A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “Four years ago,” said Mr. James.

  “Four years and three months,” Constanza said. “Simon wasn’t with us that time either. I had not met Simon. That came a few weeks later. So it did turn out the way Simon told mama: A war marriage.”

  •

  Before the end of the year Constanza was in Rome. The journey had been uncertain, long and cold, and she was grateful more than once for her decision not to take the child. At Dijon she and other passengers had to wait fourteen hours for an engine to their train; at Turin, where there was another long delay, they also ran into a waiter strike. Constanza did not care much: she felt herself at large, in the world, in a detached way absorbed. She often thought of Simon and what he had called his nightmare journey in the opposite direction in the summer of 1914. If anything was needed to bring the past war home to her, it was those trains, the crowded platforms and the icy waiting-rooms, these broken window-panes, the worn-off paint, the soldiers, the state of their uniforms, the look of the countryside, the looks on people’s faces. Over Italy the sky was grey. Her father had been waiting at the station. He was a middle-aged man in an overcoat, shorter than she remembered. She was a woman of twenty-five who had lived all her grown-up years in one of the most accomplished sets in London.

  •

  It rained a great deal in Rome that winter. Copious cloud-bursts several times a day, one day after the other, water gushing through the cobbled streets, drops of water seeping through the ceilings. Constanza had forgotten about the Roman rain, and how long it was able to last. The palazzo was not in bad repair, but it looked unlived in and nearly everything in it had become shabby, and so were the drawing-rooms of their friends. The war, the war, the war—everybody was sadder, older, poorer, and now there were strikes, they told her, discontent, more poverty, black hatred, fear of socialism. The prince and his brothers-in-law made defeatist jokes about the future. Everybody talked about the Reds. Constanza’s Aunt Maria had gone pious and talked what Constanza and her pals had used to call rosary talk. Her Aunt Carla wore an avid look and several people hastened to inform Constanza why—Fabrizio had gone off, the wretch, with a hospital nurse from Milan. Which Fabrizio? Constanza asked, and they shrugged and said, oh, of course, that was after your time. Constanza’s contemporaries were either not demobilized or tied up sustaining widowed mothers. Younger people in all walks of life spoke of emigrating to America.

  The foreign colony had melted, and such of her mother’s friends who were still there, no longer came to the palazzo. Constanza found the atmosphere provincial and the chatter dull. Her clothes, she dimly realized, though chosen by her mother, were looked upon as scandalous; not scandalous-glamorous, which would have given pleasure, but scandalous-simple, scandalous-emancipated.

  Everybody was affectionate and the prince was kindness itself; but Constanza felt that she bewildered them. They had been surprised at seeing her arrive without her maid. She explained that Angelina was expecting a baby by an English soldier and had stayed behind to have things made all right for her. It was in fact one of the last things that Simon had done for them. He had found out the name of the soldier and his regiment, and he had pulled strings to get him demobilized. Now Anna was buying Angelina the goodwill of a sweet-shop, and the soldier was being quite content to make her an honest woman. At first Constanza’s family were enchanted by this story and exclaimed at Angelina’s luck. But when it transpired (Constanza having become careless in such matters) that the soldier was something called Chapel and there was little chance of their going before a priest, they could not understand at all. Then Angelina was not being made an honest woman? and the sweet-shop was just waste. They said less, but were a good deal more puzzled about Constanza’s own situation. Everything the poor girl was, or was not, appeared to be cancelled out by something else. She was married and there was a bambina, what could be more felicitous. The husband was a Protestant, this was not so good but one lived in the world, mixed marriages were a fact and Constanza strong-minded enough to cope with one. But now she was not married anymore, and this was neither good nor bad because it could not be. Why pretend that her marriage was dissolved when it was undissolvable? Only in Heaven and in Italy? They were in Italy and hoped to go to Heaven. Oh, they well knew that divorce was something practised in some countries, but it was a great sin and furthermore not valid. So why say she was not married when she plainly was? A married woman with a baby, just like Angelina, only that poor Angelina wasn’t married yet, and never would be, and that her baby had not yet been born.

  To cushion her divorce, Constanza told them about the registrar. After this they asked no more. They thought they understood. No marriage. No divorce. A child. The child—no wonder it had been left wherever it was—remained the concrete fact.

  Soon all Rome knew, Mrs. Throg having done the rest. The man’s parents, she told them for a fact, had not been to the so-called ceremony.

  “Clever of her,” the Romans said, “to have taken that plain foreign name.”

  “Mrs. Herbert? They have special arrangements for that kind of thing over there.”

  “Is that what they call a courtesy title?”

  “Something like it.”

  The prince treated his daughter tenderly. He was worried by the thought of Anna. “Has she been difficult?” he managed to ask.

  The same question, in another spirit, was being asked everywhere. “How did Anna take it?”

  Here, also, an answer was supplied by Mrs. Throg. “La Trommo says Anna took the man’s side; the man’s been seen constantly in Anna’s house.”

  This many people did not believe.

  It was while she was in Rome that Constanza heard that Simon was a Member of Parliament. The result of that General Election—the large Liberal defeat—distressed her very much; Simon, who had stood as an Asquith Liberal, was one of the few who had got in.

  People asked her, was she back for long? had she returned to live? Constanza said she did not know herself. Presently the implications of some of the things unsaid came home to her. She spoke to Carla. “What’s all this preposterous stuff about Flavia? What next?”

  Carla said, “Well, carissima, it is confusing.”

  So Constanza patiently explained it step by step.

  When she had finished, her aunt said, “Yes, as we thought, paziènza. No visible father.”

  “I was thinking of bringing her up here,” Constanza said. “At Castelfonte.”

  “Who would they think she was?”

  “I know papa wants to see her.”

  “He doesn’t face what it will be like.” Then, more warmly, “Does she look like you?”

  “No,” said Constanza.

  “You know what you must do,” said Carla. “You must marry. Then you can have plenty of children and come back with all of them.”

  •

  All in all it was a slow sad winter. Constanza asked what had changed, the times? herself? Was it the end of youth? She was cold, she had little to do, she was alone. For the prince she felt much love but she found she could no longer talk to him. And all the time, bitterly, she missed Simon. Before it was March she told them she must go, she must go and see her daughter, she must go and see. Figlia mia, said the prince. Then they said già and let her go.

  PART THREE

  Voyageur sur la Terre

  1

  IN THE ten years or so that followed many things happened to Constanza that were not wholly shaped by and do not belong to this story. She returned to London, found her life both altered and unaltered by the fact and circumstances of her divorce, and for some time she lived plunged in the general post-war life of the Twenties. There was much in that current then that suited her affinities, as well as drifts already alien to one who had entered the adult world in the decade before the war. She was wild, but never destructive or self-destructive. She never got drunk. She always maintained the privacy of her love affairs. She did not think about manners and some of her elders found her unconve
ntional, but she had manners. As far as her circumstances permitted she often exercised a kind of peasant frugality towards herself, dimly supported by a notion that what she did not buy today, and very likely lose or wear out, might come in useful some time for Flavia.

  She was seldom without what is called a man in her life. She was slightly in love or much in love, once or twice very much in love indeed. But it always ended. It was not what in the last resort she wanted: it was not enough. And so there was no other marriage, or serious plan of marriage.

  After her divorce from Simon became absolute, Constanza who did not like mysteries had told her mother about the arrangement made between them. Anna never forgave her. For doing what she had done; for telling her about it. Anna did not forgive Simon either, but her implacability was intermittent and she did not break with him. It would have been too much for her at that stage, and too diffused. Life at last had forced the principessa to put her wrath and her affections into several baskets. She declared herself as living for her new responsibility, her grand-child, or as she preferred to call it, Simon’s girl. She also tried to pin new hopes on her son Giorgio and sent for him quite frequently. Above all she clung to Constanza. She often spoke of her as my unfortunate daughter, and she blamed much on the Italian strain.

  Simon’s affluence and growing reputation in the House of Commons did not help. Anna, bitter now where in the past she had laid her lightest touch, used it mercilessly.

  Constanza exercised a patience, a withdrawal and a coldness that had not been in her first nature. She never lived quite separated from her mother, nor ever again entirely made her home with her. They moved often and in varying combinations. One year Anna with a household and the children (Giorgio on long loan to make up for his absence during the war) would live in a largish house while Constanza had a mews flat in Mayfair; the next, Constanza would take a small house for Flavia and herself in Chester Street, and Anna, alone with Mena, moved to Brown’s. Then Constanza might be off in Spain for a long stretch with nothing more than the poste restante by way of an address, and Anna with her dependants settled in the Engadine.

  At least once a year Constanza went to see her father. If Italy was not recovering politically, the Italian spirit was. Constanza came when it was warm and stayed only a few weeks. She did not again experience anything like the alien desolation of the winter of her first return. She had learnt to travel light. In her youth she had looked at fate as the bolt from the clear sky, now she recognized it in the iron rule of time on all human affairs. Today is not like yesterday; the second chance is not the first. Whatever turning-points are taken or are missed, it is the length of the passage, the length of the road that counts. She realized that she would never again entirely belong, but also that a large part of her belonged nowhere else. Once more she basked, volatile and melancholy: the sun, the fruit, the colour of the stones were her inheritance as well as the sad pagan creed of carpe diem and stoicism for the rest.

  Life was still good to her. Exceptionally good. She had what all mortals pray for and unfortunately few are given. She had health, she had looks, she had money for her needs. If she was free, is too large a question, but it can certainly be said that in terms of our common lot she was her own master. She was equipped to appreciate, to derive entertainment, connotations, pleasure, from almost any situation she happened to find herself placed in. She had the power to inspire love. And she was not unhappy; there was only a vague disquiet, a nagging question: What is it for? What have I made of it? Where is it going, where can it go?

  Her mind was often on Flavia, her own daughter, in whom, too, elements were mixed, more mixed perhaps; and Constanza wondered. Her field here was limited by the (polite, unspoken) resistance to the child she was up against in Rome. Had she fought it, as she might, she would have had to fight her mother. The principessa so far had chosen to treat her custody of Flavia as a matter of form, nevertheless Constanza shrank from putting the issue to a test, and with her sporadic tendency not to impose her will on what might be designed, she let the matter be. When she left the child with her mother, as so often happened, she did it with an easy heart, holding that the association could only be to their mutual advantage: Anna’s influence, she remembered, on the very young was wholesome and benign. (Here she was mistaken.)

  •

  Giorgio, on his first re-appearances after the war (a boy of twelve, thirteen, fifteen, dressed more like a young man), spoke English and seemed disposed to make up to his mother. With Flavia it was war on sight. He looked down on her, and made this plain. Flavia ascribed it to her own inferior sex and age and found it not unfair. All the same she confided to Mena that she did not find il fratello quite simpatico. She spoke Italian.

  “He’s not your brother, my treasure, he’s your uncle,” said Mena.

  The principessa promptly bought Giorgio what he wanted at that moment which was a gold watch. Presently he flashed it at Flavia, telling her what it had cost. Flavia’s main concern was to be shown the works. Giorgio would have none of it.

  “Please, Uncle Giorgio.”

  “I am not your uncle,” he flared at her. “Don’t you dare call me that again! I am——” he rolled out a sonorous string, “And you are just a bastard.”

  Flavia would have made little of this incident if Mena had not surged up and slapped Giorgio’s face. Giorgio slunk off and Flavia inevitably said, “What is a bastard?”

  Mena drew her on her lap. “Nothing you need concern yourself about, my little angel.”

  Flavia went to her grandmother and repeated the question. “Well, darling,” Anna said, and, believing that she must have read the word somewhere, launched into a fascinating explanation that came straight out of Shakespearean drama.

  “Are bastards better than real princes, nonna?”

  “Well, some of them cut a great dash and were extremely brave.” Flavia withdrew having conceived a high romantic notion of herself.

  Often Anna preferred Giorgio who was her own son and would one day have her house in Rome. When he told her that he wanted to go to America later on and see her country, she felt pleased and flattered and saw him to her credit. At other times she remembered that he was his father’s son. Flavia, moreover, showed signs of being clever, which Giorgio obviously was not. When it was found out that Flavia could read, Anna began to give her a few lessons, but soon grew tired of it, saying she was too old. Her memory was as excellent as ever and the dates of the kings of England were still firmly hers, she felt no kind of excitement though in making them Flavia’s as well. The whole thing had palled. Constanza had been her educational masterpiece, she was not up to bringing off this tour de force a second time. So rather haphazardly she engaged and dismissed again a series of governesses whose comings and goings were more dependent on her own likes and movements than on Flavia’s progress. As neither Anna herself nor Constanza had been sent to school, school was not envisaged. They were sure that any gap caused by Anna’s present method could be made up by a child of theirs in its sleep.

  Flavia, who was also a child of Simon’s, managed to pick up, and miss, a good many things on her own and connect them according to her lights.

  Constanza sometimes tried to do right by her brother but with him she seldom had a happy touch. She asked him news of Castelfonte, and found that he had none to give.

  He never went there, he said, if he could help it; he loathed the country; farming was a mug’s game.

  “Then what are you going to do, bimbo, what are you going to live on, if you’re not going to live on the land?”

  “If you call me bimbo again, I shall hit you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Constanza, “I didn’t know you hated it.”

  “The steward can look after the land. I wish papa would sell the place. Not at once, of course; we must first get a decent road, then it can be built up for the tourists.”

  “You want the place to be like Florence on Easter Sunday?”

  “Tourists bring mone
y,” he said.

  “Are you going to work for the tourists . . . Giorgio?”

  “I am going to marry a rich woman and race cars.”

  “Each will require a measure of skill,” said Constanza.

  •

  His mother said yes to the first step. Giorgio at sixteen was handed the money for a motor bicycle. As neither Anna nor Constanza were given to much physical anxiety about their off-spring, Giorgio’s tearing up and down the road to Brighton at all hours caused them no loss of sleep. Anna remained ignorant of the girls he picked up or took with him, Constanza merely shrugged about his taste. “Floozies,” she said to her young man.

  “Poor chap,” said the young man. “Why don’t you introduce him to some nice girls of his own age?”

  “Do I know any?” said Constanza. “Tell you what, let’s take him to my cousins.”

  “Is it wise?”

  “They’re a pack. Anyhow, girls know how to look after themselves. It isn’t as it was in your day, Constanza.”

  “We didn’t read Kafka.”

  They took Giorgio to the young man’s cousins. Some of them were still in the school-room. Constanza tried to answer their questions for ten minutes and after that she only felt for Giorgio.

  He came home, went to his mother and asked for money. He needed a new dinner-jacket, he said, and some cash; he was going to take one of the Radburn girls to dinner at the Savoy.

  “Can he do that?” said Anna.

  “Of course not, the idiot. Giorgio, you must know that you can’t take little girls to dinner at hotels.”

  “Who’s talking about little girls?” Giorgio said coolly; “I asked Artemis; she’s been out for years.”

  “She’s engaged.”