A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  Variety presented difficulty when one ate alone. The fish course. (Fish and red wine, she had tried this out for herself a long time ago, did not taste good at all.) Would it not be unworthy, wasteful even, of the dinner, the occasion, the claret to come, to make do with a sip of water or just nothing, spoiling the ship for a halfpenny’s worth of tar? What she finally did was order a half bottle of some modest white, a Cassis or Muscadet, drink a glass or two and simply leave the rest (someone else will finish it). What she did not know for once was that her father at a similar age, dining alone and confronted by the same dilemma, had come to a similar solution by the same process of reasoning; the only difference being that he had not left a single drop in any of his bottles. Simon never did.

  When it was over, Flavia paid, tipped, shook hands, caught the last bus and windows open to the wind and stars was rattled through the night with lines of sonnets flashing in her head. Put down at St-Jean she walked home, as she did every night, not up on the hill but the long way through back-country and olive groves, past their future house and down to the sea once more by the other bay and back again and often twice. It was now that thoughts were words and words soared and all was splendour, meaning, ecstasy, and she was overwhelmed once more by certitude: Life is good and learning infinite—this can never pall.

  •

  There she went. A foolish girl, a brave girl, a single human creature in first pride of its unique existence. Ignorant, as we are all of us, in youth, in health, untried, taking possession of the world, ignorant of its workings and that of our own natures; ignorant, arrogant, generous, self-enclosed, yet visited, however briefly, by a flash of intellectual passion.

  •

  At last she let herself into the dark house. She did not turn on the lights. She would have liked to see herself as putting in more work, but she was too exalted; besides, up since first light now all at once she was dog-tired. In near darkness she undressed, washed, folded up her clothes; as her head touched pillow she wished herself a nightly incantation, Same tomorrow! Before the smile had faded she had dropped into sleep.

  2. A WEEK

  1.

  DURING those years it did not rain in summer. Rain was not expected between April and October, and no rain came. There was no fresh green and thus there was no change. The months were monochrome; nothing appeared to move; dryness, heat, was the dimension in which plants and beasts survived or throve; there was no other time in sight, life was now and now was long.

  The feast of St-Jean fell at the end of June. There were fair-booths and dancing-boards along the waterfront, and everywhere, wafted into back-streets, wafted across the bay, the drawn edgy sound of the calliopes, the quick round pops from the rifle range and the hot synthetic smells of frites and boiling sweets.

  There were new faces. Houses opened inland and on the hill. The arrivals were not tourists; thirty-five years ago few people and certainly no French went all that way for a couple of weeks. The summer people were professional men and tradesmen from places like Perpignan, Nîmes or Valence, who lived in the same kind of climate and liked giving their children a holiday by the sea. They stayed at one of the two or three modest hotels or occupied, often owned, the same house year after year and they brought car, cook, dog and of course the entire family. It was only quite recently then that people from farther afield had begun to think of the South of France as inhabitable in summer at all, and these pioneers—Americans, American writers, South Americans, cosmopolitan rich—did not go to St-Jean. The new wave there, the beginning of one, was French—publishers and intellectuals from Paris, writers (such as Michel Devaux)—and a few first English: elements if more sophisticated than the notary from Tarascon, a good deal more staid than the Americans.

  On the night of the fireworks, as Flavia was about to finish her cœur-crème, a party of seven or eight swept into Chez Auguste: They looked like strangers, indeed strange birds, in the place but they made themselves at home calling for tables to be put together, calling for olives, wine and bread, shouting inquiries about the progress of their bouillabaisse. All were sunburnt and the men wore the same kind of clothes that Flavia wore with the northern town-dweller’s delight in summer ease; and so, with some individual ornamental touches, did the women. They were painters, literary journalists and painters’ wives. Flavia, who thought that she was able to put a name on one or two of them, looked and listened.

  Artists were part both of the old and the new wave of inhabitants. The two or three great painters who early in the century had in fact discovered St-Jean were no more; good painters of the Twenties and the Thirties would as soon have roller-skated across their canvases as painted once again the famous waterfront. They painted in their studios in Paris, and occasionally in their studios at St-Jean. For the painters still came. They still loved the country and the climate and the life; essentially, it was their place; some in their first hour of prosperity had bought a piece of land; when prosperity held, they built.

  Those who ate and drank at Chez Auguste that evening past the halfway mark between two wars had reached a platform of their lives; they had done, all of them more or less, what they set out to do, had got to where they wanted and could now—in their own thirties—look forward to a reasonable period of slower development, of enjoyment. They were gay that evening, after the heat of that and other days, in high spirits, bubbling over from one subject on to the next. The women were pretty and fragile, each man had a face of his own, but the person who dominated their party, whose eye was sought, who was listened to, was a woman of entirely startling appearance. The large colourful head, sitting on powerful bronzed shoulders and a strong neck, the features as hard-cut as those of an Aztec chief, gave a sense of rock and jungle—and at the same time conjured up a cockatoo. The nose was a fine beak, the very large, prominent light eyes were heavy-lidded and boldly lined with kohl and blue, the wide forehead was divided by a triangle of fringe, and the hair, originally honey-coloured and worn half-length, was extravagantly bleached and streaked by sea water. The great handsome monster had a smile of serene, archaic sweetness; she wore sailor trousers, and little scarlet singlet that left bare the back and athletic arms, shells on her ears and more shells about her neck. Now and then she gave sound to a fine barbarian’s laugh, a laugh that reminded Flavia of Constanza who, too, used to be capable of laughing with such force and unconcern. The monster’s Christian name was Therese, and Flavia, who had once briefly met her in the winter, knew that she was married to a well-known French painter who was just then at what may have been the peak of his artistic reputation. In a dozen years he had gone, and she with him, through the cycle of obscurity, gradual recognition, success, large success, new pressures. Together they had, in that curious phrase, mangé la vache enragée, that is, experienced poverty, the extreme poverty endured by Modigliani and Juan Gris, of the unheated studio and the unpayable rent, of food giving out and the credit at the crémerie, days of actual hunger. Help traditionally came from the Sunday collector shop-keeper down the street who would take a canvas in exchange for a bag of coal or rice or a supply of paints. Loulou had also had Therese. All who knew them even if they did not know their exact history—had she really taken in washing? Did they know anyone in those days who had washing to send out? Had she really slept with the landlord?—agreed that she had been a source of strength to him: Therese had pulled him through. She certainly had sat as a model, to him and to most of his group; today from Chicago to Sydney her head is as much an international monument as the waterfront of St-Jean. In due course he had been taken up: by a dealer, a critic, an art-review, a salon; miraculous plenty was followed by near affluence, real affluence, opulence; praise by applause, hangers-on, réclame. Now he drove an American car and she drove a Bugatti, they had built a house at St-Jean and they sent their children skiing.

  Flavia very much wanted to know which of the men he was. She was in for disappointment for Loulou was not there. He was staying at a villa at Cap-Ferrat doing a woman’s por
trait; he was due for another at Venice. He was in fact on the threshold of that stage of his career when his sitters were rich or famous (and often beautiful which his critics argued was not his line), his prices high and those who had first admired him were loud with second thoughts.

  Therese was speaking, and the sound it made was unexpectedly delightful. The voice, like the laugh, was low, but gentle, fastidious even; Flavia had not dreamt that French could sound like this. Therese was telling them about having been out to sea at dawn, she talked about an apricot tree, her cats, a white jug she had bought for cream. What she said was brief and straight, clear of tournures de phrase; to Flavia there seemed to be a flavour to those transparent words (something, it crossed her mind then, one would be hard put to translate) and she wondered if she was right. Of course she was unable to place her geographically and otherwise, except that she did not sound as if she came from the South. (In point of fact Therese, whose diction was admired by her compatriots, was the child of a rural postman brought up in a fertile province who had run away from home and school at an early age to seek her liberty in Paris.)

  Therese did not call from the table, Therese got up, crossed the floor, put a hand on Flavia’s arm (she always remembered that moment though at the time it only startled her), spoke. You’re all alone my dear, do come and sit with us.

  All alone, the disliked phrase again, but it held no curiosity or offensiveness, and the actual words of course were not my dear, but mon petit, not you, but tu, and Flavia who had already got to her feet felt obscurely flattered as if this did not so much signify her own young age as some bond with these superior beings. “I should like to very much,” she said with almost equal directness and picked up her book and pocket torch. Therese turned over the book in Flavia’s hand, glanced at the title. It happened to be Candide. Therese said, “How sad.”

  2.

  The rest of the evening became merged in memory with many others. Flavia retained a sense of sitting for a long time on a chair beside Therese (they were eating and she had finished), of Therese at one point hand-feeding her with a half-lump of sugar dipped into her own glass of eau-de-vie, of talk flowing about her, of contentment in her insider’s outsider’s part. When they broke up Therese told her that she must come to dinner the next night, You know the way, come early and bring a bathing-suit. Surprised and unsurprised, Flavia went.

  The house she remembered well. It was on what everybody called the other bay and just above a beach. It was an hour or so before sunset and the Loulou children were swishing about in the sea. They were three small pitch-brown terrors with little to choose between them in size or looks. (In fact two of the three boys were twins.) They informed her that maman was still out in the boat, pointing to a blank horizon, then ignored her. When later they went in for a few show-off aquatics Flavia retaliated by swooping into a dive that left them well behind. “Maman can do better,” they called after her.

  Presently the boat came in with Therese at the helm, and they all went up to dry and change. It was a new house, essentially simple but built on ample lines. The dining-table in the living-room that ran the whole length of the front looked as if it could seat twenty, all the bedrooms were large and square and all the beds were large; mosquito nets hung limp and white from ceilings and there were windows everywhere. The floors looked bare and cool, made of old, unpatterned tiles, highly polished. Everyone had a bathroom and of these Loulou’s was the most resplendent (it was shown to Flavia the first day) with a sunken tub and a row of outsize bottles of eau-de-cologne in a niche.

  “Papa rubs himself down with a whole half-litre every time,” the little boys said.

  There was not much furniture and what there was was very fine and plain, and there was a luxury of built-in cupboards, shelves, pantries, storage space. Everything was exquisitely kept. There were few pictures, a couple of Pasquin drawings, a ravishing small landscape of Derain’s, nothing by the master himself. Loulou was always too much in arrears with his dealer, Therese said, to have anything to spare. For books, there were a few new novels in their white covers with the imprint of Bernard Grasset and the N.R.F., and a long row of Colette. The garage was vast, and one could not fail to notice the enormous refrigerator, an object of leviathan build one would never have expected to find in a French private house. Therese gave her big laugh and said it was for Loulou’s fish.

  It was a house, obviously, that was what they had wanted it to be. (Flavia had yet to learn which were Loulou’s touches and which Therese’s.) It gave a sense of a great deal of fresh air and of almost voluptuous cleanliness; it was a house that was used certainly, where people slept and made love and put on fresh clothes, but in which they did not often sit; where food was cooked but the dishes were carried outdoors. Much of the life went on elsewhere. Loulou worked in a studio at the other end of the property, the children lived on the beach or roamed St-Jean; the three or four women servants did not sleep in. As for Therese, Therese was out in the boat, in the sea, out to market, out in the garden, out in the Bugatti, out in full sun, in mid-night, out along the coast with her friends to find other friends, other places to dance and eat.

  As on the evening before there was a crowd at dinner—a long table under an arbour, some new faces, introductions, by Christian names only: Giles—Jeannine—Bobbie (Bobbie was a woman)—Paul—Flavia. Again there was the same sense of heightening, of being en fête, of shared intimacy, and for Flavia of self-suspension, of being—happily—part mascot, part onlooker, the now visible, now invisible mouse at the edge of another world. Two things were different. One was the place—the immense delight of being where one was, in stillness, under leaves, above the sea, the perennial delight of a warm night in open air. The other was Therese; here she was unequivocally the giver, she was the master of that board, the fount of hospitality. How she looked after her friends! How your glass was filled; your plate was always warm, your chair turned to the view. The food itself was beautiful, there is no other word. Simple, right, with an exquisite refinement in the simplicity, food such as can only be achieved by love, skilled care and a true taste.

  They had sorrel soup—sharp, frothy, refreshing—and after that, Therese told them, they were going to have roast duck with peas. The English, she said shaking her monster goddess’ head (how quickly one came to accept that blend in her of the wholesome with the exotic), were fond of duck with peas. Ah well, it was seldom right: the duck kills the peas; young peas are too delicate against a full-grown bird, peas ask for butter—unsalted—and duck often wants no butter at all but needs some active flavour to stand against it or something neutral and robust.

  Flavia decided to become audible. “A cassoulet?”

  The duck tonight were young birds without a half-ounce of fat on them and their crisp skin and rosy melting flesh went perfectly with the light sweetness of the peas barely out of the pods.

  The man who had been named as Paul, who sat next to Flavia and had heard her, said, “You like cassoulet?”

  “It’s the other extreme: the beans kill the duck.”

  He said to the table at large, “Fancy, it eats.”

  “What next?” said Flavia.

  Therese looked across. “Of course she does.”

  “Three helpings of soup,” said Bobbie.

  Flavia giggled.

  “An English girl that eats!”

  “Were you brought up in England?”

  “Only part of the time. I spent years in a place,” she addressed herself to Therese, “where the food is second best in the world.”

  “Ah?”

  “Catch’em young.”

  “Where?”

  “In Tuscany,” said Flavia.

  Paul lost interest. “Spaghetti.”

  “La pasta asciutta.”

  “Not at all,” Flavia said with some warmth.

  “You mean they don’t eat spaghetti?” Bobbie said.