Jigsaw (45 page)

‘It’s not because you are like or unlike me – I think you are both – that’s not the point. It’s that you are supposed to be a part of me which – in the usual course of events – will be there when I’m gone. So I look at you and feel … I don’t know what.’

‘If you’d had the choice would you have had a child?’ I said.

‘You certainly came at an inconvenient moment – as I often told you before – it tied me to your father when I was already thinking of ways to leave him.’

‘Was it the same with the other child?’

‘
What
?
What
are
you talking about?’

‘There was a second child, wasn’t there? I used to call him my baby brother in my mind.’

‘Good God! Your knowing that!’

‘Oh I knew. I also knew that it was a secret.’

My mother looked as completely thrown as I’d ever seen her.

‘I kept the secret. Not that I thought of it a great deal. I was a very small child then, it was all so far away.’

‘But
how
? How did you know? How did you find out? Who could have told you? Nobody was to know at the time. Certainly your father didn’t know.’

‘It was the pram,’ I said. ‘You gave it away, mummy, by sending for the pram.’

‘What pram?’

‘Don’t you remember? It was
my
old pram – it was kept in the loft at Feldkirch. You wrote to the lawyers who were doing papa’s side of the divorce asking for it to be sent to you.’

‘Heavens, so I did.’

‘Papa was puzzled at first and then he got upset, and then I wasn’t supposed to know about it any more. The packers came and it was all hush-hush. He and Lina talked – you won’t remember Lina, she came after you left us – I don’t think I overheard much, only, “
How could she
?
” and once, “That’s
evidence
.”’

‘Now I see how your father was able to make me the guilty party of our divorce. My folly. Not that it made so much difference.’

‘They all guessed.
I
was quite certain that my pram was for your new child.’

My mother looked at me with a kind of awe. ‘What did you feel about it?’

‘Hoped that you’d be pleased with him – I don’t know why, but I always thought of him as a boy – and that some day we would meet.’

‘And then,’ my mother said, ‘when you did
not
meet him?’

‘Yes, that made me feel most embarrassed. You see, when you sent for me to come to Italy – when you were about to marry again and we were going to live in Florence – I was expecting to find the baby boy. I nearly asked for him. Then I felt what a ghastly mistake that would have been. Either I had been wrong, or you had sent him away, to foster parents or someone, and didn’t want it mentioned. Or … that he was … dead.’

‘He was dead,’ my mother said. ‘It
was
a boy and he died after a few weeks.’

When we spoke again, I said, ‘It must have been sad.’

‘It was. I
had
wanted him. And I very much loved the man who was his father; we were going to marry, in fact as soon as my divorce got through. No, it wasn’t O – O came years later, it was the man who gave me the Klee.’

‘What happened?’

‘After the child died, I didn’t want the man any more. A curious reversal of feeling, but there it was. I broke it all off and left him.’ 

‘Did he mind?’

‘Very much.’

We both took a breath. Presently I said, ‘Mummy, why on earth did you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Send for the pram. It’s so absurd. I know you let my father keep the château and the park land and all the rest – you just gave it to him, just like that, privately, because you knew how miserable he’d be to leave it. I always admired you for that. And then you go and ask for one second-hand pram? You weren’t hard up then?’

‘It was a particularly
good
pram, made in England; I didn’t see why I should be put to buying another one when there it was, resting on its wheels in the back-country of the Grand-Duchy of Baden, and your father had got everything else. I didn’t think of the consequences.’

Something else occurred to me. ‘Mummy, was it the Copenhagen pram?’

‘Now what do you mean by that?’

‘The pram you took me in one afternoon to that
garçonnière
…?’

‘Peter’s. Your reminiscences! Peter … I loved him too, perhaps more than most – what a good writer we then thought he was – they called him the Danish Maupassant – now he’s in limbo, almost completely forgotten. I didn’t see him again after that summer. There was the War, and he died in 1917. Barely fifty, of a hundred cigarettes a day and other things.’

I said, ‘Suddenly there was his photograph on your dressing-table: I remember his long hand with the cigarette-holder.’

‘Your father saw it too. He came into my room and shied like a horse. I said to him, “I just heard – he died last week.” Your father made a little bow and said, “I am so sorry.” That was very like him.’

‘Was it?’ I said.

‘Yes, it must have been the same pram. Can you see now how strange it is to have you? The things you remember, the things you know … And there I was, having no idea. Do I know you? Do you think you know
me
?’

‘You are not easy to know, mummy.’

‘Why did you never speak to me about the other child?’

‘As
you
never did – when you talked of so much else – I felt it wasn’t up to me, anyway I’d half forgotten. It was only a fact I picked up as a child, and looked on as a child.’

‘And today? Does it look different?’

‘Perhaps.’

The donkey-man came to the house with a message. I was to go to La Pacifique at once, there a person-to-person call from London was waiting for me, from – he held out a scrap of paper – Mister Nairn. I went with misgivings. Jamie was not the man to make international trunk calls lightly.

Philippe was there, he told the operator that I was available now, and after some waiting I was through. I heard Jamie say, ‘The Judge … He shot himself … he is dead, he was found by Rosie yesterday afternoon.’

Before I could ask anything rash, he went on, ‘Nobody knows why … It’s all over the papers. It appears he’s had one or two difficult cases lately.’

My mother said, ‘You must go to her.’ I borrowed the travel money from Maria. This time I had to ask. I told her something frightful had happened to a great friend. ‘I shan’t be of any use.’ ‘You will have tried,’ she said. I took the train the same evening.

I saw Jamie first. He told me the bare facts. Rosie had gone to the flat in St James’s and had found the Judge in his sitting-room in a chair, shotgun by his side. She left – unseen – and telephoned the police from a public box. She said she was a typist who had come by
appointment
to deliver some papers. She did not give her name; she said she did not wish for the publicity that might ensue, and the police accepted this. The press (miraculously?) were making no great play of The Unknown Woman who found him. They were casting about for a reason for the Judge’s death – and so, Jamie said, must be Rosie – 
the consensus seemed to be over-work combined with the public controversy over his conduct of some recent cases. A verdict of suicide while of unsound mind was foreseen, the papers already losing interest in the case.

‘With luck nobody will find out about her having known him.’

‘How … is Rosie?’ I asked at last.

‘Quiet,’ Jamie said. ‘Practical.’ I thought that a curious expression.

I found the sisters frozen, Toni visibly the most: white, shocked, gauchely addressing Rosie like an invalid, repressing God knows what. Rosie looked much like herself, except for a certain rigidity of
movement
; she spoke little. Of what had happened not a word was said. They were no Latins – no physical expression of sympathy seemed allowable, no embrace, no taking of hands; likewise they were remote from their own warmer tradition, the Jewish sharing of grief, the sitting close and lamenting. All was dryness; chill.

Toni produced a tea. Rosie ate normally.

Some time later she suggested a walk with me on the Heath. As soon as the dog was off the leash, she talked. Everything she said was measured, spoken in a level, slow voice. She had had a wonderful life, perfect years. They were over.

‘There will be nothing more for me. I shall not go Jack’s way, I cannot do it to Toni. Think how scandalised she would be.’

I was glad to find in that last remark a hint of her old self. Perhaps whatever life does to people, there is left a spark of individuality that will out like an edge of handkerchief from a pocket.

‘Besides suicide’ – she was able to say the word – ‘may not be in my temperament. In Jack’s position I should have chosen otherwise. But then for him his reputation was his mainstay. As he was mine.’ She straightened herself like a soldier, a very tired soldier after a very long march, like a soldier all the same. ‘Isn’t it splendid that it looks as though nothing will come out about debts or bankruptcy. It would seem that his people have paid up – as they would not when he was alive. The truth will never become public.’ Her voice grew stronger. ‘As Jack couldn’t face the music, his survivors are making sure that nobody knows that there was music to face. He would have wanted 
that most. That’s one thing I, too, can still do for him: nobody will hear the true story from me.’

I acknowledged how well she had kept it from her sister and Jamie, and I assured her of my own silence. (Which I kept. Well, for some fifty years.)

Would she like a change for a time? Travel? Could she bear coming back with me (I wondering what our house had to offer)? I supposed not Sanary now?

Not Sanary now.

Would she continue living with Toni?

Inevitably. Unless Toni ran off with some singer one day. Highly improbable.

How could one help her through the next few weeks? That was easy. ‘I need a job. At once. Unless I start living off Toni.’ In fact she’d already got a job; she was stepping into the one Jamie had found for Toni, an excellent job with a gallery. Toni was retreating quite gracefully.

‘Waiting for another one to turn up?’

‘Which Jamie is trying to find for her. Jamie has been very good.’

‘And he doesn’t even know why you really need a job.’

‘Jamie doesn’t ask questions.’

‘What can
I
do for you?’

Nothing. It had been good of me to come. Jack would have appreciated it. ‘He approved of you as a friend for me. The one friend he’s ever met.’

One thing, yes: would I get her some books. She was taking sleeping pills – of course – all the same she got through a book a night. When I eagerly complied and made suggestions, she said, ‘Oh, no real books. I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only, lots of them.’

I thought of guns – and worse – found in country-house studies and libraries: could she want to be faced with such? It must be true then what people said, that death in detective stories was quite unreal.

As Rosie had made clear, there was nothing I could do; so after just under forty-eight hours in London I was on my way back to France.

Entering Les Cyprès suitcase in hand, I found Waldemar sitting on the terrace reading a newspaper. I sought out Alessandro, ‘What on earth?’

‘He came back to pay us a visit. He wanted to say thank you for last summer. It seems he’s passed his exams and is in some kind of job now. He brought his bound thesis as a present for your mother.’

‘What are you doing with him?’ I asked her presently.

‘We’ve got a bed, haven’t we? He’s in Emilia’s old room. A decent young man, though goodness how serious; and so prim and proper in spite of beavering away for the Revolution.’

I would not have wanted to go out that night; as it was, family dinner with Waldemar was in order. Alessandro cooked it. It was quite a pleasant evening; the main topic was politics with my mother teasing and at times bewildering the young German. (Of London, I would talk to my mother by and by; it could wait.) She retired, and we all went to bed early.

I was woken in the night by great noise in the house: I heard my mother’s voice. I opened my door, there was a light on in the passage and I could see her standing in the entrance of Emilia’s small room. She was in a nightgown and she was raving. Waldemar, I presumed, was in bed. ‘I want you to realise,’ she shouted, ‘that you are sleeping under the roof of an adulterer … An
adulterer
…’

Now Alessandro appeared, the shouting increased; I slunk away. Used though I was to these nocturnal uproars, they pierced the marrow. I went back to bed, put some plugs I sometimes used for diving in my ears, pulled a sheet over my head. After a time the sounds subsided. I fell back into sleep.

I woke again when Alessandro stood in the door. He was fully dressed holding Chumi on a lead; on his head was the little white cap with a peak, such as golfers sport, that he wore on motor journeys. He signed me to be quiet; I took the plugs out of my ears, got up and followed him out of the house. We stood facing each other by the balustrade above the cypress terrace. It was just beginning to get light. He said, ‘I cannot go on any longer. I must go.’

I was struck by lucid certitude. I looked at him with sudden immense affection. ‘Yes – go.’ 
‘Look after her. Be kind to her.’

…

‘Philippe and Oriane, Aldous and Maria, and Renée will help you.’

…

‘I shall send money, as soon as I can. Regularly.’

‘And what will you do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh Alessandro.’ Then, irrelevance. ‘Waldemar? What are we supposed to do with him?’

‘He’s already in the car; he’s taken my bags. We’ll go in Doris’s Chrysler – it’s got to be brought back – I’m leaving the Ford here.’

‘So you’ll be going to Berlin.’

‘Not for long. Paul may find me a job – he’s building somewhere in Germany. He can use a decorator. An
amateur
decorator.’

‘You wanted to be a real architect, didn’t you?’