A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  After a time Constanza became more herself. Flavia thawed. She was able to ask, “Why is it so different this time? Why are you so——”

  “So what?”

  “Rigid?”

  “It must be shock. I cannot take it in. All my life whenever I looked up there was mama. For better and for worse.”

  In herself she knew that she had not begun to come to terms. It might take a long time; it might take for ever.

  When she began to talk more, she said one day to Mena: “Now that mama is safe, you must tell me. Did she mean to do . . . what she did?”

  “Who can tell,” said Mena. “She is at peace now.”

  “You saw her come back from Nice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then?”

  “She was very angry. Like many other times. I’d seen her worse before.”

  “Is that true, Mena? But the other thing——?”

  Mena, with her shut face, said: “That as well. That happened before. It began in London when the prince did not come for her. Before, I was always in time.”

  Constanza said slowly, “Is this true? Can I believe you?”

  “You ask as your mother asked. What use are questions if you don’t want to believe.”

  •

  At Marseilles, Constanza was being let into figures and facts. “This, as you know, was your mother’s annual income. Before the recession that was.”

  They were seated in a cubicle. The American lawyer behind his desk, Constanza in a small armchair in front.

  “This can’t be right,” she said. “Mama had only just over half of that.”

  “I was speaking of her income before the deduction of what went to her husband, the prince in Rome.”

  “Will you say that again?” said Constanza.

  “You were not aware of this arrangement?” said the lawyer.

  •

  At the end of that interview she said, “How is it possible that after all there is so much?”

  The lawyer became almost human. “Well, Mrs. Herbert, it was always a pretty solid fortune. Then, as you may not recall, the investments were changed in 1914, a transaction that led to some eminently satisfactory results. To put not too fine a point on it, Baxter succeeded in more or less doubling the estate.”

  “We had no idea.”

  “There was evidence that your mother never read her financial statements. She never knew that she was a very rich woman.”

  Constanza did not suppress a smile. “She read Mr. Baxter’s letters.”

  The lawyer smiled, too. “Ah,” he said, seeing her to the door, “Baxter’s always been a careful bird. Well, I hope he didn’t keep you all too short.”

  •

  The man of principles’ car was at the door. So far, Constanza had accepted her neighbour’s services absent-mindedly. He drove fast; she was able to keep silent. She was a woman who had just lost her mother, he had the Latin directness and simplicity with death.

  What she had heard that day, led her into talk. “I learnt something about my mother,” she said on their drive home, “I thought she could not surprise me. But she did.”

  “You’ve been with the lawyers, so it must have to do with money.”

  “It has.”

  “People always surprise one about that,” he said.

  She said, “You know, I’ve read your books.”

  From the wheel, he sketched a slight ironic bow. “Madame, you do me too much honour.”

  “Not a bit,” she said. “You have a style like Anatole France with a modern twist. And you know, your idea about selecting our rulers by controlled tests was brought up—very rudimentarily—by a Labour man in 1912. The Fabians would have none of it. But I heard Birkenhead talk about it as a future possibility. For me the snag is still quis custodiet, who’s going to devise those tests?”

  The man of principles took his eyes off the road and gave her a quick glance.

  “We shall have to learn to co-operate with one another so completely,” he said, “that we can afford to play it lightly—democracy without equality.”

  “You might get misunderstood,” she said.

  “I have,” he said, and laughed. He added, “Social justice can only be had by trying to be just in new ways over and over again; you can’t leave it in a set mould once and for all.”

  At the villa, he vaulted out of the car to open the door for her. Flavia had come out to meet them.

  “You don’t move much like a professorial type,” she said.

  “Oh, I used to ride a bit.” He did not tell them that until only a few years before he had been show-riding for France.

  Constanza went in, he was turning the car; Flavia saw the long look with which he followed her mother.

  No sooner in the house Constanza told them: “For twenty years mama has been giving nearly half her income to my father.”

  “It was to keep the palazzo repaired,” said Mena, “and they must never sell it.”

  “So you knew it?”

  “I knew it,” said Mena. “But she didn’t like anyone to know.”

  “So that was the ‘drain on her income,’ that was what she had done for Giorgio. She used to blush when I spoke of papa’s financial position; I thought it was because she was ashamed of having left him badly off. What else did you know, Mena?”

  Mena said, “I knew everything.”

  •

  It was from then on that she and Constanza began to go over the past. In the weeks that followed they talked; in snatches. If only we had not left Rome, was Constanza’s theme: if this had not happened in quite such a way, if that had never been said. . . .

  “Why did nobody shut up Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie. If only we had stopped her from talking.”

  “My love, it wasn’t la Trommo who told her. La Trommo knew nothing.”

  “What was it then that she spread?”

  “Oh that. Something she got into her head after we’d been to Cortina d’Ampezzo. I told you La Trommo never knew anything worth knowing.”

  “But what was it?” said Flavia.

  “It was rubbish. She told people that your grandmother had already turned against the prince after Constanza was born and that was why there were no more bambini.”

  “And then Giorgio came and mama carried on so frightfully. Was it because it made her look a liar?”

  “La Trommo soon thought it was the prince who’d been a brute.”

  “Then who told mama about Giulia?”

  “Some giovanotto,” said Mena and described him.

  “Oh, that ass Milly. My Latin tutor. Oh God: I started that, too. I never forgot how I snubbed him when he tried to tell me some tale about papa. I told him that whatever it was, mama knew nothing about it. And he never forgot.”

  Flavia said: “How is one to live—if every step leads to another?”

  “Like that,” said Constanza.

  Mena said, “Don’t fret yourself, my lamb. That young man didn’t tell her anything she did not know. One day many many years before, when the old principessa was still alive, your mother opened a door and saw them, the prince and the Marchesa Giulia.”

  “And where was that?”

  “In the long room at Castelfonte.”

  After a pause, Constanza said, “Mama never liked that house.”

  “She had arrived unexpected, it was about one of her schemes, she shut the door again and walked away to the other side of the house and came in by the terrace. She did not know I had followed her. She never knew that a soul had seen her. But I saw the prince look up and I knew that he, too, had seen.”

  Presently Constanza said, “I understand his letting her go without much of a fight. Why did he let me go? At that time I thought that he loved me very much. Why didn’t he tell me? If I had known the truth, if I had known that my mother had arranged it so that I could not go back to him, I should not have left. I would have put my foot down and stayed. But he did not tell me.”

  “You are wrong there, too
,” Mena said. And she told of the plan they all had hatched to keep her, and how the prince would have none of it for her sake.

  Constanza only said, “This is too much. Too much now.”

  And then one day Mena said there was something else. She lowered her eyes. Out of her dress she produced a manilla envelope. “The Signora Principessa asked me to give you this,” she said formally. “ ‘Give this to my daughter,’ she told me, ‘and tell her that I know she will understand.’ ”

  Constanza drew back. “When did my mother give you this message?”

  Still looking at the floor, Mena said, “The day after she came back from Nice.”

  “The last time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why have you waited so long?”

  Mena now met her eyes. “She was not herself then. You had too much to bear. She did not tell me when I was to give the envelope to you.”

  “Do you know what is inside?”

  “I do not. I can guess. Angry words. Something that had better been forgotten. But she told me to give it to you; it is my duty, I must.”

  “Yes, Mena. And thank you. Mena—when I think of you, when I think of the life you have had with us—the life you have not had!”

  Mena drew herself up. “I? I have had the best of lives! I was with her. I loved her. She was always good to me. My man left me when the bambina hadn’t been born two months. He told me there wasn’t enough to eat and cleared out. He wasn’t wrong there. The bambina died. I never set eyes on him again. How can you ask me what life I should have had without her! She took me into service at the palazzo and I knew nothing. That Cosima wanted me to stay down in the scullery, but the Signora Principessa said she liked my face and taught me to look after her. Since then it has been nothing but, ‘Mena, you are not working too hard? Mena, shouldn’t you take the day off? Mena, are you comfortable? are they looking after you all right? have they given you a good room? are your sheets dry?’ The best wasn’t too good for me. When we travelled she thought of me first. She didn’t even make me go among the snakes. You know what she was, the way she would get, the things she could say. Yet to me, in thirty-five years, she never raised her voice, I never had a harsh word. How many can say that of themselves!”

  •

  Constanza took the manilla envelope and went to her room alone. It did not contain abusive words, it contained a will. It was brief, efficiently worded, dated, witnessed, signed. It left everything the principessa stood possessed of to Giorgio.

  Constanza, the same day, told Flavia.

  “We must cable Mr. Baxter, as this changes everything. Yes, darling, it’s a blow. I must get used to it.” She added quickly, “Now listen, my sweet, you don’t have to worry for yourself.”

  “I’m not worried,” said Flavia, and it was true. To boys and girls of her age the world, the future, appears both wide open and unreal.

  “We’ll get you to Oxford and all if I have to borrow from Mr. James. And I’m sure papa can help.”

  “You forget I was going to get scholarships in any case,” said Flavia. Then she asked, “When did she make this will?”

  “Last month, in March, it is dated three days before she died.”

  “Who are those witnesses?”

  “Two garden boys, near illiterates; I engaged them for her myself.”

  “I suppose it is valid?”

  “Oh, yes. I learnt enough from Simon’s books for that.”

  “So have I,” said Flavia, “I’m beginning to be interested in the Bar. Valid, unless—Constanza, we all know, including that colonel at Alassio from what you told me, that you could easily prove, well . . . unsound mind.”

  Constanza said, “Don’t, Flavia. Let her rest in peace.”

  “She did not think of you.”

  “I see it as her money. When she was alive she spent it, on all of us. She had a right to leave it as vindictively as she pleased. She was a very unhappy woman and she always tried to express it. At last she has found an effective way.”

  “But why Giorgio, after the ring and all? If she was so angry with both of you why didn’t she leave it to your Uncle Jack’s children, or some charity as people do? Can you understand it?”

  “She thought I would. She expected me to. It was a gesture of total destruction. She knew I knew she thought that with Giorgio it would all be gone. Dead waste. She must have wanted just that.”

  “I see. And you, Constanza? What will you do?”

  “I haven’t had much time to think. When women of my age lose their money they try to become secretaries, or do translations. I can’t even spell in Italian. And farm labour isn’t very adequately paid.”

  “Giorgio would have to have you live with him in the palazzo later on, wouldn’t he? Isn’t that expected? Your father had his sisters live with him.”

  “Darling, let me get off that cable before I have second thoughts.”

  •

  Flavia prevailed on her mother to go through Anna’s papers before cabling. The contents of Anna’s desk at Alassio had just been sent in a large sealed packet by her friend, the colonel.

  “There may be something else.”

  “How can there?” Constanza said. “Those are the papers that were in her desk downstairs. They can’t have anything to do with her last days.”

  Flavia said, “They were sent by Colonel Robinson. How did it come about that they were in his possession?”

  Constanza said she understood that Mena had taken them across to the colonel’s house immediately after the discovery of Anna’s death.

  “Before the doctor or anyone arrived?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why should Mena have done that? if these were just old papers in nonna’s desk?”

  “I see now,” said Constanza. “Mena cannot read English, at least not quickly and with certainty. She may have found something upstairs.”

  “Yes: and not being able to make out what it was, and not being sure if it ought to be found, and not wanting it destroyed, she put it with the papers in the desk and took the lot to the colonel. Don’t you think we’d better go through them, Constanza?”

  Constanza said she did not want to find anything more.

  They took the packet with the papers upstairs to the verandah that served as Flavia’s study.

  There were letters, bills, more letters. “Here is something.”

  What they read was a letter from a high official at Florence, a surface fascist, who used to come to Anna’s house at Fiesole. It was written in English and it was a warning. It advised Anna to leave the country within the next weeks, there was certain information that her arrest was imminent.

  “That too!”

  “Something else that Mena did not know,” said Flavia. “Do you think this was what she found by nonna’s bed?”

  “I almost hope so,” said Constanza.

  The next thing was a second will in Anna’s hand. It was as brief as the first which it revoked. It left everything “as in my previous will deposited in Providence Rhode Island to my beloved daughter Constanza.”

  Flavia spoke, “So she had second thoughts. It is all right.”

  “My beloved daughter.”

  “We can forget all about it, mummy. You need never milk goats.”

  “Signed and everything, I suppose?”

  “Everything. The same witnesses.”

  “Did she do it on her last day?” asked Constanza.

  “Yes—no—actually it is dated on the first. How very odd—Good God! it is dated the first of October.”

  “October?”

  “She must have made a mistake. October first Nineteen-twenty-nine.”

  For a while they floundered in bewilderment.

  “The same gardeners witnessed it—those boys hadn’t even come to Alassio in October—a sheet of the same writing-paper as that of the first will—there can be no doubt that this is her latest will.”

  “She mistook the date. But how?”

  “I thin
k I can answer that,” said Constanza. “The first of October was the date on which she left Rome twenty years ago. She always remembered it; it was a particularly difficult time for her each year, so Mena told me.”

  “So when she was so very unhappy again——”

  “Yes, Flavia.”

  “But this is her last intention and will?”

  “Oh undoubtedly.”

  “But not valid?”

  “Not valid at all.”

  “Couldn’t the witnesses speak up?”

  “What could they have to say, poor illiterate louts.”

  “Morally it is valid,” said Flavia. Then she added herself, “Tell that to Giorgio.”

  Constanza said, “There is one thing I can do: I can burn the first will. That is what I shall do; now that I am certain of mama’s intentions.”

  “Isn’t it a crime?”

  “If it’s found out.”

  “Oh, mummy, you will be breaking the law.”

  “I’m going to take the law into my own hands,” Constanza said. “One only lives once.”

  “Would the man of principles do it?”

  “Not he,” said Constanza. “But do stop calling him by that silly name.”

  “Michel,” said Flavia.

  “I shall burn it.”

  Constanza looked about the room. It was full spring and there were no more stoves or fires in the grate. Neither of them smoked. There was not even an ash-tray. Downstairs in the kitchen Mena and the new French cook were busy with the dinner. To Flavia’s surprise, her mother got up, put the wills on the table under a stack of letters, weighed them down with a stone and left the room. In the door she said, “Such things have to be done properly. I shall see to it first thing tomorrow.”

  Flavia now had her clue: “She does not like it; she is putting it off.” She went downstairs, strolled into the kitchen. “What are we having tonight? May I peep? Oh, and Mena, will you cut us some lemon and some ice for our vermouth? Oh, I didn’t see the tray, sorry.” When she was out of the kitchen, a few French phosphorus matches were in her pocket. A few sticks, not the box; they would miss nothing. She returned to the verandah, locked the door—such things have to be done properly—struck a match on the sole of her shoe and over a saucer set light to the first will. When it had smouldered into a thin black curl, she struck another match and burnt the second will. She scooped the remains into a sheet of newspaper and took them out of the house. She went down by the side of the road and scattered and trod and rubbed them into the earth. It was still light enough for her to see that there was left no trace. As she was coming up again, the man from the tower went by in his car.