Or did I? What about my mother? Wasn’t it odd that I didn’t make a connection. Not having been brought up exactly in, say, bourgeois sexual orthodoxy, did I really need the Kislings’ exhilarating liberation? Was there not the memory – somewhat remote – of the afternoon I spent in my infant’s pram in the hall of the Danish novelist’s bachelor flat? And before that, long before, the ‘renunciation’, a key point in her life, when she gave up a man she found entirely right for herself, because to leave an ill and older wife would have been vile, and so recast her life by accepting my father. Now, all that was history, my mother’s history; however much she let one into it, it belonged to her and to another time. A taboo remains. One listens; one believes it happened; one does not believe it has a reality applicable to oneself. My mother’s past was my childhood’s bedtime tales.
What about chagrins – and acharnements – d’amour I had seen with my own eyes? O, serious, courteous, dignified in retreat; young Alessandro in pursuit with melancholy fire, desperate at times; her dash to Venice from which nothing, not six children in a lost property office let alone one child in a comfortable hotel, could have held her back; her desolation on that winter beach. Those events were part of my reality yet in an idiom that was a far cry from Sanary’s sane and easy ways; they were on my mother’s scale. They, too, were in the past; now was the present, I wished to believe that it should and could be maintained; like peace.
7
That year I was writing to Rosie Falkenheim; or rather she wrote to me and I answered promptly. Of course I had told my mother, that was irresistible, and she showed all the expected interest in the story. It was not treacherous, Rosie must have supposed as much and my mother promised secrecy.
Easy, she said, there was no one here to tell it to.
‘Madame Panigon would have sat up at what she’d call un scandale, but as she doesn’t know the first thing about the English ins and outs –’
God forbid, I said.
The Panigons of all the old Café de la Marine befrienders were the ones we had kept up with most. (Monsieur Panigon had shifted his practice from Montélimar to Toulon, and the family now lived at Sanary in a house they’d bought.) They kept up with us. Once they had really met Alessandro they became fascinated by my mother’s marriage – the difference in age showed, always had, and my appearing to grow up did not help. They acted impeccably oblivious of such facts at the Sunday luncheons and boules (returned by less regular dinners chez nous) which had become a fixture. What they said behind our backs was a different kettle and easy to imagine; even to my face Monsieur’s irony in referring to Alessandro as votre cher papa was transparent.
God forbid, I said again. They mustn’t even hear that a friend from England is arriving, once Elise’s (that was Madame; we were on such terms now) curiosity is aroused …
‘Don’t you worry, my little Hermes,’ my mother said, ‘your protégés will be safe with me. And I shan’t tell even Alessandro – though he’s not very good, as we know, at telling stories, you never can be sure about what may slip out from someone to whom it isn’t important. You have to have a very strong motive to keep a secret.’
‘You haven’t even met Rosie?’
‘My motive is very strong: lack of an appreciative audience.’ She added, ‘And I want to please you – and your friend. It’s a wretched situation to be in. You must do all you can.’
And so it was decided that I must do the booking. It’s all quite simple, she advised me, behave naturally: go there, say you have friends coming from England, these are the dates, these are the names, rooms not too far apart would be all right – the rest is not their business. French hotels are civilised in such matters. ‘And whatever you do, don’t forget to ask about the prices, that would raise suspicions.’
It went as she had said. In due course Rosie arrived, the Judge to follow the next day as arranged (the hotel would send a taxi to meet his express at Toulon). I met her train and settled her in at the La Plage. She appeared confident and calm. We agreed that it would be best to avoid all local contact. No, she wouldn’t come to our house, thus she’d not meet my mother; whether I would see her was left undiscussed, we were more formal with each other than we had been in London. I asked after Toni (to whom I had sent postcards). Rosie smiled. ‘Toni has decided that I’ve gone on holiday in the South of France by myself.’ I smiled too. Whereupon she asked me to stay and have a drink.
A couple of days later a note from her was delivered at our house: Jack would like to meet me and was asking me to lunch with them at their hotel next day.
I was tremendously pleased, flattered by the confidence this seemed to show, intensely curious – how not! – and delighted to be meeting an actual judge.
In the nineteen-sixties I was commissioned by the Observer to do a profile of judges and their comparative comportment on the Bench. I spent an interesting month cruising between the Law Courts, the Old Bailey and Assizes, an anonymous, silent watcher from the press box. I could make notes; I had access to The Times’s Morgue. Some weeks later I wrote the piece in the quiet of an isolated wing of some friends’ large country house in Tuscany. I did eight judges, or was it ten? It was tough work – there was a sharp deadline – and I was entirely absorbed in it. Trays of meals and refreshments were deposited on tiptoe outside my door. At intervals I would pace the landscaped garden and the olive groves with alternating elation and despair. I was a prisoner whose release could only be effected by my own boot-straps. (I did appear at dinner.) I could tell a good deal more about all phases of those days, the house, the atmosphere, the bath towels, what we talked about in the evenings, what we drank before dinner: Bloody Marys and on the last night Veuve Clicquot – the rest, the judges who filled my working hours and my dreams, I have almost entirely forgotten.
Well, some were very good, some were not so; one, quite young, was outstandingly, breathtakingly brilliant, and still regarded so now; one was a good man, and kind; another remarkably less so. That remains, and some mannerisms, their faces, their voices, their very names mostly, have receded into a muddled blur.
I could still refresh my memory – clippings of the piece exist. When I met Rosie’s Judge I was not able to attend as a mute nameless reporter – no notebook – indeed I was not supposed to observe at all: I was there as the guest of a friend of a friend: I was supposed to speak, to behave, to be natural, that is, show no awareness of the subtexts of the situation. If I felt awe that was only proper in someone so junior and unlearned. In the end it turned out that I had come to enjoy myself.
Enjoyment elates the moment but is apt to blunt the memory thereof, particularly if one is given a great deal of burgundy at lunchtime.
The Judge, Jack – she called him that, I called him nothing – was certainly a handsome man, substantial without heaviness, senatorial head, hair going grey, wearing an elegant though conventional light summer suit with a cream silk shirt and a foulard scarf for tie – if memory serves, but does it? Anyway, this is how I see him. He began by thanking me for having found, ‘found us’ he said, such an agreeable hotel. Was I familiar with English seaside resorts? There was a difference. He was entirely at his ease and he was also unmistakably our host, a good host, reminding me a little of my father looking after Lina and myself at table: we were his womenfolk, he was our protector seeing to it that we were cosseted, treated tenderly. The Judge was very nice to me, with a nuance of amusement and no condescension, though without any pretence that he was other than the man he was and I a young girl. I liked that, I liked him, but then I had come wanting to like. He said he knew a good deal about me, that I was interested in law and fond of wine. Rosie looked gratified at this prise de contact. He asked if I liked burgundy. I had the sense to tell the truth, that so far, very little of it had come my way. I had come down in the world in that respect at an early age, hardly a drop of a cru classé – and that had always been Bordeaux – after my father’s death. Since then I had been drinking good local wines, a cou
ple of times I had the chance to taste a Côte de Beaune at the Panigons’ house though more often they drank Châteauneuf-du-Pape with their gigot … I do believe that I really trotted out all this to the Judge. He had put me at my ease. He did the obvious thing, saying we must remedy that, the wine list here wasn’t at all bad. He deliberated over two or three splendid names, then chose a Volnay, the year and vineyard of which I have forgotten. Can we manage a bottle, you and I? We can’t count much on Rosie. I said he could count on me.
What did we talk about? No legal anecdotes, no quizzing from me in that line. He wanted to hear about Sanary, he talked about the French, about fellow hotel guests, trying to make out where they came from, what they were up to. Though he didn’t share Rosie’s interest in the modern English novel, he was well read in French nineteenth-century literature. He spoke about their plan to spend a few days in Provence, he wanted to show Rosie Aix and the Pont-du-Gard and the amphitheatres at Nîmes and Arles …
How long should they take, could they hire a car? I had just been to Aix with Alessandro, and loved it already. It hardly mattered what we talked about, it was lively and, at least his part of it, good conversation. A cultivated man, not an intellectual, and whatever he might be like on the Bench, here he was private, charming, witty. A tape would have helped more than the notebook: the actual way he talked I am of course unable to reproduce. So there remains but little to report.
The important thing, what I longed to penetrate, was what went on between this man and this woman – the perennial mystery of what there is between two people – that eluded me. How often does one not wonder what thoughts accompany the talk, what is said – thrice quicker than speech – inside the head, and what goes on beneath those thoughts, at the back of the mind; who has not strained to listen to that composition of the said/thought/felt played inside another human being? All I seemed able to do was watch the surface while sounding my own feelings.
There were two people, ill-matched in looks (in circumstances too, but this did not show so much), who appeared to get on extremely well with each other, were attentive to each other, were enjoying a holiday, a good lunch, as though they had no care in the world. A couple, married? lovers? new or long so? the surface remained unbroken. I know what I knew and they knew that I knew but they gave nothing away.
Oh yes, we did polish off the burgundy, the Judge and I, in even shares (point of honour). I thought it tasted sublime; and though I told a few Sanary stories I held my wine quite well. This amused the Judge who said I had a good head.
After coffee he went off to have a siesta, this was meant to let Rosie and me have a few minutes by ourselves. She walked me down the drive. I wanted to tell her how much I had liked him and hoped to do so without being intrusive. I needn’t have worried. She was radiant. He loves it here, she said, he’s as happy as a sandboy. He’s admiring himself for having taken to the simple life. And you know, she said, they’d been given adjoining not communicating rooms. ‘But we have our balconies – he prefers them to the corridor; it reminds him of Switzerland and romantic novels. He tells me it makes him feel young.’
Wasn’t that rather unwise? I said, there were bound to be people out there in the moonlight at all hours. ‘That’s taking rather a risk.’
‘That’s what he likes,’ she said. ‘He’s a gambler.’ She didn’t look radiant any more. ‘With a gambler it is wise to provide a minor risk.’
I had lunch with them once again. It was towards the end of the fortnight, after they’d come back from their tour of Provence. They were full of it and Rosie delighted with what she had seen. The atmosphere was much the same, except that by now the Judge and I seemed to have become old friends. They had been bathing that morning on the strip of sand outside the hotel. The Judge had complained before of the lack of pretty girls, but today there’d been two fairly ravishing ones. He and Rosie described them. I surmised that they must be the Panigon girls and realised that they were in fact becoming fairly ravishing girls – Annette no longer a boyish child, Cécile losing her puppy-fat and her face getting quite beautiful in a soulful way. Would they be likely to come again tomorrow? Rosie wanted to know, that’s the one thing Jack expects on a beach, he doesn’t like just sun and staring at the sea. I said I could introduce them. No, no, Rosie said, that would be going too far; and the Judge laughed and concurred.
He repeated the burgundy dare. This time we had a Nuits-St-Georges, and again I thought it was pretty wonderful. The odds are that it was not quite that, and almost certainly served too warm. It is not a wine I would choose now to drink at noon in a Mediterranean August. Whether the Judge was a burgundy man, whether the wine list was poor in claret, or whether the heavier wine (those burgundies were heavy) would be more of a test for me, I never found out.
They left on the same day, travelling by different trains, he straight on to Scotland. My mother had suddenly remembered that perhaps she ought to meet Rosie because of me – doesn’t she stand in loco parentis or something? Rosie considered staying on for another forty-eight hours, then shrank from the anticlimax. I did not see the Judge again, but was able to take her to the station. In the taxi, she thanked me: it was perfect. He says we must do it again. We’ll come back.
‘I must tell you something.’ She became solemn, which was not her way. ‘This is the first time – since all those years ago in Switzerland when he was a young man – that we have ever not been alone together. I never see him with anyone, I never hear him talk to anyone, other than a waiter or a jury, I didn’t know what he was like in company. Do you know,’ she called me by my name, ‘that you are the only human being I’ve seen him sitting at a table with, this is the only time I heard him talk to someone I know. You cannot understand what this means to me.’
But I could. It came as a shock. I had not imagined their situation in that light before. I never forgot it afterwards.
* * *
My own Sanary summer had another two months to go. Much of them spent in the sea. My mother and Alessandro were in conclave doing up a house for a Dutch woman who wanted an all-year place on our side of the coast. What she’d bought turned out to be the mistral-buffeted villa we had lived in the year before, and that needed conversion from scratch. Alessandro had been commissioned, and it was riveting to watch the transformations that were taking place, at that point chiefly in their minds: my mother having ideas and Alessandro thinking up ways of making them practicable. He was extremely clever at that: suggestions turned into sketches and sketches into exact designs like conjuring tricks. He engaged a builder, an entrepreneur-maçon, and established a good understanding. The results for the present were all destruction: inside walls broken down, windows and doors knocked out, tarred canvas flapping. They were much on the building site, my mother joining him in the late mornings, or rattling about in the Peugeot hunting for furniture in the Haut-Var. Having working parents felt comfortable; when they were at home we played paper games in the evening, my mother and I with enthusiastic commitment, she quite annoyed when I won, which was rare. Alessandro didn’t mind losing. His game was patience which he played at all hours. I still see him, that slim young man with his long beautiful hands, bring out the two small packs of pretty cards and lay them out on the dining-table just cleared or on a small one by my mother’s bed while she was talking. He had a good repertory and taught me some of it; I have often found Miss Milligan or Nine-Up a soothing resource.
Alessandro was a thin-nerved fellow who kept himself under control. He abhorred stridency, noise, a quarrel. He was sweet-tempered, never quarrelled himself and knew how to smooth out my mother’s flare-ups. He did this affectionately with a mixture of good sense, laughter and teasing. It was in her nature to end an outburst by laughing at herself. I received a hint that his equableness did not always come easy when one day I went down with a bad throat, probably caught by staying out on a beach too late in the September evening vapours, and unused to feeling ill was expecting care and attention. Alessandro surprised me
by being greatly taken aback. Not you, he told me, you’ve got to be all right – looking after one woman is enough. He said it not unkindly, but it came from the heart.
Was looking after my mother such a strain, I asked myself. Her unpunctuality, her refusal to face decisions or trouble could be exasperating. There must have been more to it: did Alessandro feel he had taken on a kind of servitude? For my mother without being really selfish or egocentric – she believed in putting ideas and ideals first – behaved as though she owned her entourage, and of course above friends and daughter, one owned one’s husband. Having seen something of Toni Nairn’s marriage put this in my mind; like my mother Toni was possessive and at the same time condescending to Jamie. Was nothing ever as it should be? I thought. And what should, or rather could it be?
Another remark of Alessandro’s puzzled me rather more. We were alone; he looked at me; he said reflectively, ‘Has it occurred to you that a man might find it difficult to have a stepdaughter?’ He said a stepdaughter, not you for a stepdaughter, and it had not occurred to me.
Was it because of my having been ill the other day? He shrugged impatiently; then gave me a reassuring smile.
Jigsaw Page 17
