A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  Flavia gave her mind to it.

  When the waiter came, Andrée referred him to her.

  “You are putting me through my paces,” Flavia said evenly.

  She ordered consommé madrilène, sole florentine and framboise nature.

  “Quelques pommes vapeur?”

  “No potatoes.”

  “Une salade?”

  “No salad.”

  “A little chantilly with the raspberries?”

  “No cream.”

  “Very good, mademoiselle. Et comme boisson?”

  Without a glance at Andrée, Flavia took the wine-list. “Half a bottle of number 32, cooled,” 32 was a dry Graves, “and a bottle of Evian water.”

  “Coffee?”

  “We’ll ring for coffee.”

  “Your French is not bad,” Andrée said when the waiter had gone.

  Flavia gave her a somewhat grim look.

  “You mustn’t make faces at people, my dear; you look like a dog that’s baring its teeth. Drink up, finish your bottle.”

  “No thank you,” said Flavia.

  “My dear, not dog—bull-dog.” But sensing perhaps the hostility in Flavia, she added, “I tease too hard—forgive me.”

  Her eyes on Andrée, Flavia said, “I cannot . . . understand you.”

  “You do drive one into uttering banalities. Is it usual to understand anyone—I’m not even referring to my enigmatic self—at one’s second meeting?”

  “Fourth meeting,” Flavia said.

  Andrée took that one in.

  They sat down to dinner.

  “I asked for it,” Flavia said, “the teasing and all, after the way I pretended I could get you a taxi.”

  “That was charming of you—it showed such a chivalrous nature. You are half Italian, aren’t you?”

  “Quarter.”

  “How is that?”

  “Too complicated.”

  “But there is an Italian grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is quite ill?”

  “No,” said Flavia, “I mean yes.”

  “Read any good books lately?”

  Flavia laughed.

  “At least you are not stupid,” Andrée said.

  “Nor are you.”

  “Pour me some Evian.”

  “Has anyone ever told you——”

  “Probably.”

  “Has anyone done your portrait, I mean a modern painter?”

  “Others are hardly available,” said Andrée.

  “Have you never thought of Loulou? I think Loulou could do you—he’s very good with eyes.”

  “Ah, poor Loulou. He does everybody nowadays. Oh, I forget you know him—and that extraordinary wife of his.”

  “Therese is a truly extraordinary woman.”

  “My dear, how loyal, how English!” Then, suddenly, brutally, “Do you sleep with her?”

  Such was Flavia’s pride in the fact that she answered smugly, “That is my business.”

  Andrée said, “I thought so.”

  Flavia did not speak.

  “A vastly overestimated pastime, or isn’t that what you call it? Perhaps it still has the charm of novelty?”

  Flavia still said nothing.

  “Do you loathe me?”

  Flavia nearly answered, I do, I do loathe you. But would have had to add, A part of me does. Instead she said, “Your bark may be worse than your bite. I hope it is.”

  Andrée seemed delighted. “You’ve only had my bark; so far.” Presently, as if seized by sudden revelation, Flavia put down her knife and fork. She said in a neutral voice, “Why do you bother with me?”

  “What an elegant way of putting it.”

  “I bore you, I could only bore you.”

  “On the contrary,” said Andrée.

  “I am nothing.” Flavia spoke with both humility and coldness. “I have no . . . merits yet; and what I want to be would be nothing to you.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “You are not interested in anything I’m interested in.”

  Then Andrée saw that Flavia was near tears. “If I told you that you had a good many things I am interested in?” “I wouldn’t believe you,” said Flavia. “Don’t underrate yourself.”

  Flavia looked up.

  “I have a pretty good idea of how you see me.” Andrée’s voice had changed to a lower key, that air of persiflage was gone. “I can almost read your thoughts—yes, you are transparent, my dear—has it occurred to you that what you see and hear, my bark, might be a façade? You are a very intelligent girl and you have read a great deal—no, I mean it; one thing you can’t say is that I have been trying to flatter you—but you don’t know everything, you don’t know the French, the real French (though the Fourniers are quite an example of one kind), you can have no idea of what life among us is like, the attitudes, the demands; if you like, the values. You have no idea, have you, what my life’s been like?”

  “No,” said Flavia.

  “In a hard school, a façade is a protection. The favourite French façade is bonhomie, that perpetual guzzling: la chaleur des aprèsdîners, and the couchage. Well, that doesn’t happen to be my style, my choice of façade. The pursuit of good living is not the innocent thing you would like it to be, my dear; you weren’t born in time to watch my compatriots during the war, the energies they put into it, the boys dying Pour la Patrie while the family at home fought about L’Héritage and assured the survival of La Bonne Cuisine.

  “Don’t think I’m anti-food as such. That was quite a nice dinner you ordered, though you needn’t have been quite so Spartan—I’m glad to see you’ve allowed us some sugar with these raspberries—I appreciated your nuance of not having the fish just grilled.

  “To return to myself, to my particular egotissimo. If I appear, let us say, disenchanted, it is because I have reason to be. My life——” Andrée appeared at a loss for a word.

  “Your life has not been happy?” said Flavia.

  “If you wish to simplify.” And then, “God, how I hate talking this way.”

  “Not happy,” Flavia said, “when you are so beautiful?”

  “Am I?”

  “You are too beautiful,” Flavia said in a heart-broken tone.

  “Too beautiful for what?”

  “For everyone. For me. More beautiful than anyone can bear.”

  Andrée in her other manner, said, “Looks are useful.”

  “Don’t,” said Flavia.

  In the full, serious voice again, Andrée said, “I told you I tease hard. And not only the young. I’m known to speak harshly to my contemporaries. New friendship does not come easy to me, I feel compelled to play it rough at first—your idealism, for example, I had to find out whether it was capable of standing up; testing and teasing, for me, are a kind of initiation——”

  Flavia, sitting very still, was not sure if she could trust her ears.

  “We all have reticences, they take different forms. What are yours? I can tell you: you will talk about your ideas, you will not talk about your feelings.” She looked Flavia full in the face, “I do not mean your feeling for me, though you have hardly talked about that either. I mean is there nobody you are fond of? (Except Madame Loulou.) Are you a misanthropist, or are you an orphan? Come on, any brothers or sisters?”

  “Not really.”

  “A father?”

  “My father is dead.”

  “I thought your mother was divorced.”

  Flavia looked taken aback.

  More gently, Andrée said, “You see? You don’t talk about her.”

  When Flavia offered no help, she continued, “You see? Perhaps it’s just because you don’t like her? More daughters than would admit it hate their mothers.”

  Flavia put her hands under the table and crossed her fingers.

  “Or is it that you think so highly of her that you can’t bring yourself to cast her pearls before swine? That would be your English side coming out; I rather prefer yo
u when you are being Italian. Or it might be that you don’t want to talk about her because there is something to hide?

  “Now before you go on presenting that blank face to me, think for a moment. My dear, you are on the young side—I am only stating a fact, the kind of fact the world sees—to be living in a kind of bachelor’s establishment, so naturally one asks oneself where is that mysterious lady, her mother? Why has she gone away? Your treating the question as if it didn’t exist is no help to you, no one ever got away by playing the ostrich.”

  Flavia said, “But surely the Fourniers must have told you?”

  “Of course they have! You can imagine how fascinated Rosette is by everything a woman like your mother does; but that needn’t mean that there’s much truth in what she tells one.”

  “Quite,” said Flavia.

  “So I can’t say that I know where your mother is or why she left.”

  “Why should you want to know?”

  “You are an extraordinary girl—quite insensitive in some ways. If you don’t get it, there’s nothing for me to add. Here I am talking to you about myself—a thing I assure you I very very rarely do—while you are shrinking from making the slightest personal communication to me. It isn’t encouraging, is it? It isn’t even friendly. You are treating me as if I were another Rosette Fournier.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I am sorry. I suppose I have been beastly. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Never say that, it’s the feeblest excuse, like a housemaid after breaking a vase. Either mean it, or don’t do it.”

  With some effort Flavia said, “I don’t want to talk about my. . . about our . . . family affairs at the moment. . . .” With reluctance she added, “There are reasons.”

  Andrée gave her a half-smile. “Am I to take that as a sign of your confidence?”

  “It wasn’t much.”

  “As a reward you may change the subject.”

  “Any good book lately?”

  “Point Counter Point—Contrepoint as we had to call it in our rigid language—for the third time I might add.”

  “You read Aldous Huxley?”

  “He’s not a monopoly?”

  “You said you didn’t like ideas.”

  “I like his about people.”

  “I think he knows everything,” Flavia said. “There is no one like him. Have you read all his books?”

  “Most of them.”

  “So has my mother, though she does not put him as high as I do.” Then she took another step forward, “What would you say were your political views?”

  Andrée gave her a look of not unbenevolent irony. “In the narrower or the broader sense?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, none in the first: the more respectable French don’t go into politics.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Those who care about keeping their hands clean stay away, though we are apt to follow a general in a crisis. In the second: the obvious views, you could fill in the form for me. We’re in a mess and nothing is going to pull us out; I am not a socialist; I’m not impressed by your little man in Rome; I don’t like ultra-nationalists (I’m not one of those who’d follow the general); I think there is something to be said for constitutional monarchy but in France that cause is as dead as mutton; I have not much faith in the League, nor in democracy as an up-to-date technique of government. Call me an enlightened defeatist if you wish.”

  Flavia nodded. “Then you are for clearing up the mess if we could, you are against——”

  “Dictators and war. I am on the side of the angels—that’s what you wanted to be reassured about?”

  “Yes,” said Flavia.

  Presently she said, “I know I haven’t earned another turn, all the same may I ask you a question, a semi-personal question?”

  “I won’t guarantee an answer.”

  “Your degree?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s been puzzling me. You said that you got it for a bet, well a bet is usually something like swimming in the North Sea on Christmas Day, I mean something sharp and brief, while working for a degree, however brilliant you are, takes years. You have to keep on, it’s a way of life, and not being interested all that time—I can’t see it.”

  “All right,” Andrée said, “I don’t mind telling you. It was a half-truth. I did it for a bet—with one of my uncles, his side being that I wouldn’t stick to anything—and because it seemed as good a way as any of getting away from home, but I was not uninterested and I have not forgotten my subject.”

  Flavia was listening.

  “I rather liked the work—it was not all easy, I had to make an effort, quite an effort, at times; but less than most, I knew I was good at it.”

  “Exceptionally good?”

  “Since you ask, and since we’re talking for the record: Yes. They told me I had an academic future, a considerable future.”

  “But——?”

  “I gave it up. I didn’t go on. There are other ways, you know, for a girl to get away from home.”

  “Didn’t you want . . . the academic future?”

  “The intellectual side was all right. It was a kind of exercise, like a perpetual crossword, rather more rewarding. It’s not bad to succeed, to excel, and it’s always satisfying to solve a difficulty. It might have done. Work is a good deal less boring than doing nothing at all.”

  “What went wrong? You weren’t sent down?”

  “Indeed not. I backed out; you might say, I ran. What was wrong? The life. My not being a man. My dear, don’t talk to me about an academic career for a woman. A female don! She really hasn’t much choice, there’s the glorified schoolmarm; there’s the brave little woman who tries to be a good wife and housewife, and I daresay mother, as well, and makes a point of her pretty clothes; and there’s the blue-stocking, the eccentric and frump, the mathematics dean who doesn’t know which side her tea-cup is chipped. As for the wining and dining don, you won’t find her, she doesn’t exist, and if she did the men wouldn’t have her. Talk of segregation—you will sit with the men all right, you will sit round a table with them talking examination papers, you won’t be at the table when the decanter goes round.

  “French universities are bad enough, English are ten times worse. They sent me to Cambridge for a couple of terms—that’s where I first realized I must run—I don’t want to blaspheme about one of your famous institutions so I shan’t tell you the name of my college though you’re longing to know—the girls in their bed-sitters, the cocoa-drinking, the tittle-tattle, the atmosphere of heartiness or domesticity in the combination-room—But, my dear, it must be getting late and here I am telling you things that you know as well as I do.”

  Flavia looked at her watch. “It’s a quarter to two.”

  “It can’t be?” Andrée said. “How flattering for both of us. But you are cold?”

  “I don’t think so,” Flavia said.

  “You’re shivering.” Andrée touched her arm. “Chilled to the bone.” She went indoors and returned with an enormous, rough-looking navy-blue sweater. “There, put that on at once—catch it.”

  Flavia gave a gasp of surprise. The sweater was as light as a puff and as smooth as a bird to touch.

  “Keep it,” Andrée said. “It suits you, go and look at yourself. I’m giving it to you.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “It’s yours. It’s an Hermès.”

  “The messenger of the gods?”

  “The shop.”

  A minute or so later Flavia said, “Time for me to go.”

  “How? How did you come? I should have asked.”

  “By the bus. I’m going to walk.”

  “All of twelve kilometers? I’m going to drive you home. That’s to be our custom.”

  They went by the sea route; the night was clear and calm. They sat side by side in silence.

  Outside the house Andrée turned the car; as Flavia got out, she did too. “Good nig
ht, Flavia.” She kissed her on the mouth. It was a chaste kiss. Flavia’s heart turned over.

  For a long time she stayed outside keeping from sleep to hold that moment, hold it as being now, not letting it go to be yesterday, go into the past.

  6. MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY

  1.

  NEXT DAY was Monday. Flavia did not go to the tower. She did not go to the sea. She stayed at the villa waiting for the long car.

  The sense of happiness had remained. At times she heard a voice clearly, She cannot mean it. Another voice answered, Don’t under-rate yourself.

  The morning went. The afternoon began.

  The sunset hour. When it was nearly dark, Flavia gave it another ten minutes, another five; five more. Then she locked up and went to the house on the bay.

  •

  Although it was late, the Loulou boys were still hopping about.

  “You didn’t come yesterday.”

  “She didn’t come the day before yesterday.”

  “Did you find somebody else then to give you your dinner?”

  Maman asked after you.”

  “Papa asked after you.”

  “Not today!”

  “Today she must mind her step.”

  “Papa is in a temper.”

  “A fil-thy temper—he has thrown them all out, he has thrown them all out of the window.”

  “Is something the matter?” Flavia asked.

  “Fifty dozen tuberoses—five hundred tuberoses—five hundred dozen tuberoses—last night they went into the ice-box, this morning they were brown.”

  “White into the ice-box, brown out of the oven, five thousand white flowers—they stank.”

  “They stank worse than fish, worse than fish, five thousand francs worth of white flowers, five big pots of white oil paint——”

  “Papa isn’t shouting about the francs, it is the arrangement, the flo-ral ar-ran-ge-ment, he cannot paint fifty dozen white flowers when they are brown.”

  “And stink.”

  •

  Flavia went up to the terrace and quietly took her place.

  Therese greeted her kindly. Loulou was not there.