A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  Yet had the question gone on, And what if she does not turn up on the waterfront tonight? The answer would have been, Ah, that would be unbearable.

  Flavia was there so early that she ran into Therese in the little square where people left their cars.

  Therese took in Flavia’s gleaming silk shirt and eager face. “You’re looking very nice, coco,” she said. She noticed the new sweater Flavia was carrying and praised it generously. “You know where that exquisite wool comes from? It is very rare.”

  Flavia said, “I got some work done today—I think I’m going to be all right.”

  They were still talking when Andrée was there. Andrée saw Therese, and Therese saw Andrée.

  She walked up to them with a kind of swagger. Flavia saw a curious look pass between the two women—defiance? on Andrée’s part; stony anger on Therese’s.

  “Bon-jour, Andrée.”

  “Bon-jour, Therese.”

  They did not shake hands.

  Therese pushed a basket into Flavia’s arms. “Take it to the car for me,” she said. It was an order—a rare thing from Therese—and Flavia could not refuse it short of gross discourtesy in public to an older woman and a friend. She was marched off under Andrée’s eyes.

  “I did not know Andrée was here!” Therese still had her Medusa face. “Have you been seeing her? That is bad. How could you?”

  Humiliated enough and ready to dig in her heels, Flavia said, “What’s bad about it? Do you mean her being connected with Michel?”

  Appalled, Therese said, “If you don’t feel it——”

  “Are you going to tell me it’s unsuitable?”

  “It is—and it is wrong,” Therese said majestically. “Besides it’s dangerous.” Softening a little, she said, “Can’t you see, coco, that she’s an extremely dangerous woman?”

  Flavia was infatuated enough to be taking this as a compliment.

  “What is she doing here? Wherever she appears, she’s up to no good.” Again more mildly, she added, “I wish I could forbid you to go on seeing her.”

  Flavia said, “But you can’t. I’m going to have dinner with Andrée.” Truthfully, superstitiously, she added, “At least I hope so.”

  Andrée, waiting in her car, asked with something short of her usual self-possession, “What did that termagant say about me?”

  Flavia thought, She’s lost face because it has come out that she is on Christian-name terms after all with Therese. Relieved to be let off herself, she said lightly, “Oh, a dire warning, you’re bad and dangerous to know.”

  “Was that all?”

  Flavia seized the chance of teasing in turn. “She didn’t give chapter and verse.” In another tone, she said, “Not that I would have let her.”

  “How loyal, how British,” Andrée said and it sounded almost like approval.

  After that everything between them became easy for the time being. Andrée without appearing to do so took charge of the evening. They drove a short way along the coast to a restaurant that was neither smart nor squalid, hushed nor noisy, and where a dinner they paid no attention to was served to them seemingly without any act of volition. They talked. Andrée appeared to have padded most of her edges; she was being considerate, intelligent, serious, talking like an elder person generous with knowledge to a younger one, and Flavia ceased to feel an absurd adolescent and a target. Andrée spoke of Saint-Simon and compared him to some English memoirists; she spoke of the astonishing variety of the classical French novel, La Princesse de Clèves, Adolphe, Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

  Of the latter, Flavia said, “I realize that it must be well done, but I couldn’t bear it when I read it.” The duplicity and wickedness of Mme de Merteuil. “It made me quite ill.”

  Andrée showed a claw. “Reality would make you feel ill.”

  “Isn’t Mme de Merteuil too bad to be real?”

  “Possibly too much of a piece for modern fiction.”

  They talked, inevitably, of Marcel Proust.

  “Michel would never let me meet him,” Andrée said. “He doesn’t approve of satisfying one’s curiosity or of seeking out the notorious. He doesn’t approve of Proust either.”

  “Surely not?” said Flavia.

  “You haven’t begun to know Michel. He’s against rummaging in one’s past—not that even he would use that term for À la Recherche though he really detests the style. Michel still worships Anatole France.”

  “So did Proust,” said Flavia.

  “But he didn’t noticeably try to write like him.”

  Then Andrée talked about Paris, where she lived.

  A larger carafe of wine was on their table and Andrée filled up Flavia’s glass from time to time.

  “I’d give a great deal,” Flavia said, “to know about you, to know what your life is really like?”

  Andrée’s quizzical expression returned. “Would you?” Then she veered; assuming her least play-acting manner, she said, “I understand you, I also have that passion to get to know about people, to find out what’s behind them, what they want, what they’re after.”

  “How much truth is there in the phrase, What makes people tick? said Flavia. “Does it mean that everybody has some definite thing that moves him?”

  “Not one single thing—a clockwork isn’t so uncomplicated either—a combination. Ah, yes, find that and you can make them tick. Or stop them from ticking.”

  “I shouldn’t like to be able to do that.”

  “I told you,” Andrée said, “you haven’t enough stomach for the world. And don’t think that being squeamish is a virtue in itself—there are many ways of doing harm.”

  Flavia would have liked to hear more about this but Andrée was already on to something else.

  “Glissez, mortels,” she said, “n’appuyez point.”

  All in all it could be said to have been an amicable evening.

  •

  They had left the restaurant and were taking a few steps on the front. Suddenly Andrée said, “Take me to the place you work in, show me your hide-out.”

  Flavia manifestly hesitated.

  “What’s the objection?”

  But Flavia was unwilling to express what she strongly if obscurely felt—that a matter of trust was involved. She said, “You see I was given it to work and read in, not to . . . entertain.”

  Andre said reasonably, “You’re not being asked to throw a cocktail party. My dear, we have things to talk about and I don’t expect to be here for very much longer—would you prefer us to trail off to my hotel or some public place, or to your frankly not very inviting villa? Surely the place you work in has a more civilized atmosphere? And I’d like to see it. Can’t you take a friend, even if it’s a recent one?”

  There was nothing decently to be done and so with disproportionate reluctance Flavia took Andrée to the tower.

  The key, here, was not kept under a flowerpot or stone but in a more foolproof and elaborate hiding-place. Flavia unlocked, let Andrée pass, preceded her to the top floor to light lamps.

  “Civilized enough?”

  Andrée stood in the round room looking at the books with a mixture of curiosity and distaste.

  “You do know where we are? You know whose this is?”

  “Knock me down with a feather, to coin a phrase,” said Andrée, “It’s his, it’s saintly Michel’s retreat. I’ve heard about it.”

  Seeing it anew, Flavia said, “It is something?” “Oh, very comfortable, very sober, very insulated—I know Michel’s taste in house furnishing. What’s the rest like?”

  “I don’t use it, it’s kept locked. I only come up here. That’s where he works.”

  “You admire him, don’t you?”

  “Oh—yes.”

  “What do you admire about him?”

  Flavia thought. “Doesn’t the whole of him strike one? His mind. His manner: so calm, so kind, so on top of things. His looks. Don’t they show up what he is? . . . alert and benign—he is as good as he is intelligent. Li
ke an . . . ideal judge. A young judge.”

  “An ideal judge,” Andrée said. “What flights of fancy. I daresay his brothers might accept that one.”

  “Not you?”

  “I’d rather take the law into my own hands.”

  “I don’t believe in that,” said Flavia.

  “Meaning——?” Andrée said, not missing a thing. “Meaning that all the same you might do so yourself?”

  “I have done so,” Flavia said.

  Andrée let it pass.

  Flavia went on following her train of thought, “I cannot see him doing even a disinterested thing if it went against a rule.”

  “Not he,” said Andrée.

  “He’s so unlike anyone else.”

  “And wants to be! He despises the human race and the combinations that make it tick; the human race in its present state, he’d qualify—he’d like to send us all back to nursery school—so he has to behave as unlike his fellow beings as he can.”

  “Behave better? Isn’t that all to the good?”

  “That depends on how you count the cost,” said Andrée.

  “But Michel is so very kind to the fellow beings.”

  “So is the Seigneur supposed to be. With and without the capital S. You’ve heard him go on about those selective hierarchies?”

  “I know he is fighting the mediocre common denominator in politics and life, but isn’t he personally an extremely modest man?”

  “I would say he was too proud to put his light above a bushel.”

  “You don’t approve of Michel?”

  Andrée played it lightly. “The prophet in his own home as one might say——” She settled into the big armchair. “There wouldn’t be such a thing as a cigarette? I thought not. He doesn’t even smoke.” She looked at Flavia. “Oh, do sit down, or stand still, you make me nervous. You’re too young to have habits. That’s better.” She looked at Flavia again. “Tell me, does your mother enjoy principles and abstract ideas?”

  “Oh, yes, she does,” said Flavia.

  “Really?”

  “Not that she has so many herself—principles I mean—but they are essential with. . . when. . .”

  “When——?”

  Flavia said bravely, “She looks for virtue in those she loves. It’s in our family, we all do.”

  “Tell me, is it true that Michel wants to marry her?” “It is true,” Flavia said. “There—you’re on the defensive again.” “I don’t mean to. It’s because—can’t you see?—it’s really not up to me to talk about their . . . concerns.”

  “Their . . . concerns are being talked about. Do you prefer me then to get it all from Rosette Fournier?” Flavia hung her head. “My dear, it is time you told me a little more about it. So Michel wants to marry her—what about your mother?”

  “Oh, it’s all right, she didn’t even hesitate, she as good as popped the question herself.”

  “Did she? You know that Michel is married?”

  “Oh, that,” Flavia said, “you must know that’s just a technicality.”

  “Is that how you see marriage?”

  Flavia said with some spirit, “That’s how I see divorce. His ought to have gone through ages ago.”

  There was a silence. “I know,” Flavia went on, “that people don’t like a divorce in their family, but when you think that his has so long ceased to be a real marriage——You haven’t seen them together, Michel and . . . Constanza.”

  “No, I haven’t seen them together,” Andrée said. “What is she like, apart from being keen on other people’s principles? Albert Fournier says she isn’t too bad-looking.”

  “Did he put it that way?” Flavia said.

  “Rather Southern? rather sultry? Correct my impression, I’m listening.”

  But Flavia merely said, “You will be able to judge when you see her.”

  “Mule.”

  Flavia relented. “It just struck me, you and she have the same long eye-lashes, silky long, and so has Michel. That’s a coincidence.”

  “Any others?”

  “You both have that golden skin, but yours makes one think of lovely geometrical planes, you’re all bone, she’s got bone too, but what one sees most is contour and colour—no, you are not remotely the same type, she could never be painted by a Modigliani or a Loulou, or a Piero for that matter, she is something between a Titian and a Gainsborough.” Having warmed to it, Flavia went on, “And then you are so essentially neat, no, neat is too prosaic, you are so . . . styled, you look as though you had been made.”

  “Whereas she?”

  “Is more like flesh and blood,” Flavia said impartially.

  Andrée gave her a look that she could not interpret.

  “She’s well-read, like you. Like you, she likes to tease and can be rough.”

  “Tell me something about her life.”

  “If you promise to go to sleep,” said Flavia. “People get bored if you try hard enough to tell them how things were.”

  “Haven’t you found me rather a good audience?”

  “At moments,” Flavia admitted, truthfully. She had no desire whatsoever to repeat her own performance. The very brief account she gave now was selective—it referred to Anna but not to Anna’s story; Rome was a place of origin; there was no mention of a Mena or a Mr. James (Simon she could not entirely subdue), the prince was a bare name. Nevertheless the account glowed.

  “You see,” she said, “I had that winter with her.”

  Thoughtfully, Andrée said, “Do you think your mother cares two hoots about being married or not married to a man? From what you’ve been telling me I shouldn’t think she did?”

  “Odd thing,” Flavia said, “I shouldn’t have thought so either and now I’m convinced she does. She’s never been one for unnecessary nonconformity and there’s the Italian family to think of, but there’s more to it. I believe she used to be so reluctant about marrying people because marriage is important to her, she’s only been waiting for the right one.”

  “So you think that she wants the substance and the form?”

  “Oh, yes. The one would be less without the other.”

  “And Michel?”

  “He feels the same way. I saw how protective he is about her, and how could he protect her better than by being married to her. And don’t you think he’d like to score a happy marriage to set against the other one?”

  “And you?” said Andrée, “Wouldn’t you rather keep her to yourself?”

  “I want it for her, I want it very much.”

  “For yourself?”

  Flavia said happily, “It would be quite wonderful, I should have a family to come home to in the holidays all my life.” She added quickly, “At least for many many many more years than one can think of.”

  “By the way,” said Andrée, “leaving that rosy future aside, where are they at this moment?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “So they are together.”

  “But you said you knew? Apparently everybody does.”

  “Everybody guessed. Now you have told.”

  “Only to you.”

  “Yes,” Andrée said, “only to me.”

  “You are not going to repeat it?”

  “I don’t think I shall repeat it.” She looked hard at Flavia who as so often could not tell whether Andrée was serious or contemptuous or amused. “But I would rather like to know where they are?”

  Flavia was silent.

  “They’ve left France, haven’t they? My dear, I thought that you and I had become—friends?”

  “I’ve only got a poste-restante address myself,” said Flavia. “But where? What country?”

  Flavia began to count till ten hoping that Andrée would get on to something else.

  “I bet you told her, you told your belle-laide?”

  “I didn’t even tell Therese.”

  “Even.” Andrée’s eyes flashed. “You will do nothing for me—except spout fine words and declarations.”


  “I would do anything for you,” said Flavia.

  “Well——”

  “Anything within reason.”

  “More fine words.”

  Flavia plunged. “I did what you told me to—I’ve got it now. You remember? The conclusive experience.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Andrée.

  “I should be allowed to know about my inclinations now. I’ve had an affair with a man.”

  “You had what?”

  Flavia repeated her words.

  “When? You haven’t had the time.”

  “Last night.”

  “Say that again. And with whom, for heaven’s sake? Don’t stand there, tell me about it.”

  In a reticent but factual way, Flavia did.

  “So you and he went up to the villa? And then you went back into St-Jean again for supper? That was the only consequence you were bothering about?”

  “Only I ate supper,” Flavia said.

  “And what on earth made you do it?”

  “You. I thought . . . I understood that you might like me better if I had experience, if I didn’t have opinions about things I knew nothing about . . .”

  Andrée had begun to laugh. It was the first time that Flavia heard her do so. She laughed and she laughed, and she laughed again. “You did that for me?”

  “Of course,” said Flavia.

  Andrée’s control seemed to have gone. Flavia watched her with distaste and some alarm.

  In her smallest voice, she said, “Perhaps it was a mistake?”

  When Andrée had recovered she said, “And yet you will not tell me that simple thing?”

  “It involves them. The other . . . last night, that was only me.”