Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  Sybille continued living in London during the school term, returning to Sanary for the holidays. She also, in September 1927, went to Berlin to see her sister, Katzi, who had recently remarried. Katzi’s second husband, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, was a German diplomat of notable intelligence and charm. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, Dincklage, always known to his friends as “Spatz” (“Sparrow”), was strikingly handsome, a playboy with an unquenchable appetite for social life that matched Katzi’s own. Yet there was more to him than that: after a distinguished wartime career as a cavalry officer, Spatz had been employed by the Abwehr, posted to both Warsaw and Paris, working undercover to collect strategic information for the German military. Now with his wife he was shortly to move to Sanary, a location of some significance for one of his profession, not least on account of its proximity to the French naval base at Toulon. As Sybille wrote later, her sister’s second marriage was in time to become “a disaster of lifelong consequences.”

  At first, however, all seemed to be well. Since their father’s death, it was Katzi who had been dealing with the lawyers commissioned to arrange the sale of the Feldkirch estate. This was finally put up for auction—the house and park and Maximilian’s entire collection—over three days in May 1928, the sale producing a satisfactory sum, enough to provide both daughters with a modest but sufficient income for the foreseeable future. A legal guardian was appointed for Sybille, an ex-Cabinet minister whom Lisa had known during her marriage to Max. But for Sybille, while relieved that her father’s complex legacy was at last resolved, her most immediate pleasure was in her ownership of her father’s gold cigarette case and lighter. At seventeen, slightly plump, with her fair hair cut boyishly short, dressed in a plain jacket and skirt, Sybille adopted with relish the role of cavaliere servente. “I carried the case filled with sixpence worth of Craven A, flashing it around in solemn hospitality…[springing] up to offer a light to any woman as soon as she put cigarette to mouth.”

  It was in this same year, while Sybille was lodging with the Perkinses in Belsize Park that, somewhat to her surprise, she was visited by her mother. Unknown to her daughter, Lisa had been conducting a secret liaison with an Englishman, and had come to London to see him. Although happy in her marriage, Lisa always craved male admiration, a craving that grew more powerful with age as she sought reassurance that her sexual magnetism remained undimmed. While on a visit to Paris she had met the art critic, and notorious womaniser, Clive Bell, husband of Virginia’s Woolf’s sister, Vanessa. The two of them had had a brief affair, and now after Bell’s return to London Lisa was anxious not to lose her new admirer, who she also hoped might assist her in launching a literary career of her own. Bell had recently published his Civilization: An Essay, and Lisa offered to write about it for a German magazine; in return she asked him to help her find works in English that she could translate into German—“Il faut m’aider un peu dans ma carrière littéraire, n’est-ce pas?” (“You should help me in my literary career, no?”).

  Described by Virginia Woolf as “the Don Juan of Bloomsbury,” Bell was initially taken with Lisa, talking excitedly about his “beautiful Germanness.” Before long, however, and no doubt alarmed by Lisa’s neediness, Bell’s interest waned as he turned his attention to a pretty young actress, and Lisa was reduced to writing him plaintive letters which, it seems, were left unanswered. “Pourquoi pas de ne répondre à ma lettre? Ca vous embêtait d’écrire?…Pourquoi?…Je suis seule…J’ai tellement envie de vous revoir…” (“Why don’t you answer my letter? Is it a bother for you to write?…Why?…I’m alone…I so much want to see you again…”). Despite this somewhat lowering experience, Lisa’s spirits had sufficiently recovered by the time she returned to Sanary for her to boast that the distinguished art critic Clive Bell had asked her to marry him.

  Meanwhile Sybille was coming to the end of her time with the Perkinses: in the autumn of 1928 Christopher was offered a teaching post in New Zealand and the family planned to leave England the following January. In order to supplement her income Sybille decided to try teaching German, advertising her services in The Times, but the results were disappointing, with only a couple of pupils applying, and the immediate future began to seem worryingly insecure. Fortunately it was at this point that Sybille made a couple of new acquaintances, who would completely transform her London life. Through a friend of Lisa, Sybille had been given an introduction to two German sisters, Toni and Kate Silbermann, both in their late thirties, Jewish émigrés, whose well-to-do family had been impoverished by the post-war inflation. While living precariously in Berlin Toni had met and married an Englishman with whom she had moved to London, where soon afterwards she was joined by her sister Kate.

  Toni’s husband, Percy Muir, a couple of years younger than his wife, was a highly regarded antiquarian book dealer. He was currently working at Dulau’s bookshop in Bond Street, where both sisters were employed as occasional assistants. Kate, who had adopted her sister’s married name, first made contact with Sybille, inviting her to tea at her small flat in Marylebone. Kate was no beauty, her face long and sallow, her eyes small, her brown hair dull and crinkly, and yet she had an irresistible appeal. Clever and amusing, she enchanted her guest with talk about her past in Germany, her love of music and theatre, her passion for reading. As Sybille left, Kate gave her a copy of a novel, Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley, an author of whom Sybille at that stage of her life knew nothing. The book made an extraordinary impact, and after reading it, Sybille “got hold of everything else by Aldous Huxley…[his books] seemed to bring me everything I would then have liked to know and think.”

  Soon after this first encounter Sybille was introduced to Toni and Percy, who lived in a tiny mews flat behind one of the Nash terraces in Regent’s Park. Toni was exquisitely beautiful, witty and a mesmerising talker, but unlike her sister restless and discontented, her constant querulous complaints on the whole blandly ignored by her calm, good-natured husband. The sisters were extremely close, and Sybille was fascinated by both, although it was Kate whom at this stage she came to know better. With plenty of time at her disposal, Kate saw Sybille almost daily; Sybille took a room in a lodging house a couple of doors down from Kate in Gloucester Place, and together the two of them visited galleries and museums, lunched in cheap restaurants, attended an occasional matinee in the West End. Kate was never available on weekday evenings, but Sybille was often invited to supper with Percy and Toni, and at weekends accompanied all three on trips to the country, to Cornwall, to Suffolk, and then to a cottage Percy rented in Essex. “And so began what became a pattern in my life: friendships, attachments to a group, a couple, a family not my own…The autumn in London was a kind of turning point. I had not been unhappy before; now I was consciously, buoyantly happy, looking forward to something new, something good every day.”

  The cottage at Great Bardfield was a particular source of pleasure. Roomy and comfortable, it had a pretty garden with an orchard, and it was here that Sybille came to know Percy Muir, as the two of them tinkered happily with Percy’s Morris Cowley in the garage. Percy, an expert on nineteenth-century manuscripts and modern first editions, was about to leave Dulau’s to join the distinguished rare-book dealer Elkin Mathews. A quiet, thoughtful man with a subtle sense of humour, he could be excellent company, relishing intelligent talk, politely concealing his boredom when the conversation turned to gossip and feminine frivolities. Many of his closest friends were writers, among them Ian Fleming and also A. J. A. Symons, who rented a house in Finchingfield, the next village to Great Bardfield. “AJ,” as he was known, was a sociable, garrulous man, a collector and bibliographer, founder of the First Edition Club and later of the Wine & Food Society. A writer by profession, although hardly an industrious one, AJ’s best-known work, The Quest for Corvo, would be published in 1934. Insecure financially, he privately indulged in some dubious business practices to fund his extravagant way of life, but locally he was well liked. He and his wife entertain
ed generously; and, from the moment the Muirs first arrived, invited them almost every weekend to luncheons and dinners, in which as a matter of course Sybille was included. She was dazzled by Symons and by his articulate, literate friends, “whose horizons embraced France, Italy, Greece and beyond. At the end of a short bicycle ride in Essex I had arrived at a side-stream of the English literary world. I had found my first Garsington.”

  Equally impressive was AJ’s expertise as oenophile and gourmet. His standards were high, and much time was devoted to planning menus, attending wine tastings and keeping his own cellar well stocked. Before dinner at Finchingfield guests were taken down to the dark, brick-lined basement for a candlelit tour of the cellars, vividly recalling to Sybille her childhood experience of her father’s cellars at Feldkirch. Once seated at table, AJ would expound at length on the contents of his glass, reverently holding it up to his nose and extolling its qualities before inviting his friends to do the same, a process which exasperated some, but which deeply impressed the youngest member of the company.

  While in London one day Kate asked Sybille if she knew anything about legal process, and if she would be interested in attending a trial. Immediately intrigued, Sybille shortly afterwards accompanied Kate to the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Here they sat up in the public gallery above the court, the case in progress a libel suit brought by a popular band-leader. Sybille was spellbound, fascinated by the learning and eloquence of the judge and counsel, by the brilliant theatricality of the performance. From that moment, “I was hooked for life. By the English legal system, by the supreme importance of a Rule of Law and the ways it was applied…Everything captivated: the voices, the casuistries of the arguments, the rigidities and the drama of that formalised man’s world.” In later years Sybille often said she wished she had been able to train as a barrister, a career impossible in those days for a woman; she was, however, to pursue her passion for the law, in time becoming highly respected as a writer on the subject, reporting in both Europe and America on some of the most famous trials of the twentieth century.

  So enthralled was she by this first experience that Kate immediately arranged for her to attend again. On this occasion Sybille went on her own, and through the favour of a judge’s clerk known to Kate was allowed to sit in a far more privileged position, down in the well of the court. Absorbed in this new experience, it was only later she began to wonder how it was that Kate, who appeared to have no friends at all, certainly no connection to the law, was so familiar with this very specialist environment.

  The mystery was soon explained. Early one morning as Sybille was leaving her lodgings, a few yards in front of her she saw Kate walking home down Gloucester Place wearing a long chiffon evening dress under her coat. Over dinner that weekend Sybille finally learned about Kate’s other life. For several years she had been the mistress of a High Court judge, Henry McCardie, widely respected in his profession. Although unmarried, McCardie was careful to conceal the fact that he had a mistress, knowledge that would seriously have damaged his career, as Kate well understood. Thus every weekday evening she travelled by Underground from Baker Street to Westminster, always elegantly attired, to spend the night with McCardie, returning home the following morning to resume her normal daily routine.

  With the beginning of summer, Sybille, now eighteen, again left London to return to her mother and stepfather in Sanary. The Marchesanis were currently living at La Tranquille, a villa situated a little way outside the town. Nori’s plan was eventually to restore and redecorate the property before letting it, but meanwhile it provided a convenient, if not particularly comfortable, base for the family to stay. For Sybille the summer of 1929 was the beginning of an intense, if ephemeral, period of happiness, a period free of anxiety, of days spent swimming, reading, making new friends, eating well, and absorbing the sensuous atmosphere of the Mediterranean. “From May to October there was no rain, only night-dew, thus nothing changed: the earth was monochrome, the sea reverberated the sky. Morning after morning we woke to clear light, coolness modulating through the hours into the still, unwavering heat of noon, the small evening breezes, the warm night luminous from sky and phosphorescent sea. How permanent they felt, these even summers, how reassuring…”

  As well as decorator and architect, Nori had recently started working as an art dealer, a venture in which he had been energetically supported by Lisa. With her love and knowledge of painting, and her various acquaintances in the art world, she had encouraged her husband in this promising new project, helping him make contact with local painters and providing introductions to artists and galleries further afield. Before long Nori was travelling regularly to Paris and Amsterdam, returning full of enthusiasm for his new business.

  During his frequent absences Sybille was able to spend significant periods alone with her mother. Now approaching fifty, Lisa was still a beautiful woman; men admired her, flirted with her, yet there was detectable an undercurrent of anxiety, a hunger for reassurance as she looked for the flattery and attention which in earlier years she had accepted as her due. One incident which Sybille remembered with acute discomfort was when Lisa turned to her unexpectedly to ask, “ ‘Have I changed?’…Her beauty had been an intrinsic attribute…Now it seemed not so…I did what her question imposed, and I did it a fraction too late, I looked at her. I saw what unasked I might not have seen: intimations of wear…What was gone? A glow? She was older.” Lisa said nothing but Sybille was painfully aware that her hesitation had been noted.

  On the whole, however, Lisa seemed content, satisfied with her marriage, at least for the present. While Nori was away she and her daughter enjoyed an agreeable companionship. The mornings were spent in their separate rooms, Lisa reading and writing in bed with her beloved spaniels sprawled around her, Sybille absorbedly making her way through the works of Balzac, Zola, George Sand, the Goncourts. At midday the two of them walked into town, did a little shopping, before settling outside with an aperitif at one of the bars in the main square. They returned to the villa for lunch, cooked by the femme de ménage, and afterwards there was more reading, and Sybille often went to the beach to meet friends and to swim—“salt water, rock pools, open bays, pellucid depths, breakers and spray…It was then that I did my dreaming.” If there were no plans for the evening Sybille, equipped with napkin, bowl and torch, set off at dusk to collect their dinner, a ready-prepared dish from one of the restaurants. This Lisa ate off a tray, while her daughter insisted on sitting upright at a table covered in a cloth and properly laid, complete with baguette and bottle of wine. Lisa “had tried to laugh me out of what she called my clubmanly dinners, I said that not bothering to sit up to eat was an appalling feminine habit. We agreed to disagree.” Looking back, Sybille recalled this period as a time of welcome serenity: “a mother and her daughter, a pair of sisters, a woman and girl—ensconced happily, very happily, in our wind-blown villa, like two explorers in their base camp. Such a time never came again.”

  Since their arrival in Sanary, the Marchesanis had made a number of friends. During the summer Sybille found herself involved in a constant round of social engagements, sometimes with Nori and Lisa, sometimes with companions of her own age with whom she played games on the beach, or in the evening danced to a couple of accordions in the square. With her parents she was regularly included in card games at the Café de la Marine, in games of boules in the afternoon, in lengthy Sunday luncheons at the houses of various neighbours. Lisa enjoyed such society, talking incessantly as ever, about literature, politics, history, while Mlle. Marchesani, as Sybille was known, listened intently to her mother’s disquisitions. When given the chance she readily joined in, although it was sometimes difficult, especially for new acquaintance, to make out what she was saying: her voice was low and she had a curious habit of mumbling, an odd stuttering in her speech that rendered it frustratingly indistinct. Over the years there were many who complained of these inaudible mutters, delivered almost
as though she were talking to herself, a criticism which she acknowledged—up to a point. “[I did have] a slight stammer…[but] never quite knew whether it was involuntary or put on.”

  Among the more colourful characters in Sanary society were the painter Moïse (“Kiki”) Kisling and his wife, Renée. Kiki, born in Poland but since the age of nineteen living in France, a friend of Picasso and Matisse, had known Lisa in earlier days in Paris. Sociable and ebullient, full of energy and good humour, Kiki, now in his early thirties, was a small, bear-like man, while his wife was tall and muscular, deeply bronzed, her short fair hair bleached almost white by the sun. While Kiki dressed in neatly ironed shirts and blue cotton trousers, Renée favoured strong, plain colours, a string of heavy shells around her neck, shell and ivory bracelets on her powerful arms. Although husband and wife led somewhat separate lives—Kiki, an energetic womaniser, was often away fulfilling portrait commissions—they were tolerant of each other, and devoted parents to their two little boys, who were particularly adored by their mother. In Sybille’s view, when she came to know them, Jean and Guy were a pair of savages, shrieking as they leapt in and out of the sea, running round the table during meals outdoors, and when in the house casually peeing on the carpet.