A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

“It would kill me.”

  “Oh, please,” Constanza said softly. “Couldn’t we——”

  “Don’t speak to me of him.”

  Constanza swallowed and waited. It was the unkempt room that got her. “Mama, is there nothing I can do for you? If you hate this place, we can take another. I agree we ought to get a proper cook.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Anna.

  Constanza seldom carried a watch, but she felt it was getting late.

  “What are you going to wear?” said her mother.

  “I don’t know; Angelina will have put out something.”

  “She showed me a red dress of yours!”

  “Oh yes,” said Constanza, “I got that one myself. Rather nice, isn’t it?”

  “No,” said Anna.

  “Oh. What’s wrong with it?”

  “The colour. Chiefly.”

  “That’s what I liked about it. Mama, it isn’t . . . it isn’t because of the déclassement?”

  Anna herself these days wore only autumn colours.

  “Gracious no. You have your life before you. Because it is the most hideous common red.”

  “Well whatever you say, mama. Shall I tell Angelina to burn it?”

  “I gave it to her,” said Anna.

  “Good; she liked the colour, too. But how very undemocratic of you, darling.” Taking advantage of her mother’s easier mood, she said quickly, “What answer did you give . . . what message did you send to Rome? I really ought to know.”

  “I am leaving it to the lawyers. There will be no change. And Constanza, if you love me, do not re-open the subject.”

  “Mama,” said Constanza, “I do love you.” And so she went upstairs, threw off her clothes and let Angelina help her into a very well-made dress which she herself found rather dull. Not that it made much difference to her what she wore; nor, as she was beginning to find out, did it to other people.

  •

  It was true. Constanza had begun to love her mother. And this love was the first serious emotion of her life. Its seeds had lain partly in their new isolation, their sudden and essential dependence upon one another, the shared passage of two voyageurs sur la terre. Some of Constanza’s feeling sprang from gratitude. Her mother was the anchor, the one tie, the fixed ground from which it was possible to explore the new; more than that, she was the protectress, the giver, the fount quite literally of everything that now made up life. Once again it was owing to this stiff-necked, this intransigent woman, that Constanza had been given the freedom of a world. The same defects of vision that made Anna such a mill-stone as a wife, made her—at least from a temporal point of view—a parent of unique desirability. One second look, one gesture, and the bright new magic could vanish.

  Gratitude was an element. Not the only one. There was a compassionate side to Constanza’s nature, a streak of chivalry; she had also reached the stage where one has to love. Like many people who have discovered sensual love early, and with ease and gaiety, the scope of her emotions was left free. Again, Constanza had lovers. The setting was less pastoral, but she managed. In fact she was (for her) almost methodically careful. It was because she so entirely despised the rules (only a religious, a supernatural sanction might have made them acceptable to her instincts and her reason, and in that version of the supernatural she could not believe) that she was so determined not to be tripped up by them. The men who attracted her were vigorous, detached, subtle, gay; sturdy arcadians whose spirit matched her own. A rake herself, she looked for brother rakes, and even in that England found them. With these she was generous. She gave and expected sensuality, a measure of passion, gentilezza: a light tenderness, and comradeship. Any one attachment while it lasted—for some weeks, some months, a season—held her entirely. When it was over, it was over. It was not that she was flighty (as she was to be called), but a realist who from early youth chose to obey her instincts. Men were her accomplices and brothers; her unengaged emotions she turned—at that time—towards her mother.

  •

  Before August they had to face some of the immediate aspects of their situation.

  “So we move again. But have you any idea where to?”

  “She doesn’t know herself.”

  “Have you any idea of what she’d like to do? I mean what would upset her least?” Constanza herself had arrangements for a string of (sagaciously spaced) visits.

  “We used to go to Scotland at this time of year,” said Mena.

  “And now you’re so much nearer. It seems a pity not to take advantage.”

  “She won’t go.”

  “I know,” said Constanza.

  “She says not this year.”

  “This year? That’s one step better. What about a house in the country for now?”

  “Not her.”

  “The country here isn’t at all like Castelfonte. What about Switzerland? A lot of her cronies are going to Vevey. I’d go with her—God knows it doesn’t suit my book.”

  “She says her travelling days are over.”

  “I know. But she can’t stay put in London all summer. Not that we are staying put—that move! I suppose it will be back to Brown’s at the end. Well, Brown’s is convenient.”

  “We have every convenience here,” said Mena.

  “Yes, it’s a jolly house.”

  “She can’t bear it.”

  “I know.”

  •

  At last Anna decided to go to Brighton for a while.

  “Will you like that, mama?”

  “That is hardly the point. Mena adores it. Brighton is her favourite town in England.”

  “We never sent Mena back to her village at Udine.”

  “Mena doesn’t care for Udine. Constanza, I don’t like that giggle, it’s so like your—It’s a silly Italian habit. I was not making a joke, Mena has left her native country to follow me. The least I can do is——”

  “Make it up to her.”

  “It’s no more than my duty,” said Anna.

  Constanza, with whom love was not blind, asked herself whether her mother might have some pleasant secret reason for choosing Brighton. It was possible but, as she had to admit with a heavy heart, it was not probable.

  “I’ll take you there and I shall come to see you all the time.”

  “That’ll be lovely, darling,” said Anna; “but don’t let it interfere with your engagements. I so much want you to make some friends in England.”

  •

  The end of September was the time settled for Giorgio’s first stay with his mother. Again there had to be plans. Many people were urging the prince not to send the boy, but his lawyer wrote to Anna saying that he was carrying out their agreement to the letter. Anna took a house in Hampstead, in the Vale of Health, and engaged some staff. The suggested quid pro quo, a visit, ex gratia, of Constanza’s to her father, she ignored. There arose some correspondence as to who was to accompany the little boy on his journey across Europe; it seemed difficult to find a person capable both of coping with the trains and looking after a child of three.

  Then Constanza heard. Early one morning she and Mena stood in Anna’s door. “Papa is coming! Papa is bringing Giorgio himself—papa will be with us in a week!”

  Anna did not stop her. “How did you hear?” she said. “Did he write to you?”

  “No, Mena heard. Angelina’s mother wrote, she has it from Socrate. But it’s true.”

  “Madonna! The Signor Principe is on his way, they are packing at the palazzo.”

  “Mama, carissima, papa is coming to England—just like the other time when he came to marry you.”

  “The first time in nearly twenty years that Eccellenza has left Italy!”

  “A good omen,” said Constanza.

  Then they saw that Anna was about to faint.

  They ministered to her. When she was in possession of herself again, she said: “People here cannot realize what a tremendous thing a journey like that is for a man like him.”

  Once more s
he took to her room, was not at home to friends; but it was not as it had been the other times, it was not the same, Mena said, not the same at all.

  “You think she might . . . she would. . .?”

  “She is getting ready for the change.”

  “Do you think papa will snatch her up and carry her off to Rome by storm, like that picture we have in the dining-room?” It was a Rape of the Sabines.

  Mena signed herself and smiled.

  •

  Confirmation came. It went through the lawyers and was addressed to Anna. The prince was taking the boy to London personally; the principessa could rest assured that no attempt would be made on his part to approach her or disturb her peace; the prince merely hoped to be permitted to spend a few hours with the Signorina Constanza.

  Anna burnt that letter. Her next action was to inform Rome that she would obtain a court injunction against the prince’s seeking access to his daughter; if he persisted, he might find his way barred by a policeman. Then, stony-faced, she told them: “Your father is not coming, he has changed his mind.”

  “The Channel,” Constanza cried, “I should have known it was too much—papa couldn’t love us enough to cross the Channel.”

  Mena and Constanza were wretchedly disappointed but able to pay but small attention to their feelings; they were in for the worst time anyone had had so far with Anna.

  In due course they learnt that Giorgio would be arriving accompanied as far as Calais by Signora Rossi and all the way by a courier and a bambinaia. Constanza spoke her first harsh words: all very well for him to be so gentlemanly over Giorgio, he has let her down; I suppose that is the way he really is.

  •

  To Constanza many doors were open. She realized that she could choose, and chose. In the years that followed she still hunted but she also found her circle, circles, a place among the young in the intellectual and political world of the day.

  These years for her were splendid ones; they were perhaps, and by the nature of the times she lived in, the best she was to have. To her they were the most magical, a fulfilment, a substantiation of so many speculations, dreams and fires that had animated her first youth. The images raised by literature, by history (that passionate curiosity so casually engendered by two or three men of perspective turn of mind in her eccentric Roman school-room), life, the sense of life, as she anticipated it reading Stendhal, reading Byron, the breath of affairs, the roll of destiny in Gibbon, Pitt and Burke, her own penchant for Lord Melbourne, her Fabian hopes, the whole heightened image of England itself, all of these, in some subtle, unhoped-for way had been made manifest, made flesh, had been transmuted into the stuff of life. In the gallery of the House of Commons, at Covent Garden standing in tears after the first performance of the Chapeau de Tricorne, alone, confronted by the first intimations of the new writing, the new poetry, and her first response, she felt that all that mattered was within her grasp, knew that she was near the hub of things. London gave her what she could have been given nowhere else and not by London at any other time.

  A Liberal Government was in power. These were the years of the great reforms, of social legislation. The Bill curtailing the power of the House of Lords had been passed; now came the passage of Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act; controversy was bitter, party feeling high. Constanza, though still interested in socialism as the seductive solution, was more under the spell of Mr. Asquith than of Keir Hardie, and her spontaneous affinities were with the Liberal Radicals, not exactly with Winston Churchill’s “prigs, prudes and faddists,” but with many of their ideas and most of all with Winston, Radical Minister as he then was, himself and his friends. It was one of the worlds she lived in. The parents of one or two of her most intimate contemporaries were in the Government, a few of her older young men were in Parliament themselves or the secretaries to men in office. In the House she heard the orators of the age, she heard Lloyd George, she heard Churchill speak for Irish Home Rule, for Prison Reform, and she heard F. E. Smith. Her mother approved of her political friends and leanings, and shared them; and this became for a time one of their main adult bonds. Gradually Anna unbent so far as to accompany Constanza to some of the debates and to do again a measure of entertaining, evenings at home after the Italian pattern and luncheon parties for her daughter’s friends. She still refused to make a permanent home, but the houses she took then were at least central and the refreshments again in accordance with her own instincts of hospitality.

  When German naval building caught up with Churchill and moved him from the Home Office to the Admiralty and turned him into the champion of re-armament, Anna and Constanza looked to Lloyd George, the pacifist and the reformer. Nothing, they held, should be allowed to interrupt or even slow down the present unique course of internal social change; and the best way, they were convinced, to avert war, to stay at peace, was by staying peaceful.

  To the Suffragettes—clamorous and evident—they gave their nominal support.

  Many of her daughter’s other enthusiasms, the principessa did not share. She, too, became rather excited by the Russian Ballet, but was not really able yet to develop an eye for Cézanne and Picasso, or lend an unprejudiced ear to Stravinsky or Debussy. To writers (the new ones, to whom Constanza had soon shifted her curiosity and allegiance), Anna’s reactions were more definite. Snugly fortified by her Victorians—Thackeray, Trollope and beloved Dickens were also on her side—she had once told Constanza that Madame Bovary was unnecessary. Her objections now, she said, were not against the new. In her own time she had been ready to laugh with G. B. S., and more than ready to read, welcome and extol Mr. Gals-worthy and Mr. Bennett. H. G. Wells she held in awe, nor had she ever found—she was able to point out—that he went too far. But what she saw no point in was formlessness, ugliness, obscurity. When she found a copy of The Voyage Out on Constanza’s table, she inquired serenely about the beginning and the middle and the end. The novels of D. H. Lawrence were incomprehensible to her (to tell the truth, so they were then also largely to Constanza), and those of E. M. Forster pointless and rather drab. Marcel Proust she declared affected; but it was the poetry that Constanza in due course was to bring so triumphantly into the house—Eliot, the Sitwells, Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “a contemporary of yours, mama”—that fared worst of all. Amateurish, Anna said; and of course not poetry at all.

  “We shall see,” said Constanza. “I’m not holding it against you, darling—whatever should I have done without you? if you hadn’t had me educated? Reading d’Annunzio now, no doubt.”

  “A very fine poet,” said Anna.

  •

  Once a year Giorgio came to spend a month with them. The principessa’s feelings about this child of hers were as ambivalent as they had been from the first. She often spoke of her son in Rome, his existence was a consolation to her, the one tangible sign that all had not been in vain. But when he was with her she could not identify herself with this dark and pretty little boy. She did not know how to take him, what to do with him. Naturally she was nice to him, and she spoilt him. She did not go out to buy him toys, she had never done that, but she told Mena to take him to the shop and let him choose. Mena for some reason was not dispensable and Angelina was entrusted with the expedition in her stead, and she, too, being young and foolish there was no-one to check Giorgio’s greed. Constanza and the men from the delivery van happened to coincide in the hall. (They had just moved into a house near Princess Gate, and she had been walking in the Park.) “Good gracious,” she said, “what are we doing with so many tricycles?”

  Giorgio, who had been watching for his loot, began to take possession.

  “Have you got a gang, bimbo? Are you going to equip them?” Giorgio, unused to this kind of joke, scowled at his sister.

  The delivery men re-appeared.

  Constanza took another look and her more frugal instincts began to stir. “It isn’t as if I were just seeing double,” she exclaimed.

  Giorgio let out a howl; Constanza said to the
men, “It isn’t your fault, I know, but that stuff has got to go back.”

  She went to enlist her mother. Anna came out on the landing. “Giorgio, dear——” she said. Her son had entered his full whirl of fury and was spinning like a top. “You don’t want all these. . . . One clock-work train is much nicer than four. . . . Do believe me. Isn’t that so, Constanza?”

  Constanza looked disgusted.

  Giorgio had started grabbing things and throwing them about.

  “I’m afraid he is not clever,” said the principessa.

  “Come on,” said Constanza to the men, “give us a hand, you can see this won’t do.” They obeyed her. The toys were borne away. Anna withdrew. Giorgio calmed down and sulked. He sulked the whole day, the next day, he sulked for the whole of his visit. Constanza said he was still sulking when he came back next year. She said that she never knew Giorgio when he wasn’t either in a tantrum or in sulks; but perhaps she was not fair.

  On an earlier occasion, her friends had clamoured to see the Italian brother. They took him out on a ride. Giorgio was eager enough, but the first thing he did was fall off.

  “Can’t you ride, bimbo?”

  It turned out that he had never been on a horse.

  “Ma che? Didn’t papa take you?”

  Giorgio shook his head.

  “Doesn’t he take you riding with him? How very odd. What can papa be thinking about?”

  School, Anna kept saying, school—she was sure it would be nice for him to start going. “The Jesuits, I know, like Carla’s boys; well, they are first-rate teachers.”

  Constanza said she wondered what her grandfather—whose essays she had just been reading—would have felt about a grandson of his having a Jesuit education.

  “Autre temps, autre mœurs,” said Anna.

  •

  Constanza never became a débutante. When the point in time was reached, the point in fact had long been passed. Her mother’s heart was not really in it and Constanza took advantage of this. “Too late, darling,” she told her, “I’ve been out to so many intents and purposes that it would only start questions in people’s minds.”

  “I am not giving you what I had,” said Anna.