A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  —SYBILLE BEDFORD, 2000

  PROLOGUES

  THE RELEVANT questions, as it happened, came by chance.

  The man from the newspaper said, “The Twenties were your period, Miss Herbert? It is Miss Herbert?”

  “Well, Mrs., actually,” said Flavia.

  “You knew many of the writers of the time?”

  “Goodness, no. I was a child. Living with my grandmother most of the year. In Italy.”

  “Then shall we say the Thirties?”

  “I grew up in them. I grew up in the Thirties. I came of age the year Hitler went into the Rhineland.”

  “Is that so?” said the young man. “But you have written about the Twenties?”

  “Other people’s past. That always seems more clear.”

  “Is it true that your grandmother was a duchess, Mrs. Herbert?”

  “Not true.”

  “Your readers would be interested to know.”

  “Your readers.”

  He said earnestly, “Mrs. Herbert, our readers are your readers potentially.”

  “What a delightful prospect: you have so many.”

  “Thank you.”

  Flavia gave him a look, teasing, detached, friendly. “My grandmother was an American lady.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “She was a Miss Howland and came from Rhode Island, New England.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “She must have got married.”

  More firmly, Flavia said, “She’s been dead these thirty-five years.” Then added, “Oh, she was married.”

  “I’m only trying to fill in your international background.”

  Flavia said nothing.

  He looked insistent.

  “As a premature European?”

  “But you were born in England?”

  “Born in England. I had to cross the Channel.”

  “Your father?”

  “Was called to the Bar and became a member of Parliament, if that describes him. He can hardly be news now. He died early. Much too early.”

  “Wasn’t it he who left those pictures to the nation?”

  “Yes, they went to the nation.”

  Something made him ask, “You knew your father? You were old enough?”

  “No.” She did not add, I was old enough.

  “And where were you educated, Mrs. Herbert?”

  “At home. Not that we had one. There were . . . interruptions.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I had the luck to have some bright friends.”

  “University?” “No university,” said Flavia.

  “The bright friends——?”

  “Older than myself.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “Accidents of time and place.”

  “I understand you lived in France as a girl? The South of France.”

  “Yes, in France.”

  “It must have been quite the life.”

  “You know, in its own way, it was.” Flavia got up, crossed the room, sat down in another chair. It was a habit she had. “There was an illusion of freedom, the French used to be good at providing that. And there was one thing one didn’t think about then in that corner of the shrinking West—who called it that?—we never thought that life as we knew it could change at such a rate, that the quality of life would change.”

  “Yes?”

  “And there was the place itself. . . .” She was talking rapidly though with sudden hesitations as if she were picking her way, “The countryside down there was so very good—austere, uncluttered: olives and rock. And light. Always light. And of course the sea. It got under your skin, you became part of it, until you came to feel that you could live nowhere else. It was like love.”

  “You had a French stepfather, Mrs. Herbert?”

  “You might call him that.”

  “He also lived on the Riviera?”

  “In retirement, withdrawal rather than retirement. He wrote. Sociological home-truths. Nobody listened much. If they did today, they’d probably tear him to pieces. He didn’t think much of the common man and he foresaw a great many things that have happened since. He held no false hopes. By the way, it was not the Riviera, not by a long chalk. The unsmart side of the Coast: Provence, a fishing port and a handful of people.”

  “But you left?”

  “By Munich it was all over.”

  “After the war, you didn’t go back?”

  “I didn’t go back.”

  “Didn’t you want to?”

  “There’s nobody left there and the place must have changed. Besides I rather dislike my younger self. Don’t ask me what it was like.”

  “What was it like, your younger self?”

  “Young.”

  He said, “That’s no crime.”

  “Ah, well.” Flavia picked up a paperweight, put it down, lifted her hand. “One does odd things. You see, when one’s young one doesn’t feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not for good; everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.”

  The young man said, “When did you publish your first book?”

  Flavia told him.

  “A late starter?”

  “A late starter. Though not a late vocation.”

  “Was that the first——?” he supplied a title.

  “What homework! It must be a pretty thin book—it was a kind of an echo.”

  “Echo of what?”

  “Oh, many things; other people’s ideas. Things one liked to believe in.”

  “Would you mind checking this list of publications for me?”

  “Not at all.” And presently she said, “And now I must give you that drink.”

  “If you can make it a quick one, I have another assignment.”

  “What will you have? Scotch——?”

  “Please.”

  She made him one and gave herself a brandy and soda.

  While they drank she said, “I’m afraid this has been rather a dull interview for you. But if I may say so, you’re a bit to blame as well. People in your trade have so little curiosity.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “It takes two to tell the truth.”

  •

  Before he left the man from the newspaper produced a book in a vivid jacket. “It’s by this author I’m going to see now, American. It’s coming out here this week, it’s supposed to teach you how to change.”

  “Seldom a bad idea.”

  “You know, how to cope with life by doing all sorts of stunts to yourself——”

  “Do let me have a look,” said Flavia.

  “It’s all in recipes.”

  “Recipes?”

  “Here’s one that tells you to sit down in a chair and ask yourself a question and give the answer; it’s usually a bad one so you go on asking day after day till you get it right.”

  “And what’s the right answer going to do for you?”

  “Search me.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “There’s a whole collection, you’ve got to get the right one too.” The man from the newspaper read out, “ ‘The life of what person, real or fictional, did I try to lead between the age of sixteen and twenty-one?’ ”

  “Easy,” Flavia said, “the first answer, the bad answer: My own.”

  •

  That same evening, late, Flavia once more found herself talking to someone who was practically a stranger. It was the end of a dinner party. Those who had stayed had settled down and there was a sense of lucidity, detachment, ease.

  “It’s going to happen to me next year,” he said. “What does it feel like?”

  “Like the last days in December, the end of a page in the ledger. An accounting day.” For the dinner tonight had been given for Flavia. It was her birthday. The fiftieth.

  “A conven
tional accounting day,” he said.

  “Oh, quite. But compelling.”

  “I’m surprised at your observing it.”

  “I observe a few conventions; don’t you?”

  He said, “But then I am a reasonably conventional person and I’m certain that you are not.”

  “Conventional according to the light of our generation, or our times?”

  “One tries to arrive at some compromise.”

  “Isn’t that conformism? The French say être dans le vent for being with it, it sounds more free but it’s the same thing.”

  “And you don’t try?” he asked.

  “To conform? No. Not really.”

  “Those conventions——?”

  “Eclectic. A pretence of fitting somewhere.”

  “Pretence to whom?”

  “Oh, myself; only myself.”

  “And do you?”

  “Fit? I feel at home in a good many places.”

  “At home on a visit?”

  He had a long, leathery face and small, friendly eyes, this man whose name she had barely caught, who was sitting next to her, sitting back in the armchair glass in hand at this late hour, and Flavia, who was taking a liking to him, said, “That’s it. More or less.”

  With seeming irrelevance he said, “I bet you get away with things?”

  “Do I? I never think about it.”

  “That is the way to get away with things.”

  “My family did—they got away with things, poor darlings. Up to a point, up to a point. I suppose it was a mark of their time? The high-handedness?”

  “It could have been a mark of your family?”

  Flavia said quickly, “You couldn’t have——?”

  He said, “I could, but I didn’t.” Adding, “I’m in Rome a good deal.” He looked at her. “They still talk of your mother.”

  “They do? I’m so glad!”

  He did not take it up. “So you actually draw a balance sheet at the end of the year?”

  “I don’t say that I read it. Anyway, it’s never so bad after a writing year.”

  “And today?”

  “Today is worse. Today is fifty 31sts of December come home to roost.”

  “Is it age you mind?”

  “Who wouldn’t? Actually I don’t think much about age—yet—or that thing about looks and losing or not losing them. One would prefer to be young of course, in working condition young, but youth?—isn’t real youth unimaginable now?”

  “But you do mind?”

  “Yes,” said Flavia.

  “What do you mind?”

  “Time,” she said at once. “Loss of time. Time wasted or not wasted—gone. Over. Gone. Having reached the point where the slice in front must be less, is less, than the slice one’s had.”

  “The best part’s gone?”

  “Very likely. The largest, certainly.”

  “Does sheer quantity count?” he said.

  “Of course it does. Just as in money.”

  “Would you like to have it all over again, your time, if you could?”

  “Yes,” she said, “Oh, yes, yes.”

  “For love of life?”

  “Indeed. But mainly. . . to do things differently.”

  “You would like to tinker with your past?” he said.

  “More than that!”

  He waited.

  “I should like to have been better, to have behaved better.” She diluted it, “As who does not?”

  He still waited.

  Lightly as if without volition, Flavia said, “I made a wrong start.” She heard herself say, “It got me off course.”

  When nothing further came from her, he threw in, “What did?”

  Self-possessed again she shook it off, “One says these things.” Her tone had changed.

  “My dear,” he said, “does one?”

  It brought her back. “I have not before this minute.”

  He said reasonably, “You have now.”

  “The accounting day,” she said. “And perhaps you. I know what you are not asking, Do I want to talk about it? It’s only for memory—a series of incidents.”

  “Incidents of consequence?”

  For the second time that day, deliberately now, Flavia said, “It takes two to tell the truth.”

  “One for one side, one for the other?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean one to tell, one to hear. A speaker and a receiver. To tell the truth about any complex situation requires a certain attitude in the receiver.”

  “What is required from the receiver?”

  “I would say first of all a level of emotional intelligence.”

  “Imagination?”

  “Disciplined.”

  “Sympathy? Attention?”

  “And patience.”

  “Detachment?”

  “All of these. And a taste for the truth—an immense willingness to see.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler,” he said, “just to write it down?”

  “Postulating a specific reader-receiver?”

  “Casting a wider net: one or more among an unknown quantity of readers.”

  Quite cheerfully now, Flavia said, “You forget that I am a writer. Writers don’t just write it down. They have to give it a form.”

  He said, “Well, do.”

  “Life is often too . . . peculiar for fiction. Form implies a measure of selection.”

  He pleased her by catching on, “At the expense of the truth?”

  “Never essentially. At the expense of the literal truth.”

  “Does the literal truth matter?”

  She thought about that. “To the person to whom it happened.”

  “Even if that person is a writer?”

  Round them there were signs of breaking up. People were standing, someone was dialling for taxis. Flavia too stood up, put down her glass. Before turning away, composed now, smiling, she flicked out an answer, “Then, there might be a clash of intentions.”

  •

  Much later that night, in fact in the small hours of next morning, Flavia woke. Instantly acute, formed sentences, unprompted, unthought, sprang into her mind, flashed by in continuation, in parody of the many dialogues of the day.

  I don’t want to look at that place. I don’t want to tell about that time. It was a good place. What happened cannot change that.

  On a slower, a more deliberate level, she recognized the compulsory nature of her state, the enforced wakefulness, the pseudo-lucidity, the distortion—the mill-race inside the mind; on another, the torrent carried on. I don’t have to go on dragging that child. Cut it out? Cut it out of my biography. It’s got nothing to do with me now. It need never have existed. It did exist. Would . . . she, would. . . Constanza have told about it if it had happened to her? The question does not arise: it could not have happened to her, she could not have behaved in that way; it was not in her nature. At that point Flavia thought she heard herself say aloud, It was in my nature. I did behave in that way. Next split second she was fast asleep.

  1. A DAY

  THE CLARITY of those mornings of spring and early summer, the second year at St-Jean, the sense of peace, slow time, the long day to come, the summer, the year; the years.

  Wide windows, not yet shuttered at that hour, opened from the circular white-washed room on slopes of olives and the distant shimmering bay. The air still light and cool already held the promise of the dry unwavering heat of noon. Flavia turned seventeen, alone, entirely alone for the first time in her life, was at the long table stacked and neat with books. She was working: playing at work, hard at work, immersed, yet alert to hour and place and her own joy.

  She read; marked a passage, attempted a summary: six keywords and a date, handled another book with deliberation and pleasure in pursuit of that magic rite a cross-reference; read on. All was grist, discovery. If speculation delighted so did concrete fact: infinity and bureaucracy, appearance and reality, the tree or non-tree in the quad, the supply of drin
king water on the road-marches of Imperial Rome. How rich the world, how interesting—I am learning—There is no end to learning—Application—One foot before the other—This is the door of the feast and today is as good as tomorrow.

  Mid-day was marked by another stillness, different in quality. Flavia shut her books. Quickly she left the room, ran downstairs, left the tower. Outside struck the full noon blaze of Provence. She walked down the hillside, the last part a bit of a scramble; the air smelt of hot stone and thyme. The bay was empty, the French had gone home to eat. Flavia went to a rock-shelf and pulled off her simple clothes—linen trousers, polo-shirt, much washed, much faded, white briefs—and put on a child’s cotton bathing-suit. Flavia, then, was a lanky girl, long-legged, small-hipped, thin though not bony, who carried herself with a tall person’s slouch. Compared to her Mediterranean contemporaries, she was tall; in England she would have been regarded as above the average but not as tall as she felt herself to be. Her hair was very light both in colour and in texture and it was bobbed; her skin was slightly freckled and her face was changeable. She had heard her father, Simon Herbert, described as a stooping young man with a rather ugly, rather charming face, a bit like Boswell and a bit like a bright pug’s mug; her maternal grandmother had been an exquisitely pretty woman. Flavia had her colouring and a version of her features with the porcelain left out, and some of her father’s ugliness and much of his charm. As far as visibles were concerned she appeared to have been concocted from the Anglo-Saxon elements in her descent. There’s nothing of Constanza in the girl, people often said, some adding, perhaps not such a bad thing. And indeed there was no trace of that Giorgionesque, that dark and golden beauty, Flavia’s half-Italian mother. The only indicator of Latin blood, apart from a generous mouth and splendid teeth, was a certain swiftness of gesture: from childhood Flavia used her hands when talking.