A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

“That marriage, too, was founded on blackmail. Simon was made aware that he might find himself obliged to stand down as a Parliamentary candidate if he failed to make an honest woman out of the Press Lord’s daughter. If he did, he would have a newspaper empire backing him. And the money—it was going to be the multiplicity all right, another kind of existence altogether, power, great possessions. . . . He said it might be fascinating.

  “The pressures, Mr. James told me, and the prizes were considerable. It was a strange time, with the end of the war in sight, people feeling suspended, nothing appearing very permanent or real. Simon was convinced, or persuaded himself, that he’d been ill used by Constanza, that their marriage had been a mistake, a youthful mistake, the kind of thing one did in a war.

  “He casually suggested a divorce. Perhaps he expected some protest from Constanza, a declaration, perhaps he hoped for it. Constanza did not help him, or only in her way. She lived up to what she believed in. ‘If you want to, caro, certainly.’ She just took it. Nobody saw the blow it was. Such a blow.

  “It wasn’t even easy. Simon couldn’t afford to let himself be divorced; Constanza did some extremely quixotic things and they managed to fix it so that she appeared to be the guilty party. They plotted it together and they were nice to one another during the whole of that time and when it was all over and the lawyers were serving papers, their parting was quite unbearable. Simon wept and wouldn’t walk out of the house. But that moment passed.

  “Anna? Well may you ask! That was the dreadful side. The present and the future wiped out: for her there was no recovery. Simon was merciful, he told her himself and he gave her time. Constanza saw his face as he came out of her room.

  “What did he tell her (abetted by Constanza)? I don’t know exactly. A rigmarole he made up. No word of the Press Lord’s daughter or remarriage—one thing at a time. It was full of holes but at least Anna wasn’t obliged to see them. She never understood nor accepted, but her feeling for Simon had not been destroyed. During the months they were waiting for the divorce he came to see her nearly every day. They remained friends to the last.

  “It was her relation with Constanza that was strained. That, too, never recovered.

  “Nobody else was convinced by the official version of Simon’s divorce. He blamed Constanza. He couldn’t bear people taking her side; he turned his back on her entirely. They never met again.

  “It had been arranged that my mother should have me. ‘What about Flavia? Between Mary (Miss Mouse) and Northumberland there will be no place for her. The bambina hardly knows me, let’s give her, too, a start on a clean slate. If she grows up bright and interesting we can renew our acquaintance, a discrezione. Meanwhile you keep her, Mena’ll look after her.’ Constanza said, I will look after her, what next?

  “It is true—I didn’t know him. I can imagine him so very clearly, from his photographs, his words, but I do not remember him myself—I should have, I was two years old—it’s strange that I cannot remember seeing him bending over my cot, as they say he did, glass of brandy-and-soda in hand.

  “When the actual case came on the judge said some harsh things about the wife. The father was a busy man, he said, engaged in work of national importance, in the child’s best interest he would give the custody to the defendant’s mother. So Anna became my legal guardian. I don’t know how much actual difference it did make. For Constanza it created a sort of void—no real responsibility; and it tied us all together in new ways.

  •

  “As it happened, the war ended a few days after the divorce. Constanza went to Rome as soon as the trains were running. There were no friends; she found her mother’s circle dispersed, her father a middle-aged man. She had been away too long, in another country.

  “When she came back to England at the end of the winter, Anna with Mena and me had moved again into Brown’s. Constanza took a small flat of her own. In the winter that followed we all had a house together and Giorgio came to stay, and the winter after that Anna took me to Switzerland while Constanza travelled with someone in Spain. And that’s the beginning of the life I remember. It went on like that, the three of us never quite living together, never wholly apart. I often missed Constanza, but not being with them both at the same time was easier. My grandmother was very good to me. To her, I was Simon’s girl. When she read about his new marriage she said, The yellow press have caught him, poor boy. She sent him a wedding present.

  “There was often something about Simon in the papers, not only in the tabloids, in The Times. His election to Parliament. His maiden speech. His prospects. You see, his cousin, too, had been killed in the war, the only son of the West Country branch of the family. Then Simon had said that his eldest brother was lucky, winner takes all. He didn’t as it turned out. He died after the Armistice, dysentery in Egypt. So Simon was now an only son, an eldest son, and he stood to inherit in Somerset as well. A great house. (There was supposed to be a Mantegna.)

  “We travelled a good deal. When Mussolini took over in Italy, Anna decided that it was her duty to make her protest on Italian soil as an Italian citizen (a not too vulnerable one for the time being, but she tried her best). So she allowed herself to return at last. Rome, of course, remained forbidden ground. We lived at Fiesole for a while, then Livorno, Lake Como, Florence again. I was not sent to school. Anna had me educated at home as she herself had been and Constanza. I’m afraid it was scrappier in my case—no continuity. We shall see whether I’ve learnt enough when I go up for those exams.

  “That’s upon us now, upon me. The time I know has gone so fast. Am I skipping? I’m not trying to tell my life story, I haven’t got one yet (perhaps it began last week?) I’m trying to tell Anna’s. I suppose I want to explain—I almost said, find out—about her dying. Her story is complete now, isn’t it? It’s unchangeable.

  “There are one or two more things I must talk about. Come to think of it, not much happened to Anna from the time Simon left us till she died—fifteen years or nearly. Well, her son grew up and not into much; but she had expected that, she had discounted him (when she chose Simon?). Giorgio popped up now and again, with girl trouble, with money trouble, in a new car. He joined the Fascist party. Anna coped with him all right, Giorgio never seemed to cause her any real pain; her tirades, which used to be against the prince, were about Constanza who had ruined our lives by losing Simon. You see, she expected so much, always had, and now she was expecting some miracle to come to her through her daughter. Constanza, living from day to day, refusing to make plans, was letting her down again.

  “One cannot tell about Anna without Constanza coming into it. And the other way round—during her whole life so far everything that happened to her mother went to shape what happened to herself. Perhaps it is like that in many lives? To that extent?

  “I said I had come to the time I knew myself. It’s curious, I feel I have less to tell about it: I know what it was like, it was daily life; it doesn’t stand out, make a tale, like the things they told of the past.

  “Constanza always kept her flat in London. London was her base, her friends were there. As you know she hasn’t married again. She turned them all down, that was Anna’s refrain, no one was good enough. ‘Right enough, mama. Oughtn’t it to be something nice and lawful this time? The kind of marriage my father recognizes when he sees it? It’s his turn, poor man. Can you produce a choice of eligible Catholic Agnostics for me?’ I think she half meant it, though what she really felt was that this time she was going to wait.

  “One year, I was still quite little, we were in Italy, in a small place on the lakes. Constanza came up the path from the steamer holding the post, Anna was standing on the terrace waiting, Constanza cried out, ‘Simon is dead!’ Anna threw up her arms and they vanished into the house.

  Constanza was stricken. (She even sent away her young man of the time who was staying at another hotel.) She told me that there was nothing to be said for death, nothing in mitigation: it was extinction, the end. Anna wouldn’t spea
k of it at all for some time; later we heard about Simon’s will—he left her various things, his art library for instance (it’s a wonderful one)—and it gave her some kind of peace.

  “It happened in Somerset, in that house. Simon’s uncle had taken him under his wing, so Simon and his wife, Mary, half lived there. Simon was drinking like a fish; he wasn’t getting on with Mary at all; he was working too much, and they said he was worried as he was about to switch Parties. That night there had been a dinner for some of his London friends, they sat up late and there was a kind of wager, they went out into the park, it was a chilly night, and Simon in his evening clothes jumped into the water-piece. Afterwards Mary came to him aghast, ‘Do change your clothes, darling, I beg you.’ He turned on her, ‘Who are you to order me about?’ He just sat on dripping, calling for more brandy. Next morning he ran a temperature but insisted on getting up. It became double pneumonia. He died three days later in a nursing home. He wasn’t much older than thirty.

  “I must tell about the curious will he left. Simon hadn’t inherited yet; the house was entailed of course and as there was no direct male heir (my being what I am) it looked as if it were going to some cousin overseas, only later it became known that Mary had had a posthumous son: he’s still a minor—here’s another member of my family whom I haven’t met, I seem to have an assortment.

  “Well, what Simon could or thought he could dispose of were the pictures. He’d been collecting, you know, Italian painting. Oh, en grand. Every time he bought one you saw it in the papers. A Tintoretto, a Titian. Mr. Simon Herbert acquired a Veronese, exchanged his Bellini. . . . It used to amuse Constanza. How he must adore it, she said. If he’d stayed with us, he’d never have got further than etchings. For the money came from his new father-in-law. Prestige: Simon had told him that he would bequeath the pictures to the nation. Even so, Mr. James insists, it’s the first Mantegna that counts. Without that coming to Simon he doubted if the Press Lord would have forked out. When Simon’s will was opened they found that he had left the pictures to me. Not just for life, for good. He even advised me to sell them—I would find the legacy a great help in getting an interesting life. Until I came of age he wanted the pictures to be in his ex-wife’s custody. ‘She will look after them and at them.’

  “The lawyers wrote that my father’s new family would contest. Both Anna and Constanza let go at once. Naturally. So the pictures went to the nation after all. I’ve seen them. They’re in a room of their own called the Simon Herbert and Lord X Bequest.

  “There was an aftermath. One day an enormous crate arrived at Constanza’s doorstep. A letter explained that it was the pictures Simon had owned before his second marriage and which by rights belonged now to his daughter. It was puzzling. When Simon first turned up he didn’t have anything at all. They undid the crate and there was a live Douanier Rousseau, one of his huge bright beast and jungle pieces pouncing upon the room. There was a second picture, a Juan Gris, very fine. Who had paid for them? Why? It was a mystery.

  “Constanza put them on her walls. She did look at them. She loves them. They are literally the only possessions she has in the world: those two pictures, and the ring, her father’s ring. She doesn’t even have a wrist-watch. All this brings me to our getting here, to St-Jean. I’m coming to that now.

  “I told you that Constanza regarded London as her base, her home if you like. Lately she had begun to feel that things were changing, or that she was changing. Her friends were settled, politics infinitely depressing, she came to the decision to make some break; it was time for her to go. Go where? Not to live in fascist Italy (it was still all right for her to spend a month or two, with her British passport, with her mother and me and carry messages over the border for the underground). She had no plan, except to move—navigare; the price of the future, she said, was to bum one’s boats.

  “She gave up her flat. That was last summer. A day or two before she was due to move she ran into a man she had known as a rather mysterious friend of Simon’s who used to turn up on leave now and again during the war. It was he actually whom Simon had asked to be the co-respondent—bogus co-respondent—when they were concocting their divorce, it was about him that the judge had scolded her and given me to Anna. Nobody had ever heard of him again. Constanza’s friends said he was a myth. Now there he was. He had a new name, a new identity, in fact he was Lewis Crane, you know, the art critic. He is also a kind of consultant that’s less well-known, he’s supposed to run the art market—lives like a tycoon, but he really loves painting. Simon taught him. He told Constanza that. During the first days they talked of no one else: this man had loved my father. He told her things she had not known about him—good things, acts of generosity—it came out that it was he who had got Simon on to my pictures, the Douanier and the Gris; he had practically given them to him. That gave her a turn.

  “Then Lewis Crane asked her to marry him. She said no, of course; he persisted. For the second time in her life, she says, he had appeared out of the blue as it were and took charge. After she had left England, a few weeks later in Milan, she accepted him. He had to be in Amsterdam next week, he told her, and Rio in November, so they decided to get married in Brussels in the last week of October. Constanza said she would have to tell her mother first, and me.

  “Anna and I were at Alassio. We had been there some time. The régime is tightening and she had been warned that they might no longer put up with her outspokenness and propaganda; her friends thought that she would be safer somewhere close to the French border, but she was taking against the place. The Ligurian Riviera wasn’t Italy to her; she felt in exile once more; the move had been a failure.

  “Constanza asked me to meet her and Lewis at Genoa. I must say I was rather excited to meet him. I have read his books. He is a big man. Not big as a bear, big as a cat. Not my idea of an intellectual, or a businessman; to me he’s like a merchant in a fairy tale. I asked him if he had a fur-lined coat, he said as a matter of fact he had. Constanza seemed all right, and I could see that he thought the world of her. He said that at moments I reminded him of Simon. I promised to see that Constanza would get to Brussels on time, and he promised to take me behind the scenes of the art world.

  •

  “So I went back to Alassio and at the end of the month Constanza came to pick me up and to tell her mother. We were going to travel together as far as Paris, I was to go on to Calais. You see, I had been doing something about my own future, too. Mr. James helped me. He found a tutor in London who was going to coach me for University Entrance. I was to live in his house; Anna had said yes. She also said that I was leaving her. She wanted me to say, Please come to London with me. She might not have come, but I didn’t want to say it. Some days were . . . difficult. I longed to be off, I wanted to be gone before anything could prevent it. Then Constanza arrived.

  “There was a frightful scene. About Lewis. I could have heard even through closed doors—I stopped my ears. But I heard her cry out, I heard the tone.

  “Next morning I asked, ‘Mummy, we are still going? You to Brussels, I to London?’ ‘We are. What next?’ But Constanza was tense and cold. ‘I had hoped it would please her,’ she kept saying. ‘I so hoped she’d be pleased.’ Our train went after luncheon; Anna didn’t come down.

  “We sat in the train, my mother and I, waiting to get into France. That slow train with all the stops, full of militiamen and police as so few Italians are allowed to go abroad. I wonder how long it will be before we take that train again? I guessed that Constanza was acting courier. (For the last time. She, too, has since been warned.) As we were standing still at the frontier—you know, nonchalant, nervous, not showing it—the compartment door opens and who should walk in? My uncle Giorgio. He was all ciao ciao and kissy cheeks; she practically said, Bird-of-Ill-Omen where have you sprung from what do you want? He had missed us at Alassio and followed the train in his car, he had something to speak to her about. I left them, I walked down the platform making faces at the blacksh
irts. When Giorgio had skipped I went back and thought no more about it. Ten minutes later we were in France—the relief. At Nice we were to change trains: as we’re getting up Constanza notices that she hasn’t got her ruby, her ring. Naturally she doesn’t want to get off before having looked for it properly. There’s no time. We stay and the train moves on. The conductor arrives and the head conductor, there’s a search, no sign of the ring. They write a report. All the time the train is carrying us slowly but surely up the French coast. Constanza is handling it lightly, but I know how shaken she must be by losing the ring. It’s getting later and later. We all share a kind of supper. By then we realize that we’ve missed all connections up the line. The men tell us we’d better get off now and spend the night somewhere. Constanza hesitates, we don’t jump to it, the stops are so brief, the stations look so dark. Eventually they practically push us out. There is still a bus and it takes us to that hotel on the port. Next morning we know where we are. Constanza is able to put a name to it, she has seen that waterfront before but where? She has seen paintings of it: it must be, we are at, St-Jean-le-Sauveur. We are here.

  “First thing I did was to try to get us organized to leave again. Not so Constanza. Ought we to rush on before doing more about the ring? ‘Constanza,’ I said, ‘we are expected. Lewis is waiting for you.’ ‘So he is,’ she said.

  “I couldn’t budge her. The weather was delicious; she liked the look of the place, the last weeks had been hectic. Every day it was something else. It was Sunday, she was expecting a detective, the timetable at the café was out of date. ‘Darling, there’s no hurry.’

  “Once he knew where we were Lewis telegraphed every few hours. ‘What are you going to tell him?’ Exactly, she said. Then I did ask her, ‘You haven’t changed your mind, mummy—you are going to marry Lewis?’ ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ she said, ‘let me wait.’

  “I don’t like waiting. I can’t bear it. And there was nothing I could do.