There are some actual words of Toller’s that I can recall – probably because my mother used to repeat them – lamentably they are a remark about myself. He had asked, That your book? (It was Les Faux-Monnayeurs.) Then to my mother, Funny kind of girl you’ve got here, comes in from making sand-castles then reads André Gide.
To my surprise if rather against my will, Madame Panigon began to treat me as an inseparable companion of her brood (this was something to be met often among the French: a great verbal roughing up at the beginning followed by showers of charm and goodwill; one might nearly get thrown out for expecting a table then end up dinner with brandy on the house), I was being drawn into the family bosom. We met mostly at the market or a café (oh not the beach) where my mother often joined us. Madame Panigon was full of bourgeois wisdom, common sense and gossip, and she was far from reticent; my mother found her excellent value. She was the wife of a notaire at Montélimar (she revealed, seated, hands never idle, in the Café de la Marine) who was still detained by les affaires – she’d left the cook with him, naturellement, you know: men – but was soon to join his family at Sanary where they annually spent the summer holidays. Conscious, like Mrs Bennett, that in due course she had daughters to marry, she diligently tried instilling strict and cynical sagesse into jeunesse; her dicta about l’amour really shocked my mother being herself – it struck me – a headlong romantic who loved deeply, unwisely and for ever each time it occurred. Madame Panigon however, was increasingly treating her as a crony. I did not mind consorting with her brood. I liked Annette who had some pluck; Cécile, the dumpy sister who looked like the future replica of her mama, I found rather tame and wet (I was quite wrong); if Annette was like a colt, Cécile was like a pretty heifer. There was also an uppish elder brother, Frédéric, a clever fiend, quite well set up, who had his own fish to fry. Most of the year those three were being crammed with Racine, Corneille and Molière at their lycées; en vacances they were allowed some dissipation. Many nights I found myself, chaperoned by Madame Tricoteuse, dancing javas, foxtrots and the quick waltz to a concertina with Cécile and Annette. We were looked on as children and rarely asked to stand up with a youth or man (Frédéric too was undisguisedly not interested in the least). We drank tisanes, lemonade or a bock, the small measure of light beer. I enjoyed the dancing and did not care with whom.
So that first summer was not all bad and it went fast. Hardly into September, my mother and Alessandro began brooding over moves to make; the first step being to part with me. One day I was taken to Toulon, not to Sanary-cum-Ollioules, to Toulon from where the fast trains went, not in the bus but in Monsieur Panigon’s Renault car. My mother saw me off. Give my love to Jack and Susan, she said as the train was about to pull out, And what did you tell me they were actually doing now? Inspired, I asked, ‘Mummy, did you meet Susan and Jack on a beach?’ She did not have the grace to blush, she had the grace to giggle. ‘Well – more or less …’
2
I was back quite soon. At Christmas in fact, a rarity, we kept moveable feasts. I found them in a villa with a wide view on the sea, in an easy mood. Each day there were hours of warmth around noon, real warmth, we ate our luncheons out of doors on the terrace in shirt-sleeves. I had brought a book for my mother, by a new English writer she had not heard of, expecting he would astonish and please. She read him in one go.
Much had happened to me in the last short three months. I would sum it up as friends, new writing, law courts. The friends I made by chance, the first friends of my own, elders and betters they were, had to be, it was too late to form a bond with contemporaries. I walked into a second-hand bookshop off Bond Street one afternoon, when I couldn’t find what I wanted I left my name with an assistant, it was my father’s name and she said, I used to know someone married into that family quite well – she mentioned the house in Berlin – are you the granddaughter? I said, no these were connections of a first marriage, the one she was talking about I knew only by hearsay. She remained interested – well and what was I doing …? By myself and all that? I told her that I was living with friends in Hampstead and was educating myself. She asked me to tea the next week.
For one thing I had made a mistake going into that bookshop as they sold only first editions and rare books, nor would I have left my name with the unremarkable middle-aged woman if the beautiful tall young man who might have come out of a Greek poem (Bob Gathorne-Hardy in his youth) had not been engaged with a customer. This is by the way or not so by the way when one reflects on how chance operates. I nearly did not get there, to tea with Rosie Falkenheim. The address was somewhere near Baker Street, there was a fog, I got off the bus too soon, her number seemed not to exist, I turned yet another corner, tried basements, passers-by were strangers and hurried on … I felt at the edge of a panic. This still besets me in situations such as these. Impervious to own reasoning, I lose my nerve feeling that I shall never reach my destination but remain lost on some alien road or platform without ever seeing a known face again. I did not throw myself into Miss Falkenheim’s arms but must have transmitted a glow of the storm-tossed wanderer’s grateful relief when at last I entered her well lit bed-sitter. A tea tray stood at the ready (bespeaking thoughtful preparations); conversation began, easy as skating. It might have been a stiff one-off visit had I not been unstrung and open in my post-panic deliverance. My hostess treated me as though I were a guest and equal, heady stuff. I felt I had plenty to say. Rosie Falkenheim was a woman with a long, sallow, vaguely simian face, some hard crinkly hair, small brown eyes that were humorous rather than sad, and a not very good figure. Clothes hung badly. If you stretched the definition you might just have called her a jolie laide. What was not immediately apparent was that she liked, and had a way with, men. She must have been in her upper thirties then; I came to be one of the very few people who knew her story, which was an unusual one. Presently all one could assume was that she had not started life in a bed-sitter in Marylebone. There was fruit and Gentleman’s Relish as well as cake for tea. Before I went, Miss Falkenheim proposed to take me to her sister’s sometime soon, her sister who was married to the bookman who had recently opened the shop I had strayed into. If Mrs Robbins will allow you …? I forebore to say that Mrs Robbins did not expect to be asked. I left with a book I had been lent under my arm. A rare book? A new book – the kind she read herself. It was Antic Hay.
Mrs Nairn – Toni – and her husband lived in a minute flat above the garage in a mews behind one of the Nash Terraces in Regent’s Park. A patron, an American book collector, absentee tenant of the front house, had let them have it for an indefinite time. Toni was very pretty in a fragile way – an exquisite small head and pouting profile in the style of Queen Nefertiti (as she had been told); there was however a generic likeness to her elder sister (which grew over the years). Toni’s figure, too, was imperfectly put together. They talked, drawing me into their private jokes, Rosie’s gently dry, Toni’s of unexpected ruthlessness. They got on to music: opera: Toni had ‘a voice’, a teacher whose method she did not approve of and some hope (forlorn, if I read her sister’s neutrality). I was probed just a little – most tactfully, but I recognised the undertow: And where does your mother come into this? The subject though that was pursued most ardently on that afternoon was poison. Administered by murderers, murderesses preferably. Contemporary cases, nineteenth-century cases, Toni had them at her finger-tips. Toni, not Rosie; Rosie looked aloofly amused. Was Toni interested in other forms of homicide as well? (It sounded out of a phrase-book.) She was. Less so, but she was. Then I had to ask. Had she heard of our family murder – my father’s brother done in by his wife – a mere shooting? Indeed. Moreover, she and the convicted woman bore the same first name, Antonia. Your aunt Toni, she said. All of this in the quietest of tones among the teacups, rather grand teacups (got out this once).
Presently a heavy tread on the flimsy steep stairs, Mr Nairn coming home from work: a big, slow-moving, handsome man who filled the tiny room. He gave his wif
e an affectionate pat, nodded to his sister-in-law, shook hands with me. A good face – brown hair, grey eyes, strong teeth – with a calm and humorous expression; I liked him at once.
Room was made for him at the table, the cream-puffs cleared away, a meal of a kind, not quite fish and chips but of that nature, was placed before her husband by Toni with, I thought I discerned, faint distaste. The sisters lit cigarettes. Jamie Nairn spoke little; when he did it was in a deliberate, unhurried voice, a baritone voice (he sang in a choir), dropping some clear declarative sentences into our minds. ‘That man came back and paid four guineas for the Meredith.’ ‘Bob thinks the Browning is a fake.’ The sisters, who sometimes helped out in the shop, knew how to take this up; I listened. In the course of this and other, soon becoming frequent, visits I picked up a number of things about the Nairns without being able to sort them out as yet into a coherent whole.
It was evident, for one, that Rosie and Toni had been bred to the customs of another country: urban Germany and unmistakably Berlin. There was still a whiff about them of the intellectually alert, materially indulgent Jewish upper bourgeoisie of that city as they scampered after a bus – they would not walk – to take them two hundred yards up Baker Street. While Toni’s transplantation to a London mews was explained by her having got married to a taciturn Scot for her sins (her words), Rosie’s must have been due to choice. She was not a premature refugee; this was 1926, if Hitler was already ranting in the wings, he was ridiculed and discounted by the few who had heard of him, not feared. Had Rosie come to England then to hold her sister’s hand? Permanently? (She had applied for British nationality.) The sisters did live in each other’s pocket, mutually solicitous about sleep and feet and health – Did you get your rest today, dear? – yet also often snapping. Rosie seemed to thrive in England, loving it, loving London, everything English, while Toni was apt to be dismissive. Both showed concern for Jamie’s bookshop – founded on a little capital lent by friends. Jamie Nairn, I realised (not through him: he was a modest as well as a silent man) was already regarded as an authority on nineteenth-century manuscripts and modern first editions. He still was, and looked, a young man, in his early thirties, say, his wife probably older by a couple of years. He, too, lent books to me.
I was asked to the Nairns’ about twice a week now, tea extending into supper; Saturday afternoons spent keeping Jamie company in the garage as he tinkered with their Morris-Cowley with me being only too pleased to help. (Toni thought I was mad getting oil on my hands when I didn’t need to, and made us wash in the kitchen.) With Rosie I had tea only, or a matinée at the Old Vic; Rosie in the evenings was not available. Had I ever been to a Court of Law? she asked me one day, I might find it of interest. So I went to the Strand – she seemed well-informed as to how and when – sat in the public gallery and got hooked from the first May-it-please-your-Lordship. It was a libel case, involving the leader of a well-known band; I don’t remember names, or who heard the case, only that the standard of advocacy must have been high. I went again and again (with help from Rosie over the case list), more readily than to a play or film. Everything captivated: the voices, the casuistries of the arguments, the rigidities and drama of that formalised man’s world. It was fascinating to watch the chase for the elusive truth, the attempts at getting justice done; watching the wheels of that clockwork being driven on was both food for thought and supreme entertainment.
I only went to civil cases heard before the High Court – libel, disputed wills, divorce; my days in Magistrates’ Courts, the Old Bailey, in European and American Courts came much later. At sixteen, not in my wildest dreams – and I had dreams – would I have seen myself reporting a murder or a great political trial. Now that I have, I rather regret that I did not sign those – oh, highly serious – efforts Bill the Lizard.
I owe much of that to Rosie Nairn (she eventually had to take her brother-in-law’s name). Meanwhile I had read Antic Hay and got hold of everything else by Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, Limbo, the early essays; they seemed to bring to me everything I would then have liked to know and think. That, too, I owe to the Nairns. I never quite knew why they befriended me, a stranger, a girl twenty years their junior. When I had known them long enough to ask – towards the end of their lives – they couldn’t remember. Their taking me in may have had something to do with the curious isolation in which the two women – not Jamie – seemed to live then. Rosie had no visible friends; Jamie never brought his men friends home to the mews. Anyway, befriend me they did, and so began what became a pattern in my life: friendships, attachments to a group, a couple, a family not my own, friendships that lasted through the changing stages. That autumn in London was a kind of turning point. I had not been unhappy before; now I was consciously, buoyantly happy, looking forward to something new, something good every day.
* * *
I did not mind the Christmas stay – which it was supposed to be – at Sanary with my mother and stepfather. I rather enjoyed it. It is nice to go away when one has something to come back to. After the New Year came a development in my mother’s sporadic plans to find employment for Alessandro as a middleman’s middleman in the art world. She still had connections with the circle of O, the painter, the man she had jilted. Now someone had come forward offering to show Alessandro the ropes. It meant Paris, Amsterdam, weeks, possibly months … Should she go with him? There was the expense, a single man more lightly slips by. Delicacy of feelings was also involved – perhaps it was better for Alessandro to go as his own man? And there were the dogs, the puppies were gone, but there were still three Japanese spaniels. All in all, she had better stay put … Here at Sanary, in the sun. I like it here … There is much to explore. She turned to me, Will you explore with me? Will you stay on? Will you keep me company? She said it most charmingly; I said that I would.
3
Though an improvement that next villa too left much to be desired. It was new, clean, spacious: a salon, four bedrooms, and everything in it and about it hideous. Mercifully it was sparsely furnished. Brass bedsteads, armoires à glace, hard chairs, a large buffet stacked with patterned services de table which we did not use; we ate off the kitchen plates. There was nothing we could do about the floor tiles – a mustard and violet design – and very cold on the feet. The villa stood at the end of the road that winds along the hill above the bay, the last in a row, empty and shuttered now against winter. It was exceedingly draughty, with rattling doors and numerous badly fitting French windows; we were attacked by cold blasts whenever the mistral blew which it did often, leaving beautiful clear blue-swept skies and a sense of exhilaration. Out in the open that was: the house was unheatable in any contemporary sense, but then we were used to being cold indoors in southern winters. One retreated. Thick sweaters, bed for my mother during the chillier hours. We didn’t use the salon at all, and the salle à manger rarely; we made camp in our bedrooms keeping a couple of sturdy little wood-stoves going as well as a minute electric fire. A femme de ménage – a nicer one – came early, bearing provisions, lighting the kitchen-stove, knocking at my door as she took the tray with café au lait and two bowls into my mother’s room.
Our day began. In the long mornings it was concentrated plunges into la lecture. In France backwaters have bookshops; if Sanary did not run to a full-sized librairie, it had some well stocked shelves in an artists’ supply shop by name Au Grand Tube, run by a charming non-local couple. Here we found what is surely the ultimate in paperbacks: classics of French fiction at one franc twenty-five – three pence. New French books, then as now, did not come out in hardback – how I liked those light white volumes, beautifully produced by the NRF or Bernard Grasset, with their plain covers elegantly lettered like the labels of a first grand cru. That threepenny library was something quite else. Decades before Penguins, and also unlike the present French livres de poche, those books didn’t even look like books: they were flat, the shape of large notebooks, the paper was cheap and the print was smudgy – what matter, they were
treasures; carrying an armful up our hill, I felt rich. I must have read (with earnest marginal notes) and my mother re-read half of Balzac, most of Maupassant, some Zola, Alfred de Vigny, Chateaubriand, George Sand, the Goncourts … All essential in their so various ways, my mother told me firmly, if I were to begin to understand something about the country I was in. Flaubert and, prematurely no doubt, Constant’s Adolphe I had absorbed earlier, at my mother’s knee as it were, and however little of their substance I had been capable of extracting, it was a foundation. Stendhal, too, had no part in our reconnaissance at that stage; Stendhal, a sincere and early passion, I felt to be both Italianate and a great writer hors nation. By noon we had shut our books, ready to stroll down, baskets over arm, into Sanary. Our bitch, Chumi, went with us. The few errands done, we would seek a sheltered table on the terrace of Chez Schwob, one of the bars tabacs. Schwob was a large and erudite Alsatian, married to a large and placidly competent black woman who nursed an out-sized baby while he spouted Heine and Descartes as they sold cigarettes and stamps and poured bright drinks from behind the zinc. Theirs was a steady clientèle of fishermen, masons, sailors, interspersed in the morning by artists, foreigners, French from other parts, and some of the larger-minded notables. In the evenings all these latter went to the more expensive Café de la Marine next door, the day resort of local professionals and retraités. The Café de Lyon and the other tabac must have been strictly other ranks, in all the years we never saw anyone we knew set foot in them.
Jigsaw Page 10
