So there we sat Chez Schwob, my mother and I, sun-warmed, looking at the sea and tossing boats, drinking a modest apéritif, saluted, addressed, often joined – chairs pulled out, shopping net or newspaper put down – by a miscellany of men and women. My mother, too, had struck up some acquaintances during the autumn months (by way of Madame Panigon, who else?).
We walked up the hill again for our lunch, having been preceded by la Mère Dédée who cooked it. She’d find the key under the geranium pot as was the custom of the country. She ran a fish stall, not among the market hoi polloi but smack in front of La Marine; she shut up at twelve: my mother had persuaded her to devote l’heure du déjeuner to us. My mother was being appreciated, I had noted, by the French of various kinds; that speed of mind which could bewilder or antagonise the English and Italians was taken in their stride. La Mère Dédée (for Désirée) was Dédée tout court then, the adjunct eventually came not because of maturity or offspring but because the fish stall having prospered and expanded she became patronne of a restaurant that at one point found itself, if unstarred, in the Guide Michelin. She was a proper Provençale and knew how to deal with aubergines, tomatoes, crustaceans, olive oil and garlic. What we ate – spicy fish stews, vegetable messes – was local, authentic and delicious. My mother made coffee for all three, pure black droplets from a miniature espresso machine, one of the first made, given to Alessandro by a Milanese friend. Afterwards no sleep for the virtuous: we went back to our books. I into my bedroom rigged as a study, card-table for desk by the window; my mother reading and scribbling in her bed, warmed by such dogs as chose to stay in.
Animals in my family lived beside rather than dependent on us (though Chumi, self-contained and calm, did not always conceal her devotion to Alessandro). Her young, males, were a tough lot quite unlike their over-bred mama; there was, as in all her litters – her choice, our casual ways – a good deal of mongrel in them. They roamed the hillside as they pleased (cars were few); perhaps dogs used to grow and thrive more easily, I can’t remember ever taking them to a vet or their having shots for this and that; fleas and ticks were all we had to worry about.
Early evening: early dark. I would walk down again with napkin, bowl and torch to fetch our dinner. From the same cook-shop the Cyril Connollys used to get theirs a few years on. I am still moved by his passage about this simple act in The Unquiet Grave, and tempted to quote from it once again.
… On dark evenings I used to bicycle in to fetch our dinner, past the harbour with its bobbing launches and the bright cafés with their signs banging; at the local restaurant there would be one or two ‘plats à emporter’, to which I would add some wine, sausage and gruyère cheese … then I would bowl back heavy-laden with the mistral behind me, a lemur buttoned up inside my jacket with his head sticking out … We ate with our fingers beside the fire …
I did not carry a graceful lemur, I might have one of Chumi’s pups following me on a string, nor did I use a bicycle as our hill was steep (the Connollys, Cyril and Jean, lived on the flat side of Sanary), the wind though, the smells, the sense of moving through the hibernal Mediterranean night bound for home, companionship, a fire, were the same.
We too ate the dinner I brought back in happy domesticity. My mother, for all her apparent volatility, had a talent for contentment. I have met few women who made so little demand on distractions or entertainment: she made her own with whatever was at hand. If she had lived a life of frequent changes, it was imposed on her by circumstances and perhaps too often by the conflagrations of her feelings, never by a wish for change. I believe that she would have liked permanence; whenever things were good she wanted to stay still (‘then the gods won’t mind you’); she did not like, nor was she skilled, to face or shape the future. When there was no immediate menace, she ignored it. Carpe diem.
We did not eat our take-away dinner with our fingers, at least I did not. My mother insisted on eating hers off a tray by the one-bar electric fire; I on eating upright at a table properly laid – length of bread, bottle of wine. She had tried to laugh me out of what she called my clubmanly dinners, I said that not bothering to sit up to eat was an appalling feminine habit; we agreed to disagree. To talk – and talk we did – we had to pitch our voices like people addressing each other across a restaurant. Before the end we unnoticingly relented, my mother approaching the table the better to peel an orange, I pacing the floor apple in hand.
That agreeable routine was varied as we got drawn into Sanary winter night-life. Some of my mother’s new acquaintances met for a game of cards at the Café de la Marine on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we were asked to join them. First step was putting dinner forward, these assignations being for a quarter to nine. The upheaval, my mother said, like dining out before a dance. To save me another walk down and up the hill, we did our own cooking. She made the soup, potatoes and leeks or potatoes and cresson, the ubiquitous good soup of the evening of the urban and suburban French (the peasant’s main-dish soup was something else). I made the oeufs-sur-le-plat in a couple of small round buttered dishes gently till the whites were set pure and creamy with the yolks still perfect, as my father had taught me when I wasn’t tall enough to reach the spirit-lamp (now it was more tricky on the charcoal-stove but attention – also taught by him – would do it). These were not the fried eggs of the English hotel breakfast: hardened, browned and frizzy at the edges, spluttered fat congealing into tepid grease. Our bi-weekly menu was always the same: small courses in the pattern of the French en famille at night (who ate more, much more, than we did at noon). After our eggs, we had a slice of ham with a green salad lightly dressed, and to end with a coeur-crème with apricot jam.
The ham was rosy white, the unsmoked kind called jambon de Paris, and it came from a tip-top small grocery shop run without frills other than the quality of their wares by a family from the Basque country who had started commercial life selling cheeses off a barrow. Monsieur Benech, a meagre little man, inevitably stroked his female customers’ arms or worse as he brushed past them to weigh out an hectogram of the best butter; one tried to get served by the wife – who pretended that the goings-on were naught – or the amplitudinous aunt; the little boy who did deliveries was the son. Today, Monsieur Benech is no more, the son is middle-aged (and utterly correct), there is his wife and other vigorous aunts who help in the shop which still flourishes, a little enlarged – not much – with a few more grandes marques champagnes in stock, English teas, a little beluga molossol; butter is sold in packages now but the ham is still exquisite and there is what anyone who ever stood waiting his turn at chez Benech saw before him: their centre piece, the enormous wheel of gruyére cheese, so succulent, so freshly cut – it seemed to go from one minute to the next – that it was compulsive not to leave without a chunk. When Cyril – he does spring to mind in the context – bullied his American in-laws, the Davises, Annie and Bill, into buying him a whole gruyére cheese in Switzerland just after the war and transporting it across Europe on the back seat of their car, I’m sure it was the memory of Benech’s wheel that prompted him.
* * *
The game we played on those winter evenings was that national game belote, an unserious subspecies of bridge played seriously. Many a headline had we seen telling of revolver shots fired at a partner who had failed to do the right thing by a trump.
SANGLANT ÉPISODE DANS UN CAFÉ DE BANLIEUE:
OUVRIER MENUISIER TIRE DEUX BALLES SUR SON COPAIN
We did not play belote seriously. It was my mother who made that impossible. Curious that someone who set so much store by mental processes could be so off-hand with figures be they presented by clocks, calendars or the bank. She did not count up her hand. They forgave her. Anyway, belote in those days was very much a man’s game; when ‘the ladies’ did partake, the men became jocularly chivalrous (neither sex taking offence); the stakes at La Marine were low and the occasion social rather than competitive. The company was heterogeneous though I remember it chiefly as an aggregate: men a
nd women, adult, settled in their lives, formally mannered, fluent and shapely of speech, disposed to please (and to be so themselves); their common ground for me was their Frenchness. There must have been, there were, many social and indeed political shades, demarcations blurred and not blurred, not to say chasms. (The French need not speak of class, they just say milieu. ‘Cela ne se fait pas, this is not done, parmi les gens de notre milieu.’ As clean-cut as that.) One indicator was who asked whom to their house and who met whom only at the café. This was far from all-revealing as at that time entertaining at home was still more or less reserved for family and connections, and not only in the stricter circles. Whatever individually they were, these inhabitants of my first French world, they were not the dukes and Madame de Sévignés of Nancy Mitford’s golden vision – there are almost as many ways of falling in love with France as there are of falling in love – my life among the French began with a lawyer from Lyon practising at the Toulon courts, and his buoyant wife, cronies of the Panigons and much birds of a feather; a cousin of theirs, a widow (impermanently, one foresaw) on long visit; the man who owned the second-best small hotel, whose wife stayed at home; the couple, she an ex-schoolmistress, he a Sunday photographer, who ran – over-generously: most of their customers stood in debt to them – the artists’ supply shop, M. and Mme Grand Tube as everybody called them – he was indeed enormous. There were also the local house agent and another very large man who lived in a Saracen watch tower he had converted – with great good taste – sailed his own boat, was a friend of the painter Derain and said to smoke opium. Both the latter were bachelors, des garçons, a fact that caused some routine banter, the implication being that they were free and lucky to pick and leave their women without trouble. Talk was bright and concrete, rapid gives and takes; subjects: the things that were happening in their and other people’s lives – who were having or had or would soon be having an affair; who was definitely not and who was most probably not his father’s son and whether or not he knew; land: a piece of, reputedly for sale; prices in the shops; wills, deathbed marriages, the curé. He was always a butt (we never met the poor man who scurried across the main square like a pantry mouse); the native Midi and those who had chosen to settle there, though Catholic to a man, were not bien-pensants, some might put their faith in God, none did in the clergy. And so another gratifying source of scurrilous anecdote was at hand.
Everybody believed in the Guide Michelin. Here conversation went crescendo: where one ate and what one ate and the way it was cooked and where one might eat next Sunday; poetry welled up in every heart – Vaut le détour … Vaut le voyage … One hour twenty-five from door to door, I swear to you, and not a minute more.
That was when we turned to cars. All the world loved a car in that decade, those who had one and those who didn’t, even my mother who, mercifully, never learnt to drive. (I counted the years before I’d be allowed to.) It was the golden, the romantic age of motoring; cars had ceased to be delicate untrustworthy individuals requiring a mechanic or at least a chauffeur and long hours of waiting by a dusty roadside, were becoming cheap enough to be owned or hoped to be owned by those of moderate means, while the roads were still empty to go fast in: one stopped at will in front of any shop, any house, in the uncluttered streets. One might go anywhere, at one’s own time, see undreamt of sites conquered before only on foot or mule. There was the sense of a brave new personal freedom.
We not only shared the pleasures of our friends’ Citroëns and Renaults, we were actually being asked – by some – to their houses, to a game of boules, that other lackadaisical-to-impassioned game, in the garden of an afternoon or to déjeuner on Sunday, elaborate and delicious. My mother told me that this could only be permissible by their standards because of our ambivalent position: a married woman on her own (they had had glimpses only so far of Alessandro and were probably saying among themselves that he was young enough to be my son, but were too polite to ask questions to our faces), and I – though they called me Mademoiselle, which I disliked, followed by Alessandro’s surname – could be regarded as a child, so did not count. We were foreigners, birds of passage, dark horses – spies conceivably – in fact so much outsiders to be admittable ex gratia. And how very kind they were to us. We were given the name of the right plumber, the reliable seamstress, shops at Toulon – les bonnes adresses. The women left, without intrusive lingering, small presents: the first mimosa, a pot of confiture, lemons in a nest of their own leaves, the recipe for the poulet à la crème we said we had enjoyed.
Such were the pointillist touches that made up existence in that Mediterranean province of France. Pleasure in good living was inherited, instinctive; rarely gross, never snobbish. They liked what they said they liked.
The café put down its shutters at about half past ten, there was no calling of time, no grabbing a last round. We may have sounded sybaritic, talking gastronomy in serious, and in honest, terms, our actual consumption on those belote evenings had been modest to abstemious. Infusions of verbena or lime, perhaps a rum toddy or some coffee laced with a teaspoonful of brandy, a couple of halves of light beer. The winner was supposed to pay, though after a token struggle this would always be a man. We got into our overcoats and mufflers, shook hands all round (much less kissing than there is now), said au revoir and à demain and started walking our different ways into the night. (One walked: people did not take out their beloved cars lightly, the self-starter had only recently come in and was used parsimoniously.)
Nobody else lived up our hill, one didn’t even think about being safe, so my mother and I set off by ourselves, taking the longer, winding way not the steep shortcut up from the harbour. The air would be cold and clear, the sky light enough not to use our torches. When we came out from under a thin cover of pines, we stopped to look at the stars. Very happily, though vague about the constellations (Alessandro would have set us right). It was a good cold out here in the open; once inside our horrible villa it was just very very chilly. My mother went straight to bed, I sat at the foot, wrapped in a blanket. There was much to chew over. It was still far from midnight. And beyond … It was the time of lucidity, clarifications.
At first she – we – made a few jokes, reminded each other of this and that, then we got down to questions to which I hoped for answers and she begged other questions. How to connect (not in a strictly E. M. Forster sense) the recorded past with our fragments of the present, trace sequence from what we had been reading in the mornings to the lives and voices of the day?
The burden of her quest – as I thought I understood it – was that the world, the human world, we were inevitably, inescapably placed to exist in, was shaped – apart from natural forces which were largely hostile – by men and women who in turn were shaped by what others of their kind had done and thought before them. To make sense of it one had to try to find out what people, individually and in society, were like and likely to do, and why.
‘The French now …’ (She had lived among them before, at the tangent of disparate circles in Paris, at home on her visits.) ‘It strikes one how they’ve brought back that glow on life, though the war – the two last wars – are in their flesh and bone; there’s still a sense of national bereavement. They are stoics: soft and tough at the same time. When one thinks that most of it – the killing and the dying, the countrysides laid waste – happened, on their home ground … They’ve well earned their joie de vivre now!’
How should we see our friends at La Marine? As Mauriac and Julien Green were seeing them and as plausible descendants of Balzacian great-grandparents? And heirs of the Grand Siècle? Where did they begin? Where does it ever begin? The Gauls? Charlemagne? Jeanne d’Arc?
‘She left her mark – on that bone-sceptical people, still half ready for a Second Coming.’ Had I looked at that slim equestrian statue on the Place des Pyramides? A more graceful warrior myth surely than the Valhalla vision of the Heldentodt? The French never had to dream up such Germanic props to their superiority: every pos
tman’s little boy at the lycée knew that as civilisation went France was the cat’s whiskers.
Yes – that hyper-civilisation, the glory of art and letters, Versailles … At the same time war after war – wilful wars – brutishness, oppression, injustice, la misère; and then the great flings into convulsive turbulence: the Terror, Napoleon, the nineteenth-century see-saw when everything went back and burst out again or went sideways – Restorations, Empires, the Commune … 1870, 1914, dates branded into every European’s consciousness whether he or she was born at the time or not … ‘And in the intervals of murdering each other, they listened to Lully and Rameau and painted bread and fruit as Chardin did, and the “Grande Jatte” and the “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”, made delicate objects and cultivated that flow of sanity and balance in daily life … Able to wound, able to heal.’
How did one connect those spurts of à la lanterne, of heroism, endurance, the reeling between the excesses of revolution and bureaucracy, the intellectual rigour and the rhetorical platitudes, the elegance, the arrogance, the exquisite domestic sensuality, the petit train-train de la vie and all the niceness and avarice that went with it? Not leaving out the horrors of French bourgeois life – ‘They are horrors and I’m sure they still go on … They are a perplexing people!’
But then civilisation was always a mixed bag. National character? How far did it exist? Once you looked closely, up came the paradoxes. ‘Try to pin down the English … Try to think of the Germans without parti pris … As for the Chinese, you and I can’t even begin to think about the Chinese.’
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