Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Sylvie puffed at her cigarette, and then in the middle of one of Katherine’s sentences abruptly stood up. ‘I’ve never been very good at school,’ she said in a bored voice. She sauntered from the room, paused at the door, and turned.

  ‘Katherine, you’ll be pleased to know that I’m only here for a few days. Then it’s off to Rome.’ She gave her daughter a look which combined challenge and malice and then left them.

  Katherine sat rigidly in her chair. Princesse Mathilde chatted on, pretending nothing was amiss. She was angry at Sylvie. She had urged her to be kind to Katherine and the woman had promised. But then Sylvie had never been controllable. The Princesse sighed and then with a smile urged the girls to go off and unpack before having a swim. The pool had just been cleaned and called out for swimmers.

  Katherine, as they made their way up the stairs, made no attempt to answer Portia’s unspoken question and engage in confidences about her mother. Beneath her external calm, she raged and felt frightened by turns. Sylvie was no longer the withdrawn, slightly pitiable figure she had last seen in New York. She was fuelled by a frenetic energy which spoke to Katherine of danger.

  Over the next days, the girls swam, took long walks, talked, and ate cook’s meals which seemed more wonderful than ever after the school’s frugal fare. Katherine tried to enjoy it, tried to forget her mother’s stalking presence. But at every turn it caught up with her, here to laugh belittlingly, there to make a venomous comment, about Katherine’s hair, her clothes, her French accent. Katherine unconsciously reverted to her childhood tactics, withdrew, tried to make herself small, invisible.

  The Princesse stepped in to defend her at every turn. One day Sylvie turned on her. ‘Stop behaving like her mother,’ she said bitingly. ‘You and Jacob have done quite enough together.’ Sylvie paused and then burst out in a shrill laugh, before leaving the room.

  It was the Princesse’s evident flush which made Katherine begin to speculate. What was Sylvie implying? What was the ‘quite enough’ that Mathilde and Jacob had done? Thomas had warned her that things here were never quite what they seemed in this old world. Could it be that Mathilde and her father had… She stopped her thoughts. But they kept returning. She embroidered on them. How she would have liked to have Princesse Mat as a mother, Violette as a sister. Yes, perhaps that was why they were so kind to her.

  The thoughts provided her with a refuge from Sylvie.

  Towards the end of the week Katherine was called to the telephone. The voice at the end of the line made her break into smiles.

  ‘Hello Schätzchen. I’m in Geneva. Shall I take you out?’

  ‘Thomas!’ Katherine peeled in delight. ‘Yes please. But wait, I must check with Princesse Mat.’ After a moment, Katherine returned to the phone.

  ‘Mat says you’re to come to dinner tonight and stay over. Then, if it’s all right, my friend Portia and I can drive into Geneva with you tomorrow.’

  The familiar chuckle warmed her ear, ‘Anything your heart desires, Schätzchen. It will be a pleasure.’

  ‘It will be quite a party, then,’ the Princesse’s dark eyes shone when Katherine reported back to her. ‘Like the old days. My two grandchildren arrive this afternoon with their nanny. Violette is driving up from Geneva with from what I can make out is her latest beau and two friends. Then there’s Doctor Mohr and his wife. And Sylvie. I must go and warn cook about the growing numbers.’ The Princesse moved into action with the energy of a much younger woman. But before she left the room, she turned back.

  ‘Katherine.’ she looked into the girl’s unreadable grey eyes, appreciating the fineness of her face, ‘Katherine, my dear, you must try not to mind too much about your mother.’ She paused for a moment, seemed to be about to say something else, then changed her mind. ‘I, we all, love you very much. You know that.’ She held Katherine’s gaze, smiled seriously, then with a swirl of skirts hurried away.

  For the rest of the day, Katherine felt oddly blessed. As she clambered over the steep Alpine meadows with Portia, she told her friend for the first time about Thomas and how he had helped her when she had nowhere to go. She didn’t go into the reasons for her running away from home, but she extolled Thomas’s role.

  ‘A veritable knight in shining armour,’ Portia laughed. ‘Come on, let’s go back and make ourselves beautiful for him, for this evening. I’m dying to try out my hairdressing skills and I’ve got these two absolutely sumptuous dresses which haven’t been worn for ages. You can try them and see which you like.’

  The girls hurried back excitedly, then, bathed and scented, they tried on combinations of clothes and hair for effect.

  ‘The trouble with you, Katherine Jardine, is that you look too good in anything and everything,’ Portia said wistfully as Katherine slipped into the borrowed blue silk dress with ruched sleeves. ‘If I ever have a man, remind me not to introduce him to you.’

  ‘The trouble with you, Portia Gaitskell,’ Katherine countered, ‘is that you’re too good for any man. And don’t forget it. But just in case you’re intent on finding an admirer tonight, I’ve decided which way your hair looks best.’ With a few deft strokes of the brush, Katherine gathered up Portia’s fine sandy hair into a loop at the back of her head and let its length trail her shoulders. From a small vase, she took two of the daisies they had picked that afternoon and wound them strategically in Portia’s hair. Portia was delighted with the effect. She had already had occasion to notice Katherine’s skills, skills with arrangement, with colours and shape. Their room at school, within a few weeks of Katherine’s arrival, had by a few deft touches and additions, acquired a new look.

  ‘And now you should really wear the white dress. A proper English rose,’ Katherine suggested in her usual hesitant tones.

  ‘While you provide the contrast as a proper femme fatale,’ Portia laughed and looked at Katherine’s shapely figure swathed in blue silk, the glow of her bare shoulders darkened by the sun.

  ‘No,’ Katherine met her friend’s eyes in the mirror. ‘I look ridiculous decked out like this.’ As ridiculous as my mother, she thought to herself, but said aloud, ‘ Not at all how I feel.’ With rapid movements, she slipped out of the revealing dress and pulled a girlish white frock out of the wardrobe. ‘This is much more my style.’

  Portia smiled and twined some daisies through Katherine’s thick auburn hair. They examined themselves in the mirror. ‘Snap,’ Portia said, ‘Two of Madame Chardin’s prize ingénues.’

  The windows of the Princesse’s salon had been thrown open to make it one with the vast slab of a marble terrace. Here some of the assembled company sat watching the sun set in rosy technicolor behind a jagged peak. Katherine and Portia were amongst Violette and her friends, Simone, Yves and Carlo Negri. While Violette entertained them with stories of increasing complexity, Katherine from below lowered lids stole occasional glances at Carlo. She had never seen anyone quite like him before. There was a slow sensuous laziness to his movements contradicted by the dangerously hard angles of his face, the flashing darkness of his eyes which no matter how covertly she looked at him seemed to be gazing at her. He was like a large, beautiful cat, poised and motionless, but prepared to leap. Katherine was rapt by his magnetism. It made her feel uncomfortable and strangely vulnerable. She forced herself to concentrate on Violette’s lurid tale, another instalment in her life with the police.

  ‘Violette is in love with death,’ Carlo suddenly interrupted in a soft but resonant voice.

  Violette looked at him defiantly, ‘There speaks the man who drove us here at such breakneck speed that I began to take pity on his poor Ferrari’s engine. We left Simone and Yves behind in a trail of dust just outside Geneva,’ she shook her dark curls woefully.

  ‘Ah yes, when it comes to that, Violette and I are two of a kind,’ he said with mock mournfulness. ‘These old old families, you know. The genes want a rest.’

  ‘Genes, yes, how they mark one,’ Sylvie sat down next to Carlo, a little too close. She smoothed her
elegantly cut celadine dress. ‘Though I sometimes think Violette is more like me than my own daughter,’ she laughed loudly. ‘You have a sense of adventure, my dear.’

  Katherine saw Violette look at Sylvie with frank admiration. ‘But I can’t sing like you. Otherwise I might trade in my detective work for a life on the boards.’

  ‘Song, yes. My gift from the gods. The Dionysian gods,’ she threw Carlo a sultry glance.

  ‘Why don’t you sing for us now?’ Carlo said lazily.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t. My voice isn’t what it used to be.’

  ‘Go on, Sylvie. We’d enjoy it,’ Princesse Mathilde encouraged her.

  ‘Well, if you like,’ she looked at Carlo again, moved to the piano, ran long fingers over the keys, and then in a low, sultry voice began on a medley of wartime numbers.

  Katherine averted her eyes. She couldn’t bear the sight of her mother preening, her squirming body. She watched Portia to see the effect Sylvie was having, watched Carlo and Violette. And then suddenly, Sylvie called out to her.

  ‘Katherine, come here. Come and accompany me. You must still remember some of the numbers you were taught. A simple one. Let’s start with La vie en rose.’

  Katherine wanted to run. She hated playing. She could sense the scene coming, foresee the inevitable criticism, the malicious put-downs. Her fingers stiffened under the memory of the innumerable raps on the knuckles Sylvie had given her in the past.

  ‘I didn’t know you played,’ Mathilde’s warm voice intervened.

  ‘She doesn’t play very well,’ Sylvie’s laugh tinkled. ‘But I’ve tried. Lord knows, I’ve tried to teach her. Come along Katherine. Just a little accompaniment. You can manage that, surely.’

  Katherine felt the hush in the room grow ominous in its waiting for her. Suddenly in that tremulous silence the French voices had left, a fragment of the buried past rose in her like a wave of nausea. ‘You can manage that, Katherine,’ Sylvie said to the gathered guests. ‘Surely at your age you can manage that. Girls of four don’t wet their beds night after night. Like some untamed beast. It’s disgusting. The sheets stink. The mattress. Disgusting.’

  Shame, cloying, dirty, engulfed her. Katherine’s legs trembled, refused to take her weight.

  ‘I can do La vie en rose,’ Portia leapt up. ‘Katherine’s not in the mood, are you Kat?’

  Katherine shook her head bleakly.

  Portia tried a chord, then another. Sylvie’s voice burst upon the room. Jarring, electric. Katherine sat tautly at the edge of her chair. It had been averted. The scene had been averted. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.

  Then from behind her she heard the butler announce, ‘Thomas Sachs.’ Thomas. Escape. She could escape. Katherine leapt up and moved with alacrity towards the hall. The Princesse was already shaking hands with him and Katherine held back a little. He cut a striking figure in his dark dinner jacket, his shock of white hair swept back from his wide forehead, his clear blue eyes alive with irony. Thomas, how glad she was to have him here. Glad of his glow of appreciation as his gaze rested on her. She rushed girlishly into his arms.

  ‘It is very very good to see you, Schätzchen,’ Thomas said in a low voice. He held her by the shoulders and kissed her in continental fashion on the cheeks.

  They walked towards the salon together, arm in arm. As they approached, Sylvie’s song beckoned to them, enfolded them. Suddenly, from the threshold of the room, Katherine saw her mother through Thomas’s eyes. A mother whose eyes and gestures were seductively alive. A mother in an elegantly cut celadine dress which moved with her body. A mother whose blonde hair was wound back in a demure knot, but whose lips were pursed in the semblance of a kiss. The mother she had portrayed to Thomas as a monster of iniquity.

  Applause covered that mother as her song ended.

  Katherine tensed.

  ‘You must be Mr Sachs, what a pleasure it is to meet you at last,’ Sylvie moved towards them at once. ‘You’ve been so kind to poor Katherine and I’m so grateful to you. She’s such a difficult child, you know, always imagining things.’ Sylvie wrapped her hand round Thomas’s arm and led him towards a far corner. Katherine followed in growing horror. Sylvie’s voice was warm with complicity. It wooed Thomas, complained lightly of a problematic child, while her gestures told him how attractive she found him. Katherine looked on in confusion. Thomas seemed to be succumbing to Sylvie’s charms as much as to her narrative. She wanted to intervene, to warn him, but her limbs, her tongue, were frozen.

  The dining room table was sumptuously set with the Princesse’s family silver and vast candelabra. The Princesse presided at one end, while Thomas had been placed as guest of honour at the other. To his left was Sylvie. To his right, a nervous, embarrassed, Katherine. Next to Katherine sat Carlo.

  The gourmet dinner cook had prepared tasted like sawdust in Katherine’s mouth. She felt trapped in the web of narrative her mother was spinning about her. Each time Thomas or Carlo tried to draw her into conversation, the words dried on her lips. She knew she was behaving like a silly child, the little girl she no longer was. But she could do nothing, while Sylvie’s presence drew everyone like a charm. The fact that Carlo was sitting next to her, overhearing the conversation, indolently gazing round the table or raising his glass to sip the delights of the Princesse’s cellar only made things worse.

  As a half eaten plate of delicious boeuf en croute was lifted away from her, Katherine heard her mother say, ‘And do you know, one day when Katherine was tiny, she stole the engagement ring my husband had given me,’ Sylvie looked with limpid eyes into Thomas’s face. ‘I told Dali about it and he simply chuckled. “Quite, quite right,” he said, “little girls have to be jealous of their mothers and of their Daddy’s affections”’, Sylvie laughed with a silken tone. ‘And it never changes, never.’

  Katherine’s face had grown contorted. Thomas’s hand patting her knee reassuringly did nothing to still her emotions.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he smiled at Sylvie urbanely, ‘I think we inflict the oedipal story on our children and attribute emotions and intentions to them which are more properly our own. Perhaps we have got things the wrong way round. Perhaps it is fathers who are jealous of the sons who will soon replace them. Or mothers who are jealous of their daughters. While the children are merely innocent mirrors who reflect what we wish to see.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sylvie replied sweetly. ‘But in my case, I can tell you it was quite different. The ring was merely one instance.’

  ‘Bitch,’ Katherine mumbled under her breath, not knowing how the word had made its way to her lips. She rose abruptly from the table. ‘Excuse me, I’m not feeling very well.’

  She rushed away before anyone could stop her, rushed too quickly to hear Carlo say, ‘I don’t know, I think if I were the beautiful Katherine’s mother, I might suffer the occasional twinge of jealousy.’

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  __________

  ∞

  The arched hall of the Palazzo was cool with the marble and stone of centuries. A coolness unimaginable in the pulsing outdoor heat of that Milan afternoon. It enveloped Sylvie, chilled the dampness of her forehead, calmed the fever which had brought her here.

  For two days she had surreptitiously watched the gateway of the magnificent house from the cover of a plane tree on the other side of the road. She had observed the Palazzo’s comings and goings, trying to sniff from them a sense of the life within. The clandestine nature of her task, the whiff of danger, filled her with excitement. It reminded her of another time. Another Sylvie. The Sylvie of the underground, the war, its risks. The charge of being incognito. She felt as if, at last, after all those American years of stifling tedium and vagueness and oppressive normality, she were again herself. There, in the secret shade of the plane tree.

  Sylvie followed the dark-suited man who had opened the vast polished door to her, trailed past antique busts of senatorial gaze. In the loggia there was a hushed stillness, b
roken only by the rampant colour of geraniums pouring through columns from the courtyard beyond. She was shown into a library of gracious proportions, ushered towards a chair. From nowhere another dark man appeared, bearing a tray, a pitcher of Campari and soda, a tall iced glass. He hovered, moved invisibly into the background.

  Sylvie waited. Let the tranquility of the Palazzo lull her.

  Four years. It had taken her over four years, but here she was at last.

  She remembered the point of origin of her journey distinctly.

  She had been in the clinic in Pennsylvania. It was her third visit there, perhaps her fourth. It was 1956. She was forty. In tangible decline. The weight of that age sat heavily on her shoulders, marked her body, tore at her mind. No one she had loved, no one she considered her own - neither her father, nor her mother, nor her brother, nor her friend Caroline - had reached such a ridiculous age. An age which it struck her had no future.

  Jacob hated her going to the clinic, but she went whenever things at home got too difficult. She liked it here. Liked it in part because Jacob disapproved. Liked the plump nurses who wore ordinary clothes and smiled inanely and constantly. Liked the other patients with their erratic ways. Liked the doctors who let her say and do anything she pleased. As long as she didn’t drink. She didn’t mind that. They gave her pills which kept the world at a distance, muted things, let her dream. Jacob hated the pills.

  She liked the grounds too, the little woods, far from the ugly clamour and harsh odours of the city.

  That time, a little boy had been there. A little boy of about eight, small for his age, curly-haired, dark. He sat in a corner, sat very still. His only movement was in the tears which crept down his pale cheeks. For some reason, Sylvie took solace in him. He reminded her of something, of some repressed part of herself.

  She sat near him, not too close, not too far. She saw how he refused everything. Food. Talk. Attention. But she knew he was aware of her. Not too near. Not too far. One day he looked up at her, met her eyes.