Many years later I came across a letter of Maria’s written during the Second World War to her niece, Claire Nicolas White. It was a long long letter – such as Maria used to type, rapidly and with eccentric spelling, late at night when Aldous was asleep – the occasion was either a twenty-first birthday or an engagement, and it contained good counsel on many things from washing one’s brush and comb to helping with the housework without letting one’s family notice it, and not insisting on being right even if one was. One item particularly impressed me. ‘Always give to people before they have to ask.’ This was what Maria did for us now. She sought me out. Your stepfather must be having a great many expenses, she said. (They called each other Alessandro and Maria face to face, but in absence referred to ‘your stepfather’ and ‘Madame Huxley’.) Then she offered the money for the clinic. She had it on her. It was an act of generosity all the more remarkable as she was painfully aware of how hard Aldous had to work and over-work to earn their living. Each of her acts of generosity, and they were endless, was a laceration for herself. One must add that in this realm her ‘Aldous says’ was unequivocally and perennially ‘We must help’ from his own mouth.
Alessandro was impressed. We must repay Madame Huxley, he said to me. (I am glad to say that eventually we did. Which, and I don’t like to think of it, was not always the case with money Maria lent or gave me in my later life.)
Emilia went off on her postponed holiday. Before she did so, she gave Alessandro notice: she would not come back. No reason was sought or given. She owed us no loyalty, she was not a family retainer, though she had served us like one. It was decent of her to have told us, it would have been easier to leave with nothing said, then not return. We gave her an extra month’s wages, drove her to the station and saw her on to the slow train that would eventually carry her to Livorno.
Alessandro engaged a femme de ménage. This, given the disorder my mother was strewing about the house, was a necessity if we were to stay on the right side of squalor. The best ones were in work; we were taken on by La Grosse Hélène, as she was known, a young local woman of vast bulk; her manner was jovial, if familiar, and she was known to be a gossip. That was now of little moment; there were too many subtle and less subtle indications that Sanary knew what was going on at Les Cyprès. Only Madame Panigon had been able to maintain a façade of pristine ignorance. She was too practised in knowing more about her neighbours than she ought to, to let on that there was anything she knew.
Eventually Aldous took off to Berlin with his learned friend J. H. W. Sullivan, learned in physics, mathematics, astronomy, literature and music; they were going to interview eminent scientists. We were in September. Maria was about to leave Sanary to stay with her family in Belgium. After moves and countermoves, on the last practicable day, Maria on her own drove my mother to the clinic at Nice. As they left, my mother kissed us both, then, looking at our stricken faces, said with a sweet and mocking smile, ‘I know you couldn’t wait for the gates of the prison house …’
6
A few days later I found myself translated into the serenity and order of a French household. In the morning, when the breakfast tray was brought and I pulled the Venetian blinds that shaded the wide windows, my large bare room became as one with the olive grove outside. The rest of the house was quiet; no demands were heard. I drank my café au lait slowly, book in hand, breathing, looking out. Presently I washed and dressed in a gleaming bathroom, at my own pace. Later: the knock at the door:
Bien dormi, Billi?
The message from Nice had been that it would be a long process, a month if not more; for the present the chef de clinique forbade any visit, especially from the husband. The clinic would tell us when the ban was lifted; meanwhile I would be allowed to telephone the head nurse once a week.
Alessandro went off, using the time for earning – he hoped – a little money. He was still the go-between of collectors and a few artists who liked to by-pass their regular dealers once in a while. (There Kisling had been of much help.) He was travelling in the Ford and had taken one of the dogs, Chumi, who was most used to his ways. He meant to go to Paris and Amsterdam, whether he had the intention of going to Berlin I had no idea and did not ask.
The Desmirails came and told me that I must stay with them at La Pacifique for the duration, as it were. (As I said before, everyone knew about our troubles.) Pour le moment tu es ma fille, Philippe had said; Oriane was soft and serious. I was as touched as I was surprised by such kindness and affection, and found it difficult not to cry. Les Cyprès was shut, La Grosse Hélène coming in twice a week to air and dust; the remaining two dogs – on the under-trained side – were put en pension with the wife of one of Philippe’s drivers.
September storms, those waterfalls that drench the Midi at inconvenient moments, had broken the summer heat early. So far it had been a long bathing summer – mild swimming well before May – one could have gone on after the storm; we called it a day and changed into a more autumnal routine. To my astonishment I found myself writing; not merely keeping regular hours (like Aldous!), but actually writing. A novel. No more contorted essays. A story, a plot, people. It was painful, hard work and a great joy. The breakthrough had come about in this way: Oriane even at her nicest could not lay off play-acting for long. Perhaps it was not play-acting, to assume a role was nature. With no Louis any more nor anyone or anything in particular to glamorise her (the worldly cousins had returned to their native Paris), she tried to make something out of me. She had exhausted the, always limited, exhibitionism of what she now alluded to as our sentimental past; for the present I had been treated like a younger sister who needed looking after, very nice for me but hardly enough feather in cap for her before the world. So she became a literary patroness. She convinced herself that I was a writer of much promise, overnight I was turned into her jeune écrivain. Mon jeune écrivain is staying with me, mon jeune écrivain est en train de faire un bouquin formidable, she would inform the busmen, Madame Panigon, the company at Chez Schwob, who all knew better. Nevertheless by the force of her expectations, by instructing Suzanne, the bonne à tout faire, to tiptoe to my needs, by putting the right table and ruled paper in my calm and spacious room, she transformed the myth into reality. Some kind of reality; I eventually did finish that first novel. It was about a young man in the South of France and his adventures; the title was An Expense of Spirit (an unkind friend added, In a waste of time). Not unpredictably it was diluted Aldous Huxley – Aldous Huxley and plain water. It went the publishers’ round, turned down first by Chatto and Windus – rightly so but to my desolation at the time – then by several others.
While I laboured – ill-served by a handwriting so bad that I could not read it unless I put the words together in block letters – Philippe spent his mornings looking after his paperwork and his buses (which continued to devour money); Oriane went into Sanary to market and in general kept house. It was not something she was much interested in, yet like nearly all French women she was brought up to do it efficiently and smoothly. An impeccable house, fine linen, a punctual sequence of meals, well-cooked, well-presented, without ever invoking a husband’s help, were a fundamental part of bienséance, the peace and seemliness of domestic life. Both Oriane and Philippe were congenitally tidy; their cupboards, drawers, tool-shelves were an aesthetic pleasure to behold. Of all the orderly French households I have known, the Desmirails’ was the most exquisite one.
Released at noon, lunching with them was the reward. I already mentioned their perfect manners to each other – no nagging or snapping in that ménage – manners that included listening to what the other had to say. Their morning’s forays into Sanary yielded amusing gleanings. Like many intelligent people, like Aldous, like my mother, Philippe enjoyed gossip of which he was both a source and a conveyor. Intelligent gossip, as opposed to gossip tout court, makes for good conversation. Philippe, though far from being a local man, knew – or invented – a good deal about the secret histories of Sanary inhab
itants; two of his favourite butts were a retired military gentleman called Rose, referred to as le Général Rose allongé, and a moustachioed spinster of uncertain sex whose actual name was Mademoiselle Casanova.
Over coffee, Philippe, like Alessandro, laid out his patience cards while Oriane sewed. Philippe had a special patience board that rested on his knees while he sat in a deep chair smoking one of his small clay pipes. Idle hands stood out in this house – another of Philippe’s recreations was tinkering with chronometers or the smaller parts of their many aged cars – so I, too, played patience and found that indeed it soothed the nerves and mind. Then it was back to the grindstone, Philippe to his Compagnie des Transports, alleviated by a little tennis; I to piece together the next paragraph. Oriane retired with a book.
Presently final release – how I waited for that knock on the door – from my métier de jeune écrivain: Oriane and I had tea together. Companionably. Then we picked up the two dogs at the driver’s wife’s, set out by car to a good starting point and went for a long walk. By the time we were back, Philippe had returned; we changed into indoor clothes and spent the hour before dinner reading on the terrace. Separate books, shared comments. Bernard Grasset and other Parisian publishing houses still sent their new novels to Philippe; parcels of pristine books were arriving at La Pacifique every few days. Their pages uncut as was the way with French books then. There were paper-knives of all shapes to hand: Philippe cut all the pages of a book meticulously before reading a word; Oriane and I liked stages, we cut the first eight, read, were brought to a halt, cut again.
Dinner at eight. The food at the Desmirails’ was curiously neutral. What we ate was as unsensual as good food – it was good food – can be. I once heard Oriane describe a dish as ‘correct’. We might have been a thousand leagues from Provence: no aromatic herbs, no colour, no spices, no garlic; above all no garlic. Une question d’éducation, Philippe would tell me, a well-brought-up person does not eat garlic, it may cause offence to someone else who has not. That the dilemma does not arise in the Midi as everyone eats garlic did not deter him from this precept. A deeper reason for his gastronomic reticence was, I thought, his post-war recoil from some forms of Frenchness, a protest against his compatriots’ pantagruelism. The protest included wine. The Desmirails drank water at their table, Evian or Vittel. That mineral water phase is something I suspect Philippe has well forgotten and would not like to be reminded of today when, among other things, he has become quite a distinguished viticulturist with whom his friends have shared innumerable good bottles. The asceticism of his past, during what I now see as his dormant years, was part of the recuperation from the trauma of the 1914 War – his tenuous survival after three brothers killed, for all his poise and air of balance, he was then a being still retarded in some aspects of a man’s life.
Even then he had remained French enough to have found it inconceivable not to provide wine at his table for a guest. A carafe of decent red was placed by my glass at every meal and it was regarded as natural that I should freely help myself to it.
After dinner, Philippe might try to teach me something, rudiments of physics, the development of motor car construction; on these occasions Oriane, already well-instructed, knitted. Or we played a game, mah-jong, three-handed belote; often we quietly sat, each reading a book. At bedtime, around eleven, Oriane made and Philippe drank some cocoa.
Once a week the telephone call to Nice had to be made. It was always a Thursday, and the news was never good. My mother had not reacted well to any treatment. They had difficulties with her as a patient. She had got hold of something she should not and they were loath to accept the blame. There was trouble with a nurse she had taken against. Once she tried to leave without authorisation – escape I should have called it – something you are not allowed to do once you have signed a paper of commitment, and the surveillance had been able to prevent it. The worst was that when complete withdrawal of the drug had finally been achieved, my mother’s physical condition was very low. Various secondary complaints were emerging. My mother, once so healthy, was now a very ill woman. They foresaw, spoke of, a drawn-out and difficult convalescence.
When might I see her?
Possibly soon. Though so far she had not asked for any member of her family. There was now one nurse she had got fond of, and who was able to do something for her.
I got into a state well before those calls. It began by Wednesday evening. The Desmirails were very good to me on these days.
The best of the week for me was Sunday, because on Saturday night Philippe brought the office typewriter, a great clumsy thing used by Josée, the ‘overpaid’ secretary, on working days. Philippe unfailingly carted it up to La Pacifique every Saturday and took it back on Monday morning. On Sunday I typed out what Oriane and I, keeping an ironic tone, called mes oeuvres. I transferred six days’ harvest of block letters on to stiff white paper. Was it all right? Was it wonderful? Was it drivel? I hoped, I feared, I exulted: seeing it in type was almost as good as print.
One of the rituals established by Oriane for her young writer was her impressing on the maid Suzanne never to intrude on me with such things as cleaning. (Any writer, old or young, genuine or aspiring, would jump at such protection.) Kind Suzanne only took broom and duster to my room in my absence, a quick dip after luncheon. For a time all looked well. I love order, excessively so according to some of my Anglo-Saxon friends, but well below Desmirail standards. One day Oriane decided that my room needed a proper tidying up, which was done by Suzanne during one of our walks. Fretting that ‘my papers’ might have been disturbed or, God forbid, discarded, I did a thorough check afterwards. Everything was in place except for an aspirin tube that was missing from the dressing-table. That tube had been given me by my mother during those last days of vacillating before the clinic. Would I keep it for her without opening it and trying to look what was inside? Would I give my word? She did not hold with this much herself but trusted that I would. Naturally I promised. It was a very minor Bluebeard’s chamber, an almost weightless aluminium tube that made no sound when you handled it. I gave it small importance – so many bizarre things were going on at the time. When I left Les Cyprès I packed it with my brushes and things, and left it on the dressing-table. Now it was missing; Suzanne must have thrown it away; I didn’t like to ask about it – it had probably contained some nefarious substance we were better off without. I did not regard it as a sacred trust (safe for not opening and looking) and dismissed it from my thought.
It was a good, a healing, a peaceful life that I was leading at La Pacifique – even without the bonus of being made to write – and I am for ever grateful to the Desmirails, for their generosity and affection – they were angelic.
Perhaps not consistently angelic as Oriane went, that was not in her nature, something drove her – it got worse in later life – to show claws from time to time. One evening at dinner – we were alone, some crisis with a theatre bus was holding Philippe at the garage – as I was helping myself again from the carafe of wine (a third glass? a fourth? I drank a good deal for my age), Oriane said in a velvet voice, ‘You know, ma chérie, I should be careful in your place – after all, ta mère est une morphiniste.’
Instantly she was appalled (far more than I was) and cried forgiveness. ‘How could I? Je suis méchante.’ I understood or thought I did; we calmed each other, being certain that not a word of this would be breathed from either to Philippe.
Oriane talked a good deal on our walks. Some of them led to or passed by hide-outs – an abandoned hut, a sheltered clearing – she had discovered (used?). I thought of Louis. She was talking of other men. Future men. A banker in Paris, very clever, an ambitieux who would go far, who was waiting only for a sign from her … but he was middle-aged. The driver of bus number one was giving her smiles, but would need encouragement, a very well-set-up young fellow, one’s husband’s chauffeur – would it be amusing to be the French Lady Chatterley? (I’d like to have heard my mother’s comment on
that.) Her younger cousin’s husband was mad about her too – I’d seen him: wasn’t he handsome? – it would serve Adrienne right, she’s been cuckolding him enough and she tried throwing herself at Philippe, on the other hand an affair en famille wasn’t what one really wanted, was it?
What, I thought, shocked and puzzled, did Oriane want? Excitement? Amusement? Vanity appeased? There were elements of these in many love affairs … To that degree? And what of Philippe? Yes – one knew about Philippe’s version of the post-war code of marital laisser-faire, his was based on tolerance (with a pinch of lassitude, indifference?), this was not unmatched by Oriane: her springboard was triviality and one-upmanship; her permissiveness, in thought if not in deed, lacked dignity (let alone the spontaneity of the Kisling milieu). Oriane talked a good deal about Philippe, how she loved and admired him. And in fact she did. They were inseparable, she believed (and would do her best, her worst, to keep them so), and they were alike: two of the same mould. Their tragedy was that he, too, believed this, at least for a long time. They were not alike, not in their characters (his had strength, hers self-will), not in their values. The twin-act of their youth was trompel’oeil; their affinity – so marked in their looks – a product of education, milieu, manners, a few shared tastes and distastes, and the great illusion of their marriage. They were just alike enough not to strike fire in each other as lovers; they were too unlike for her to go on subscribing to the fundamental tenets of his nature, his exceptional gentleness, probity, moderation; too unlike for him – once he awoke to it – to go on forbearing the lack of them in her.
There was a hunger in Oriane to be effective, to make a great splash, a longing for fulfilment, love, vocation; she had courage, dare-devilry and a taste for outrage, and if fate, as was likely, would fail to deal her the great hand, she would go hunting for it like a thwarted feline beast.
Jigsaw Page 34
