of not staying married to her.’

‘You must not hate so,’ I said when we were alone.

My mother said, ‘Look at me. He has destroyed me by doing what he did.’ 

‘He did not mean …’

‘The oldest excuse – not really mean to eat the apple – and the lamest.’

On other days, on other subjects, she would talk gently, reflectively. Then I could love her again.

Evelyn Waugh. She had saluted his stature in the days when I, guided by Rosie Falkenheim, had sent her his first novels. Now she had
Vile
Bodies
by her side, one of the books Uley lay on. Did I realise how much despair there was in that novel? ‘He must feel the despair I do. Someone who writes like that must either take to drink or to what I took to, or religion. I think it will be religion – he’ll become a Catholic.’ (I think Waugh already had at the time or was thinking of it; neither of us knew this.)

Out of the blue she asked me, ‘What is that novel of yours about?’

I blushed. Then admitted to the young man in the South of France.

‘Ah yes. Nearly everyone starts writing about their own experiences. Although these can’t be quite yours. At least you are not writing about your school.’

I agreed that I did not have the most original of subjects.

‘You have me. I’m a much more interesting subject than your dreamt-up young man.’

‘God forbid, mummy.’

‘One day. When you remember all this.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘No, I don’t think I ever could.’

She gave me a cynical smile.

Madame Panigon imparted that Oriane had had a nervous
breakdown
,
une dépression nerveuse
, she called it, and had to be sent away to Switzerland. To a sanatorium, so-called … ‘I always thought she was unbalanced.’

To divert Madame Panigon, I asked what news of Cécile? ‘She’s living in Paris with a man old enough to be her father, a
peintre-artiste
, no money to speak of. She’s disgracing her family, they are getting married.’

I met Philippe on the port. The Desmirails were not part of my dissolute life. ‘
Oriane est en Suisse
, she’s taking a cure.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said gently, uncomprehendingly, ‘
elle fait un peu de neurasthénie
.’

My mother looked at me wonderingly. ‘I find it stranger and stranger to have a child. It was easy when you were little, but now there is a whole, grown-up, separate person … You stand here: and I think is this what
I
have produced? Giving birth is one thing … When you’ve given birth to something that goes on becoming someone else, then it turns so odd.