Oriane was going through a phase of conventional chic. Cousins with distinguished-looking husbands were staying at the Grand Hôtel at Bandol, the women spectacularly turned out. Oriane herself had given up the Desmirail twin look and the sublime simplicities of designer’s workmen’s clothes and chalk-white espadrilles for the more orthodox trappings of couturier elegance. Philippe showed no sartorial changes, Louis occasionally was made to appear wearing long trousers and a shirt. Oriane had become bored with buses: she was seldom seen at the headquarters of the CTL where Philippe with the help of the donkey-man and the over-paid (according to Oriane) staff was beavering on. Oriane and cousins would be off for days at Antibes or Juan; she’d stop me on the port to talk about the fabulous things she’d been engaged in. Nevertheless she appeared restless and put out.
I was introduced to the cousins, patronisingly shown off as one might a clever and devoted stray dog who followed one about. In point of fact I could no longer follow her about, even if I’d wished to or been invited to join the fabulous engagements, because it was getting more and more unsafe for me to leave the house. I went for very brief swims and turned over the little marketing there was to Emilia. My mother finding settled meals irksome, preferred to eat, if at all, off trays at odd hours. La Signora is not very well, I had to mutter in explanation to Emilia who replied, ‘Se vede.’ It is seen. My mother had grown thin lately, unbecomingly thin. Her quiet or benevolently animated hours were getting shorter and this meant more frequent demands for a hypodermic which I tried to resist or rather stave off for an extra hour or half-hour that would be filled with threats to me and abuse of Alessandro. She had begun to turn against him, speaking of him, calling him names, in a way I had not thought her capable of before. Asperity, home truths, temper, these I was used to and able to accept. What she uttered now, during bad hours, was violent spiteful malediction that would have shamed a Madame Panigon. When, horrified, I tried to stop her, exclaiming at injustice and sheer lack of truth, I was shouted down. Ungrateful brat, you’re on his side! Sooner or later, more often sooner, I gave her the screamed-for hypodermic.
Once I tried to stall with the excuse that the syringe had not yet been sterilised. (The spirit-lamp was slow in getting water to the boil.) You are lying, she said. I was.
After the deed was done – how I hated it – when new peace had settled on her, she would give me a sweet smile. Have I been very horrid? You have. Do forgive me. I melted.
‘I told you,’ she said, ‘I am condemned to have two sides now.’
What frightened me was the increasing dosage. Five in any twenty-four hours by now was not unusual. There was the perpetual worry of getting the stuff in time; far too often we were near running out. It seemed I was always en route to Joyeu or trying to find a complacent chemist. The routine at Joyeu’s consisted of my stammering out something about ma mère and another attack in the night, his looking at me bleakly from his opaque and shadowed eyes, heaving a sigh and after a pause, a long pause, slowly writing out a prescription. Once in a while he would say, ‘Dites-lui de faire attention’, mostly he would say nothing. I would utter the customary formula (French patients pay on the nail at the door), Combien je vous dois, Docteur? He would name the unvarying modest sum. I had it ready. ‘Merci.’ ‘Bonsoir, Docteur.’ ‘Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.’
I was losing my nerve about going to the pharmacies and so exercised perhaps unnecessary care, hesitating, saying a prayer on the doorstep, asking for toothpaste and aspirin along with the prescription. I was never turned down (intense relief each time) nor was I ever asked to produce the rigmarole about heart asthma.
There was one brutish occasion at home when I dropped the syringe, a glass syringe already primed with the precious contents of an ampoule, on the tiled floor. It shattered. My mother crouched down trying to retrieve fragments with her fingers. Then she flew at me, pulling my hair. I did the most sensible thing I could, ran out of the house, started the car and drove down to the chemist, our friendly chemist. Fortunately it was neither siesta hours nor night. From then on we kept two syringes in the house.
Every five or six days or so, I received a telegram from Alessandro with a new address. Valencia … Toledo … Madrid … A very old bent woman acted as telegraph boy in Sanary then; I had become adept at intercepting her. My mother developed a second sense: a few hours later on those days she would ask, Where is he? I had to tell her. Make him come back, she would say.
Renée Kisling’s car overtook me as I was driving back from a Toulon chemist. We both stopped, ‘One doesn’t see you, mon coco,’ she said. ‘You didn’t come out dancing with us on the quatorze.’ When I looked stupid, ‘le quatorze juillet.’
‘When is it?’ I said.
‘Last week.’ She gave her big laugh. ‘You didn’t hear the fireworks? You must be in love.’ She looked me over. ‘Not going well.’ I hadn’t been out to sea for weeks, would I come with her? I didn’t think I could, I said sadly. She asked no questions. I wished she had. We resumed our cars and drove our ways.
They had been building a casino on the port at Bandol for the last year, a proper gambling casino authorised, if not for roulette, for its mini-cousin, boules (nine holes for the little ball to trickle into instead of thirty-six) and a salle privée for baccarat. This establishment was about to be opened by the Prefect of the Var with a gala dinner and a cabaret of grandes vedettes from Paris such as Maurice Chevalier and the aged, perennially fascinating diseur Mayol. Not only Oriane and her entourage had been talking of this event for weeks. Admission to L’Ouverture du Casino was by invitation only. We received one, the Huxleys received one (the net was cast fairly wide). It said tenue de soir which for the men was understood to be anything from the Préfet’s white tie and the Maire’s frock-coat down to a dark suit. Aldous, one might be surprised to hear, elected to go, so did my mother. In both cases it was mainly to hear and see Mayol once more weave with his extraordinary hands in the famous performance of the chanson ‘Les Mains des femmes’. Aldous also went because he was at that time amused by local goings-on; my mother because the Huxleys had asked us to join their table.
For me (among other problems) there was the vexing question of clothes. I was not going once more into pale blue chiffon yet I had nothing else that could be called tenue de soir. Maria – having meanwhile had some second looks at me and realised that I was not nine years old and that any friendship with their Matthew, a very nice little boy indeed, would have to wait – Maria, prompted by some process of divination, offered an old mess-jacket of Aldous’s that he had needed when they went round the world a few years before. We tried it on: it reminded me of my father’s coats I had been given to wear in church when I was Matthew’s age; my father had been a tall man, Aldous was taller. Maria, not abashed, undid seams: there was nothing beyond the wit of a little back-street tailor to take in. So it was. After a couple of sessions of pinning and adjustments, the mess-jacket was transformed into a nice fit. With it – again guided by Maria – I was going to wear a plain long black linen skirt (run up by a back-street seamstress).
My memories of the great night are mixed and full of holes. I cannot recall, for example, who else was at the Huxleys’ table. Which of their likely friends? Raymond Mortimer? Chronology says probably not. The ravishing young Yvonne Franchetti as she was then (later married to James Hamish Hamilton, the publisher)? Possibly. The Charles de Noailles? Again possibly, though I think not. Clive Bell over from Cassis? Drieu la Rochelle and (another beauty) his wife Olésia? Quite possibly. What is certain is that, when we got there, we found women who looked good and men who talked well. Maria herself will have looked enchanting, with her face of a young El Greco saint, corals on her ears and in her hair a single brilliantly white flower from her garden.
When we got there. We, my mother and I, were late. Even at her best she had not much regard for time. First she had not wanted to get changed at all – for a little rustic do: where had I got such bourgeois notions? Then she threw hers
elf into it all too much: orange lace, deep décolletage, a Spanish comb with a wisp of veil. I fancied myself in my tenue de soir and was anxious to be off and with the Huxleys and the fun. I urged her on; she resisted. At one point we both howled at each other in great wrath. (I discovered that I had, or was developing, a temper.) Then, simultaneously, we laughed. Don’t take after me, she said. In the car at last, I found it difficult to drive in the long narrow skirt, my mother kindly helped me roll it up. That, too, took time. You see? she said. We felt reconciled.
Our entrance – well after Monsieur le Préfet, which was not bien vu given my mother’s appearance, make-up and somnambulistic walk, cannot have been inconspicuous. However, we reached the right table, the men whose identities I cannot remember stood up, Maria said the right word, and there we were. A few minutes after, I saw the Desmirails glide in – two slight silhouettes, he in a dinner-jacket, she in a white sheath – later even than we were, odd considering Philippe’s manners. They were followed by the splendid cousins; Louis, Oriane’s attendant demi-god was missing. With hindsight this was the most memorable event of the evening – the disappearance of Louis from the Desmirails’, from Europe and this story. At the actual moment it was a mere ripple. The dinner, pretentious though not bad, got served with some hitches and was eaten; the official speeches, pompous, deferential, spiced with predictable gallic wit, were sat through; the cabaret got under way and was enchanting. Maurice Chevalier en chair et en os, in flesh-and-bone as the French call a live performance, set the audience alight; Mayol entranced it, a fat old man miming a sentimental song. Those who ever saw his act recall what it was like; for the rest it is as though it had never been (unless, improbably, a scrappy film exists): Aldous and my mother, lured from their separate inner worlds, gave themselves to its small magic.
Later, anticlimactically, the lights went up and there was dancing. (Not taken on by the men at our table.) I got a few turns from Oriane’s cousins’ husbands. Passing me, she looked over my get-up and threw me an ungrudging Très chic. Next time we were in speaking distance, she said, Louis m’a plaquée. Plaquer, transitif, can mean anything from ‘stood me up’ to ‘walked out on me’. She made it sound a great joke.
My mother held up well; our party was one of the earliest to leave – after a brief tour of the salles de jeu, and much head-shaking from Aldous – he simply could not understand anyone wanting to do anything as uninteresting as gambling: too extraordinary. My mother helped me rolling up my skirt again and we got safely home.
Next morning the first version of the Louis story was trickling around Sanary: the Desmirails had been late last night because Louis had turned up at their house in a rebellious mood dressed in a reach-me-down suit and an open shirt. Oriane, at her disdainful best, told him, ‘You might at least have put on a tie.’ Whereupon Louis lost his temper, shouted ‘Zut pour la cravate!’, slammed the well-fitting doors of La Pacifique and rushed into the night.
Oriane, furious in her turn, was soothed down and persuaded to proceed without her amant en titre.
The first amendment came from herself; she told everyone who lent ear that what Louis had hurled at her was not the harmless childish zut. His parting shot had been, ‘Merde pour la cravate!’
What was not known until some days after, was that Louis in thunderous black mood had run into his brother on the port. Louis had poured it forth. The brother, an elder brother, married, who happened to be staying at the Hôtel de la Plage for a holiday, listened. Louis was fed up with fetching and carrying and being bossed about by Oriane. He had had enough. He wanted out. The brother saw his chance. One should remember that the family – solid, respectable, highly regarded in the Parisian art world – was against on every count: a married woman, indiscreet, keeping a young son from the family, keeping him from painting. The brother took Louis back to the hotel, settled him in his own room, fanned the flames; then left him and went to work. Quick work. He telephoned to their father in Paris, the father telephoned to an uncle in Marseille, the uncle chased up a sea captain of his acquaintance, a capitaine au long cours, whose ship – a tramp steamer – was lying in port ready to weigh anchor that very dawn on the way to the South Pacific. Louis meanwhile had been nourishing his wrath (helped by brandies and sodas). He would show the bitch, he would. The brother lost no time getting him into his car in the clothes (sans cravate) he stood in. A little after midnight he was on board, under the wing of the complacent captain and delighted with his destination. (Louis liked thinking of himself as a noble savage.) The ship, the brother was assured, would not call at any port for at least five weeks. The plot was a triumph of initiative, family solidarity and cunning, as well as will over matter when one considers the state of the French telephone system (now the pride of Europe) in those days.
Before sailing, Louis had found the time to scribble a postcard addressed to Madame Philippe Desmirail. It said in shaky block letters (I saw it: Oriane showed it to me): ‘En Route pour Tahiti! Au revoir!’
At first Oriane took it for a prank. The brother soon circulated the truth. Then Louis’ father wrote her a restrained letter informing her of his decision – at the cost of great personal loss to Louis’ mother and himself – to send his son to the other side of the world for a couple of years. (They must have considered her very dangerous.) Oriane appeared to take the loss well, making a story of it – and all that for une cravate. Later I learnt that it had shaken her badly, a bad blow, as bad in its way as the literal collapse of her tennis future on that court at Biarritz. Each time a Bovaristic dream shattered, a corner of a world she had created to revolve round herself ceased to exist. On a daily level the disappearance added to her serious under-occupation, running Louis the Satellite had used up some of her abilities and time (he was a malleable fellow). Now she began to suffer from a series of crises de nerfs – as they were always referred to – which from then on beset her at intervals in later life. At the time she suffered these in private, Philippe, also in private, bore the brunt.
What Louis felt the morning after his abduction is not known. He did not return to France until some fifteen years after the war, that is after an absence of over thirty years, as a middle-aged man (with a young Tahitian wife in his baggage) who had not become a latter-day Gauguin but a moderately unsuccessful export-import man. What had been a humiliation for Oriane caused much grief to his parents who did not live to see their son’s return. Then, Louis sought out Oriane, who had long lived separated from Philippe, told her she was the love of his life and proposed marriage, averring that he could easily get rid of the young native wife. Neither took it very seriously, though Oriane was flattered enough to tell me (the physical change in him was much greater than the change in her). Together they enjoyed a few jokes about la cravate, then drifted apart for good. He is said to have returned to the tropics.
The story of his original departure on the night of the casino opening was relayed to Aldous by way of Maria. She was his eyes and ears for what was going on in the human world; for his books, she would explain, any odds and ends came in useful. So I was egged on to provide tales. Now the Huxleys, the born, the authentic Huxleys, not the wives they married, were dreadfully addicted to puns and verbal jokes, though Aldous less relentlessly so than his brother Julian. Louis’s quarrel at the Desmirails’ house La Pacifique, the Peaceful, and his subsequent destination, Le Pacifique, the Ocean gave him the opportunity for a very poor jeu de mots.
*
From Toni I had had listless notes. About her, I had heard rather more. She was not adjusting herself to the new life, she was beginning to realise. She missed Jamie. Was her sense of injury still intact? Rosie wrote, Toni would want one to think so, yet there might be a slight chance, a minute chance, that it could crumble. If the right thing occurred. Word had got to Toni that Jamie was moping badly and that it was showing even in his work. That shook her a little. Could she be brought to think, Rosie was asking herself, that the man had been punished enough?
Rosie wa
s working on it – it wouldn’t be the first time ever that a divorce had been stopped. She wrote a word to Surbiton telling Jamie she would like to talk to him. When he replied, he apologised about the delay: he had left his mother’s – from where the note had been forwarded – and moved into London again. The address heading his letter was in Bloomsbury: he did not say so, but Rosie gathered that it was Cynthia’s. Jamie had not asked what Rosie wanted to talk about, nor had he suggested a meeting. So that glimmer of hope was extinguished.
Now Rosie was beginning to feel that she really could not leave Toni and go off with Jack to the South of France. He was able to go this year, wanted to go, insisted on going, she herself longed to go … But when she thought of Toni – who had no one to go away with – stuck on her own in London, she felt that she ought to take her somewhere, a fortnight in Brittany, say. Oh, she did not want to. To be able to travel once more with Jack! She was torn. What was she to do – what did I think?
What did I think? My heart was with the lovers – they had already missed Sanary last year because of the Judge’s troubles – one should take joy when one can, if one can, but can one? If Rosie felt so guilty about abandoning her sister? For whom things were pretty grim. Was it never possible for everybody to be happy? Did anything good have to be at somebody else’s expense? I wanted Rosie to have her time with Jack, I wanted them to come. Did I really? Did I want to face – or evade – Rosie’s questions at this point? Was I in the mood for burgundy lunches with a distinguished ever so nicely patronising judge? (That had been two years ago – it felt an age.) Would I not watch the swing-doors of the Hôtel de la Plage dining-room for my mother wandering in?
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