A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “One morning she had made up her mind. ‘You’d rather like me to marry Lewis, don’t you?”

  “Very much, I said.

  “Why?

  “We are used to giving answers. I tried to tell her. I wanted to have her looked after, have her settled—even if it sounds like Anna—I wanted it for myself. It would be nice for us to have a home.

  “She listened to me and said, ‘I’m sorry, darling, but I wasn’t going to do it for you. You have your own life before you (rather as you said to me, Therese) and you must make it for yourself. She has not. Only when we had that row did I realize how much the wish to please her had come into it. Again! I’ve learnt nothing.’

  “ ‘But she was not pleased.’

  “ ‘That’s the irony of it. As she sees it, what did I come to offer her (and she waiting all these years)? Marriage to a middle-aged art critic who has turned dealer. I didn’t dress it up; no wonder she took it as life letting her down once more. Lewis ought to have gone himself, he is a showman: he might have caught her, Simon’s friend, as he did catch me.

  “ ‘But mama is not the point. The point is that I made a mistake—oh, I do have a feeling for him that helped to confuse the issue, we do like one another—what I have come to see is that my falling for Lewis was not what I took it to be.’

  “I did not ask her what she had taken it for. She was cool that morning, detached, brutal with herself—people say that Constanza has such arrogance, well, she also has humility. I knew she would go on.

  “ ‘I took it for something inevitable. A link with Simon. I took it for a continuation. Now I see that it was—marginal. It tied up some loose ends.’

  “ ‘And now,’ I said when I had taken it in, ‘what will you do now, Constanza?’

  “She evaded that. ‘Write a letter to Lewis. It’s not going to be easy to convince him.’ (She was right there. Fortunately he’s gone to South America.)

  “ ‘With yourself? Where will you go?’

  “ ‘Go? Why not stay?’

  “ ‘What for?’

  “ ‘I have a feeling that I ought to sit back—one chooses too often—that the next move is not up to me.’

  “ ‘Why here?’

  “ ‘We are here. Don’t you think that fate has given enough hints?’

  “She even took this awful villa, it was offered, it was available; and when I saw that she was firm about not letting any of her friends come out to stay with her, I decided to stay myself. She wanted to be alone—she never was before—but perhaps not entirely alone. I just told her that it might be interesting for me to get to know something of France, after all I was still young for University Entrance and could probably arrange to do some of the work here. She gave me rather a long look but let it go at that.

  “It was she who liked being in France. No memories, no ties: new ground and neutral ground, restful she called it. She found the French mysterious and fascinating and liked to listen to them talking among each other and me to take them off for her afterwards. We did laugh so much during those months—you must have seen us sometimes at the café. We’d never been alone together for so long before. I did a lot of work; Constanza read. Racine, Balzac, new novels. We used to picnic below Michel’s tower, it was shut up—they told us it belonged to a French man of letters—it’s more sheltered than the villa. And we talked and talked, on our walks and late at night, I sitting on her bed wrapped in a blanket, goodness the place was cold. She did talk about her life—Rome, the war, Anna—all that came up, but so much else besides.

  •

  “The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go? How simple and shining it all had looked when she was young and mama was preaching democracy and she went one better with her faith in Fabian Socialism. The influence of private individuals on events was negligible—and yet they must keep on. ‘One thing I learnt in England: public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.’ How did we get into the situation of today? Economic bewilderment in the United States, uninspired government in Britain, unemployment, gloom, insuperable problems everywhere, unspeakable things happening to men and women inside half the countries in the world. ‘In our poor Italy on a comparatively petty scale,’ she said. ‘Think of Soviet Russia. Yet never make that mistake, Flavia, never take lightly the one man in the prison cell.’ She believed that there would be changes, a new cycle of prosperity, Mussolini will fall. ‘But when? How? What about the people to whom it will have cost perhaps a third of their lifetime? What about our tendency to slide into the next trap?’

  “Do we know our true needs? She asked herself, Are we inescapably the products of our habits and environment? Are we not already too many, simply too many, to be able to change the patterns deliberately? Who should begin? Quis custodiet? It is hopeless.

  “ ‘Constanza, some things have become better? Which do you think are good, entirely good? The rule of law?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Where it obtains.’

  “ ‘What else? The Kellogg Pact?’

  “She said, ‘The invention of anaesthetics and the abolition of judicial torture.’

  “Where it obtains. And that would get us back to castor oil and the secret police; Lenin’s Kulaks in the cattle trains, Devil’s Island, English prisons. Oscar Wilde. Crime. Ends and means. Free will. Character, what makes it, what destroys it. Conduct. She would speak of the necessity of holding on to a framework of belief, a reasonable percentage of belief.

  “One thing she often came back to was what she called the great divide in all individual lives. Youth, when death has no reality (she doesn’t mean fear of death, children can have that), and our actions and pleasures are for their own sake, for what they are now and new. Middle-age when the fact of death—impermanence, and our own slackening of impetus—is the dominant, the clef changing the notation; what we do, we do for the nth time. What will it add up to? We are concerned then with the sum not the parts.

  “What is achievement? Art, undoubtedly. Religious experience? outside her range. Science? for what ends? Increasing human happiness? another chancy one that. And for the ninety-nine without a vocation?

  “Pessimism, she affirmed, is to her the most rational view, the long-term view. In the present she mostly enjoyed herself, or had so far: ‘I’ve been sad so often yet from day to day I’ve enjoyed everything that was going.’

  “ ‘Mummy,’ I said, ‘in your whole life what have you enjoyed most?’

  “ ‘Hunting, I suppose.’

  “And we talked about the books we were reading. She re-read Howard’s End, twice, it was so beautifully fatalistic, she said, it suited her present mood. Among the new English writers, I am backing Aldous Huxley and she’s backing Evelyn Waugh. Someone sent her Vile Bodies, when she had finished it she cried. She hadn’t done that she said since she was my age and came to the last page of Le Rouge et le Noir.

  “I said nothing happened. Well, Anna came a few times. She had herself driven over and never spent more than the day. She brought us Parmesan and Italian vegetables and Mena to do an afternoon’s worth of sewing, but it never went right, she disapproved of us dreadfully. The mistral, the villa (‘When I think of Somerset!’ ‘Don’t Mama.’), Constanza’s aimlessness.

  “ ‘What are your plans? Your brother is doing very well.’

  “ ‘All of a sudden?’

  “ ‘Giorgio is marketing a new design for a motor car and they are favourably impressed at Turin.’

  “She never mentioned my having got stuck here as well, but I could hardly look her in the face. She wasn’t even glad about Constanza’s having given up Lewis. ‘Mena, is she worse?’ we asked. We asked that, we did not ask, ‘Mena, what can we do?’ Her answer was, ‘She is tired of herself.’

  “When she was gone we felt miserable, angry with her and like criminals.

  “The rest happened
by post. First it was something good, or so it seemed to me. Constanza was moved but sceptical. It was late in the day and nothing had led up to it. For the letter was from the prince. Poor Anna had been very indiscreet, the fascisti were going to arrest her or put pressure on her to leave the country for good, but he had been assured that if the principessa were to live again with him quietly in Rome nobody would touch her. He was offering her the protection of his house and name. ‘She is my wife. We are both getting old. I have missed her.’

  “I said, ‘Giulia?’

  “ ‘Giulia is old now and papa has persuaded himself that he is; he has allowed himself to slip into old age. Mama has not done that. She hasn’t softened, she isn’t resigned.’

  “So Constanza went and met her mother halfway at Nice. She came back defeated; she had not been able to move her.

  “Constanza’s next task would have been to get her to leave Italy . . . without too much pain. ‘Will it be London?’ I asked. ‘Do I have to live with her?’

  “Before we did anything there was something else. It was good and bad. An envelope arrived with only a receipt inside, it was for the ruby ring. It was at a jeweller’s in Milan and could be retrieved for a certain sum. Constanza was stunned. The ruby was coming back to her! It had been pawned with a discreet firm and the person who had pawned it was her brother Giorgio.

  “It was all too obvious to hindsight. When Giorgio had descended on us that day in the train he had asked her to advance him the money to build the new car, and when she had turned him down he was furious. He snatched the ring. (Constanza has a habit of slipping it off and placing it on the table in front of her. She’s done it for years.) Now she had to pay up. She telegraphed Anna to meet her, she couldn’t have put her hand on so much money on her own.

  “They met again at the same hotel. An orchestra was playing and they were served tea. I don’t know why Constanza told me that when she told me so little else. Only this. When Anna heard, she changed: she became formidable. She cried, ‘So my son is a thief. That, too!’ She turned on Constanza; Constanza lost her head, she struck back, she said the things she had not said in a lifetime, the things that should not be said. Anna rose and walked away, very slowly and stiffly—Constanza tried to follow her but a waiter held her up with the bill. When at last she got out of the hotel Anna’s car was moving down the drive.

  “Constanza went back to St-Jean. The day after we tried to telephone from the post office but could not get through to Alassio. Four days later early in the morning the telegram came.

  “When Constanza got there she was told that her mother had made a mistake with her sleeping pills, her maid had been witness to that. Veronal. The principessa’s heart had been bad for some time. Mena was unshakeable. America cabled that Anna had left instructions to be buried in Rome. And so she was. From her husband’s house.

  “Afterwards Constanza came back here with Mena. They were both . . . strained. They did not talk about it, we did not talk about it. (At first.) Let her rest in peace, Mena said. Constanza was kept busy coping with Anna’s estate. It had to be done through the American Consulate at Marseilles, sixty miles there and back, she was away most of the day; I was glad of that too, we didn’t really want to be alone with each other just then. And when that was over, well, since everybody here seems to know about it, there was Michel.

  “Constanza has been . . . fortunate. (She doesn’t like one to use the word lucky.)

  “Did you know that Michel actually turned up on that dreadful morning when Constanza was frantic to get to the station? I thought he was the taxi-driver. He came as a neighbour offering help.

  “The week before we had noticed that the shutters were open at the tower (no more picnics) and we had seen the car. The French politician had arrived. We used to refer to him as the man of principle. You see we had heard quite a bit about him—the locals boggle at the way in which he doesn’t dodge his taxes. We were told that he refused to take his seat in the Chamber of Deputies because there was something he didn’t approve of in the campaign. ‘Mummy, he must be an awful prig.’ ‘He doesn’t sound like one.’ She had bought a copy of De l’Administration. ‘That’s written by a first-class mind.’

  “Well, I didn’t take him in that morning. When he came back later on to ask if I needed anything, I was struck by his face—the intelligence in it, the structure, it is a noble face, isn’t it? Constanza says it’s a French period face, Clouet, the portrait of Monsieur Pienne (clean-shaved). And I was struck by his youth, I expected someone . . . ponderous, not a man in espadrilles and blue overalls who moves like a feather. He is Lewis Crane’s generation actually, about ten years older than Constanza. You know that he stopped by the villa every day asking what he could do for me, offering lifts, bringing books, staying to talk. The kindness! And he a writer, not minding about his time.

  “I asked (I was trying to fit in what we’d heard of him) about his having passed out of the Ecole Normale so high, which had rather impressed me. He was amused, though not very. He said that he was not a Normalien, he was Condorcet and Polytechnique.

  “ ‘Marcel Proust went to Condorcet?’

  “ ‘Right.’

  “ ‘But not on to the other?’

  “ ‘Right again.’

  “ ‘You did pass out high? What’s the French equivalent of a Balliol double first? And would you mind explaining what is wrong with being Normalien? I’d have thought one had to be very bright indeed even to get in?’ ‘Ambition,’ he said, ‘ l’amour du portefeuille.’ ‘You didn’t take up a profession, you went into politics and gave them up again?’ ‘I gave up front-line politics, yes.’

  “ ‘Would you call yourself an homme de lettres?’

  “He laughed and said that nobody under ninety called himself that nowadays. I said, more’s the pity and that I had seen the term both in the Petit Larousse Moderne and the Figaro Littéraire.

  “Michel laughed again and said, ‘Well, we do have a great many men of ninety. All the same don’t believe everything you read, ma fille.’

  “Another time I asked him about his having turned down Parliament on a point of principle. That really amused him. ‘I’ve never had the honour of being elected. I stood down well short of it. I see that I enjoy an exaggerated reputation for probity among my compatriots. I can assure you it is wonderfully easy to acquire.’

  “ ‘But you could have?’

  “ ‘Become a legislator? That, too, is not difficult.’ He had come to realize that the technique of politics as currently practiced was ineffectual and in the long view immeasurably harmful in twentieth-century conditions. To maintain any form of quality and security in our environment and lives we would have to scrap most of our notions and tackle everything from different ends. ‘The knowledge is there, it needs to be applied.’

  “Wasn’t that a tall order, I said; and again please to explain. What about democracy, what about that technique?

  “Michel said I reminded him of his audience at the time when he made speeches. Democracy, alas, though still far from being universally practiced or accepted, was already out of date.

  “ ‘But we know that any alternate system is inevitably worse, much worse?’

  “ ‘We might say that democracy, at this stage, is preferable to any current dictatorship and to many periods of absolutism in the past. Can we say that it is preferable to any system or order of government that might be devised?’

  “I asked him what he had in mind.

  “ ‘A controlled hierarchy, selected rather than elected.’

  “ ‘By whom?’

  “ ‘Controlled by law. Selected by objective tests.’

  “ ‘What will come first? The laws and the tests, or the hierarchy?’

  “ ‘That is the crux. There we have infinite moral and political problems. The initial mise au pouvoir, the right beginning. It may be impossible. It is worth thinking about.’

  “ ‘My mother says, As we cannot cal
l in the gods, quis custodiet?’ “ ‘The beautiful lady whom I drove in my car? A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles?’

  •

  “When Constanza was back, Michel took her into Marseilles every day. I don’t think she noticed him beyond feeling vaguely grateful for his kindliness and care. I don’t think they talked much in that car; she was still so tense and shocked. He drives fast and she’s always liked speed. He seemed to know what she needed, silence, a little small talk to make it natural, transport at the door. When he brought her back he just drew up in front of the villa, jumped out, opened door, kissed hand, ‘Bon soir, Madame,’ and he was off. I went up to the tower sometimes later in the evening for a talk, he had said I might. We sat in his lovely round room with all the books (little I thought!). I asked him what he did with himself in Marseilles all day long? ‘Oh, I get a surprising amount of reading done in the car.’ ‘Notes and all? I do call that concentration.’ But did he mean that he actually sat waiting outside the U.S. Consulate? ‘Well, they do keep her there till all hours.’ And what did they to between twelve and two p.m.? ‘I usually drop her at Cintra’s Bar, she can get a sandwich there and a glass of port.’

  “ ‘You drop her? You don’t go in?’

  “ ‘She hasn’t asked me to.’

  “ ‘But, Michel, dear, isn’t that what the man’s supposed to do?’

  “He said very sweetly and tenderly, ‘These are no normal occasions, elle a eu beaucoup de chagrin.’

  “A few days later he told me that he’d been to Cintra’s with her. At the door she had suddenly looked up and said, ‘Don’t you eat?’ He said, ‘A côté.’ Constanza said, ‘How absurd, and how perfectly awful of me.’ I told Michel that was all very well but for goodness’ sake stop taking her to that white port-wine place, the sandwiches there—though delicious—are minute. ‘Do take her to a proper restaurant.’ From then on she came to the surface more; it wasn’t long before she said to him, ‘This cannot go on, haven’t you anything better to do than being my chauffeur all day?’ ‘And what did you say then?’ ‘Flavia, you ask too much,’ he said, and surely I could work that one out by myself. I think I can.