A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

“What did you say to your father then?”

  “I haven’t got very far.”

  “May I see?”

  “If you want to. It isn’t much.”

  Simon took the sheet of paper from her table, looked at it and crowed with laughter. “Listen to this,

  Darling Daddy, I hope you are well. It is very cold and Simon and I went to the Opera on Wednesday. The singing was very fine. This morning we saw a horse——”

  “That isn’t what I said. Give it to me! And you know it’s in Italian.”

  “I translated freely. . . for you to grasp the point.”

  “I told you it wasn’t much.”

  “It’s the letter of a child of six.”

  “Papa and I never write long letters.”

  “Does your father also make spelling mistakes?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “Does he write demotic grammar?”

  “Oh, come.”

  “You do.”

  “How do you know?” said Constanza.

  “My dear, I learnt Italian. It’s very good. Bolognese.”

  “Like mama. Hers is beautiful and Tuscan. I am Italian.”

  “Yes, my sweet, a real Italian, a real illiterate Italian,” and Simon began to dance about the room on one foot.

  Constanza said: “No! It must be true. All my lessons were in English. I never had anyone Italian to teach me. I suppose mama simply never thought I ought to learn to write my own language. It never occurred to any of us. I haven’t been taught Italian grammar or syntax or composition—it was just forgotten.”

  “A curious omission,” said Simon.

  “I’m an Italian Illiterate. Well, strike me pink!”

  “You know: I never said that in my whole life before that evening; and I don’t think I ever shall again.”

  “It is for startling occasions.”

  •

  Simon came back from Northumberland deflated and relieved. “They have not taken to you,” he told Constanza, “and they have cut me off without a shilling.”

  “Sensible people. What happened?”

  “To begin with, they were in rather a grim mood. My eldest brother has just got his commission and he’s going out and so is my only cousin, and they feel I’m a disgrace before the neighbours. They positively prefer to have their children blown to pieces. For another thing, some poison-pen had already spilt the beans. They’ve been told I’ve formed a most undesirable connection in London. Two foreign women of doubtful reputation. I hardly know how to break it to your mama. To Northumberland she is an Italian adventuress with a bogus title. When I pointed out that she was an American, they didn’t think it an improvement. And you move, it appears, in a very bad set. Fast. When I told them of my cherished plan, they threatened to cut off my tiny allowance. Now it’s either or.”

  “Any hope of your following your parents’ excellent advice?” said Constanza.

  Simon simply went to Anna.

  “Free, white and twenty-one,” she said. “There’s only one thing for you to do, you must marry at once and live with us.”

  “That’s what he’s been doing, mama.”

  “You would prefer a house of your own?” said Anna. “Shall I start looking for one?”

  “What next? I am going to stay with you.”

  “I hope I shall be as nice to him as mammina was to me,” said Anna. “Simon, wouldn’t you like a house of your own? English people do.”

  “No thank you. Cosy Italian family life for me.”

  “I’m seeing to it that Constanza gets a decent allowance.”

  “How will you manage that, mama?”

  “Oh those men are being unexpectedly pleasant about it. It seems there is provision for the contingency as they call it.”

  “Trust funds within trust funds,” said Simon.

  “I wish I’d known,” said Anna. “Well, whatever it is, it may not be very much. If you get short the way one does, you must always come to me.”

  •

  One thing Constanza asked of Simon: No wedding. “Now that your people are staying out and I don’t have to think immediately about papa, let’s cut out the Oratory and the rest of it. You can have no idea what it would entail; a mixed marriage needs a lot of working out, and I want to steer clear of all that just now. So a registry office e basta. I don’t care what people say here, and papa need never exactly know.”

  “Suits me,” said Simon.

  “That leaves mama. I count on you to square her.”

  •

  It was now that Constanza decided to put the straight question to her mother. Her own doubts had begun long before she heard Simon’s story.

  “When you left my father—did it have anything to do with money?”

  “Money? No, of course not. What makes you say that?”

  “Isn’t it time that I heard the whole of it?” said Constanza.

  Anna was quite ready. “You’re old enough now, it may even serve you as a warning. Thank God, my darling, you are marrying an Englishman.”

  But it was not Anna who was able to pour out the tale. Constanza did in one sentence and two names. “And that was it, mama? and that was all?”

  Anna had covered her face. “All?” she groaned.

  “And you never knew before?”

  “He lied to me for seventeen years.”

  “Politeness,” said Constanza. “And you never tried to look through it—at the truth?”

  Anna’s face was exposed again. She pursed her lips. “I do not have that type of mind.”

  Constanza was silent. Then she said without anger, “What can I say to you, mama? What can I ask you? You heard that he was sleeping with another woman and you left him?”

  “Your language, Constanza.”

  “Never mind that. You left him——”

  “Any other woman with the slightest self-respect——”

  “I am not asking about other women, I am asking about you.”

  Anna did not answer.

  “What was it you could not forgive? You are not small, mama. You did not believe that men are always faithful to their wives? Do you really feel that people own one another? You condemned my father for enjoying himself in a way that excluded you? Do you like to be selfish and possessive——”

  “Constanza, stop cross-examining me. Have you no moral sense? What your father did was horrible. . . .”

  Constanza said in a hard tone: “Mama, this won’t do. Mama, you must grow out of this. And you calling yourself a Christian!”

  “Can this be my own daughter?” said Anna.

  “Papa must have been wretched. Speaking of him as a criminal. Think what you did to him . . . to us all.”

  “I thought you loved your years in England.”

  “Yes. But I was not asked.” Now Constanza thought of something else. “Then you must have left papa very badly off, all of a sudden.”

  Anna blushed.

  Constanza said, “I was a proper fool.”

  “He is all right,” said Anna, “he is not badly off. I happen to know this.”

  “How do you?”

  “You must believe me, my dear.”

  “Oh mama! How can I?” And it was Constanza who began to cry. “How could you—how can you be so unforgiving?”

  “He never asked me to forgive him,” said Anna.

  •

  “Oh, Signorina Constanza!”

  “You heard?”

  “I listen when her voice begins to get . . . that way. You shouldn’t have said the things you said. It is no use.”

  “One has got to tell people. As long as one loves them. Oh Mena, dear Mena, I feel I can never forgive her.”

  “It’s not her fault, poor woman, it’s the way she is made.”

  “What is it, Mena?”

  “Some women get to hate their men. They don’t know until something happens. With her it was Giorgio. That reminded her.”

  “Oh, of what, Mena?”

  “Of havin
g a husband. They do what is required, they don’t mind too much, but they don’t like to think of it, they feel they are too good. We had a poor soul in my village who gave ground glass to her man. He died, and she’d had four sons from him.”

  “Is it the bambini?”

  “The bambini are part of it, my lamb.”

  “Mama doesn’t hate men. She spends her life with them. Look how she dotes on Simon. She patronized papa but she seemed fond of him.”

  “That was when she didn’t have to remember.”

  “All the more reason for not grudging him to Giulia?”

  “She loves the Signorino,” said Mena, “the Signorino Simon. She is happy with them as long as there’s no danger. Don’t spoil it for her now.”

  “If I went away and left them together——?”

  “That would not do at all. Oh Signorina Constanza, don’t change your mind now!”

  “I’m afraid I cannot,” Constanza said. “Because if I did it would be revenge.”

  •

  Simon managed to square the principessa. “I told her it was a war wedding. It worked like a charm.” They were married, as Constanza had wished, before a registrar. Their witnesses were Mr. James and Anna.

  Mr. James, the night before, had taken Constanza out to dinner. “He ought to be taking me,” Simon said. Constanza pointed out that it was not he who was about to lose his freedom.

  They went to the Carlton Grill and waited for the mood that might develop.

  “Isn’t one supposed to go over one’s whole past like a drowning woman?”

  “Too early for you,” Mr. James said sternly; “much too early.”

  “I feel you are disappointed in me.”

  “I am,” he said. “I would have backed you as more selfish.”

  “Whatever prompted me was not my guardian angel. And to be alive these days is quite selfish enough.”

  “Your mother,” said Mr. James, “is one of my oldest friends—but I am not in her confidence. She has never chosen to speak to me. I have not—shall we say?—the right temperament.”

  “Oh, how fond I am of you!”

  “Will you take something from me, my dear? What you are trying to do is not wise.”

  “I’d take anything from you; but shouldn’t you have spoken a bit earlier? What I’m trying to do? At this point, isn’t it as good as done?”

  “One does not like to . . . meddle. And you did not give us much time.”

  “And I am . . . meddling?”

  Mr. James drew a deep breath.

  “Do let’s have it out,” said Constanza.

  “My dear, dear girl. I have found that what one does is likely to work out in a certain pattern. It’s a question of leverage. If you go too far away from yourself you increase the leverage, but it also becomes less accurate. To change the metaphor, at long range you aim at one thing and you hit another. You can choose for yourself; you cannot choose for others. If you do, you are only manipulating them.”

  “I’m not one for power,” said Constanza, “I have no wish to manipulate.”

  He said, “The things one feels obliged to do against one’s inclination are often the most harmful. Chalking up the cost to oneself is no kind of guarantee. One contracts a debt one may be unable to meet in the long run. Choosing for oneself in twenty years’ time is another form of over-reaching.”

  “That means every marriage, every contract, career, all planning.”

  “Some people have come to that conclusion,” he said. “It is not a popular one.”

  “And so? Go on.”

  “Keep to the middle course. Beware of ulterior motives. Do not attempt to pin down the future.”

  “Even good ulterior motives?”

  “Especially those.”

  “You talk as if it were all in my hands,” said Constanza. “I did not start it. Well, except in one way. . . I’m not the king-pin in this cat’s-cradle—to change the metaphor.”

  “You are the one who is choosing to be fitted into the pattern.”

  “And so the most to blame?”

  “Not the least responsible. The other two are out for themselves. You are standing aside. Discounting A (A being you) for the sake of C, and not thinking of B at all.”

  “So Simon is the Excluded Middle?” said Constanza.

  “You still muddle your terms,” said Mr. James. “Though it serves: Simon is hardly to blame, and it is not very fair on him.”

  “Il l’a voulu, Georges Dandin.”

  Mr. James said, “It was your attitude to Simon which . . . baffled me. You and he get on so very well.”

  “You see? What right have I got not to marry a man with whom I get on so well.”

  “That was not what I meant.”

  “Can you tell me in words of one syllable?”

  “I expected better things from you.”

  “Is this an incitement to stand up Simon at the altar, or what serves as one?”

  “I don’t go in for drastic measures, as you know. It might be in your line.”

  “I cannot do it,” she said. “You don’t know, you haven’t lived with it. It would kill her.”

  “Yes: I can hear her say that.”

  To cheer themselves up, he said he had never told her the story of Mena’s wine. It showed a side of the principessa’s character which he found, well as Simon would put it: interesting. Many years ago, then, the principessa was in England on a visit; it was the first time that Mena had come with her, and they both put up at Brown’s Hotel. Anna—you know her way—asked Mena if she was looked after properly and if the food was all right. Mena said the food was not too bad, but what she minded was that there was no wine. No wine, said Anna, why how unpleasant for you, we must see to that. So Anna went and spoke to the waiter or whoever it was who had charge of the table-d’hôte at Brown’s where the lady’s maids and couriers ate, and told him that Mena was used to it and must have her pint or two of wine with meals. So out they brought for her their Médoc Supérieur, and very sound stuff it is in its unassuming way. A few days later Anna asks her, does she get her wine? Oh yes, says Mena, they give her wine, but pretty poor thick ink it is, paziènza, all puckery in the mouth, one might be drinking tea. Now our Anna caught on to that at once. She learnt to drink good claret in her father’s house and she still, to give her credit, serves it at her dinner parties; but she, too, has acquired quite a taste for that nice light red Italian lemonade they all swill down whatever they may be eating and not a second thought—and so have you, my dear: don’t pretend, you’ll never make a claret drinker, and that’ll be a grief to Simon for the boy has a nice taste in wine, a very nice taste indeed for one his age—Valpolicella, Capri, Colline Senese, and very easy and companionable too, kind on the liver if you have one, but they’re to the product of the Gironde what baby prattle is to Plato.”

  “Simon says Italians have no palate.”

  “Well, it is not tuned to Bordeaux. What they cannot take to is the tannin. So down went Anna to speak again to that waiter. Italian wine, she insists, it must be Italian wine. The waiter is doubtful, he doesn’t think they have any. Anna sends for the dining-room head-waiter, for the wine-waiter, the manager. Long faces. They have quite a nice little cellar at Brown’s and they don’t clutter it up with great stacks of straw-clad flagons. No demand, they say. But of course they bow to Anna. The sommelier promises he’ll do his best. So out they nipped down St. James’s, and soon they found a merchant who was able to oblige. He did not have his cellar full of straw and hand-blown glass either, but he had a few bottles of something that came from Italy all right. It was the Barone Barbasoli’s Private Bottling straight from the Gaiole Vineyards, Gran Riserva, Stravecchio, Classico and all the rest of it, and they sent it round.”

  “It was good?” said Constanza.

  “They let it have a rest on its side at Brown’s, they drew the cork at the proper time, they decanted it, and stood the decanter in front of Mena’s place. It wasn’t what Mena had expected
, but she took to it; she took to it so well that repeat orders had to be placed in St. James’s and in Tuscany, and they began stocking it at Brown’s. Mena reported she had never tasted better wine come out of a carafe, and she drank it every noon and night. Since then they’ve always kept some against her visits, and even now your mother is getting it for her by the case from Brown’s. I shouldn’t mind having some myself, if it weren’t that it’s worth its weight in Mouton.”

  Constanza for once was not amused. Perhaps he was right, she said, she did not know enough about real wine, but it seemed to her that it had been very nice of mama to have gone to a bit of trouble.

  “I think I must end by applauding Simon’s decision not to earn your living,” said Mr. James.

  •

  After the ceremony the next day, quite a lot of people had been asked to Regent’s Park. Simon and Constanza arrived in high spirits. Simon was as merry as a grig and had been mimicking the Registrar practically to his face. Constanza had suddenly decided to enjoy her wedding-day; in consequence all had passed off in a gust of what Anna called Roman irreverence and Italian giggles. Anna, too, looked as if she had swallowed a good deal of the cream. Most of their guests were puzzled. Such men present whom Constanza had turned down looked at Simon with distaste and astonishment. The ones who had not been turned down were more astonished still. The absence of the groom’s family did not go unnoticed, and the women were most intrigued by the nature of the wedding. It wasn’t as if Simon were being whisked off to war, they said.

  But that was it, someone said, “He is. They all know about it at the War Office. He’s to be off on a most hush-hush job.”

  “Simon?”

  “Oh, that defeatist jabber is just a blind.”

  “Yes, I suppose with all those languages.”

  “They’re sending him into Turkey.”

  “But what has Simon’s going for a spy to do with their cutting out church? Church is just as quick.”

  “They’re not allowed to put foot into Constanza’s and they don’t want to afficher the fact.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see, after all those dark doings in Rome they excommunicated the principessa.”

  “Papists in bad standing. The Herberts can’t like that at all.”

  Someone had lent them a house in Wiltshire. Simon loudly complained that it had to be that, not Paris.