A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “I have been called a dilettante.”

  “I know the word, but will you please explain to me exactly what it means.”

  He tried.

  “Hmm. Not a professional?”

  “Quite, my child.”

  “But I was told,” she said, “that you taught at Harvard?”

  “That was a very long time ago and quite brief.”

  “Still,” said Flavia, “it must have been something. And you went to Oxford, too. I’d call it all very grand. Can women go to Harvard?”

  Anna, who for herself was quite fearless in such matters, never let Mr. James leave Italy without distributing half a dozen envelopes about his luggage—just to post abroad, you know—containing if not paramountly useful certainly quite compromising documents. Constanza, who could not bear to think of anything happening to Mr. James, never failed to make them disappear again.

  “Does he know you do that, mummy?” asked Flavia, who saw far too much.

  “No.”

  “How do you manage it?”

  “Substituting perfectly harmless envelopes,” said Constanza.

  “Substituting?”

  “Putting one thing in exchange for another.”

  “Cheating?” said Flavia.

  “Yes,” said Constanza.

  “Mummy, when is it all right to cheat?”

  “I’m so glad you said when, not if. When one does it for someone one loves. When one does not do it for oneself.”

  “I see,” said Flavia. “Mummy, was the letter you put in my suit-case when we came back from Switzerland a perfectly harmless envelope?”

  “No,” said her mother.

  Flavia said nothing.

  “Does that puzzle you?”

  Flavia’s very blue eyes had a way of appearing to turn dark at moments of emotion. “I haven’t worked it out yet,” she said in a neutral tone.

  “Let me help you,” Constanza said. “If they’d found that letter at the frontier, nothing would have happened to you. Not like Mr. James. They don’t do anything to children. They would have blamed me. Do you follow that?” Flavia nodded and her face cleared.

  She said, “You did it because we hate the blackshirts.”

  Constanza said, “That’s not quite the right way round. I’m against the blackshirts because of the things they do to people, and make them do; and I mind that ultimately, because I love those people. Hate is nothing, even in politics, hate is only temper and unhappiness; it’s an accident. It is stupid and unkind to let it overtake one. I don’t hate men who wear black shirts, I sometimes hate what they do—can you see the distinction?”

  “I think so,” said her daughter. “I rather hate nonna,” she blushed, “when she talks, you know. . . in that way when she’s angry; but I do love her. She can’t help it—poor woman,” she added in Mena’s voice, for Flavia was a mimic.

  Constanza kissed her, then gave her a wink: “And now you must let me see to Mr. James’s packing.”

  •

  Mr. James was with them again when Giorgio made one of his appearances. There was something in his buttonhole. It was the insignia of a Fascist Youth organization.

  Constanza flung a word at him. He still feared her and with the look of a cat at bay, all insolence and deferred defiance, he slowly picked out the small enamelled thing and dropped it in his pocket.

  “You could be sent to the Islands for this,” he said, but in so low a tone that it was scarcely heard.

  Behind his back, Constanza said to her mother, “What can you expect? He doesn’t know any better, wretched boy, do think of the pressure that’s being put on all of them. But I thought it was right to show him that it still isn’t accepted in all human company.”

  Anna’s reaction was different. If she had never given to her son the feeling she had given to her father, to Simon and to Constanza as a girl, he had also never had a taste of her full anger. She took her time. She sent for him. She let herself go. He was dazed, he was cowed; he was also rather impressed. Giorgio had always been impressed by his mother, while he looked down on his father (through a layer of affection), as a man in whose shoes he would do a good bit better.

  It was at this point that Constanza gave up her opposition to Giorgio’s transatlantic longings. Let him go, she advised his mother, it will get him out of this at least: he will learn how the decent half still thinks.

  “It will be a wonderful influence for him,” said Anna.

  Mr. James, who unlike her visited his native country frequently, hinted at some changes in President Coolidge’s United States. “He may meet other things besides New-England probity.”

  Oh, very likely, Anna said. “Prohibition. That won’t concern him much, he’s an abstemious Italian. Constanza says——”

  But Constanza, who saw America through the eyes of her mother’s youth but also through the novels of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and a new magazine called The New Yorker, did not know what to say.

  Giorgio was buoyant. Letters were sent to Mr. Baxter, the trustee; to Arizona, to half-remembered friends. Giorgio had a visa, more new clothes, travellers’ cheques. There was even a prospect of some instructive employment being found for him in the automobile industry.

  “You are interested in that, aren’t you?” they asked hopefully.

  •

  Giorgio had sailed. It was early summer. Anna had taken her family to a small resort on Lake Garda. Constanza was fond at that time of a man on long leave from the Colonial Service, whom she had borne off from London. They were at the hotel; Constanza’s policeman, as she called him, had taken a little house inland. Flavia liked him too, and Anna did not mind him. It was a pleasant life. The lake was blue and calm. There was some animation though the summer visitors were yet few. The post arrived by boat, and people walked down to the shore to meet it. The food they ate was local, simple and dripping fresh. This was Flavia’s word. She was a water creature and most of the time was in or on the lake or sailing a small boat with Constanza and the policeman. At noon they put in at some bay and ate a picnic in the shade.

  “Dolce far niente,” Flavia said to her mother with the policeman’s accent.

  “Yes, we must stop him saying that.”

  The governess of the moment had been sent on holiday. She had not liked the place at all and come to Anna the first morning with a list of her complaints. At night Flavia ate dinner with the other three, and after Constanza and her young man had driven off to dance somewhere, her grandmother would read aloud to her. They often settled for Trollope. “Can we skip this?” Flavia usually said when they reached a love passage. “I find it so unreal, and I don’t like this heroine. Let’s skip her.” Sometimes she asked for legal anecdotes. “You must remember some, nonna?” Anna said it was a mighty long time since Great-Grandfather Howland had practised at the Bar. “Anecdotes live on,” said Flavia, and Anna found that this was so.

  One morning Flavia was sitting in the open verandah with the principessa. Suddenly she saw her mother coming towards them through the garden very rapidly. She was not actually running but she moved as if propelled by some great urgency, her eyes were wide open and unseeing, her hair appeared to be streaming and her face was like a mask. When she had reached the steps she called: “Simon is dead!” The principessa rose and slowly lifted her arms in a speechless gesture. Then the two women passed into the house and the door was shut.

  It was only some minutes later when she found that Mena was by her side and she in Mena’s arms, that Flavia realized that the person dead was her own father.

  •

  Constanza had not believed that Simon could die. Since the war the thought had never crossed her mind. Much else, but never that. He and she were of the same age, almost to a day; Simon in her memory was life itself. Now she blamed herself for negligence. She was struck by his death; by death. It was not her own loss then that moved her, she hardly would have known if it was one. He was alive, now he is dead: that was the thought, the feeling foremost
in her mind, it was what she told herself.

  Simon! How was it possible, how could it be? Fuller news came slowly. Letters, the English papers. It had happened in Somerset, in the Italianate house. The uncle, the owner, who now befriended Simon, had long been ill, his end often in sight. Simon and his wife had been living with him, Simon going up to London to be in the House, going up for committees (Simon had been returned at every election, holding then a Labour seat); he had a Bill of his own on his hands just then, he had been working extremely hard, he had not quite recovered from a severe attack of influenza in the winter and it had all been rather a strain. The uncle took a turn for the better; in their relief they asked some people down to stay. There was a night with Simon flushed and excited and everybody drinking a great deal. Later the men had gone out into the park, the night was chilly, there had been some argument followed by a wager and Simon, fully dressed, had plunged into the water-piece. When they came in again and Mary, his wife, had begged him to take off his wet clothes, he had sent for more brandy and told her to go to hell. Next morning he was half delirious but insisted on getting up. He got himself to London but collapsed at Waterloo Station. He was taken by ambulance to a nursing home. There they found that he was in very poor condition—worn out—and without any resistance at all. He did not last three days.

  Constanza openly carried herself as one bereaved. She told her policeman that he must go.

  He was flabbergasted. “Am I not to see you again?”

  She did not know. Tears streaming down her face, she told him he must go at once. “It would not be respectful.”

  Flavia was able to say to her, “Death is very terrible?”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes,” said Constanza.

  And when the child continued to look at her, “Because it is the end. It is the end for them.”

  “Mummy, don’t cry so.”

  Constanza said, “One must cry for the dead.”

  She sent for all the English papers, read the obituaries, was assuaged by every tribute, deeply moved by the few words spoken in his memory in the House. She expected her friends to write to her. (Few did.) One matter agitated and distressed her—would they bury Simon in Northumberland? Would they? could they? she asked and wrung her hands.

  “They mind?” Flavia asked lightly.

  “We don’t know. We must act as if we knew. We must do as we feel would please them. Anything else is impious.”

  Anna inclined her head. She had been very good throughout, gentle and silent. She thought it was wrong of Constanza to include the child, she preferred a degree of prudery about death, and she had never seen her daughter so excessive; but awed, she neither commented nor interfered. She was hard hit herself. Simon’s death was a personal loss to her. He wrote to her quite often, and when she came to London he never failed to look her up. The reason was that he liked her. He had done so from the first. You old humbug, he would say and kiss her on both cheeks, and Anna would feel oddly relieved.

  She had often asked him to see and speak to the child, but he had told her, No. There was no point—it would have to be more than that, or nothing. Constanza never saw him; they had run into each other once or twice and he had been very cutting. Simon had taken against her since their divorce. A version of it had leaked out and people thought the worse of him for it. Captain Ware, it was said, was a figment of the imagination, and in point of fact when he was to be put on the pensions’ list he could not be found and there was no proof of his ever having existed. Men and women of all shades of opinion said that Simon had sacrificed Constanza to ambition; he himself had mocked ambition, and they did not forgive him. His new wife was not popular; their marriage had not been happy. Simon despised her and did not care who saw it, and that, too, did not go down very well. His political career had been set back—not for long it was said—by the decline of the Parliamentary Liberal Party and his own change of allegiance. In other ways his father-in-law had been able to be helpful. Simon, in his short life, had already made a mark for himself as a collector of Italian painting.

  Presently news came that Simon had been buried in Somerset with his uncle’s people.

  For days on end Constanza talked and talked about Simon. What he had said about this, about that, their first meeting, his plan to cut Stendhal, his views on the Russian Revolution, how he used to rock himself forward and back in his chair when in the grip of words, how he had known the classification of the Médoc Crus by heart and would recite them like so many lines of poetry:

  Château Latour, Château Rauzan-Ségla, Château Rauzan-Gassies,

  Château Léoville-Las Cases;

  Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, Château Monirose . . .

  It was a need to her and she felt it gave him substance.

  People at the hotel pricked up their ears and tried to get their two’s and two’s to match. They were mostly German, and called Constanza the young widow. Sometimes Flavia was accosted in her play and asked for confirmations.

  Simon’s uncle, advanced in age and very ill, did not survive the new shock long. A few weeks later his death was in The Times.

  “If Flavia had been a boy,” Anna said with a note of reproach.

  “Well, she isn’t,” said Constanza. “And don’t put anything into her head.”

  “When you think of the advances we have made in women’s rights! Who will inherit now? Who will have the house—?” Simon, so set against early children, so far had had no others.

  “Nobody knows. Some cousin in Canada, no doubt.”

  •

  She was wrong. When Simon had died, his wife was expecting a child. After some months of uncertainty, it was learnt that Simon had a posthumous son. The principessa was back at Fiesole by then; Constanza was off somewhere on her own. Flavia was shown the newspaper with the two or three printed lines.

  “That is my. . . half-brother?”

  “Yes, darling,” said Anna.

  “He is not your grandson?”

  “Not really,” Anna had to admit.

  “Shall we see him?”

  “Not for the present, my darling.”

  Flavia knew of course by now that there was nothing in that bastard story, a fib cooked up by Giorgio when she was too young to know better; all the same she felt convinced that something was a bit odd.

  The principessa had been informed of Simon’s will, made at the time of his second marriage and containing several bequests by codicil of various periods. By one codicil he left his personal jewellery to Anna. By a later one (having meanwhile collected a library), he left her his art books. The books, cases and cases of them, arrived at Fie-sole in due course. Anna was very touched. The jewellery had puzzled them, but when it, too, arrived (in a small insured parcel) Constanza said that she saw what Simon had meant. All of it—some links, some studs, a flat watch and chain, a pin—had originally been given to him by Anna. “And very nice they are, too, mama,” Constanza said, kissing her, “I didn’t take in at the time how nice. He must have loved them.” Apparently he had never had or worn anything else. For a day or two Anna was nearly happy.

  The third codicil had been made the winter before Simon died. It was regarded in the nature of a bomb-shell by his second wife and her family, and they gave notice through their lawyers that they would contest it. Simon had left all his pictures absolutely to his only daughter Flavia. The bequest was written in his own hand and tone. In case the girl turned out a dud, he wrote, this legacy would at least keep her in husbands. If not, and if she sold it at her convenience, it would help her to have an interesting life to which he wished her luck. Until she was twenty-one he desired the pictures to be in the custody—he used this word—of Constanza, his first wife. She would look after them and at them.

  Anna’s solicitor’s advised her of the other side’s contention: The paintings had been bought through the financial assistance of Mr. Herbert’s father-in-law and on the explicit understanding of their going ultimately to the Nation.

  “Yellow Press mon
ey,” said Anna.

  “Very well spent for once,” said Constanza.

  She had read at one time that Simon was bidding for a Tintoretto; she had scarcely believed this possible. Now they learnt that it had been true. The catalogue of Simon’s pictures was awe-inspiring. Tintoretto, Veronese, a Bellini, two Mantegna, a Titian.

  “Rather fabulous for him,” Constanza said fondly. “It was very cheeky of Simon to leave them to the bambina and very sweet. She must hear of it one day.”

  “But,” Anna said, “they belong to them?”

  “There’s no doubt. They belong to them. Lord Thingummy’s money. A great pity. You must write the lawyers to say there is no need to contest.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said the principessa.

  She, as Flavia’s guardian, had to sign a mass of papers. When it was all over she was informed that there could be no objection now to letting Flavia inherit such pictures as Simon had owned before his second marriage. Arrangements were being made to have them delivered at Constanza’s London address.

  “That’s easy,” Constanza said, “he never had any. Poor Simon.” And she remembered how she had prevented him from buying a Degas drawing. One thing drifted into her possession at that time. Someone sent her a snapshot of Simon. It must have been taken shortly after the war, and he was in wig and gown. Simon, as he had said he would, had been called to the Bar, though he never practised. He must have bought himself a wig or borrowed one, for here he was in it, new and snowy white, looking as pleased as punch. Constanza thought that she had never seen him look so much like himself.

  •

  Giorgio’s American journey did not turn out a success. No single very serious thing happened, it was just one muddle, one vexation, after another. He spent too much money, borrowed more, failed to pay some bills, trod on people’s toes. He took some of them on lordly sprees and made blatant use of others. He never seemed to know or care to know who was who and he made a good number of social gaffes. He proposed to girls and made love to married women; he never listened to anyone’s advice, treated Mr. Baxter, the trustee, as if he were the steward at Castelfonte, got into poker games on trains and never went within a hundred miles of that instructive job.