A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error
Page 50
The same voice, “I shall see you later at St-Jean.”
Andrée said, “She’s got some luggage.”
“That can be seen to. Go.”
•
It was only when she was standing on the highway that Flavia remembered that she had no money. Little matter: One only has to keep on putting one foot before the other, like this and like this again; and so at a moderate pace, steady as a sleep-walker, she started on the road home, if it was that.
An hour or two later a car pulled up beside her, one of the many that had stopped to offer the lift that she did not take. She walked on. The car remained: Michel opened the door, Get in.
After a time he said, “Your mother is in Rome. I shall join her there tomorrow.”
“Michel——”
•
“Michel——”
“Don’t tell me about it.”
“Michel—I must—You must——”
“We will not talk about it. We will not talk about it, ever.”
AN ENDING
CONSTANZA and Michel Devaux never married. During the years of their life together they neither apologized nor explained. They furnished the house at St-Jean-le-Sauveur as they had planned and when it was finished moved into it together, Michel keeping the tower for his writing retreat. They never called themselves anything other than Mrs. Herbert and Monsieur Devaux. Whether their situation made a difference to their lives is not possible to say. They were accepted everywhere they cared to go, and by Devaux’s family with some reservations. The prince died soon; Constanza in no case would have been affected by any attitude of the new head of the house, her brother. She cut herself off from Italy. In a measure she also cut herself off from England, but that might have been because her interests were no longer centred there.
Flavia first procrastinated then gradually gave up all idea of an academic education or career and spent many years in an eclipse of relative idleness and dissipations. She began a habit of moving about a good deal; her basic home, however, remained her mother’s house at St-Jean even after she had contracted what was looked on as a wasteful if not scandalous marriage to a man twice her age, a homosexual, of undoubted brilliance and initial talent, who drank too much and was then already an established failure.
When National-Socialism came to power, Christian—that was the man’s name—who knew Germany, became one of the earliest Cassandras of the régime and Flavia put her energies into the same cause. Here she had her mother’s approval and support. Flavia’s own heart was in it; at the same time this, too, could be seen as one of the excuses for retardation and by-passing obligations nearer home.
Constanza ceased to be well-off. Anna’s money after holding up so many years against so many inroads finally did not long outlast her lifetime; whether due to the depression or Devaux’s management on which Constanza insisted, it diminished annually by leaps and bounds. Flavia gave up a regular allowance and earned some money by reading for publishers and translations. During that time she did practically no writing of her own and the little she produced, a few book reviews, some political journalism, was adequate—no more—and derivative.
Flavia’s relations with her mother were never other than affectionate, but they had changed. Too much had come too suddenly and when they met again at the end of that summer they found it no longer possible to talk in their old way. Left to her own impulses Constanza might well have liked to ask some questions, even so she might have feared to seem to probe or blame; her daughter had turned alien to her in some aspects, as incomprehensibly as her own mother had in some of hers. Michel’s interdiction and Flavia’s loss of self-confidence each played their part. Michel consistently acted as a friend and a companion to the girl: the atmosphere in the house at all times was immensely civilized, but Flavia, who had heard his other voice, could not detach her consciousness from what might be beneath the surface. She felt herself, mistakenly perhaps, to have been judged, not heard. She continued to admire much about Michel but was never at her ease with him again. A good part of her waking life was spent with Christian and his followers at parties and in cafés. For a long time she held the hope that one day, when they were both older, Constanza would be able to hear, and she to tell, the truth.
•
After Munich, Constanza and Michel shut down their house at St-Jean and went to Paris where they camped in Michel’s old flat waiting on events from which he could no longer feel aloof. Flavia moved to London. Her intermittent existence with Christian had foundered; partly on the irreducibly square streak in her own nature. They were amicably dissolving the marriage and Flavia had gone back to her own name. At that time she was regaining a balance and also beginning to buckle down to sustained work.
In 1940 after the German break-through, Constanza and Michel stayed on in Paris until a date in June when they decided to join the exodus, gain a southern port and make their way to England. They were ready to leave in several cars with Michel’s lawyer brother and his family. What kind of a place Michel Devaux would have taken in the Free French movement, or how he would have made out with its leader, we shall never know as he did not get there. At the last hour he received a message from his youngest brother who was still in his house in the country. Andrée had arrived, placing herself under his protection. Andrée, it was known, had publicly and insolently unmasked a German agent during the recent phony war, as well as indulged in some merciless leg-pulls with some prominent French Nazi sympathizers; she was a marked person (as it turned out, both the names Devaux and Herbert had got on to Gestapo lists), in danger, and a risk as well as an embarrassment to the rest of them. The brother and his large household were preparing to be off as soon as possible and put some distance between themselves and the advancing German armies. What added to their troubles was that things down there were already disorganized: most of their vehicles had been requisitioned, the remaining ones were wholly inadequate, Andrée had lost her car, there was no petrol. They implored Michel to come at once, while the going was good, to take charge and cope with Andrée’s evacuation. They reminded him that he was the head of the family; the other obligation was not expressed in words. Michel and Constanza did not want to leave one another. Their decision—it was always said that it was made by both—was that he had to go. So at Fontainebleau they went on in different directions, he driving off alone, Constanza going on with the family party. They had a rendezvous at Bordeaux, and if that failed a later one in London.
On the second day out, low-flying planes again machine-gunned the crawling queue of vehicles on the road and the men, women and children who tried to take cover by the sides; and many people, Constanza among them, were killed. So the favourite of the gods died in a ditch after all.
Michel remained in a remote part of unoccupied France for the rest of the war. He did not join a maquis, but personally at great danger to himself sheltered and assisted a number of individuals of all nationalities and races. Few people ever heard of his activities; there were later on even rumours of collaboration. Andrée who had managed to keep moving between the two zones under a cover name was decorated both by the French and the British.
•
Flavia has often come near to absolving herself. At such times she seeks to answer one question—did she or did she not suspect from the beginning who Andrée really was? She goes over those days again hour by hour, word by word, and always comes to the conclusion that her mind had been in fact a blank: She knew nothing. It is then that she hears Mena’s remembered voice, “Anna opened a door and saw . . . in the long room at Castelfonte . . . she shut the door and walked away and came in again from the other side of the house, a smile upon her face.” And she wonders.
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