(Did all women carry the seeds of their own destruction? Toni … my mother … Doris … Cécile … Yet there was also Renée; and Rosie, dear sweet ugly Rosie; they were sound.)
While I was living under the Desmirails’ roof, these misgivings about their mutual future were intimations, thoughts crystallising below the surface of my mind; what occupied it then, and is forgotten now, was the character of the young man in my novel, of whom I remember nothing except that he was likely to have spouted Mallarmé and Catullus, and that he had a mistress, a teasing, ravishing woman in her thirties whose name was Marie-Laure de Sainte-Trinide.
In the meantime, when I did not think of the clinic at Nice – which I did not as often as I could manage – I was happy.
7
When my mother was at last allowed to come home, we prepared for her, and ourselves, as well or as badly as we knew how. A young nurse, who had travelled with her, helped her out of the hired car. My mother held on to her arm – slowly they walked up the drive. The woman Alessandro and I saw approaching was gaunt and moved awkwardly. She returned our greetings with a vague compliance. We saw her face: it was lined, there were grey streaks in the chestnut hair; the eyes were dull.
When I had seen her at the clinic (lately I had been allowed to do so a few times), she was someone ill in a hospital bed, made ready for a visit, pronounced too tired to talk much – she was afflicted with acute pain and stiffness in her joints – I had not expected her to be herself. Here, upright, dressed and ‘cured’, the change struck home.
We went indoors. It was around three o’clock in the afternoon, seldom the best of times for an arrival. She sat down. I sat down. The nurse said it was time for her to be going. She kissed my mother who as if panic-stricken held on to her hand, then wordlessly let it go. Alessandro conducted the young woman to the car.
I had moved back into Les Cyprès two days before. Alessandro was already there. He had re-painted our hole of a bathroom to make it look brighter, and constructed a special table for the books and papers my mother liked to have about her bed. Maria (the Huxleys were back in Sanary) had filled the house with flowers, the room was scented with them and the late autumn fruit I had brought and arranged in a leaf-lined basket; La Grosse Hélène had put her energies into a cleaning; the dogs were there. My mother was as indifferent to their greeting as she had been to ours and all the rest.
Alessandro returned. (He had had a word with the nurse who told him that ‘adjustment’ was a difficult thing. The first days could be the worst; someone discharged had to be looked after with great care. Alessandro had looked after my mother always, no one better than he, as a man looks after a woman. Not a son, not a sick-nurse. Moreover – like myself, like many people who have known little of it – he feared and distrusted illness.)
‘Would you like to go to bed now?’ he asked. ‘I suppose so.’ She looked about her despondently. ‘There isn’t anything much else to do.’
I took her into their bedroom. ‘How primitive the plumbing arrangements are in this house – is this all the running water you can manage here?’ It was said with resigned surprise rather than reproachfully. ‘You were comfortable at the clinic then?’ I said, recalling my glimpses of it – a cross between a luxurious hotel and a discreet madhouse; I was also thinking of the bills.
‘Comfortable?’ she said, ‘comfortable? Oh, I suppose in a sense it was, one never lifted a finger.’
She looked at the large bed. The expression on her face was half fearful, half sullen. ‘I think,’ she said very slowly, ‘that I shall require nocturnal solitude. Will you tell him that?’ It would not be the last time that she was conveying a message to Alessandro indirectly.
That evening he moved his things into the spare room. I did not intrude on, nor wish to know about, his relief.
My mother’s physical condition improved. She was able to move quite easily again, but her spirits were very low, and they infected us and everything we did. All her responses were grey. Nothing pleased her; few things markedly displeased her: she had become acquiescent. She talked little. Her zest for analysis had gone and so, except for a touch of hauteur shown now and again to Alessandro, apparently had her temper. In place of the alternating personalities of last summer, we were finding a new third.
I tried to break through by asking, ‘Mummy, you are still very unhappy?’ ‘Happy … Unhappy …’ she said in the new slow way, ‘I can’t imagine happiness, I can’t imagine anything. Is there anything?’ She was afflicted by what they talk of in the carefree Midi, where it is said to strike in the afternoons, as le cafard, that heavy unmovable black thing that sits upon man’s spirit and turns the finest day, the brightest prospect, into dust and ashes.
The man at Nice had given my mother a letter to a GP at Bandol. We were afraid now of all doctors. That one, a well-disposed, common-sensible, homme-moyen-sensuel sort of chap, was reassuring. Yes, he told us, she was going through a phase of depression. Pauvre femme. Not much to be done about it medically (not at that time, not at Bandol). He advised some mild sedative, Sedobrol or her ineffectual old friend, Paciflorine, and warned us to keep her from heavy sleeping pills. Distractions? rest? – they would not signify. Just patience … Time …
We tried to make her eat – she was far too thin – and get up and dress at least once a day. Alessandro and I cooked the things she liked, Madame Panigon (always kind to our faces) sent round some exquisite soup she had made herself. My mother would sit up wearily, drumming her fingers on the table, listlessly eating just enough to forestall comment and cajoling, waiting for Alessandro to re-fill her glass, then greedily gulp her wine. We used to tease her about how little she would drink, often no more than half a glass of claret with her dinner. Now, we did not resist her demand, ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘amuse me, if you can.’ I tried to talk about life at the Desmirails’. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘not exactly amusing, I’d call it a eulogy: first it was Oriane, now it is Philippe – my poor child, all your geese are swans.’ She reached across Alessandro for the bottle. ‘Are you asleep?’ she said to him. The wine was bringing back something of herself. It was a relief.
The Huxleys gave my mother a kitten, an offspring of Matelot and Pussy, their Siamese couple. It was a beautiful small animal with creamy pale fur and all the right black tips. My mother took it into her arms and on to her bed where it made its home. Siamese are eclectic devils, this one allowed himself to be taken to by her. She called him Uley, which was the way the Huxleys’ name was pronounced by the locals, Hs and Xs not trundling readily off their tongues. She played with Uley, with the papers on her bed for toys; she fed him on the best bits off her plate; when she got up she carried him in her arms. The dogs, whom she was still indifferent to, got up to trouble, she quelling them. It was the first breaking out of her deadly negativity.
As my mother was picking up, she became chummy with La Grosse Hélène, sending her off in mid-housework to do errands. (Could it be cashing cheques for her at the bank?) La Grosse Hélène, knowing and bonhomous, treated all of us with a mixture of the maternal and the insolent.
My mother became brighter, spurts of optimism with intervals of sullenness; she took to talking again. Some of our dinners were animated once more. At last she began speaking about the clinic, not about horrors – about people, staff, fellow patients. Now we learned that she had struck up a friendship with a Russian, a White Russian émigré, not in his first youth, who was undergoing his sixteenth detoxification cure. ‘Sixteenth. I’m not going through a second. Ever. That I promise you.’
Alessandro and I sat with folded hands and prayers in our hearts.
The Russian, his name was Ivan, ‘Not very original of him, or rather of his father; but then that wretched man was stuck with Ivan as well: my Russian is Ivan Ivanovich.’ Well, he had gone through the gamut, cocaine, hashish, opium, heroin. Opium was the best, he told her, if one learned one’s way about it, one could make it last the longest. The Russian, a man of infinite finesse and cu
ltivation, said that she would never get the full perfection of Turgenev unless she learned to read him in the original; she needn’t trouble to learn Russian for Tolstoy whose style at times was clumsy, he read better in translations. She missed Ivan Ivanovich … She implied he had admired her. They had promised they would meet some day, when he came out, whenever that was; he did not trust himself for long in the outside world.
‘I think I shall learn Russian. He’s already taught me the Cyrillic alphabet.’ She fished for paper and pencil and fluently produced 4 Cyrillics. Then cried out, ‘Oh don’t look at me as though I’d performed a circus trick – you are treating me as if I were a dangerous animal. I still am … Oh do I know what I am?’
Alessandro got up and uncertainly patted her arm. ‘You see?’ she said with a sneer.
On other evenings she would lament for the young nurse. ‘There was someone who knew what one needs when one’s not well. She read one’s thought.’
‘That’s because she is a nurse,’ Alessandro said, unwisely perhaps.
For these evenings would end either in sudden flatness or in the now renewed tirades against Alessandro. To his face, behind his back.
‘He brought me to this,’ she would cry in sudden fury.
I tried to imply that this was over, must be put behind, she burst out, ‘After what has happened to me! My ruined … health.’ (She was unable yet to speak of the ruin of her looks.)
She slept heavily and long, sometimes into the afternoon. One day I came across the gin bottle in her bed. It fell out, it was empty, a bottle of Gordon’s gin. She first pretended that I was dreaming, then that the bottle got there by accident.
The second time this happened – I had not waited for the bottle to fall and it was not empty – she was furious.
‘And if you dare tell anyone, least of all the medical Cerberus at Bandol …’
So it was not just to cash cheques that La Grosse Hélène had been sent into Sanary.
‘I believe that woman steals,’ my mother said to me, ‘are you missing anything?’ No, of course not. ‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘With all her faults, that’s the last thing Hélène would do. She’s honest. I dare say she steals our good name.’
‘We haven’t got a good name. With the loose life my husband leads.’
It had been predictable, the common-sensical Bandol GP said. And you can’t stop her. They always find ways of getting at it. Try to make her take less, try to make it look natural, convivial, drink with her.
So we got in vermouth, orange juice, angostura, ice, and suggested wouldn’t it be jolly if we had gin slings, Tom Collinses together or whatever. Goodness how false it rang. My mother wasn’t taken in, that didn’t suit her at all. She wanted her secret – to retire from time to time, return to bed with Uley and a bottle.
For a time she managed this rather well. It enabled her to be almost normal and up and about at most times. She went out by herself, shopping, to the hairdresser. The grey streaks in her hair disappeared, a good sign. Her taste for social life revived. She called on people, sometimes at odd hours, was invited on her own and went – almost on time – to lunch with the Panigons, the Kislings, the Huxleys. She even called on Oriane. (Philippe she avoided; she had an instinct about the granite below the graceful comportment.) And the best of it was that she was no longer immersed in depression, no longer desperate. What was bad, very bad, was her continuing hostility to Alessandro. She treated him with mockery and scorn, making him feel a criminal, a worm. He bore the assaults with great courage.
‘Don’t you want to go and see your concubine?’ she asked him in my presence.
He controlled himself with difficulty; in a sudden flash I realised that his anguish was about my mother’s behaviour and not about poor Doris. Admiration as well as love for my mother had filled almost all of his adult life; for on to a year now she had been destroying her beloved self before his eyes. He could not bear it.
When I sought him out later, a possible time had come to ask, ‘Do you want to see Doris?’ Oh no, he said. That could not be renewed. It had been paid for too dearly.
Soiled and spoilt, I thought. ‘What is happening to her?’
He groaned. Poor little Doris. She would not go back to Paul. She no longer accepted his money. She was working for some political association, immersing herself in active German politics, ultra left-wing. Paul was heart-broken. ‘I wish I were dead,’ Alessandro said.
My mother received letters from her Russian, Ivan Ivanovich. She would snatch them, take them to her bed, hide them under a pillow. Perhaps they were love letters; perhaps she liked us to believe they were.
She had acquired a Russian grammar. Time she did something to improve her mind, and Uley liked to be called by Russian endearments. She might also take up soon her essay on Stendhal and Flaubert. She was talking to me as she used to, often very sweetly. So I told her about the novel I had started at the Desmirails’ and not touched since.
She was serious about that. Did I realise how difficult it was to write a good novel? Perhaps the most difficult, and rewarding, of literary forms. She herself would have given everything – no, not everything, as her life would appear to have proved, but a great deal – to have written something: to have achieved that translation from experience into art. Might she have had the necessary talent? One could never tell unless one tried – and trying was work. ‘I’ve never learned to work.’ Writing was something one had to give oneself to like a vocation. If it hadn’t been for all those love stories … Lived, alas not written.
As for me, her daughter, I might bring it off or I might not. If I had the talent, if I accepted that writing had to be served. ‘Never look over your shoulder, don’t think of a public, or reputation, or money – follow your inspiration, if you have it, then do your damnedest to pin it down, prune it, lick it into shape.’ And it would be best for me not to marry, not to burden myself with a house and child. She grinned. ‘Oh I know they all think I haven’t burdened myself enough with you. But then I have not become a writer, here’s a nice non sequitur. And now you must leave me. I need a little rest.’ She smiled engagingly again, ‘I will have a little nip and Uley may have a drop of it in his milk. I don’t particularly want him to grow into a huge cat.’
On Christmas Eve my mother and I – Alessandro had some work that entailed his spending a few days at Aix – had dinner at the Huxleys in Maria’s basement kitchen dining-room (Maria’s entertaining was unconventional long before it became willy-nilly so for most of us). My mother brought Uley who was entirely ignored by his parents; Aldous was fascinated by this parental detachment and compared it favourably with human family patterns. He was himself much attached to the cool father, Matelot, who liked being in his, Aldous’s, work-room, perching on his shoulder as he typed. So we sat at Maria’s large oilcloth-covered table, talking Siamese cats, eating rose-leaf jam and salted almonds shunted to and fro on a miniature railway young Matthew had constructed for the occasion; my mother was in a good mood. It seemed possible again that life was tolerable.
We jogged along. For weeks on end my mother was quiet and aloof, Alessandro came and went, a peace was kept. I was writing again. A little and not easily. One winter afternoon I came back from a walk with Oriane, I had found her edgy, seething with discontent. She couldn’t stand the silly buses, the dull life at Sanary any more, nor Philippe’s stance that it did not matter what kind of work one was doing as long as one did one’s best. (One’s best! When money was going down the drain, drivers’ wives were being treated in private clinics for ridiculous complaints at the Company’s expense, and a rival line had started a service from Bandol!) She was going to Paris to see theatres and some civilised people, or she might well go to Switzerland and take a rest-cure in a sanatorium, where they were able to do wonders for one’s nerves. ‘Comment, idiote, tu ne savais pas que je souffre des nerfs?’ I managed to soothe her, said that I would find Paris better for my nerves than Lausan
ne, and went home. In the hall I was met by a faint smell of ether. Quicker than thought, my limbs began to shake, arms and legs doing an independent little dance. It was an odd experience; only after seconds, did my mind make the connection – this is what she cleans the needles of her syringe with. It had begun again.
When I first attacked her, she denied it. Ridiculous suspicions; we were degrading her with our surveillance. When it became more obvious – there were other signs besides the smell of ether, once we were alerted – she made the admission with a kind of triumph: what fools we had been.
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘None of your business any more.’
And so it turned out to be. One thing, both Alessandro and I made clear, we would have no hand in it this time. No assistance with the spirit-lamp, the whole witch’s set-up, no touting in pharmacies. My mother said she did not need or want our help.
‘You can do nothing to prevent me,’ she said lucidly, ‘short of extremes you would not envisage such as reporting me to the French authorities who might deport me or get me locked up – or very likely wash their hands of the whole thing. Equally it would be impracticable for you to deprive me entirely of money. You could keep me short of course, but we have credit …’
She was right. We had no weapons we could use.
Jigsaw Page 35
