Jigsaw
Page 30
Alessandro and I were waiting on her in a state of suspended hope. If I was helpless, he was doubly so. Bound by his own feelings which I guessed to be between guilt and longing. Did we behave like ostriches? It would look like it. We were learning, but we were learning in the dark. There was no one to ask. We were both quite ignorant about drugs. They were something one read about in adventure stories (Sherlock Holmes, Chinese opium dens) and the gutter press (fashionable young women sniffing cocaine in night clubs). My mother’s treatment was medically obtained (we avoided talking much about Docteur Joyeu) and administered by a kind of nurse’s routine, a meticulous process, tedious if you had to follow it three times a day (we tried to keep it down to that). The needle and the glass syringe (no disposable ones then) had to be sterilised, that is boiled for some ten minutes in a little saucepan, kept covered, allowed to cool, assembled again. At first Alessandro had done this on the kitchen stove – la Signora’s medicine as far as Emilia went – when it continued he became discreet, bought a spirit-lamp, kept the paraphernalia in a locked drawer, carried out the process in their bedroom.
He had two conversions on his hands, Le Lavandou and La Cadière, my mother no longer much helping; both were nearing completion, he had to be out of the house some of the time. So, as my mother had suggested, he taught me to give her the treatment, prepare the syringe, open the little ampoule with the miniature file provided, apply the disinfectant, give the actual injection. It is not something one likes doing, I recognised it as unavoidable and minded every time.
We instinctively knew that we must keep people from knowing. For my mother that meant above all the Huxleys. Seeing them did her a great deal of good, she made efforts to keep up a façade, with them she was at her best. (Which meant careful timing.)
Though Aldous kept utterly regular working hours – two or three in the morning, at least two more in the afternoon – he and Maria were quite social. They had people for lunch and often dined out or had people to dinner; when the house became properly habitable (with three guest rooms) they generally had friends (interesting and charming) to stay. Then there were the picnics, the hilarious Huxley picnics, on beach and cliff and wind-swept plateau, nocturnal picnics with Aldous’s planter’s punch to drink, Maria’s eccentric food – she was fastidiously anti-food but fed children and guests – fried rose leaves, fried zucchini and rabbit, quince jelly to eat, games to play. These and music at night – Aldous’s Beethoven records listened to in hammocks in the garden under the stars and leaves – were sheer enjoyment, giving in to the moment. (Over, when my mother felt the first twinges of restlessness.)
As I said, we jogged along through May. At the back of our minds there must have been a belief in an eventual solution: the Alessandro-Doris situation would end … the need for the treatment cease …
Alessandro? Did he have moments of remission on those outings, listening to Artur Schnabel playing the First Piano Concerto? It was precisely at a soirée where the maestro in person had been playing that he and my mother first met. Then they sat out the music. Now he was receiving letters from Berlin through the poste restante. Where he read them, if he destroyed them, I did not know. What came out was that absence, as my mother had foreseen, was not working. Presently, Paul proposed an opposite remedy.
Paul had taken it both badly and well. He was very unhappy, he still wanted to marry Doris. He insisted on going on supporting her grandmother and on Doris accepting his allowance. He tried to take it as a coup de foudre that must be allowed to run its course. He went on seeing Doris, was kind, made no demands. What he suggested was that Alessandro and Doris should go away together for a month or two … Travel. Doris intimated that she would be content with this – a stretch of time with Alessandro, limited happiness. Ultimately he only loved my mother, he would never give up his marriage (he had as good as told her). As to Paul, she did not want to think beyond her time with Alessandro. She might remain single, living only in the past … (This reminded of Cécile Panigon: she was in Paris by now with the blessings of the difficult rich aunt, studying art; single or not, one had not heard.)
Gradually Alessandro enlisted my mother’s support for Paul’s idea of cure by proximity. He tried to persuade her that this would be the solution – some weeks, a couple of months perhaps, on their own: it should be enough – such things run their course, he wanted to go to bed with Doris, not make a life with her. He thought he knew himself enough, he knew men …
Here my mother quoted some lines from the 129th Sonnet.
Alessandro sighed. Could she not simply regard it as a kind of delayed wild oats? He would return.
All as before? How can it be?
Different. We can have a long time before us yet, he told her. A good time.
My mother’s first reaction was not favourable. What she called her bad incarnation came to the fore. There was a scene; I was called into their room by her; it was the first one I witnessed. Later, unopposably, she asked for the fourth hypodermic.
In the days that followed she became consistently more and more reasonable and sweet. It was truly extraordinary. ‘I must let the dear boy have what he wants …’ I was elated by admiration, Alessandro by gratitude. And in that spirit the actual plans were made.
My mother became interested – together they weighed up different countries, then decided on Spain. He had never been: my mother knew Spain well, indeed she and my father had lived a year or more in Andalucia – a closed, early nineteenth-century Spain of few foreigners and abominable roads. They had to leave – regretfully – because it was not considered safe for my mother to give birth there. (I was conceived at Cadiz: sherry and the Armada.) It was not a woman’s country; she remembered my father’s Spanish valet who whatever happened in the house never took her side. That was near Ronda – they had driven up there in a horse carriage, there was no railway, oh the dust in the air, the lack of springs in the carriage, but the nobility, the grandeur of the landscape … Alessandro … and Doris, must go to Ronda. Seville? Holy Week – incessantly noisy – there she had fallen for a small boy, very fair and blue-eyed, most unusual in Andalucia, who had danced in the ritual ballet round the altar with much grace; she had lit a candle and made a wish that her baby should look like him.
I didn’t come up to expectations, I said. She laughed.
Otherwise Seville was overrated, so was Granada, more essential to see Cordoba, and he must go to Madrid. Alessandro had already thought of it: the Prado.
He arranged to meet Doris’s Berlin train at Marseille, and go on from there. My mother had wanted her to come to Sanary first and stay with us for a few days. Alessandro prevailed in discouraging this.
They would travel in Doris’s Chrysler – what luck it was still here, parked in our yard – he would leave his car for my mother to be mobile. I was to drive her; I said I would. With great care.
To me he talked over money arrangements. He had been paid, or nearly all paid, for the two conversions, so there was a substantial amount in the bank; out of it would have to come outstanding bills to carpenters and masons – ‘See to it that she doesn’t do anything foolish, she’s capable of spending money like water.’ They had a joint account. (There was a small branch of the Crédit Lyonnais in the main shopping alley at Sanary which opened twice a week.) Alessandro would have liked to leave most of the money with me, but I was unable to open a bank account – still legally under age. ‘Would you like me to keep it in the mattress?’ On the whole he thought not. ‘She’s promised to let you take charge of the cash she draws, just watch out for her writing extra cheques on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’
I thought I ought to know, among other things, how much she had to pay Dr Joyeu on her weekly visit for the renewal of her prescription. Very little, Alessandro said, just what he took to be the going rate for a brief consultation with a country GP. He named a small sum.
The nearer we got to the date of his departure – early July – the more precarious my mother’s state became, the four
th injection being routine now. With that her control held; there were no more scenes. No blackmail.
Addresses needed delicate negotiation. They agreed not to correspond. (No postcards from the Alhambra.) Alessandro did not reveal an itinerary; he would telegraph me as they moved along, where to reach him, reach him in an emergency. He did not have to add only; he knew I was resolved to leave him alone.
Nor was there an explicit date for his return, some time in August seemed to be the understanding. Whether that meant beginning or end, no one said.
The first address he left me was c/o American Express, Barcelona.
When he had left, my mother, buoyed by her own magnanimity and courage, was almost in high spirits, and full of plans for our entertainment and occupation. She was going to give dinner parties, go on sightseeing trips – ‘We have the car’ – she might take up writing again. ‘I do have notes for my essay on Stendhal and Flaubert.’ It was the first I heard of it.
* * *
None of the plans worked.
She insisted on giving me dinner at Le Sourd, so we drove there. Le Sourd, elegant, not large, practising a restrained classical cuisine, was then one of the most expensive restaurants in Toulon. We’d been there before, taken by one of Alessandro’s patronesses. My mother ordered – there was no gainsaying – an elaborate and heavy dinner: I must have this and that and so would she … It was a Sunday; the place had undoubtedly been bustling at noon, now it was nearly empty with the waiters glum and tired; the French do not dine out much on Sunday night. My mother picked at the first course, some delicacy barely in season; the duck looked huge on her plate and she could not touch it. By the time they wheeled in the paraphernalia for the crêpes Suzette, she told the head-waiter she was taken by a malaise, and me to get her home without delay (she needed the fourth hypodermic). As expeditiously as I could, I paid for the uneaten dinner and drove her back at speed.
When I went to the chemist with the ordonnance, the weekly prescription, the pharmacist asked me to wait. The shop as usual was full of people. He beckoned me to step behind the counter and come into his cubby-hole.
‘Mademoiselle,’ he said, ‘I cannot go on filling these prescriptions – not week after week, not for these amounts … Docteur Joyeu exaggerates …’ He said it sadly, considerately, also with exasperated firmness.
I was dumbfounded. ‘But these are medical prescriptions!’
‘For what?’ he threw at me, ‘for what medical purpose?’
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘to calm the nerves.’
He looked at me with pity and more exasperation.
‘You must understand: pharmacists are controlled … There are laws …’ He talked about narcotics, stupéfiants … la drogue … Terrifying words. ‘That’s what your mother is playing with.’
‘She needs it,’ I said.
‘Yes: now she would need it.’ Again the anger and the pity.
This was panic. ‘What are we to do?’
‘Je suis désolé pour vous, et pour Madame votre mère. Her husband, I understand, is away?’
(And there is not going to be an SOS to American Express, Barcelona, I thought. Anyway, it’d be too late – What would I do if I went home now empty-handed?) Again I asked, ‘What are we to do?’
He would give it to me this time, he said, not to would be inhumane, and dangerous. He would also go on until … until other steps could be taken, to honour a prescription every now and again. Meanwhile he advised me to try some other pharmacies.
There was only one other at Sanary, I interrupted.
Oh, he would avoid Sanary altogether. I must go further afield, Toulon, perhaps Hyères … And not to the same too often.
Bandol? Bandol was nearer, I said.
‘Too near.’ He hesitated, hesitated again. ‘Docteur Joyeu is reputed to be … to be somewhat free …’
I caught on that it would be prudent to go to places where Docteur Joyeu was unlikely to be known, and to produce a better reason, if asked, than nerves.
‘What is it prescribed for?’
‘Pain.’
‘Yes.’
‘After accidents, wounding in war, operations.’ There were other conditions for which it might be required. ‘Now if for instance your mother suffered from attacks of a certain kind of asthma, it would be given to relieve an acute state.’
He did not make it very clear to me, as I think he meant to. ‘You are saying it would stop an attack?’
‘Definitely. It can be very useful, in some cases necessary.’
‘You mean if my mother had such attacks …?’
He suggested that she talk it over with her doctor.
So what was I going to say handing in a prescription at Toulon or Hyères?
‘You might say that the patient is suffering from heart asthma – this is far from correct but they wouldn’t expect anything more precise from a young lay person like yourself.’
I thanked him.
He handed me a week’s supply, the flat cardboard box with the two layers of twelve ampoules each inside, and a few extra ones in what looked like a half-packet of cigarettes.
I thanked him again.
‘And do try not to let your mother take more than her ration.’
‘She’s been very good,’ I said, ‘she’s not asked for more than four a day for several weeks.’
He threw up his hands: ‘Didn’t you know that the dose has been increased? Twice … Once in April, and again last month.’
Contemptuous of my stupidity, he talked milligrams. ‘That’s why I can’t go on, that’s why I had to warn you.’
Finicky man, my mother said. Very well, you must go to Toulon, there are two pharmacies to every street.
When I repeated what I had been told about attacks she thought she really ought to see Joyeu about them. ‘I’m afraid he’s not a really first-rate diagnostician.’ She must have done something of the kind because shortly after she began to talk quite seriously about her dreadful heart condition.
The threatened dinner parties did not take place, in fact we saw little of our friends. In certain moods my mother began to fight shy of them, in others she would hare off on impromptu calls. That had become one of my worries, her sudden vanishing on her own. I’d come home from market or the sea, and she was gone without Emilia having seen her leave. Emilia these days was rigidly minding her own business. (She had most kindly though at Alessandro’s request postponed her holiday this year until the autumn.) Once or twice my mother had just gone to and blithely returned from Toulon (on the Desmirails’ bus pass) with her arms full of presents for me, more trousers from the Bazar, books. Sometimes I suspected, and she denied, that she had been to the bank. Another day she walked all the way to the Villa Uley dropping in to tea with the Huxleys. Maria brought her back in the Bugatti, implying a routine lift after a pleasant visit: Maria was the soul of tact. I was aware of what she must have seen – the staggery walk, the glitter in the eyes, the erratic make-up.
Was it, or was it not, all right for me to go for outside advice? Whom could I tell? was one of the questions revolving in my mind. Maria? Aldous and Maria were my mother’s friends. Oriane – unthinkable. Philippe? A rock of strength. Yet there was that unassailable rectitude: what steps might he not take (had I not been told that there were laws …)? Moreover he had no real love for my mother. Renée? She would have been the warmest, the most absolving to turn to, but then she like Philippe had no rapport with my mother. How could I bring our tale to any of them? A sense of disloyalty, betrayal, blocked the way.
I tried – more than once – to talk to my mother herself.
‘It isn’t good for you. It can’t be.’
‘Yes it is. Very good.’
‘The way you are feeling in the mornings and whenever it wears off?’
‘That’s why I have to take it. It’s then that it does me good.’
‘You wouldn’t have to take it, if you hadn’t begun to take it.’
‘You know why I did
,’ she said sharply.
‘Please, please, think of your health.’
‘I have other things to think about.’
The Panigons (minus Frédéric who was still away doing his military service) asked us to one of their dinner parties. My mother accepted. Recklessly primed, she sailed through the evening without disaster: nothing worse than a high degree of animation, poor appetite, flagging towards the end. She touched on Alessandro’s absence with exactly the right tone and length: he was travelling in Spain on his art-dealing concerns. When we got home she started to cry; it was the first time and she cried bitterly and long. She told me how frightful it was, what had happened between her and Alessandro, how unbearable his absence and what he was doing during the absence. Up till now she had hardly mentioned him, more concerned, I felt, with what she called her magic spells, her snatches of euphoria. Helplessly I tried to comfort her.
Presently she asked me to give her another hypodermic. I protested. We won’t be able to get through the week as it is, I told her. ‘Oh just go down to Joyeu, tell him my attacks are getting more frequent.’ She was so unhappy that I had to give in.
*
I did not think much about Oriane these days. If love can cast out fear, the opposite happens as well. Looking at her could give me a pang; when she wished she could still cast a spell; the intensity though was gone. Did this mean that my feelings had been any the less – any the less what? True? Glorious? Devastating? Real? Or did it show them up as immature, mistaken, presumptuous, an irrelevant luxury? They had existed. Here were questions I would learn to work out. Some time, not now.
The Desmirails had moved into their new, their ultra-new, house, all cubic, spacious, cool and white with huge shutterless windows – Venetian blinds keeping out the sunlight – and scarcely any furniture except bookshelves, large dinner table, Philippe’s large desk, some not uncomfortable chairs. It had unique amenities (unique for Sanary) such as oil-fired central heating, bathrooms en suite, an electric cook-stove, built-in cupboards, twin beds, a refrigerator and a telephone. (The Villa Uley also possessed the two latter which when I happened to mention it distinctly annoyed Oriane.) They had named the house La Pacifique (with reference to the ocean?). Like all our houses including the Villa Uley it was not exempt from the endemic summer water shortage.