Therese repeated, “I don’t like it.”
4.
Flavia alone brooded over it. Like that other time, she told herself, the first time (I keep mum about forever and ever cross my heart), then it was for the best. I did it for her. And surely it was right? It was Anna’s last will, her last act of will, an act of love, “To my beloved daughter.” Morally it was valid. The earlier one was an impulse to leave waste, to bring the pillars down, writ in anger. The Church says that the last thought counts. I would do it again. But it was easy—a bit of paper burnt, a drift of ash rubbed out, a word here lightly: and so much changed by so little. Deus ex machina.
Flavia did not giggle. Am I becoming a . . . manipulator? “My beloved daughter Constanza”—and she all right, with the money she is used to. That was not wrong. She had said to me, One only lives once. She might have taken the law into her own hands; I did it for her. But I must not get the habit. It is not how I want to live; not really.
3. A NIGHT
SHE CAME back to it all a few nights later. Therese, so uncurious, so immersed in the moment, set it off. In that voice of hers, that warm low voice, she said, “I know you must be feeling sad so often, that was a bad thing your grandmother dying so soon.” Flavia’s reaction was, Oh God, she knows too. And it did not happen here, not at St-Jean, it happened a hundred miles away and more, across the border, at Alassio, in another country, in my country, one of my countries.
She found herself answering quite reasonably, “It was bad for . . . for Constanza.”
She was not unaware that Therese disapproved of the use of her mother’s Christian name—the French had it all straight, about the family, about death, and how to talk about it; and they did talk: familiar with death.
“They parted in anger. The last time they saw each other.”
Flavia herself had an impulse to talk—now, to Therese, to this Frenchwoman, this new, this alien friend she liked immensely. “The last time they met on the face of this earth.”
Therese stroked her hair.
“They had been against one another for a long time. That day it all came out. Constanza tried to follow her out of the hotel—as she was very very upset, my grandmother—but Constanza was too late. You could say that she died of . . . moral shock. But then, she had wanted to before. Mena told us. Our maid, her maid really. She was with Anna for forty years. It is sad, sad, sad for Mena. She loved her so. I must tell you how it began: Mena got to Rome when she was young—her people were very poor—someone had promised her work but there wasn’t any. Then a woman in the street—the Via Monserato, between the Tiber and the Farnese Square, they talked about it so much, Mena and my grandmother, when I was little, I think they talked about it every day: Il Quartiere Papale, it does have a magnificent sound, hasn’t it? and so much of it a slum; the rich live above on the piani nobili, the ground floors and cellars are rented out to artisans; my mother, who was brought up in those streets, says to know them you must have breathed the air in the evenings when the wine-shops are full and they are lighting charcoal braziers on the pavements; she says I will go one day, but I think I know already—well, a woman in Mena’s street who sold salad greens knew the cook who worked for Anna and the prince round the corner and Mena was given things to do in the kitchen. One day Anna came down, Eccellenza as they call her there, and saw Mena. Mena says Anna liked her face. Don’t think that Mena is pretty, she’s a tiny woman: shrivelled. Perhaps she wasn’t then, it was before I was born, even before Constanza was born, when they were still happy. Mena’s everyday face is just stubborn, you could call it proud—she’s a countrywoman from a good province as they say—but Anna took to it, she did take to people—her infatuations, Constanza says—she took to my father when he was a very young man and he wasn’t so good-looking either. Nothing like the prince, her own husband, who was so bel uomo.
“With Mena it lasted. Anna taught her and made her her own maid and they lived together ever after. She had her own room in the palazzo on the same floor as Anna’s which wasn’t at all the usual thing then: In 1892. Not that the Roman aristocracy didn’t look after the people who worked for them—though people nowadays don’t like it when you say so—servants didn’t sleep the way they did in Tsarist Russia or at Versailles before the revolution, but it still didn’t seem good enough to Anna—I told you she was American?—so Mena always had a nice room of her own; later on too, at Brown’s Hotel. Brown’s in Dover Street, they went there straight after it went wrong, my grandmother and my mother and Mena. I know Brown’s, I stayed there myself.
“I never saw the palazzo. I have never been to Rome. That’s all part of the story. I’ve seen them at Pisa and Florence, they’re only large houses really, rather grand all the same, so much stone and ceiling, hard to keep warm in the winters. Anna put in heating, it was almost the first thing she did. The prince always let her spend her money in any way she liked. She spent a good deal on the house; well, it was his house, she kept it up for him, even afterwards. That was one of the things we did not know. She kept up the palazzo for twenty years—two decades. Imagine that. And she never saw it again . . . alive. Mena knew it all and how Anna loved that place. As for Constanza, she says she left it, she left it behind and that is that. If she had stayed, all would have been different; it wasn’t in her stars to stay. She does talk like that. Not that she believes in anything, religion and so on—and nor do I of course, though I was brought up a little as a Catholic—but she goes by omens, auguri. Romans do. Mena didn’t mind leaving either. She didn’t mind anything as long as she was following the Signora principessa. Goodness when I think of the moving they must have done, the trunks they must have packed. And when they were travelling it was Anna who looked after Mena, you know, ordering in languages for her in the wagon-restaurant. She spoilt her, people said. It was Anna’s way. She spoilt my father, too.
“When he came to see them, Anna and my mother, the first time in London, 1914, the war had just begun, Anna had some rather good Sauternes on the table. She told me she never saw a man so pleased by a glass of wine. He never forgot it. She spoilt me too, when I was little, and Constanza had everything when she was young. Only she doesn’t care much for things or what she eats, what she wants are people, action. Mr. James says that she is unbribable. It’s a thing to be. I shall be in my work, I hope.
“Well, Mena had the best of it—Anna was good to her. ‘Never a harsh word, in all those years,’ that’s what Mena told us, ‘how many can say that of themselves?’ We can’t, Constanza says.
“I don’t mean that Anna didn’t go on the way she did in front of Mena, but it wasn’t directed at Mena and she knew it; she only minded her being unhappy. When Anna raved in front of me, I did mind. I used to sit under the table and pretend not to hear. When I was older I often left the room. It made me feel horrible: unkind and strong. Mena always stayed it out. Oh, she was good to Anna. She got up at night to look at her asleep, to see that she lacked nothing. That was how she found her . . . that night at Alassio.”
•
When Flavia spoke of all of this, it was also night. They were in bed, Therese and she, and they did not know how late it was. It was only their second week and Flavia, a little puzzled, a little awed, at times, was at ease now with the alien friend, the tender and exciting alien she was beginning to love a little. Things were going well. Flavia was working; the long days in the tower were intact, only in the evening she set out for the house on the other bay; the difficult hour at the café was cut, even writing became bearable. Often she stayed the night. Not inevitably. Therese had implied other claims. Benevolently, she exercised a check, kept a light hand on their relationship.
That night there had been much wine at dinner and Flavia, though far from drunk, felt warmed, free. As long as she could remember she had heard—servants’ gossip; visitors’ cluckings; her grandmother denouncing the past; Mena explaining away; Mr. James rationally doling it out; Constanza’s open dissections. She had heard; she had not th
ought. Her mind had been occupied with things like the freezing point of soda water or the melting point of cheese; later on it became the non-revolutionary redistribution of the means of production and the alternate vote. She had not thought, perhaps she had felt? For now she found that it was there, an entity—not quite picture, not quite story—demanding sense and shape: expression. This rather reserved child, this self-styled future utopian essayist, found herself rattling on about unhappiness and happiness, found herself possessed by a desire to comprehend and convey what had happened, was happening, to a handful of people near her.
The windows were open and the sky was dark. Lying on Therese’s shoulder, staring into near darkness, speaking to the dark ceiling, she went on. “Anna was Mena’s life. Yes, we counted; we are the family, she looked after us too. Now it’s no longer the same—for her, it’s all over; she’s worn herself out and she’s through with us, we remind her too much of her. She wants to go back to her own people with her savings and what we have given her and cut a bit of a figure. It was because I felt this that I . . . interfered. Can you see now?
“Mr. James? Anna certainly wasn’t his life. We don’t know what that was. One didn’t ask. He liked to tell one that he was a dilettante, ‘I’ve never written a line for publication nor put brush to water-colour, in short I never did a stroke of work, except for those few years teaching at Harvard, and I must admit that I enjoyed every moment of them—in retrospect.’ That was a set-piece. I believe he was a real bachelor with a ravishing mistress tucked away. He always had plenty of time for us. He was very fond of Anna, though she often maddened him. He knew her as a girl when she first came to Rome. She was so pretty then, he says, and full of hope and plans. She had a way of never doubting other people or herself, it was head-strong, he says, and naïve and infuriating, but it was also touching and one let her have her way. Losing her like this must be a blow to him. She wasn’t his life: she was his youth; Constanza says they had the same kind of public behaviour and as one gets older it counts. It’s begun to count with her and she’s still young. Your generation. I don’t know what I shall have to share with mine when I get older? The members of it I knew had all sorts of behaviour, public and private. Resort children. It had more to do with their nationalities than their ages. I could tell you a lot about resort children. I used to get a pretty good idea of what was to come just from the way they shook hands with a grown-up. They are all living on somewhere in the world. This very minute. Hard to take in.
“Anna and Mr. James didn’t meet at a resort, their families were connected, vaguely. Her father was a lawyer who wrote, he was quite an eminent man, of great intelligence; erudite. That’s where Constanza’s got it from, her mind; and her conscience, her touch of New England conscience as Mr. James says. The Italian side were mostly ninnies. He—my maternal grandfather—made a stand against war, all war; he wasn’t very popular and retired early from public life. A bit like Michel, Michel Devaux.
“Mr. James only got to know Anna well in Italy. In the 1880’s—two Americans living in the country of their choice. That’s where Anna’s story began. Only that for him, being a man, it was a matter of choosing. One fine day he decided to take an apartment in Rome. Anna had to get there by marriage.
“He did explain that to us quite often, when she had fallen in love with Europe and the prince proposed, she saw herself in Rome; the Eternal City, it was always that to her. He, Rico, the young man she met at Lake Garda, was the means to an end.
“That, Mr. James says, was her first mistake. Her not seeing it as what it was. She would not allow herself to see it. It had to be a love match. Life had to be what she believed it ought to be; she had no sense of reality. It never crossed her mind—that was the bad part of the mistake—that for the prince as well the marriage could not be an end in itself. She knew that the prince was not well off, he never made any bones about it. It was obvious to everybody in Rome that he had to marry money. He had his widowed mother living with him and two sisters who had to get husbands; both Mr. James and Constanza say that it would have been considered an almost monstrous act of selfishness if the prince had insisted on marrying one of the Montecativi or Roccarosa girls for their beaux yeux.
“That didn’t mean the prince wasn’t pleased to get Anna. He would have turned down millions if the woman had been ugly or ill-bred or disagreeable. He liked Anna; he thought she was charming and a credit to himself, and he meant to look after her. But the point that Anna failed to grasp was that without the money it would never have occurred to him to marry her.
“Anna didn’t have millions. At least she didn’t think so; she used to scold Constanza for saying they were rich, when of course they were for Italy. She spent a good deal—she always did that. Her trustees kept writing to her, she never paid any attention. They kept writing to her about retrenchment till her dying day. She didn’t spend very much on herself, she spent on houses, and during those early years she entertained—people lived differently, you know, dinner-parties for English visitors, musical parties, charity affairs; and she spent a lot on other people, on her new family and the poor. It was natural for her to give people things; making them comfortable, she called it. Oh, always in the material sense.
“She never brought it up. Curious thing—she who held on to so many grievances, never spoke twice about the money she kept pouring out on all of us. Constanza never had a penny of her own, we were Anna’s dependants you might say; well, we never felt it, she never made us feel it. It is curious.
“As I told you, Anna adored her new Italian life. They adored her—that did count. There was the prince’s mother, mammina, the old principessa she was called to tell her apart from Anna. Mr. James remembers her well, she was a sweet woman, all good nature, not a thought in her head, who asked for nothing but to love and cherish (her husband had been spectacularly unfaithful to her, even for Rome—it runs in that family). And then there were Constanza’s aunts, the prince’s sisters. Well, Anna transformed their lives. They had been sitting at home (unheated, before Anna put in the plumbing and the armchairs) with cousins and priests coming to black coffee now and then while the prince was out on his horse or at the club. Suddenly there was Anna doing a hundred things a day: the house wide open, parties and picnics and streams of presents. It wasn’t only that. They loved her. You must see it—there was all that freedom, so new, so different from what had been dinned into them before.
“And for them it was exotic. One must realize that they didn’t travel. The women not at all. The prince had come over to London to be married—from the house of Anna’s sister who was settled there—he hated every minute of it. He carried on about crossing the Channel for years. It was diabolical, he said. I think he was just very seasick. But it stuck in his mind that getting to England was something perilous and rare like rounding the Horn, it must have had something to do with his allowing himself to get so wholly cut off from Constanza later on.
“But I mustn’t confuse you. In those early years the horrors of travel merely reminded him what a long, long way Anna was from her own country, and he used to say that they owed it to her to make up for it. ‘Poor woman—let her have her head.’
“Anna wasn’t really pining for America one bit. She did care about American democracy, that was one of her great ideals, she looked forward to the ultimate conversion of Europe. The prince used to tease her about her efforts to get people taught to read and write; it became a household joke, Constanza joining with her father, though she herself was much taken by Fabian Socialism as a girl. The big difference between her mother and herself, she says, was that she, Constanza, was a realist. The Romans are realists. It’s the one thing Constanza had always been proud of (although she is a total internationalist of course). Being a Roman. Oh I can understand it. It is something. I am one-quarter Roman myself, you know. I often tell myself, but I can’t quite feel it. One-quarter Roman, one-quarter American, one-half English. Only modern Rome, anyway; Constanza won’t admit that when
I point it out. Romans like her believe in an unbroken line to the Antonines.
“Where was I? The prince teasing Anna. You see, it appears that they got on well enough. She rather patronized him, but he was impervious to that; it amused him—he was not unsubtle, Mr. James says, but didn’t bother to show it—he was amused by her American independence which served him just as well as Italian docility. They each came and went as they pleased. For her it was art and her circle of friends and admirers. I should have explained that she was an intelligent woman. She was well educated; she had the good memory we all got from her, and she really did get to know about pictures and architecture, more than most dilettantes. At least my father thought so. The prince himself was not a stupid man, basically, according to Mr. James, but he had let his mind go and he didn’t care. He was equable and a pessimist and very gay in everyday life. He was quite determined to let sleeping dogs lie. That meant ideas, understanding people, searching for motives; he didn’t want to change the world as Anna did and Constanza in her early years. He was an all-change-is-for-the-worse man.
“Anna didn’t have to go to her museums alone, there were plenty of young men and older men hanging about. Anna was quite a flirt in those days, Mr. James insists on that, it is quite the hardest part to imagine. She always seemed to loathe it so . . . what flirtation leads to. That was what she used to rant about, Men. She didn’t hold with going to bed with one’s friends.
“You see, she didn’t even hold with going to bed with a husband. That’s perhaps why things began to go to pieces when the boy was born. But that was years later. She didn’t appear to mind the first time. Constanza. She talked of her duty to give the house an heir. Constanza wasn’t an heir, she was a girl. That didn’t seem to matter either.
“It’s time I began telling you about Constanza. Chronologically. She was born when they had been married a few years. She always says it’s easy to remember her age as she was twenty-one in 1914. She was married in that year, too. To Simon, to my father. And divorced before the end of it. The war, not the year. But I said chronologically. Rome in the 1890’s then. Yes, Constanza was born in the nineteenth century.
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