At one point I said, ‘Where is Doris?’ He had left her in the car, had driven straight to the house, driven straight from the border, straight through the night. They had not been at Granada when the telegram must have arrived, they were touring the south of Andalucia, they were at Ronda in fact when it caught up with them, the telegram. They started off at once, driving north through central Spain, two thirds up to Madrid, eastward to Zaragoza, Barcelona and on, straight on. It was hot – August in Spain, a hot August, the height of the holiday season, crowded roads. How many days? They had practically no sleep: twice only they stopped at a roadside inn for a few siesta hours.
We found Doris sitting upright and awake in the Chrysler, she looked frightened, sad, and utterly exhausted. Her face and dress were covered with dust; the car and windscreen were filthy and sticky with dead insects.
My mother, nine-tenths in control of herself, made her come in, You must be dead, my poor child. While they slept – Doris in the spare room, Alessandro on my bed – I drove about Sanary trying to find an hotel room. Not a hole to be had; finally the Plage, where we were in good standing, relented and promised a maid’s room after the weekend. So Doris stayed at Les Cyprès, urged to by my mother who went on treating her in a friendly detached way. Alessandro she mostly ignored, making conversation over his head. Suddenly Doris said,
‘Where’s Waldemar?’
‘Good God,’ said Alessandro, ‘where’s Waldemar? Gone, I suppose.’
‘No, no,’ Doris said, ‘he wouldn’t, not without saying goodbye to us.’
‘Who is Waldemar?’ I asked.
Oh well, a young German, a student, a Communist – he was keen on letting one know that – they had picked him up, rather he had picked them up, at the Spanish side of the border. The guards were refusing to let him in, something to do with his travelling on foot or not liking the look of his papers (it was the year before Spain became a Republic, six years before the outbreak of the Civil War), he was afraid the French might not let him back in again – so perhaps if he could cross with them in their car? Alessandro had other things on his mind but Doris was firm that people in trouble must always help other people in trouble. Once in France with Waldemar crammed in the back with the luggage, they had gone on giving him a lift. He was a Berliner – with nice manners – who wanted to see a bit of the world during the holidays.
Presently Waldemar drifted in, he’d been asleep under a cypress tree, now he wanted to say thank you and goodbye. As well as travel-stained, he looked under-nourished: a skinny hare. His French was atrocious in accent but grammatically correct; when he broke into German, he talked in Doris’s educated Berlin voice. You must tell us all about the state of the Weimar Republic, my mother said and asked him to stay. We had no second spare-room; Waldemar said he would be happy sleeping on our terrace, he carried all he needed in his rucksack. In due course some water was doled out for his bath.
This domestic situation persisted for some days, my mother alternately withdrawing for long periods and reappearing with renewed animation; Doris heroically concealing what went on inside her while we were all too aware of how much there was to conceal; Alessandro taking gradual cognisance of the damage wrought during his absence, lounging about the house adrift in indecision. There was too much to speak about. Mostly we said nothing.
When he learned about it, Alessandro wanted to stop me from scrounging round the pharmacies. That really appalled him. I told him, If you or I won’t do it, she will on her own; in a taxi, I suppose, with God knows what results.
Waldemar came and went, folding up his bedroll or whatever he slept on, rigidly uninvolved, exploring the countryside, puritanical about accepting meals; even the sticks of bread and salami for his walks had to be pressed on him. One afternoon we were all sitting round a table with my mother, Doris and he arguing about dialectical materialism. Waldemar and my mother stuck to Marxist points – he hair-and-hide in favour, she coolly against – with Doris declaring that most good people nowadays had to become Communists. Alessandro and I sat there rubbing our eyes.
‘Yes: taking the red veil,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t let yourself be tempted into doing that, darling. Don’t believe you have a vocation.’
She was addressing Doris, not me.
Next thing, the nice-mannered young German was talking metaphysics.
When at last there was a room and Doris moved down to the Plage, things at home took a turn for the worse: my mother reverted to open scenes – accusations, taunts, cries for help disguised as cries of abuse. Alessandro would repeat that Doris was leaving, was ready to leave. And he to stay.
With me?
With you.
Why?
Wearily after a pause, he said, I told you I would.
Do you want to?
He did not have the courage to answer, she had the courage to ask, Stay with me as I am now?
After another pause, still from the other side of the room he said, You will not always be like this. You cannot.
There were the logistics of getting Doris back to Berlin. He still would not let her drive on her own. To put her on a train to return by herself after their time in Spain was a trifle unchivalrous. In the end Waldemar was persuaded to escort her. Then it turned out that he had never done such a capitalistic thing as learning to drive a car. He didn’t have the train fare and he wouldn’t take it from us. Doris, whom he accepted as a near-comrade, thought up a compromise: she would pay for their both going third class which was the price of one second-class ticket. (I suppose Waldemar agreed because he believed it was good for her to travel third.)
Doris left. Alessandro had to take her and the political young man to Toulon station. No chance to say a private goodbye. Just a straight return to Les Cyprès. I prayed that my mother would leave him some peace that day. She did.
Doris was gone. Nothing was changed.
We watched each other, not knowing what moves to make. Did you expect me to lay aside my syringe? my mother asked. Perhaps we had. Perhaps she had? Impasse.
It was broken by Maria. This is what happened. Her red Bugatti stopped in the curve outside our house. Maria was taking Aldous to the English dentist at Hyères, would I come with them? The Bugatti had a token seat in the back; as the passenger seat had to be pushed backward to its limits to accommodate Aldous’s immensely long legs, the third traveller had to perch sideways, knees up like a jockey. Outside the dentist’s Maria stayed in the car. She always did. In all those years and years of driving him – which he could not do himself because of his poor sight – to doctors, to meetings, to gurus and quacks, she always waited for his return by the very front door to save him a wait or a walk, however short, when he came out. She had a great regard for his time, which was to be used for his work and his thoughts, not for hanging about while she might have nipped into a café or a shop. (Yet with all her care – her life-long care – for Aldous, there was always time, money, strength – she was physically frail – to give to, to help, others, her family, her friends, the person at the door.) So there we were outside the dentist’s in a tree-lined street. ‘Viens t’asseoir près de moi.’ Maria and Aldous usually spoke French to each other at home. I climbed into the seat beside her. She turned her head – she had a sharp-cut profile – and gave me an intense quick look, like a bird facing one (it was a way she had), from those luminous green-blue eyes. ‘Tu sais, ta mère est bien malade.’
There was no contradicting.
Another darting look, ‘Cela se guérit.’ This can be cured.
How?
It was Maria who found the specialist in Nice; it was Maria who made the appointment for a consultation. It was not as plain-sailing as that: the appointment was broken, and had to be re-made. It was Maria who had gone to see my mother, had walked into the house, into her room, had sat by her bed: called her by her name, spoke to her. We knew not what. My mother had a surrendering confidence in all that came from the Huxleys.
Alessandro and I took my mother
to Nice. We went by train as the drive might be too tiring; we were beginning to realise how much this thing was weakening her physically. It was not an easy ride as she played at changing her mind, threatened to get off at stops. In the end we got there. My mother was ushered into the consultant’s room at once. It was Alessandro and I who waited, not speaking, inwardly biting our nails. Once a nurse looked in, gave us a contemptuous look, we jumped up, she withdrew. When after an hour or more the door opened again, it was the great man himself. He gave a glance at Alessandro and said curtly, ‘Vous êtes son fils?’
‘Son mari.’ Her husband.
‘Very well. You may come in.’
I stood up. ‘I am her daughter.’
‘You can wait here.’
‘I looked after my mother on my own, I had better be present at this consultation.’
‘As you wish,’ he said coldly, and walked through the door. Alessandro waited for me to follow and went in after me.
My mother was sitting in a comfortable chair, I could not make out whether she looked more scared or defiant; anyway the light of battle had not entirely gone out.
The consultant said, ‘I am informed that this addiction has developed in only a little over half a year. Is this a fact? I can hardly credit it, given the patient’s overall condition.’
My mother looked as if she were about to interrupt.
‘Yes,’ Alessandro said, ‘it began last February.’
If that was so – a relatively short period of intake combined with a very high degree of addiction and deterioration – it was the most remarkable and serious aspect of the case. He explained. The taking of a drug, an opiate, inevitably leads to addiction to the drug, that is, the mind and body of the taker can no longer function normally without the drug. Parallel to that addiction, that increasing need for the drug, goes an increasing tolerance of it: larger and larger doses are required – running in order to stand still, and these doses in turn increase the subject’s deterioration.
That was the inevitable spiral. No one regularly resorting to drugs escaped having to increase the drug sooner or later. The time scale was a crucial point. Acquiring addiction could be a slow process. At one extreme end of the scale, subjects were known to continue on opiates for year after year before the changes and increases became marked; at the other they could be as rapid as they were in the present case. Galloping addiction. On an average it would take anything from fifteen months to three years to reach that stage. The determining factors? Constitution … History … Vulnerability in persons of low intellect was generally assumed, yet here the subject appeared to be of good intelligence …
‘I wish,’ my mother interrupted in clear tones, ‘that you would cease to refer to me in this disagreeable manner. You are referring to me I take it? I am here, I am sitting here … Professeur.’ She did not address him as Monsieur le Professeur.
‘Madame.’ He turned to her with a small bow, his cool tone only very slightly tinged with irony. If his amour propre was touched at all, it did not show. ‘Let us then discuss your future …’
There he had the whip-hand. A course of detoxification in a specialised establishment. Imperative. Soonest. Delay would be at the expense of further damage to health and increased future suffering. No need to go to Switzerland or Paris: he would advise a clinic run by a top man a few miles above Nice. For her, he would not advise a cure in a public institution. The clinic in question was not a mental home: indeed they would not and could not undertake a cure without her consent. My mother gave in. Verbally, for the present. She had put and answered questions with dignity and self-possession. Now she appeared tired. A nurse came and gently led her into another room. The consultant signed us to remain.
‘I have arranged for her to be given what she needs for a tranquil journey home. I shall also write out the prescriptions that will carry her through the coming days.’
Both of us nearly spoke.
‘I am not asking you,’ he went on, ‘what your wife’s previous sources of supplies have been. I practise here, in the Département des Alpes Maritimes. I have no responsibilities towards the authorities of the Département du Var. At the same time I must alert you to the fact that it may soon become extremely difficult to obtain the doses she has become accustomed to from any legitimate source so-called. Examination showed that so far she has been injected with the article in its pure state; that would no longer be the case once she is forced to obtain some form of it in the black market …’ He looked at Alessandro, ‘Back-streets and bars … The stuff they offer can be dangerous.’
Alessandro said, ‘This cure? What will it do to her? Will it hurt her? Is it very bad?’
Alessandro looked bowed by heavy sadness. When I first knew him, I saw him as the young man in Quattrocento paintings standing on the piazza near the scaffold, hand on sword or horse, witnessing grief; now he looked a figure of grief himself.
‘Very bad,’ the consultant said. ‘These cures always are. However they do them … This will be in my colleague’s hands. I do not consider your wife’s an easy case.’
‘What if she decides not to do it? If we put it off? What will happen then?’
The consultant threw up his hands. ‘What will happen? Haven’t you seen enough? Death. In some form or another … Of too much of the stuff or too little. Suicide … Not probable in her case, though possible; accidental suicide. Entre-temps il se peut bien qu’elle aille assassiner quelqu’un. I refuse responsibility.’ Furiously, mocking me, he broke into English, ‘She may well murder one of you, Miss, some fine day.’
We hastened to say we would do all we could to make her do as told.
‘The decision rests with her, she will have to sign a paper. Unless you choose to have recourse to the judiciary, who might constrain her by an order, though as you are not French – as I assume – they might prefer to avoid that hornets’ nest by deporting her. Well, I see that you are not contemplating this; so my children, what I advise you is to use your influence.’
‘And she will be cured at that clinic?’
‘Of course she will.’ The consultant shrugged. ‘They all get cured. The question always is how long will the cure last.’
Aghast, we said, ‘You mean, she may … she could …?’
‘Become a recidivist.’ He was not so angry this time. ‘Yes, that is the great problem. Having experienced Les Paradis artificiels –’ he gave me another mocking look, ‘I am sure Mademoiselle has read her Baudelaire – they go on striving to return. At whatever the cost. You must hope that she is not one of them.’
He saw us out; my mother was in the hall. He took her hand and said with some cordiality and strength, ‘Allez, Madame, bon courage.’ He shook hands with Alessandro and me perfunctorily, already turning away. The nurse saw us into the taxi.
* * *
Those were ambiguous weeks, the ones that followed. Weeks, not days as hoped by the cool consultant. My mother’s position, on any count, was an agonising one. What lay before her was unknown territory, a cruel ordeal, a move from one trap into another. The inevitability of either course made it more unbearable. Thus indecision alternating with terror, optimism, defiance was natural and human, and understood so by Alessandro and myself.
Alessandro was crushed by her suffering and his own sense of guilt. I did not feel guilt – not yet – only pity, tension and an overwhelming desire to be free, for this thing to be over, for my mother to be out of the house and off to that nebulous destination I, too, dreaded for her.
Alessandro, I felt sure, was possessed by this same desire and this increased his guilt. Use your influence, the consultant had said, and we did. When she asked, Must I? What will it be like? we gave the right answers – right from the medical point of view, right from the common-sense point of view – yes, yes, but our motives were not pure: we felt in our bones what the absence of her present self would be for us, and we longed for it with chafing, burning impatience. We might each still have given our life for her, yet wh
en she contrived another delay, we felt murderous.
Maria came and exercised her benign wiles. ‘Aldous says’ was her opening when she wished to give weight to some opinion or advice. I was quite aware that Aldous more than probably had not said. He might have concurred with the opinion or advice, but he would not have initiated it himself. Maria seldom troubled him with problems, her own or friends’, unless they happened to be helpful to the book he was engrossed in. Now my mother was bombarded with the ‘Aldous says’, Maria talked to her as though she were a child about to be packed off to boarding-school: Think how wonderful it will be when you are back again, when it’s over and we shall all be there wearing our very best clothes to welcome you home. I would not have got away with such Sunday school twaddle; Maria commanded the magic of the pure in heart and my mother’s sharp, sophisticated mind was soothed and charmed.
I will do it, she said. Maria tied her to a date (changed more than once).
* * *
Alessandro and I became aware of other realities. The charges of the clinic, which bore the name of a female saint, were high. A solid deposit was required upon entry. We didn’t have enough money, Alessandro told me. She spent a hell of a lot while he was away in Spain. Rather more, it turned out, than I had feared. What can we do?
Last year’s Wall Street crash was now – late summer of 1930 – reverberating in Europe. Even if we had been willing, which we were not, to inform on my mother, it was doubtful whether her trustees could help much. It was no time to sell stocks and shares. My own capital, such as it was, a minor’s capital, was locked up. Alessandro thought of approaching one or two of his patrons, or patronesses, with a view to an advance on future work. He still could get work, he believed, in spite of the state of the market, but to do the work he had to be free, able to move. What were we to do?
Jigsaw Page 33
