A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “What about the inglese?” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “You like him?”

  “I did,” said Constanza.

  “You don’t like him any more?”

  “Not that one,” she said, half teasing.

  He scowled. “I’d like to wring their necks,” he said. “You and your inglesi.”

  “Inglesi are not stupidly jealous.”

  “Why not?” asked the boy.

  “It doesn’t occur to them so quickly. You think of nothing else.”

  “Constanza,” he said, “mi amore. . . .”

  “A conditioned reflex.”

  Again he gave her that suspicious look. It did sound rum in Italian, and to her too.

  “Promise you will never make love with an inglese.”

  “You’re mad,” she said. “How can I promise such a thing when it’s probable that I shall. We know so many.”

  “You’ll be disappointed,” he said, relaxing.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “I’m not at all sure.”

  They both laughed.

  “Oh tesoro,” he cried, “will you love me next year?”

  “Who can tell?” she said.

  “If only this summer would last. . . .”

  “It’s here now,” she said; “if you don’t spoil it with worrying about the collegio and worrying about inglesi yesterday and inglesi tomorrow.”

  He said, “If only it would all last for ever!”

  “It will not,” said Constanza. “And don’t think that my future isn’t too hideous to contemplate. You realize, I shall be seventeen and a half next summer? They’ll be bound to notice sometime, and then everything will be different. Not too different,” she stopped and kissed him on the mouth, “not too different. Mama will be very good about it, and I suppose papa will be quite easy, but it isn’t them I am thinking about—it’s out of their hands, really. I shall have to be launched in society, it’s the only way there is, they can’t help it. I don’t think mama quite sees how it will be. I am not looking forward to a Roman début; I dread it. I shall have to be an unmarried girl—the dullness, the constriction. I know the kind of life my aunts had before they were married. I haven’t even been trained for it.”

  “You are furba,” he said, “you know your ways and means; you will manage.”

  “There’s always fun to be had,” she said; “but I shall not like the part and I shan’t do well in it and I must be careful not to cause some stupid scandal that won’t do anyone any good. I shall see to it that I’m not going to play the jeune fille for long. Ah, but again, one can’t marry quite at once—I shall need time to look round. It’s a mistake to marry too too quickly, one is bound to make a bad choice. So I’m just in for it. It’ll pass. But for the next few years, the future looks far from rosy. A waste.”

  “You could marry me,” he said.

  “Madman.”

  “Who will you marry?” “That’s the trouble,” she said. “I don’t know. I shall have to find out. I know that I want to travel. I think I want to get out of Italy. You know, mama has never taken me anywhere—not that I really wanted to go up to now—it’s one of her ideas. One ought to stay put as a child, she says, in the same place, make roots, and start travelling all at once later on. That’s the way it was with her. Only, once she started travelling, she never went back. One wonders about the roots.”

  “If you married a diplomat, you’d be able to travel,” he said.

  “I don’t want to marry a diplomat. I don’t want that sort of life, and they are not statesmen. It’s all surface stuff and I daresay other people’s secrets. I might like to marry an explorer, and go with him of course, or perhaps an English Cabinet Minister, if he’ll have me, somebody like Lord Melbourne. Oh, be quiet, the man’s been dead and buried these sixty years. The more’s the pity, I may never find another like him.”

  “Why not marry an Italian and have me as your lover?”

  Constanza looked fierce and also nearly sad. “I want more than that,” she said.

  They were both silent. After a minute or so, she said, “I did not mean you.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Look at my Aunt Carla. . . . Even at Giulia. Though I rather admire her. And then—all those brats.”

  “Don’t you want any?”

  “There you go,” she said. “It’s another Italian reflex, like the jealousy. Bambini. No, I don’t. I expect I shall have one—one, mind you—it seems more natural. So you won’t be saying, ‘No bambini? poor woman.’ Poor women indeed. Their lives; and what it makes them be. They feel they have to have a temper to be interesting. Everybody here is playing their men; they boast of being capricious, difficult. Even mama has caught it. Heaven preserve me.”

  “You are not that,” he said.

  “No,” she said tenderly. “I am not that.”

  “Listen!” he said.

  “It’s nothing. It’s all right—they’re taking out the donkeys—they are going away—they’re going up the hill—they’re all going into the other valley to pick figs. They won’t be back till evening.”

  “We shall have till evening,” he said.

  “Yes, my sweet,” she said, “we shall.”

  6

  WHEN DISASTER came, they were unready and did nothing to divert it. When Anna broke into his room like a creature pursued by furies, the prince had just come in from an interrupted ride. Nobody had warned him that the horse was going lame and he had had to turn home halfway. Earlier that morning the steward from Castelfonte had been to see him with the accounts and a mass of pressing requests. It was a September day and the sirocco was blowing. The prince felt dejected and he was, for him, in an irritable mood.

  He said, “Oh Anna, what is it now?”

  This did not matter as she had not heard him.

  The tale burst from her in smouldering fragments. Now she was eloquent, now choked by outrage, pain. Giulia—He—They—For Twenty Years! For twenty years Giulia had been his Mistress. She found it hard to speak the word.

  She was standing, ready for a storm to match her own. The prince was seated.

  He said wearily, “I thought you knew that by now.” And added, “Like everybody else.”

  “It is true then?” she cried. “Don’t tell me it is true.”

  But at that moment he was past wishing to restrain her. The whole scene bored and repelled him. If Anna’s cry for help, her need for a denial, was plain, he did not hear it.

  Suddenly she was near collapse; the prince sprang up, helped her to a chair. Then he went back to his original position.

  “The whole of our marriage then——” she tried to say, “My life——”

  The prince not only refused her denial, he refused her drama. He was getting frightened himself by now and he took refuge in anger. He said: “Oh, Anna, be your age.” It was his second fatal mistake.

  •

  Of what followed, my childish mind had formed a simple image. Anna’s discovery was the immediate turning-point in all their lives: the great door of the palazzo slammed, the principessa with Constanza by the hand stood outside, they were gone, it was over. It was only many many years later when we were in France and it had become necessary to go into it that I was able to shape a picture nearer the reality. It had neither been as simple nor as quick nor even as inevitable as I had imagined. Between discovery and flight, there had been a row of days during which everything hung in suspense, days of negotiation, entrenchment, influences, fear and hope, like the days before a war.

  The prince was no longer a resilient young man. Mammina was dead. Anna’s demanding nature largely ignored itself. Hindsight is struck by how alone they stood, at that hour when the demons were upon them, their selves and what they had become, how bereft they were of help, of any effective benign or moderating influence, any source of reason, charity or humour that might have turned into a healing force.

  •

  They fell back, as p
eople—and nations—in a crisis do, upon ready-made standards and emotions. Anna, hurt, denied herself any original response, she did not choose or was not able to link her experience with her own immediate reality, her actual self; instead, she dealt with it in the terms of a set past: she judged and felt about the prince’s conduct as once it might have been judged and felt about by her New England family. Between her—real—pain and the handed-down reaction, the living experience of half a lifetime lay blacked-out and fallow.

  The prince, within his own terms, did the same. He fell back upon a concept of his forebears. Like Anna’s, it was one that suited and had shaped his nature. It was a concept of the family tie: the world was hopeless, all strife doomed to failure, the sole aim to get by, to be left in peace, and peace, safety, was only to be found within the family. Anna—after so many frittering attempts—had made a frontal attack against the sacrosanct.

  They had their scene. Anna said most things a woman can say in that situation. The prince, though furious, tried to stay aloof. When he spoke it was to relieve himself; he attempted neither to appease nor to explain. Too angry, he refused to appeal to her emotions; even angry, he did not present a case for himself. There were too many things a man did not say to a woman, did not say to his wife, to Anna. For seventeen years he had tried to ignore Anna’s prudishness, now it paralyzed him, and whatever he did say was too little and too much.

  “A lie,” Anna had cried once more. “That was all it was—one long lie. Oh, what have I done to deserve this!”

  The prince did not tell her.

  “The laughing-stock of Rome!”

  “Not at all. Everybody presumed you knew.”

  “And condoned your vile deceptions——?”

  “Oh deceptions, cara?” he said. “Politeness. Gentilezza. You, too, were polite. I could have sworn you knew: I can still tell you the day, the hour I knew you knew.”

  She swept over this. “Your vile life, your vile immoral unspeakable life.”

  He shrugged.

  Her voice rose. “I have spent my life among vipers! Dear mammina—for the first time I am glad that she is dead.”

  “Anna,” he said on a warning note.

  “At least she’s been spared this day.”

  The prince said in an icy tone: “My mother was a real woman.”

  “I want to go home,” said Anna.

  The prince’s anger went flat. He was a compassionate man. “I wish mammina were with us,” he said.

  “You have ruined everything,” said Anna.

  The prince said, “Who the devil told you?”

  “According to you, the roof-tops.”

  The prince flared: “There isn’t a man, or a woman, in Italy who would bear such a tale.”

  “Such a tale. You are all depraved.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A better man than you. A man from my own country.”

  “Già,” said the prince. “One of your aspirants. Tired no doubt of being kept at arm’s length. Getting his own back. I should have known this would happen.”

  “Mr. Miller told me because he could no longer bear to see me in my position.”

  “Have I had the advantage——?” said the prince. “He used to come to the house a year or two ago, he did Constanza’s Latin.”

  “The Latin tutor. An unmarried man, I presume?”

  “He loves me,” Anna said, “inconceivable as that may seem to you.”

  The prince, exasperated again, said, “Why don’t you go to bed with him? Why don’t you go to bed with one of them?”

  “You are unspeakable,” said Anna.

  “The trouble with you,” said the prince, “you’ve never been in love with anyone.”

  “How dare you speak of love?”

  They got nowhere. They were not trying to get anywhere. Neither of them at that hour was looking beyond it. The prince being the cooler might have seen further, might have established some initiative: Anna was shaken enough to be malleable. He did nothing. There was no catharsis. When they had done with each other they parted. Anna did one of the few things women—women without a job in front of them—can do, she went to her room. She went upstairs, locked the door and went to bed. The prince went to the club.

  In the afternoon a messenger came for his things and to say that the prince was off on a duck-shooting trip. Constanza was still at Castelfonte with her Aunt Maria. Carla was taking the cure at Montecatini. Thus, Anna was left to herself for forty-eight hours.

  •

  When two days later the prince came home, Anna was waiting for him. “I wish to dissolve our marriage.” Her tone was composed.

  The prince, having meanwhile breathed other air, found this so preposterously unreal that he allowed himself to laugh. Whatever next? he said. Did she think they would give her an annulment? Even she would find that hard.

  If Anna’s announcement had been a ballon d’essai, her resolution hardened. She had not meant annulment, she said.

  Still humouring her the prince asked if she had forgotten that there was no such thing as a divorce in Italy?

  She lashed out at him. Divorce? There had never been divorce among her people—she had not been thinking of the laws of his immoral country, but of her father and mother turning in their graves. “I have decided,” he said, “on a legal separation.”

  She must be mad, said the prince. Paziènza. Again both withdrew.

  Later on that day Anna’s maid waylaid him. Her mistress was in a very sad mood, she said, a very sad mood. Would he not go to see her?

  “Does she want me?” asked the prince. “No—Mena, I can see she does not. She is out of her mind, she is talking of a Legal Separation. Did she tell you?”

  “I wish Eccellenza would come.” “What’s the use?” he said. “Not until she’s more reasonable. She’s making us all ridiculous—can’t she see?”

  “She needs someone to talk to.”

  “Let her talk to you.”

  “The Signora Principessa is not enraged with me,” said Mena.

  “All the better,” said the prince. “You must try to calm her, Mena cara. Tell her to see reason, tell her I’m dining out, tell her what you like.”

  The prince went out to dinner and Anna saw Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie.

  •

  Mrs. Throg had been in a state of agitation for the last two days. Young Miller, scared out of his wits by Anna’s face after his revelation, had rushed to her in distress.

  “Oh, Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie—something terrible. I told the principessa everything.”

  Now as it happened, Mrs. Throg, though all too ready to believe the worst, was one of the few people in Rome who did not know everything. A foreign male or an Italian woman would not have been excluded from such general knowledge, it was the combination of being alien, female and herself that had defeated Mrs. Throg.

  When Miller realized this, his face grew very red. “Oh, my God,” he said.

  Mrs. Throg ruminated. “The Marchesa Monfalconi, did you say?”

  There was no turning back. Reluctantly this time, in subdued terms, Miller repeated his performance.

  Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie’s reception of it revived his sense of mission. “You think I did right?” he said. What he had seen was still with him. “I’m not so sure now. I didn’t mean to hurt the principessa that much.”

  “You did absolutely right to tell her,” said Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie.

  •

  Promptly Mrs. Throg went on a round of calls to glean more ample information. Possessed now of the pass-words, there was no more difficulty. It was an old, old story, some of her contemporaries remembered how it all began: At Castelfonte. Rico was a boy, Giulia had been married for some years to a man who was rich and himself devoted to the eldest of the Baldovici sisters, who was married to a Neapolitan engaged with an opera singer. Rico did not go wholly without censure. Giulia had a good deal to put up with, Rico was so flagrantly unfaithful, dancers, English women, contadine. . . . All the same
, the older people said, it had lasted, it was nice to see the way it had done that.

  It was a bursting Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie who arrived at Anna’s. At the end of her visit, Anna’s mind reeled. But it had been made quite clear to her that she was the heroine of a tragedy, the victim of moral outrage and one hundred percent in the right.

  Leaving, Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie stood still on the threshold. “You must punish him,” she cried, “Do you hear me? You must punish him!”

  •

  The next step was a lawyer. Anna shrank from laying bare her life. Mrs. Throg, who came to the palazzo daily, offered to do it for her. The man she chose was an American lawyer who though sympathetic thought it wise to get the opinion of an Italian colleague. After some little delay Mrs. Throg brought the gist. Given the circumstances, Anna would be able to get a Legal Separation for the asking. There was, however, one difficult point: the custody of the children.

  “Difficult?” said Anna. “He is the guilty party.”

  Mrs. Throg was obliged to explain what had been explained to her. The Italian Court might hesitate to take the boy entirely from the father, particularly if the mother, however innocent, was a foreigner and likely to bring him up in America. “I don’t believe it,” she added; “I’ve arranged a consultation with another man tomorrow.”

  Anna said she could believe it only too well.

  “You must fight them,” said Mrs. Throg.

  Anna said she would.

  •

  “How is she?” The prince was asking on the staircase. He was leading his habitual life, only more so. “Is she eating?”

  “A little,” said Mena.

  “Good. We must give her time.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Mena. “Things are going on.”

  “What things?”

  Mena shut up. “The Signora Principessa trusts me.”

  “Naturally,” said the prince.

  “If only Eccellenza would try to see her.”

  “Try—did you say try?”

  Mena hung her head.

  “You mean she wouldn’t let me in?”

  “I beg Eccellenza to try.”

  “To get into my own wife’s room? You are all mad, it’s all women’s talk. You look after her, she’ll come round—I know her.” And he was off.