Mimi bows her head. ‘It is because I don’t love him,’ she whispers. She has never touched on these matters before and is anxious to avoid them now.
‘Love!’ says Sofka scornfully. ‘It is marriage we are talking about. He does not ask you to love him. He asks you to care for him as he will care for you. You have enjoyed his company, the concerts, the walks. He knows your ways, our ways. That is what matters, believe me. And you are not getting any younger.’
‘Mama,’ begs Mimi. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Daughter!’ cries Sofka, in a loud voice which startles them both, as does the archaic use of the word. ‘I do not want to die and leave you alone. I do not want you to remain my little child, without your mother to run to. Do you know what they say of such women? Do you know what it is like for a woman to grow old without a man? To be a godmother to other women’s children, useful for presents and otherwise disregarded? Do you know what it is like never to set a family table? Never to celebrate? To sit alone, because it is inconvenient for your friends to invite you? Do you know what it is to be left out of other people’s plans? To be left out of their conversations, even? Do you want to grow old like this, playing the piano, dreaming like a girl? Do you know the names that other women apply to women like you?’
Mimi lifts her head and stares at her mother in horror.
‘Do they talk about me, then?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ says Sofka. ‘They talk about you. As if you had some fatal illness, which God forbid. But they will not talk about you after your wedding. Lautner is not undignified. He is a good man. And no one will talk about you in that way when they see your house, when they admire your possessions, when they come to your afternoons. Papa left you a settlement, you know. You will not be poor. And when you have a child of your own, then you will no longer be angry with your mother. Then, my darling, you will rejoice and be proud and be a real woman at last.’
There is silence. ‘Trust me, Mimi,’ says Sofka, smoothing the untidy hair. ‘And show them, show your family, what you are made of. We have all waited a long time.’
‘You have waited?’ asks Mimi, with a strange laugh. ‘Then I must not keep you waiting any longer.’
When Mimi sits down at the table for dinner, she is bathed, changed, and to all intents and purposes entirely calm. It so happens that Alfred is present that evening, and with the faintest touch of irony Mimi allows her mother to tell him the glad news. Alfred’s response is explosive. ‘You must both be mad,’ he says. ‘Lautner! Of all people! Lautner!’
‘I think you had better practise calling him Joseph,’ says Mimi, unmoved. ‘I should like the wine sauce, if you please, Alfred. It is just by your elbow, as usual.’
Alfred looks stunned at this evidence of insubordination. His sister has always waited on him, deferred to his wishes, kept an anxious watch on his appetite. His sister has always been like his mother, in this respect. And here is his mother, looking down at her plate, trying to efface a smile, then looking up again with the expression of one contemplating vast and harmonious horizons, as if nothing were amiss.
‘You can’t get married,’ explodes Alfred. ‘You can’t even cook. You don’t know anything about running a house. And where are you going to live, by the way? Not here, I hope?’ The prospect seems to stagger him. The idea of living on equal terms with Lautner makes a mockery of everything that he has worked for, his ruined childhood, his desiccated manhood, the freedom which he has had to renegotiate all the time, always on other people’s terms, it seems to him.
‘Joseph has a place in Kentish Town,’ says Mimi calmly, emptying the jug of wine sauce over the square of batter pudding on her plate. ‘I dare say that it will do until I can look around for something better.’
‘Why not wait until you have found somewhere, darling?’ murmurs Sofka, not really anxious to allow too much delay.
‘Oh, no,’ says Mimi. ‘I should like to get married as soon as possible.’
‘Lautner!’ explodes Alfred once more, as the meal draws to a close. ‘He used to brush my father’s coat.’
‘You may be quite sure that he will not brush yours, Alfred,’ says Mimi, folding her napkin and pushing it through its silver ring. ‘Will you ask for coffee, Mama, or shall I?’
In the weeks that follow, Mimi has a not unpleasant time spending a great deal of money. Even Sofka is rather surprised at the quantities of linen and china that Mimi decides she needs. Clothes are ordered from the dressmaker, and a fur coat is designed by Sofka’s furrier. Sofka is briefly revived by all these acquisitions: she is also encouraged to see Mimi so purposeful. As the boxes and packages mount up in the flat she wonders whether there will be room for all these purchases in Kentish Town. Mimi does not appear to give this matter much consideration. ‘What I don’t need I will send for later,’ she tells her mother. ‘You can leave everything in my room for the present.’ Dolly comes to tea, ready to disparage, but is forced to concede that the preparations are of high quality. Alfred spends as much time at Wren House as he can during these weeks of activity. He is not looking forward to the change, and congratulates himself on being able to escape at the weekends. Sometimes he makes the weekend stretch as far as Tuesday. After all, if Lautner is to be one of the family, there is no reason why he should not make himself as useful as possible.
The piano is silent these days. Mimi has not yet decided whether she will have it moved to Kentish Town. She seems to want to get away from the old image, the old memory of herself, sitting in her room, and dreaming, and passing the time as best she can. She has told them at the hospital that she will not be coming back for the time being, although she will keep in touch. They have given her a very pretty china cake-stand as a wedding present.
Here they all are in the photograph. Lautner looks radiant. Sofka wears a dress of parma violet, with a little hat of violet petals. (I have this on record.) Here are Nettie and Dolly, looking as unlike each other as it is possible for half-sisters to look. Strangely enough, those two have never got on very well. Dolly looks stunning, in a burnt orange two-piece. Nettie wears pale blue, which sets off her still beautiful hair. Hal is there, of course. And Nettie’s funny little good-natured husband, Will, whom they see all too rarely. And the girls, Lili and Ursie, dressed to the nines and ogling the photographer. There are some absences, of course. Frederick and Evie have sent a telegram. ‘Heartbroken not to be with you today. Love to our dearest Mimi.’ And there is one from Betty, who is rather mercifully absent as well. ‘Love and kisses to my big sister on her wedding day.’ Mimi herself surprises them all by wearing white peau-de-soie and carrying a great many flowers; she looks extremely gracious, rather grand. After all, she is not her mother’s daughter for nothing. Alfred, who gave her away, is very stern. Alfred’s brow, in fact, is like thunder. Is that why Sofka has tucked a restraining hand through his arm?
11
FREDERICK, becalmed in Bordighera, rarely thinks of home. The war, which isolated them all in this little town, seems to have cut them off definitively from their roots. The war, of course, was bad for business, but for Frederick and Evie it was a time of astonishing calm, even happiness. Both have proved themselves to be fearless and adaptable in the business of survival. As soon as they saw signs of invading patrols of any description they hastened down to the enormous cellar, the existence of which very few suspected, and emerged with several choice bottles in which they insisted on drinking their visitors’ health. For this reason they were soon on friendly terms with officers of more than one nationality, for the wine was too good to bring to the notice of the common soldiery who would in any case merely have smashed the bottles. With fine vintages as their currency, Evie and Frederick obtained enough food to live on and were content with simple fare – sardines and cheese and olives and bread and fruit – which kept them healthy and bright-eyed in appearance. So welcoming were Evie and Frederick, with the hoteliers’ knack of instant appreciation of the client’s needs, that the officers would take to drop
ping in to the deserted hotel in the evenings for a bottle of wine and a little relaxation; parcels of comestibles would change hands, and, after a brief wordless nod from Evie, Frederick would then proffer the fine cigars which he had saved from his father’s belongings. Although war and depredation may have raged up and down the coast, all was peace and amity at the Hotel Windsor in Bordighera.
With so little to do and no guests to provide for, Evie and Frederick could concentrate more easily on each other. This war, which separated so many couples, merely reinforced their dependence on each other. It was with deep joy that they awaited the birth of their twins, attended only by the ancient village doctor, who delivered them in one of the spare rooms of the Hotel Windsor. Evie, up and about within five days, gave proof that the earthiness that first enslaved Frederick was in fact true currency: fecund and beaming, Evie found motherhood the easiest thing in the world. Slopping around in old sandals, her springy hair slipping from its moorings, she gave evidence of a profound sluttishness; Frederick remembers her face shining moistly, her spotless tongue slipping between her unpainted lips, her effortless and unselfconscious squatting as she cleaned up a little spilt milk or one of the dog’s accidents. In fact, Evie found this wartime déshabillé so much to her liking that, once the bad times are past, and the hotel begins to fill up again, Frederick has some difficulty in persuading her to go to the hairdresser and the dressmaker and to put on stockings and lipstick. He will always think of the essential Evie as bare-legged, her feet in broken savates, her nightgown slightly soiled with milk, yawning and stretching in the early morning, and, half-asleep, going through to the dressing-room to feed the babies. Frederick, with the finely attuned senses of a man who has always loved women, finds this scene ravishing, voluptuous. Evie, who never really worried, knows that she will not lose him now.
Frederick’s earlier friends would be a little surprised to see him these days. He has put on quite a bit of weight, and his hair, now sleek and much longer, is peppered with grey. He wears cream linen trousers, a white cotton shirt, and a panama hat. Only the pale narrow shoes reveal the cad and the dandy that Frederick used to be. This uniform is unvarying. The hat is in place when Frederick enters the hotel lounge from his private quarters at nine o’clock every morning. He has already been to the station for the newspapers, which he places on the glass-topped wicker tables, and then he briefly takes a turn in the garden, where the gardener’s hosepipe is playing on the tubs of orange-trees. After this he is more or less free until the evening, for Evie has wisely decided to treat him as if he were a boy, on holiday from school, which is exactly how Frederick feels. It is this odd mixture of juvenility and paunchy assiduity that would confound Frederick’s earlier friends. In his panama hat and his pale shoes, his short-sleeved shirt, in the breast pocket of which his lunchtime cigar is visible, and the slightly fatuous smile of contentment on his face, Frederick seems as disarmed and as disarming as any innocent tourist. Frederick has always been a tourist rather than a traveller. He has no real interest in one place as against any other. He appears to see no differences in landscape or customs provided that his own comforts are assured and his habits safely accommodated. He accepts the Hotel Windsor as his home in much the same way that he once took his ease in his mother’s house. A faintly patronal air was there from the start, and, by the same token, the good manners of the excellent guest that he always was. Frederick was the guest of his mother; rising from his chair in her drawing-room to welcome the friends who used to come for coffee and marzipan cake on a Sunday afternoon, he would have the same expansive and attentive air that he now uses to such good purpose in his new trade. What would puzzle his friends, apart from Frederick’s appearance, would be to see this process reversed, to see assiduity shading into automatic bonhomie, and the patron only taking his ease when the demands of the guests have been attended to.
Yet Frederick has no idea that a shift has taken place in both his fortunes and his reputation. This may be, of course, because there is no one around from the old days to witness the change. Is it perhaps for this reason that Frederick feels an instinctive reluctance towards the mere idea of going home for a visit? Does he know that this combination, so marvellously to his taste, of Evie’s sluttishness and his own dandyish but decidedly foreign appearance, might not pass muster with his mother, his brother, under the weeping skies of London, a city which now appears to him as small, huddled, grey, and unheroic? By unheroic Frederick implies no moral failing; morals rarely come into his equations. In any event he has had no need of heroism himself; the cellars have furnished him with an easier means of exchange. No, by unheroic Frederick understands himself to mean dreary, lacking in expansion, lacking in physical excellence. Frederick, acute always to the implications of colour, outline, the elegance of silhouette, the charm of appearance, far prefers this little town, where, under skies as blue and as cloudless as the inside of a painted cup, he can stroll down the Corso Italia and see nothing less harmonious than the jagged leaves of an overgrown palm tree. Stepping delicately but briskly down the Corso on his way to the station, Frederick will see oranges and lemons growing on trees; he will see and smell the café with its gusts of vanilla and its squawking coffee machines; he will greet the spotless and handsome waiter opening up the restaurant for an airing before lunch; and he will wave to the old lady who keeps the ironmonger’s and for whom he will sometimes take a letter to the post. In this way, the golden light that illuminates Frederick’s early morning excursion will have effectively blotted out the sparse colour and harsh winds of London, where he feels he would no longer be at home. In any case, he knows that the old house has been sold and that the family has moved to Bryanston Square; it would hardly count as going home now even if he were to go back. Frederick feels that the family has moved away from him rather than the other way around. In any event, under the impact of this unvarying light, it is very difficult to imagine himself returning to anything less brilliant, less natural, less effortless than this place. Frederick, like any other instinctive creature, espouses a habitat where he is most at ease.
Of course, he will go home some day and see his mother; he has promised her as much. And of course she must see her grandchildren, his children, of whom he is immensely proud. In a way it would have been a good idea to go back for Mimi’s wedding, the news of which came as a considerable surprise. But after happy days in his pale shoes and his panama hat Frederick cannot quite see himself in the solemnity of a morning coat and in a crush of relations. He really does not care for all those people any more: his mother and his sister he prefers to cherish as golden presences about his early youth, unmarked by age or care or change. He thinks it not a bad idea that Mimi should marry Lautner. They both, he sees, have some quality of gravity which makes them natural partners but with which he was never completely at ease. And he likes to think of an additional member of staff, as it were, on duty to care for his mother. In a way, it is as if Lautner were substituting for himself as he so often did in the past. Yes, he is all for the marriage, but as he sees it there is no longer any reason for him to be present. If Lautner is there then Frederick is relieved of his duties. He sends a telegram, of course, and treats himself to a cognac after lunch in which he drinks his sister’s health.
Frederick’s contacts with England are now confined to whatever Sofka and Mimi care to send. A constant stream of requests for Start-Rite shoes, Dundee marmalade, and Floris’s New Mown Hay goes out from Bordighera to London and is answered by carefully packed parcels and letters of credit to a bank in Nice. Alfred has proved remarkably successful in business, as Frederick always knew that he would, and Frederick has no qualms in asking for some of the profits, for which, as he sees it, he is partly responsible. Besides, the hotel needs extra staff and the money has to come from somewhere; Evie’s Dadda lost quite a bit in the war, and she feels that he deserves great sympathy in this respect; the funds in Switzerland are not to be drawn on until Dadda dies, and anyway that money will come to Evie.
It is only right that this money should be balanced by something from the other side of the family. In this way Frederick manages to think of England as a place of funds and commodities, devoted to that business which he always disliked, and functioning as a service area for places of natural enchantment and superiority where lives may be more pleasantly and more attractively lived. If there is any hint of filial impiety from Alfred, whose letters are curt and without affection, Frederick has one unanswerable trump card: he has fathered twins. He is, of all Sofka’s children, the only one who has gone forth and multiplied. There can be no criticism that will not be nullified by this evidence of fruitfulness. By this very act of fathering his children Frederick has placed himself beyond reproach.
And he loves these children, who so resemble their mother, and who, in response to their mother’s excellent nurturing instinct, grew up without problems, without those little finicky appetites which had always dogged his brother and his sisters, without faces pale and temples hollowed by the hours of reading that he remembers as such a feature of his own youth. Frederick’s children, Erica and Thomas, have always slept through the night and have eaten everything that is given to them. They enjoy scratched legs, dirty faces, and days in the open air; they flourish on the intermittent hygiene meted out by their mother, on the inappropriate menus which come down to them from the hotel dining-room, and from the ice-creams at the café for which Frederick always slips them money. Erica and Thomas speak Italian and a sort of French, both with lingering uneducated accents; they are sharp and resourceful children, and they will never be properly educated. In many ways they resemble the children of the environs; canny and quick and very slightly underhand. They will do well, and they will never go home. Yet, with their square teeth and their Start-Rite shoes, they grin convincingly enough in the photographs which Frederick sends home to his mother to set her murmuring about resemblances and peering at the tiny faces in an effort to see reflected there the image of her beloved son.
Family and Friends Page 13
