Jigsaw (7 page)

My mother captivated by her looks alone, yet what drew most men and women into her orbit at first meeting was her talk. She was an extraordinary talker, a storyteller who could make the truth with all its ambiguities come whole: the moment, the connections, the
perspectives
. It was also never relentless, quite interruptible, full of
self-mockery
, and it was often very very funny. I saw that Alessandro loved to listen to it as much as I did –
that
was our education. We saw that acts had predictable ends and yet not, that there were always more than two sides to anything, and that what you did yesterday would be relevant to things to come. We were avid to learn, both he and I. The talk often began at breakfast, she in her bed, we sitting on it, and the hours went and little would get done. She paid no regard to my age or his feelings. With nonchalant openness she told about that great 
‘previous attachment’, the man she had loved so much and had to leave, and how she had chosen my father – affected too by the magnetic field of his pursuit of her – as a retreat into a different world, and how wonderfully unconventional my father’s (he guessed about it all) attitude had been. (New light for me.) Unconventional too, one might say, was Alessandro’s attitude: he accepted these resurrections of her past; to him they were ingredients of her legend.

Something went wrong. Alessandro had to go North to see his family. Look after her, he said to me, try to cheer her up; I’ll be back soon. How soon? I would have liked to ask. He added on his own: As soon as I
can
.

I was grateful to him for his trust, but I was unable to divert her. She hardly spoke; our meals had become silent. One winter afternoon we went for a walk along the beach. Her steps, she was walking ahead, were uncertain, she had slender ankles and was wearing the wrong shoes, she was not looking where she put her feet. Watching that walk I was gripped by an unaccustomed feeling: pity. My mother was not the kind of person one felt sorry for; she always seemed to be holding an advantage point. She sat down on a rock. I stood in front of her. How
can
he come back, she said, they want him at home, they need him at home – I can see how
they
see it: a foreigner, a divorcée and of course the proverbial woman old enough to be his mother; a dubious Catholic as well. They won’t
let
him come back and
he’
s not strong enough.

He
will
come back, I said. He told me so.

And how can it last? He’s too young. He’ll always be too young. We met at the wrong time. Come to think of it, there could never have been a right time, given the dates of our births.
That
is the inevitable factor. I’m a fool but not such a fool as not to know that we are headed for great unhappiness …

‘Billi – can you understand that one can miss one human being,
one
presence … in the whole of the universe … to the point of … well, extinction of all else? One day
you
will know too.’ 

‘Yes,’ I said.

I was able then to love my mother. I wished her well. I saw that there might be things in store for which there was no help and no answer. For the first time I felt the sting of compassion; I never forgot that afternoon by a grey Mediterranean.

He did not come back. He sent for her instead. She had to leave me by myself again: it could not have been a trickier moment. As my father was dead, a German court was appointing a legal guardian; they would not accept my mother nor anyone she proposed, they required
somebody
resident in Germany. I said I would have my sister’s husband, the deputy mayor. Are you sure, my mother said, your sister is such a bad picker? I like him, I said. He’s on our side. I don’t think
anyone
is going to be on our side, she said. But all right, let’s have him, and meanwhile we’d better lie doggo for a bit – don’t open any buff envelopes with great German seals while I’m away.

She stayed away for what seemed a long time. I was beset with the heavy feeling of afternoons, the sense of standing still, of belonging nowhere. It was warm in daytime, out on the terrazzo, on the sunny side of the street, indoors it was cold. I had not known that the South could be so cold. The pensione was empty; the owners, the
hard-working
owners, the Emilios, were kind to the
bambina
. Oh they were more than that. I was living with the open-armed emotions of Italian working people: their goodness, simplicity, affection reminded me of my father’s Lina, but in that village Lina had been a rare bird; here, lovingness splashed like the quick water from the fountains, and the current of shared humanity flowed through the most trivial of daily exchanges. All the same I did not weep in Signora Emilio’s arms, nice though it would have been, because of her criticism – unspoken – of my mother. Chivalry forbade. I still had an old racket and found a wall against which I could play tennis solitaire. The ball kept going over garden fences which meant ringing doorbells and apologies; one man got furious and that put a damper on the game. When O was with us 
at Merano he had bought me something I had much coveted in the shops, a pair of those Tyrolese shorts made of beautifully soft chamois leather, complete with embroidered braces and white linen shirts. To boost my morale I put on these shorts and a nice clean shirt for
la cena
in the evening. I was soon aware that this was frowned upon – girls at Sorrento were no better off than girls at Feldkirch, in an obscure way I was causing scandal again. I hardened myself: I no longer took pleasure in my shorts but I went on wearing them. When at last they returned – this time they returned together, mummy and Alessandro – I was taken to Pompeii for a treat.

Life became settled unsettled. We went to Capri for a time (where someone gave me lessons), then back to the mainland, then over to Sicily, to Palermo, Taormina, Syracuse.

‘Are we on the run, mummy?’

‘You might call it that.’

‘Are you … Will you …?’

‘No, darling, we’re not going to get married. He wants to, I will not. I’m sure I’m right.
Carpe diem
. And don’t look so many questions.’

She and Alessandro must have had troubles. I was one of them. (Fancy taking the child with them,
they
were saying;
they
seemed to be looming everywhere.) The buff envelopes were slow to catch up with the postes restantes, but they came. My sister’s husband had been accepted as my legal guardian. Then my sister left him, like that, out of the blue, running away with a young good-for-nothing (was there any stability in our family life?) and my brother-in-law, ex-brother-in-law, backed out. I became the ward of a court and the court wanted to know where I was. It was my mother now who was badgered about educating me. On principle she was all for it, being well educated herself, at home as it happened; she believed in tutors though at present this was awkward – local lights were engaged when they could be found but did not amount to much. Alessandro tried to teach me algebra which he knew but was not very good at making clear; besides, my mother, for whom time did not exist, would interrupt. 

Another source of awkwardness was my father’s will, an impossible will as the courts conceded in the fullness of time. He had left the château and contents to my half-sister and myself provided that the estate was never sold and the collection preserved
in perpetuum.
There was no money for upkeep, to keep the place in repair, the objects dusted and warmed, the taxes paid (there were horrendous arrears). My sister decided to contest the will but could not do so without my consent: I was a minor, my mother’s address (by then) was poste restante Agrigento, my official guardian a court. The court prevaricated; meanwhile money was required, considerable sums, and there was
no
money (just a bundle of old banknotes in my father’s safe made worthless by inflation). To raise something on the estate required my consent and there we began again. My mother’s trustees, expressing dismay and distaste by post, offered to maintain me temporarily if a suitable establishment were found. The German court expressed itself in similar terms. It was not put soothingly and the prospect frightened me. (The court sat in a market town in Baden, the sight of its postmark made me feel sick for many years to come.) At the time my mother just kept our heads in the sand.

‘Darling,’ (my mother one morning) ‘I don’t think I can spend the rest of my life at Agrigento, besides it’s not as warm – you’ve noticed? – as it’s cracked up to be. Alessandro and I are thinking of going to North Africa, we think we’d like to try Tunisia.’

‘Africa!’ I said. ‘Another continent!’

‘You
have
taken to travel … Perhaps not quite the moment. You see, we can’t have you on the run as well.’

‘Yes …?’

‘So duck, I think you had better go to England.’

‘To an
establishment
?’

‘If that’s what you call a school.’

‘What school, mummy?’

‘Ah, there you have me. How can I choose a school from Sicily? Can you see the Italian post coping with all those prospectuses? So I thought I’d better send you to some friends and they’ll find one for you. I’ve 
written to Susan and Jack – you can’t just ask anyone to do that kind of thing for you, but they’re very easy-going. They have dozens of children so it shouldn’t be difficult. The trustees will pay your fare and the fees. They’re both painters; you admire artists, I’ve noticed. I didn’t like to ask any of my stuffier friends … Anyway you’ll find Susan and Jack charming.’

‘Where do they live in England?’

‘How precise you’re being. Actually they move about a good deal. I wrote to Susan’s people’s address.’

‘Mummy, when am I going?’

‘As soon as I hear from them.’

A
LESSANDRO took me to the Italian mainland by ferry and train, an escort from some agency was to pick me up at the French border, Susan, Mrs Robbins, to meet me at Victoria Station. The middle stage, Naples to Ventimiglia, I was to travel on my own, connections looked up, ticket in hand. Before parting I asked
Alessandro
, having mustered courage for this along the way, How long will you and mummy be in Africa? He said he did not know, he did not know at all. You do like travel? I said. You see, he said, I’ve had so little before. What I remember of my own journey is that it was long, bedragglingly long. France did not register, maybe I slept through France. When it came to the Channel steamer I was drugged with tiredness but waked a little to the new smells. I endured the crossing. Dover and the sight of a waiting train – a small-looking train – and other new smells, soot, unfamiliar tobacco. In London it was evening once more – the third? – and Mrs Robbins met me, we were lolling in a wide taxi cab, startled by enormous red buses and then we were in the lobby of the Green Park Hotel (long since defunct), it was heated and plushy and more like the house in Voss Strasse, Berlin, to breathe in than anywhere I had been for years. Can that really be you? Mrs Robbins now said. She called me by my unabridged first name which no one ever did. ‘I got the impression you were
much
older … That you were supposed to go to finishing school …?’ ‘Oh, no,’ I said.

She gave me another look and took me upstairs in a lift; to a large room with long windows on street-lamps and trees, and a bathroom with cascades of hot water. I was in bed almost at once, a tray came 
with biscuits and something milky and warm, and I felt I had reached comfort and safety.

Next day, Susan – I was to call her that, and she was charming, just as my mother had said – took me to the National Gallery and to eat at the Chinese restaurant overlooking Piccadilly Circus. Altogether this was a high moment almost ranking with the night by the Bay of Naples – the hub of an Empire, I said to myself. In the afternoon we took a train to the Midlands.

And that was the beginning of a life that was to me intensely exotic and of course to real English people not exotic at all. On the train Susan did a bit of explaining – I knew from the tone that something was up – we were going to her father and mother’s house (only for a little while of course), she and Jack had had to give up their cottage, Jack had started doing frescos, frescos didn’t seem to catch on awfully well – actually, you see, we’re broke. I did see.

The house was on the edge of the town and quite large, and the household too was large. Granny, maiden aunts, unmarried sisters, a line of female servants: housemaids, parlourmaid, cook, and of course the masters, the old people, Susan’s mother and father. There weren’t dozens of children, just two girls at home between schools, Marjory and Joan, big girls in their teens, older than I, younger than Doris. You’re a foreigner, they said. I don’t know, I answered. They lost interest. (Hadn’t much to begin with.) Meals were worlds apart from any I’d known, twice as many meals as there were in Italy. They were what they were sixty years ago before quiche, kebab and pasta had become ubiquitous in the land – breakfast off the sideboard (this I found splendid), another big spread at four p.m., main meals a steady rotation; after wishy-washy soup and a bit of fish, beef and mutton, hot joint, cold joint, mince, cutlets, hot joint, cold joint – pickles, bottled sauces, dispirited salads, custards, vegetables that were about par with Feldkirch cookery and puddings that were much better. Drink was water, soda water or barley water. Tea was offered again at
bedtime
. There were morning prayers and these made me feel odd. Was 
the family Church of England? Now I think they may well have been something more strict and narrow, then it didn’t occur to me that there were niceties in heresy; if I had lapsed from my religion, its teachings still told me to recognise no other. No one asked me questions. This may have been a way to make me feel at home. Jack’s mother-in-law had given him the use of the garden-room as a studio (this was regarded as indulgence), and he asked me to sit for him; he needed a child for a large composition. When I wasn’t sitting I was encouraged to work the pianola – much more enjoyable – as Jack liked music while he worked. For the rest of the time I seem to have been trotting after Marjory and Joan on their not unpleasant round of following an aunt leaving orders at the grocer’s and the
greengrocer
’s, changing library books at Boots, taking turns for fetching grandad from the works in the pony trap. Did it really happen? Did people ever live as they do in an E. F. Benson or an Agatha Christie novel? On Wednesday afternoons we went to the cinema, and, casually, miraculously, there was tennis! Tennis with a live opponent on an actual court. Contrary to my early aspirations I never got any good at it at all.

What did I learn, what did I unlearn from that first piece of England? It was all such a far cry from my mother, from the village school, from the Pensione Emilio. I caught on that people did not shake hands every time they met in the morning or parted for the night, that they kept reading newspapers when they were sitting in a room together; I learned of another kind of cold, in bedrooms that were never heated, in stark bathrooms where there was yellow soap and tooth mugs slopping with disinfectant; of a new kind of warmth when you toasted yourself piecemeal before a fire. I learned that servants were not quite so easily people you threw your arms about and laughed and cried with, and yet they were kind enough – it was all quicksand. Jack and Susan, too, were not consistent, they were different on their own away from the family table. There was a brother who did not live in the house, who helped run the works (tractors, I think, agricultural engines) and from his visits one somehow gathered that Susan and Jack were not all that was expected of them. One day Jack said that he
and Susan wanted to speak to me, we had a conference, they called it, sitting the three of us in the makeshift studio.

Your school now … Susan had been arranging for a place but it’s for older girls, so we would have to start again. We’ve been thinking about it – you know it won’t be easy to find the right kind of school for you; Marjory and Joan didn’t get on in any of theirs, they loathed each more than the last. So we have a suggestion to make, it’s up to your mother of course, but we wanted to know how you felt about it. Would you like to go on staying with us? doing lessons with a tutor? We’d keep the girls at home too and club together so we could get someone really good to teach you. We’re thinking of moving to London – Jack thinks he’s got a chance to do posters. You’d be a kind of PG, if you know what that is, it’ll come to no more than your school fees. What do you think your mother would say to that?

Oh,
she’
s in favour of private education, I said.

What about yourself now? There
are
advantages about school, you’d be with people of your own age … You must think about it.

I did not. I fell for the plan at once. No
establishment
, no new change, the line of least resistance.

I took trouble over the letter to my mother, to be enclosed in Susan’s, urging our case. By the time her answer came – a reluctant yes – we were already ensconced in a flat in Hampstead. So the pattern for the rest of my childhood and early adolescence was set. It was a key decision and, as I knew even then, it was my own. Circumstances allowed me to make a choice when I was still incapable of weighing what the choice involved. Life with Susan and Jack – once they had escaped their parents and the starched servants – was cheerful, easy-going; they enjoyed being artists even if they weren’t successful ones and were light-hearted over their periodic financial disasters. They were nice people, kindly people, naively bohemian, quite as delighted as I was to find themselves eating out at a Charlotte Street trattoria. They were good to me but had no intention of playing foster parents – I was lodger and stranger, a near equal from another tribe; that I was a child was largely ignored; as long as I looked after myself, that was the unspoken compact, and caused no trouble with my shadowy guardians, I could do as I pleased. 

As far as my education went, they were as good as their word. At first. They found me a tutor, a woman with a history degree; I bicycled to her flat twice a day, and loved it. No more parroting by heart – I was taught properly. Jack’s posters did not catch on, London was expensive, we were being mildly dunned … After less than a year we left the Hampstead flat one early morning riding on the furniture van – it felt both an escape and a picnic. For a time we lived on the South Coast; in various places, once in one of those converted old railway carriages by a beach, there I used to read in an upper bunk by a one-candle light. Then when finances got really low, we went back to the parental Midlands; then to a series of country cottages, another stretch in London when Susan had been promised a show. So it went on. For my teachers, as in Italy, we had to rely on local lights; some of them were good, others less good. I did work on my own but it suffered from lack of supervision. People we saw were mostly grown-ups, casual ones at that, Susan and Jack picked up friends and we were often a crowd, but they, too, like the rest of our life were here today and gone tomorrow. When there was money there was drink in the house, gin, red wine: Australian burgundy of deplorable memory and Chianti so-called, a meal out, the pit in a theatre …Second-hand cars were acquired with optimism, parted from sorrowfully. I had pocket money, and we all borrowed from each other freely. My clothes had become almost as run down as they had been at Feldkirch, my daily costume being a blue serge school tunic handed down from Marjory or Joan. When my father’s estate was finally settled – the will broken, the house sold, the contents sold – my sister (did I hear from her? a dozen lines now and then scrawled large over a page of crested paper; she had her own troubles, big troubles, but these scrawls conveyed nothing of them), well my sister did an imaginative thing, she wanted me to have my father’s gold cigarette case and against much opposition she wanted me to have it
now
. She was right there: it gave me more pleasure than it could have at any later time. I carried the case filled with sixpence worth of Craven A, flashing it around in solemn hospitality. They would have let me smoke had I wished; I tried it once or twice, didn’t like it, was never tempted again. When we got hard up
at the end of the month, I handed the gold case to Susan (Jack was not to be told) who would take the bus to the nearest pawn shop. It was honourably redeemed each time.

Yes, they were nice people, kind people, who kept going by being able to laugh at themselves and at what befell them; for all their muddling they had strength, a very English strength: made up of modesty, pluck, acceptance of the surface of things – tolerant qualities, survivors’ qualities (which can keep the sky from falling). Humour was Jack and Susan’s weapon to dilute the anguish of existence with its infinite possibilities of disaster. A useful weapon, a likeable weapon – not a romantic weapon and not the best for getting at the essence of existence. To me then, growing into my teens, arrogant with intellectual desires, bound on some quest I could not have defined, they were not the people to engage emotions or fire the imagination.

Life was further fragmented by stays in Italy at intervals. The idea had been that I should go there for the holidays but as these were irregular and my mother no more settled than Susan and Jack, I went when asked for. I travelled on my own, trustees sent money and that, by going third class, could be laid out to advantage. I contrived stops between trains, dined in splendour at the Galleria in Milan on real Italian food and wine, put in a little dogged sightseeing in places I’d been told of, quite uncertain yet of my own taste. If it was summer my destination might be some villa on the Mediterranean (oh, the clear water of those uncrowded bays), if winter a chalet in the Dolomites belonging to Alessandro’s family where he taught me skiing. He and my mother had got unobtrusively married.
Indissolubly
what’s more, she said, do you realise there’s no divorce in Italy, neither religious nor civil, benighted country (those were the early years of Mussolini). Alessandro would say nothing. I accepted what I found. Most children have a pinch of fatalism and detachment in their composition, they also totter through a jumble of tough observation and absurd
misjudgements
. Each Italian visit felt different; some slow almost invisible shifts had occurred, such as the shifts that slide a series of stills into a 
moving picture. My mother and Alessandro must have been going through a process of establishing a framework, a common ground in the outside world, and there was ever the question – this
was
discussed
– of finding an occupation for him. The rented house, the borrowed lodge or flat, was always made liveable, civilised. This they achieved as a team. My mother had a knack of making any room look charming. Alessandro was good with his hands. First thing my mother would hang up her Klee. (She did have a Paul Klee, a present, I
understood
, from a previous lover, and she took it wherever she went; once when that love was brand new, she had propped up the Klee in the compartment of her wagon-lit.) Then they would move the furniture around and if it was sombre or ugly they’d paint it over with some pleasant colour (this often caused trouble with the owners). Alessandro could knock together an efficient ice-box from old packing cases, sawdust and tin in a matter of hours, then embellish it and the kitchen cupboard with fragments of pastiche – a couple of Braque cubes, a trace of a Marie Laurencin – he was quick on the visual uptake;
anything
he had seen once, if only in a book, he’d have the hang of it. My mother seemed pleased by such feats and would show them off in her slightly deprecatory manner, as she would show off, say, my spouting chunks of poetry, implying that we, he and I, were rather clever if hardly original for our age and station at things she could have done with her hands tied behind her back. Her married life had an audience now, friends staying at the house, overflowing into local hotel or pensione. My mother’s friends they were and during those early years mostly women. She did have women friends and was loyal and devoted to them, as they were to her: attracted – she was always a centre – by her vitality, the flowing talk that seemed to give a point to everything they did, the laughter. They also grew attached to Alessandro. They had come to judge –
Twenty years younger … Much
too handsome … And what does he
do
? – they stayed to bask in his company. He liked women and showed it, it was as simple as that; he treated them
indiscriminately
in a light flirtatious way, all on the surface, quite public. It might have given offence, apparently it did not. Yet there was not the slightest doubt in anyone’s mind that his entire devotion was for my
mother. Alessandro’s serious leanings – so far – had been towards women older than himself; his first affair, when he was little more than a boy, had been with a married lady in her forties whom he was still fond of and occasionally visited. As for other friends, he seemed to have shed them for the present; men bored him and men’s talk (though he himself was not in the least an effeminate man). He had not shed his family. They too came and stayed, mingling or not with my mother’s friends. They – there was Mama and a gang of young brothers and cousins – seemed to have accepted his marriage with fairly good grace: his father was dead and Alessandro, though not the eldest, was his own man. Mama was a vigorous woman, embarrassingly youthful, with a clear face and a manner that often missed being tactful. She and my mother managed; she jangled her son’s nerves, which he visibly controlled. My mother, I guessed, was quietly doing something for the brothers, helping to put one through university, pulling strings for another (she had not burnt
all
her boats). That was a period when the money situation was on some sort of even keel, the trustees too had accepted the marriage and were underwriting my mother’s refound respectability. We lived in modest comfort. There was little mention of bills and no utopian attempts to grow our own potatoes, which seemed indicators of high financial stability to me. I, by the way, had an allowance now out of my father’s estate which was paid by the courts to whomever I was living with. We had servants. A cook, a maid, an older woman coming on washing day (when the wash was taken to the communal stream or trough); I quickly forgot the early skills acquired as a sub-drudge in the German village and became oblivious of housework. The time I had now, I spent reading. They were nice servants, Italian servants, which was synonymous; it was they who provided an element of continuity. Not that they remained long the same, there was no family factotum to follow our geographical changes – Erminia … Fosca … Renata … Camilla … your faces and names are as fused now as the places: were you with us at Positano? on Capri? at Fiesole? What remained constant was what they gave to us, to the house, to themselves, a compound arising from their natures and traditions: hard work, dignity, much laughter; cleanliness to
the degree where it becomes an aesthetic element; generosity in their dealings:
gentilezza
. It was reciprocated. Here Alessandro was perfect. Mutual respect, trust, emotions shown at crisis times, without familiarity. Young he might be, he was
il signore
, the master. With me, too, it was good. Good at the stage when I was the
bambina
, the child of the house (they, the servants, treated me as such); and still good later when they felt I should reach the
signorina
stage, still easy, affectionate, though it wasn’t a stage – if one translates
signorina
as young lady as I suppose one must – I ever came much to terms with.