A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  They took the villa that had been so fortuitously offered. It was a preposterous choice, as they learnt later on, at the time it did not occur to them to look for any other. It stood on the end of a narrow hill edging the sea, and it was exposed to every wind. The hill which was called the Hill, la Colline, was covered chiefly with stunted, shrubby pines, and there were a few modest villas, all new, and all of them already locked and shuttered against the winter. Half a mile inland lay Mediterranean country—cypresses, olives, vines, but the hill with the sea, the pines, the villas, offered only a mélange of the grandly bleak with the suburban. The only graceful thing on it was a Roman watch-tower at the tip, white-washed and soberly converted into a place to live. The tower, too, was shut up.

  Lewis’s telegrams subsided. He accepted Constanza’s plea to postpone, to wait. We have been rushing ourselves into things, she wrote to him. Very well, if you wish, take your time, he answered by telegraph. She had never had a letter from him yet.

  “Do you think all his books are ghost-written?” she said to Flavia. He did not offer to come to the South of France, but suggested various meeting places. Her answer always was: Later; not yet. At last he acquiesced.

  “I rather think he has commitments at Stockholm at the end of the month,” Constanza said.

  She asked Flavia when she would be off. “Michaelmas term must have started.”

  Flavia had thought it over. “I think I’ll stay on with you for a bit, if I may,” she said lightly.

  “Darling, your career!”

  “I’m very young actually, I’ll be able to catch up. We might write them to send me some books: I might try to do some work for them by correspondence.”

  Flavia did not know why she, too, now felt compelled to stay. There were several pointers: a chivalrous sense that she must not desert Constanza; a sense of something going to happen; curiosity.

  Constanza had rather felt that to be alone—a rare state for her—was a prerequisite of the reculement, the retreat, she was seeking for herself; but she was touched and pleased, and she said yes.

  “As long as you remember that you are not stuck here because I choose to be. There is still a Calais Express for you every day.”

  Their villa was new and clean and ugly, down to the coloured tiles. Except for the dining-room there was mercifully little furniture besides the wide brass bedsteads and the armoires à glace. The coal-stove in the kitchen was hard to light and smoked whenever the mistral blew, the windows were badly fitted and rattled in the wind, and the mistral that winter blew a very great deal. It is a hard wind, bringing swept blue, bitter days. Soon they were extremely cold. They lit mi-russes and kept them going and they bought a tinny electric fire with two bars, but the current was weak and regularly failed and their fire often fused. Flavia enjoyed mending it. The first-floor master bedroom had a glassed verandah overhanging the sea, and while the sun was on it this was the one warm room in the place. Flavia turned it into her study and had the dining-room table moved upstairs to work on. The drawback of this glass-house was that if one opened a window—which one was obliged to do now and again if only to gain respite from the rattling—in swept the wind and out whirled one’s papers. There wasn’t a drawer in the house and even the stones they used for paper-weights did not always avail, so at least once every day this happened and the only thing to do was to hurl oneself downstairs, scramble down the precipice and retrieve what could be retrieved off thyme and pine before it was blown into the sea. “Mes æuvres!” Flavia shrieked and Constanza, too, dropped everything and out they dashed on one more paper-chase.

  They had no cook or maid. A femme de ménage washed up and cleaned; she was one of the best in the place but by their Italian standards, she was a slut. A woman who kept a fish-stall outside one of the cafés on the front, and who had been in service in her youth, was easily persuaded by Constanza to come up every day at noon and cook them a delicious mess of provençal vegetables or fish. Their dinner was cooked by Constanza. If the stove did not light, she would start a charcoal fire. On some evenings Flavia walked down to the village with napkin and bowl and brought back a plat à emporter from the traiteur.

  St-Jean was a summer place, they found out; the painters still came, but also foreigners now and writers. One very eminent English man of letters indeed was said to be building next year; they did not quite believe this but Flavia pricked up her ears. The people they got to know that winter were French, local and middle-aged. The man and wife who owned the hotel, the maire, the man who ran the house-agency in summer and was trying to start a bus-line to Bandol, the man who ran the paint-shop, a retired wholesale grocer from Clermont-Ferrand and an old journalist who still wrote feuilletons for L’Echo du Mîdi.

  These new friends sent them confitures, mimosa from their gardens, freshly caught sardines. Constanza was advised where to get wood, Flavia was given the use of a bicycle in good repair. They were asked to houses for l’apéritif and a game of boules, though most of their social life took place at the Café de la Marine. Flavia and Constanza went down there after dinner to play belote or dominoes. The French forgave Constanza’s bungling play because she was so beautiful, and because she was animated and enjoyed what they had to tell. There were always stories—they were all articulate, all raconteurs—stories about food, about love, about politics, about funerals and money. On they went, with Constanza languidly putting the wrong trump on the wrong suit, about les amours du médecin, le terrain du curé, les pots de vin du ministre and la mort de Madame Bontemps. And of course about what to eat, where to eat, what to drink with what to eat, what one ate last night, where to eat next Sunday, what one drank, what one paid, what was said. What was said entranced Constanza most. In Italy, she told Flavia, she had been taught to express herself by exclamations, in London by a five-term code, “These people use words.” Flavia, with the conservatism of youth, kept more aloof, but she did apply herself to learn proper French.

  “Sans accent,” they told her.

  Immediately Flavia broke into her mother’s Italian accent and after that into English French.

  “She’s a parrot,” said Constanza. But when they were alone she encouraged Flavia to tell the stories back to her in meridional or genteel pointu.

  At that season the café shut by half past ten. The consommations, cafés arosés, demis de bière, tisanes and rum grog for the jovial, had been settled in rounds by the men. Everybody shook hands and said bonne nuit and à demain. Flavia and Constanza had their pocket torches and thick overcoats. Nobody lived their way, and together they set off on their walk home up the hill.

  When they got there they would find the villa freezing. Constanza went straight to bed, Flavia in overcoat and trousers sat up with her. They drank Viandox, a concoction made with liquid bouillon essence and thermos water, which had the virtue of being hot. And they talked. Much about the French. How strange they were to her, Constanza said, and how familiar; they made her feel like an animal uncertain if it is its own image that is confronting it in the looking-glass. The French, she said, had a most unnerving effect on the Italians. She found them soothing and diverting—so much scepticism tied to so many certainties. “They are softer than we are and more stoical.” Their losses in the war, she said, had been on a tragic scale and one still had a sense of national bereavement. Yet they had kept a glow on life, and she admired them for it.

  She also said to Flavia what an unexpected relief it was to find herself here, in a neutral country, “where, thank God, nobody is Anglo-Saxon either,” to have come to terra incognita, new ground.

  They read enormously that winter, mostly in the mornings because the days were short and the artificial light so poor, and the books were French. Not Stendhal—he was another France, Constanza said—but Balzac of course, Zola and Maupassant and the Goncourt Journals; Jules Romains, Jules Renard, François Mauriac and Julien Green.

  “No wonder we are so much simpler, nous autres Italiens, we haven’t had so many people tell us what
we’re like.”

  They also read the polished idols of French literature, who were idols then, Jacques de Lacretelle, Abel, Hermant, Giraudoux, Valérie Larbaud. And Flavia also read Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin.

  Every day in the afternoon they went for a walk to the tip of the hill as far as the Roman tower. An enclosure had been walled off in front of it and below those walls there was shelter from the wind and it was warm. So warm, that when they peeped inside they were not surprised to see a flourishing fig-tree. There was also a fountain, only a sketch of a dolphin spouting, a pastiche, a learned mason’s joke, but here, in this region so poor in casual architecture, its presence moved Constanza and filled her with contentment.

  Flavia peeped further. Through a chink in a shutter she saw a book-lined wall, a fire-place, something that must be a paraffin lamp. “Wise man.” They knew now that the tower belonged to a Parisian, un homme politique, without, it appeared, party, following or office.

  Now and then they spent the day at Toulon—by tram to La Seine, thence by ferry across the harbour—buying books, sailor clothes for Flavia, eating coquillages, but their real reason for going was that they liked to be there. One night when Topaze was on tour at the Municipal Theatre, the St-Jean house agent took them all en bande in his brand-new bus; after the play they had supper on the Boulevard, and getting the bus home was like collectively driving a whale.

  There was a local cinema hall and it gave a performance on Sunday nights: a short silent film, a long silent film, static advertisements, a man at an upright piano. Down in the well sprawled the youth of St-Jean, in berets basques, whistling tunes, champing cacahouettes. The notables and villa people sat in the balcony upstairs. The whole place was blue with caporal tobacco smoke. Constanza and Flavia went regularly. The price of the grand seats was Frs 4.50, nine pence. It was an innocent life they had that winter, and they were very happy.

  •

  When they found out her address, London friends proposed themselves to stay. After they’d been discouraged they said, “Oh well, Constanza must be off with a new man.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “Flavia’s with her this time.”

  “What is going to happen to that girl?”

  “What will she turn into?”

  “Join a cloistered order I daresay.”

  The real outside world was Lewis and the principessa. Constanza was surprised how easily, how plainly, she had come to a decision about Lewis. She could no longer imagine marrying him. False trails had misled her. One was simple enough: for a few days at Genoa she had believed it to be the coup de foudre. It was not; it was a mistake she made, and that was that. The other, irresistible, trail had been her own interpretation of portents: the sudden meeting with Lewis, the co-respondent, the key-figure of her divorce, during her last days of London in the mood of change (off with the old); Lewis almost wordlessly moving into her pattern; the dismantled flat; the discovery about Simon’s pictures; all, all of it, sudden and condensed, pointed one way. It pointed: she mistook the direction. It was not to the new, it was not to the future; it had been a final going backwards, it had been the rounding of the past, the end, not a beginning, of the pattern. It had been in fact the last step in her off with the old. A narrow escape!

  Flavia, very disappointed indeed but equable, asked her, “How does one break with a man?”

  “I never found it difficult,” Constanza said. “If you really mean to break; and do it. There’s a natural breaking point, though it’s always one who sees it first. If you allow things to mend—one does and they do—you get something different, a kind of artificial fibre, and then, well, misery begins. I don’t find it at all easy to explain to you, my sweet.”

  “I’m learning,” said Flavia loftily.

  It was not easy with Lewis. St-Jean knew that the telegraph woman (it was an old woman in a black dress) once more climbed that hill two or three times a day. Lewis would not take no for an answer. At last he made a suggestion which he was forced to send under cover of an envelope. He wrote a letter. All right, he said, if it is marriage you object to, will you allow me to establish you in a house or flat in a European capital of your choice? Paris being of course the most convenient.

  Constanza roared with laughter. Dear Lewis, she said, and it’s always Paris. “Simon longed for us to go when we were married. It was the war and we had to make it Wiltshire.”

  “Does Lewis want to make you a kept woman, mummy?”

  “Yes, darling. No more, nor less, than in marriage. But so much more flattering always.”

  At length, Lewis had to start for South America.

  “Shelved?” said Flavia.

  “Well, he is fond of cabling. That poor woman! Yes, Flavia, it’s shelved. Lewis isn’t one to go after what he cannot get.”

  •

  In London they said, “Constanza’s going to marry Lewis Crane.”

  “She can’t, he’s been to Sing-Sing.”

  “That wouldn’t stop her. As long as he doesn’t get jugged again.”

  “Anyhow, Crane’s got at least five wives.”

  Someone else said, “Nonsense. I happen to know all about Lewis Crane. I know his people.”

  “Oh?”

  “Is he Rasputin’s son?”

  “I couldn’t possibly tell you. The man once did me a good turn.”

  “So very frightful?”

  “So frightfully respectable.”

  •

  From time to time Anna descended on them. She arrived with Mena, driven by her spoilt young Italian chauffeur, and they all got out of the car. Anna, slim, erect, dressed in sober and becoming silks, walked up the gravel path. Anna was nearly sixty and her beautiful soft hair was white. Her blue eyes were paler than they had been, and by her clothes and presentation of herself she was marked as an old lady, but her face was unlined, smooth, with the skin and features as finely fragile as they must have been at thirty. There was an unreal, waxy, artificial look about her, yet whatever it was it was not art. Mena and the chauffeur followed, having unloaded baskets of exquisitely chosen provisions.

  “Mama, cara,” said Constanza, and they kissed.

  For a few minutes all went well. The presents were unwrapped. Then gradually it came back again. The principessa looked at the room with disfavour as if she were seeing it for the first time.

  “Really Constanza, I cannot understand you.”

  “Yes, mama. I’m not as adept as you in choosing houses.”

  “We are as hideous as we’re uncomfortable,” said Flavia and giggled.

  Mena meanwhile had gone off to sort and sew up Constanza’s things. She did this every time. Anna fastened her attention on the door-knobs.

  “What is their substance?”

  Nobody answered her. She said, “White porcelain. I’m sure they come off in your hand. And the way these doors are set—how can you bear it when you have the tramontana?”

  “The name of the prevailing wind is mistral,” said Constanza.

  Anna returned to where she started. “I cannot understand you. When I think of Somerset! We knew one or two old people in Rhode Island who made themselves deliberately uncomfortable. Can’t you at least find a better house?”

  “For one thing, I signed an eight months’ lease for this one.”

  “I never let that worry me,” said the principessa.

  “Mama,” said Constanza, and not for the first time either, “there’s a depression on. Mr. Baxter writes to me, too.”

  “The depression doesn’t touch honest investments,” said Anna.

  Flavia snorted. She had come to feel very critical of her grandmother, even hostile.

  In point of fact Mr. Baxter had secretly written to Constanza on a reassuring note. Their investments had suffered relatively little (so far); dividends had dropped off and were bound to drop off further, yet as it happened the fund disposed of a capital sum to tide them over for some time to come. Nevertheless it would be wise to impress ec
onomy on the principessa.

  “We’re not in the work-house yet,” she said. “As a matter of fact, Giorgio is doing very well.”

  “Tell us?” said Flavia.

  “He’s gone into partnership with some car-designer at Turin. He spoke to Colonel Robinson about it: they are putting an engine back to front——”

  “Front to back,” said Flavia.

  “The colonel says it’s quite an innovation. They’re going to show it in Milan this spring.”

  “Not a new motor car?” said Constanza.

  “Giorgio calls it his proto-type.”

  “He talked to me about something like that on the train.”

  “Was that the hare-brained scheme, mummy?”

  “It sounded as if it required a round sum of money,” said Constanza.

  “Oh, Giorgio is only one of many partners,” said his mother. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if after all he turned out——”

  “Responsible? Very wonderful.”

  “And what are your plans?” said Anna.

  The truth was that Anna was as disappointed by Constanza’s backing out of marrying Lewis as she had been by the original plan. After the first wave, she had waited to be persuaded, tempted, won over; the blankness instead frustrated her. She could not bear Constanza’s inactivity. She called it aimless, empty.

  Constanza did not give way.

  To Mena she said, “What is the matter?”

  Mena answered, “She is tired of herself.”

  •

  From Italian friends Constanza now received warning that her stay so near the border had aroused suspicion. It was known that she had been put on a black list and they advised her to cross into Italy as seldom as she could. It was not unexpected news and it put an end to Constanza’s slightest usefulness. It also served her present resolution to stay put: no visits to Alassio. Flavia, with ill grace, went every other week.

  “How was she?”

  “She hardly eats. At least not at table.”