‘Was it?’ I said.
‘Yes, it must have been the same pram. Can you see now how strange it is to have you? The things you remember, the things you know … And there I was, having no idea. Do I know you? Do you think you know me?’
‘You are not easy to know, mummy.’
‘Why did you never speak to me about the other child?’
‘As you never did – when you talked of so much else – I felt it wasn’t up to me, anyway I’d half forgotten. It was only a fact I picked up as a child, and looked on as a child.’
‘And today? Does it look different?’
‘Perhaps.’
8
The donkey-man came to the house with a message. I was to go to La Pacifique at once, there a person-to-person call from London was waiting for me, from – he held out a scrap of paper – Mister Nairn. I went with misgivings. Jamie was not the man to make international trunk calls lightly.
Philippe was there, he told the operator that I was available now, and after some waiting I was through. I heard Jamie say, ‘The Judge … He shot himself … he is dead, he was found by Rosie yesterday afternoon.’
Before I could ask anything rash, he went on, ‘Nobody knows why … It’s all over the papers. It appears he’s had one or two difficult cases lately.’
My mother said, ‘You must go to her.’ I borrowed the travel money from Maria. This time I had to ask. I told her something frightful had happened to a great friend. ‘I shan’t be of any use.’ ‘You will have tried,’ she said. I took the train the same evening.
I saw Jamie first. He told me the bare facts. Rosie had gone to the flat in St James’s and had found the Judge in his sitting-room in a chair, shotgun by his side. She left – unseen – and telephoned the police from a public box. She said she was a typist who had come by appointment to deliver some papers. She did not give her name; she said she did not wish for the publicity that might ensue, and the police accepted this. The press (miraculously?) were making no great play of The Unknown Woman who found him. They were casting about for a reason for the Judge’s death – and so, Jamie said, must be Rosie – the consensus seemed to be over-work combined with the public controversy over his conduct of some recent cases. A verdict of suicide while of unsound mind was foreseen, the papers already losing interest in the case.
‘With luck nobody will find out about her having known him.’
‘How … is Rosie?’ I asked at last.
‘Quiet,’ Jamie said. ‘Practical.’ I thought that a curious expression.
I found the sisters frozen, Toni visibly the most: white, shocked, gauchely addressing Rosie like an invalid, repressing God knows what. Rosie looked much like herself, except for a certain rigidity of movement; she spoke little. Of what had happened not a word was said. They were no Latins – no physical expression of sympathy seemed allowable, no embrace, no taking of hands; likewise they were remote from their own warmer tradition, the Jewish sharing of grief, the sitting close and lamenting. All was dryness; chill.
Toni produced a tea. Rosie ate normally.
Some time later she suggested a walk with me on the Heath. As soon as the dog was off the leash, she talked. Everything she said was measured, spoken in a level, slow voice. She had had a wonderful life, perfect years. They were over.
‘There will be nothing more for me. I shall not go Jack’s way, I cannot do it to Toni. Think how scandalised she would be.’
I was glad to find in that last remark a hint of her old self. Perhaps whatever life does to people, there is left a spark of individuality that will out like an edge of handkerchief from a pocket.
‘Besides suicide’ – she was able to say the word – ‘may not be in my temperament. In Jack’s position I should have chosen otherwise. But then for him his reputation was his mainstay. As he was mine.’ She straightened herself like a soldier, a very tired soldier after a very long march, like a soldier all the same. ‘Isn’t it splendid that it looks as though nothing will come out about debts or bankruptcy. It would seem that his people have paid up – as they would not when he was alive. The truth will never become public.’ Her voice grew stronger. ‘As Jack couldn’t face the music, his survivors are making sure that nobody knows that there was music to face. He would have wanted that most. That’s one thing I, too, can still do for him: nobody will hear the true story from me.’
I acknowledged how well she had kept it from her sister and Jamie, and I assured her of my own silence. (Which I kept. Well, for some fifty years.)
Would she like a change for a time? Travel? Could she bear coming back with me (I wondering what our house had to offer)? I supposed not Sanary now?
Not Sanary now.
Would she continue living with Toni?
Inevitably. Unless Toni ran off with some singer one day. Highly improbable.
How could one help her through the next few weeks? That was easy. ‘I need a job. At once. Unless I start living off Toni.’ In fact she’d already got a job; she was stepping into the one Jamie had found for Toni, an excellent job with a gallery. Toni was retreating quite gracefully.
‘Waiting for another one to turn up?’
‘Which Jamie is trying to find for her. Jamie has been very good.’
‘And he doesn’t even know why you really need a job.’
‘Jamie doesn’t ask questions.’
‘What can I do for you?’
Nothing. It had been good of me to come. Jack would have appreciated it. ‘He approved of you as a friend for me. The one friend he’s ever met.’
One thing, yes: would I get her some books. She was taking sleeping pills – of course – all the same she got through a book a night. When I eagerly complied and made suggestions, she said, ‘Oh, no real books. I couldn’t look at those. Detective stories only, lots of them.’
I thought of guns – and worse – found in country-house studies and libraries: could she want to be faced with such? It must be true then what people said, that death in detective stories was quite unreal.
As Rosie had made clear, there was nothing I could do; so after just under forty-eight hours in London I was on my way back to France.
* * *
Entering Les Cyprès suitcase in hand, I found Waldemar sitting on the terrace reading a newspaper. I sought out Alessandro, ‘What on earth?’
‘He came back to pay us a visit. He wanted to say thank you for last summer. It seems he’s passed his exams and is in some kind of job now. He brought his bound thesis as a present for your mother.’
‘What are you doing with him?’ I asked her presently.
‘We’ve got a bed, haven’t we? He’s in Emilia’s old room. A decent young man, though goodness how serious; and so prim and proper in spite of beavering away for the Revolution.’
I would not have wanted to go out that night; as it was, family dinner with Waldemar was in order. Alessandro cooked it. It was quite a pleasant evening; the main topic was politics with my mother teasing and at times bewildering the young German. (Of London, I would talk to my mother by and by; it could wait.) She retired, and we all went to bed early.
I was woken in the night by great noise in the house: I heard my mother’s voice. I opened my door, there was a light on in the passage and I could see her standing in the entrance of Emilia’s small room. She was in a nightgown and she was raving. Waldemar, I presumed, was in bed. ‘I want you to realise,’ she shouted, ‘that you are sleeping under the roof of an adulterer … An adulterer …’
Now Alessandro appeared, the shouting increased; I slunk away. Used though I was to these nocturnal uproars, they pierced the marrow. I went back to bed, put some plugs I sometimes used for diving in my ears, pulled a sheet over my head. After a time the sounds subsided. I fell back into sleep.
I woke again when Alessandro stood in the door. He was fully dressed holding Chumi on a lead; on his head was the little white cap with a peak, such as golfers sport, that he wore on motor journeys. He signed me to be quiet; I took t
he plugs out of my ears, got up and followed him out of the house. We stood facing each other by the balustrade above the cypress terrace. It was just beginning to get light. He said, ‘I cannot go on any longer. I must go.’
I was struck by lucid certitude. I looked at him with sudden immense affection. ‘Yes – go.’ ‘Look after her. Be kind to her.’
…
‘Philippe and Oriane, Aldous and Maria, and Renée will help you.’
…
‘I shall send money, as soon as I can. Regularly.’
‘And what will you do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh Alessandro.’ Then, irrelevance. ‘Waldemar? What are we supposed to do with him?’
‘He’s already in the car; he’s taken my bags. We’ll go in Doris’s Chrysler – it’s got to be brought back – I’m leaving the Ford here.’
‘So you’ll be going to Berlin.’
‘Not for long. Paul may find me a job – he’s building somewhere in Germany. He can use a decorator. An amateur decorator.’
‘You wanted to be a real architect, didn’t you?’
‘A real architect. A little late now.’
I recalled another time when I had stood with him when he was ready to leave at Sorrento and I, seeking reassurance for her, had asked, ‘You will come back?’ I did not ask this now. I was filled by a surge of love, impersonal love, as though he and I had become a link in the chain of the brotherhood of man. I put my arms round him, elated with his need for release; absolution. Such absolution as one human creature can give to another. We stood together for some moments. I had never felt so close to anyone.
The words came out, ‘Go in peace.’
When he had left, I stood for a time by the balustrade. It was the break of another relentlessly beautiful morning in the Midi. There were steps. Alessandro had come back, he was carrying his Remington portable. ‘You had better have that. Use it.’ He was gone again.
I went into my room. The house was silent. I was about to shoot the bolt inside my door then realised that I could no longer allow myself to do this. I put the typewriter by the table I used for a desk, symmetrically, and went back to bed. It must have been about five o’clock. With luck I could count on a few hours’ sleep.
Afterword
Jigsaw is my fourth novel and, I very much fear, my last. I finished it over ten years ago – a long time that went quickly, in idleness, in pleasures, in much private grief. The decade before, a good chunk of it, went into gathering the strength of mind to shape, reshape and finally write this novel with two sub-titles and an author’s note trying to elucidate Who is Who, Who is Half-Who and Who is Not.
That note must be a clue as to why I went through so many hesitations, detours and delays before getting something down on paper that felt right. At the time this baffled and dismayed me: it was unexpected. I was no longer the innocent with the passionate aspirations to the literary life who, a quarter of a century before, had thrown herself with such a compound of conviction and self-doubt into her first (published) novel. I was a writer – a professional. I had just come out – we are in the mid-seventies – of a long discipline of servitude to factual truth (as far as that can be nailed down) – ‘a biographer is an artist under oath’ – six years of single-minded hard work on a biography of Aldous Huxley, and was looking forward to regaining my inventive liberty. As friends and editors were beginning to ask, ‘And what are you going to do now?’ ‘What are you going to write next?’ I would trundle out something to the effect that I was planning to return to the freedom of fiction. Well, fiction? Alone, at my desk, on my walks – now mainly in London streets or the back country of a more and more built-up South of France – I began to see pitfalls. What I had in mind – or wherever such directives originate – was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth: in fact the Unsentimental Education of my main sub-title. It had to be a novel in which the events had actually happened and happened largely as described; to invent, such was my instinct, would have been pointless: it mattered that these things had occurred. Truth here was an artistic, not a moral, requirement – truth to be presented in the terms of the novelist, not the biographer, terms that meant timing, selection, avoiding repetition … It involved using myself as a character in the centre of the narrative; in plain words, writing about myself, my feelings, my actions. There I felt resistance and avoided recognising its cause, deluding myself that it could be … what? Left out? Circumnavigated perhaps. (Did one have to have a parent?)
For the moment I put it all aside. London held many attractions, distractions, now that I was beginning to live there practically for the first time as an adult. I became active in PEN, joined committees, canvassed in elections, was asked to act as assistant consultant on an encyclopaedic volume on wine. I jumped into that: it required more acquisition of knowledge than fine-tuned writing; it devoured a full six months. Above all there were friends; friends in walking or short driving distance, old friends, very new friends, a few brothers in wine as I called them, droves of writers everywhere: dinners, dinner parties, cooking for dinner parties … An existence unlike any of my previous ones – unlike the euphoric years in Rome, the years rusticating in southern France: steady work, companionship, the sea, dawn markets of fruit and fish, rough gardening with scant water on hard ground. Unlike, also, the intervals of travel journalism that fed my desire to see and to learn and helped to finance my slow books; unlike the often months-long reporting of controversial or political trials in courts of law here and there from the Old Bailey to Frankfurt, to Paris, to Texas. Then all this had come to an end with the absences in pursuit of Huxleyana, live witnesses rather than papers, since most of these had been destroyed in a Hollywood hill fire. The base was still France, writing in my austere, whitewashed room, though I had to be away for stretches of time: in provincial England, in Italy, Paris, Holland, a year almost in America, coast to coast. And now urban England, a deliberate move, deciding on another kind of life; a very great wrench. I never stopped missing France. (France, one of the three countries I can feel almost belonging to – England: attachment to language and some institutions; Italy: romantic first love, visual, sensual; France: for everything else.) The new life now, London, if beset with real anxieties – how to acquire a place to live – was an interesting life of (guilty) leisure. As the right structure for my novel continued to elude me, they increased: the leisure and the guilt. Where was the proud professional? The writer who doesn’t get down to the next book – I had faced this before – is once more nothing. (Do I sound like Cyril Connolly carrying on? Well, I know how he felt. At least I did not lie in bed crying ‘poor Sybille’.)
The one thing I was in happy certainty about was my locale, my playground. A place I knew – none better – a fishing port on the French Mediterranean. Sanary. Sanary-sur-Mer. I had loved it. I still do. As it was then: small, unfashionable, modest – a French village, a back country of classical landscapes: hills, olives, vines. I had described it, briefly and under due constraint, in the part of the Huxley biography called ‘The Apparent Stability’ – Aldous and his incomparable wife, Maria, had lived, been at home there, for a good number of years. For them, as for myself, Sanary, their Sanary house (Villa Uley) had remained a point de repère, a compass point, throughout their lives. It was there that I spent a part of my adolescence and the best of my youth; there that I met the diversity of men and women who became mentors, examples, seducers, friends – loved friends, life-long friends … (Few of them at the time of my attempting this novel, alive.) Their origins were as varied as their codes of behaviour; most had come by choice, instinctive or rational. They were able to work and play in this place of benevolent climate and natural beauty remote from the centres of government and commerce, and dictate their private stories. That was in the brief span of time between recovery and new fear, the middle years between two wars. We are in the 1920s with the wish, the illusion that history can have a s
top, moving into the thirties with our heads still in the sand.
So I had the time, the place, the people. Where was I? How plausibly could I insert myself, full-fledged, into a somewhat complex milieu in meridional France at the age of about sixteen? Who was I, where had I come from? I needed provenance, an identity. Which must mean trotting out my short and recent past. I had little desire to go into what passes as my childhood. I had never been much interested in myself as a child per se, moreover I had already used tales that had come my way in a previous novel in which I had also tried to construct and interpret my own father’s nature and life to the best not of my knowledge but of my imagination perhaps, plus guesswork. He had died when I was so very young; was there anything more to learn? Could I or should I invoke him again? (I often dream about him – sad, puzzled, remorseful dreams, where he is a lonely, hurt, forgiving man whose existence I, long grown-up myself, have ignored throughout the years, as callous as the unfeeling child I had been.) Then, quite suddenly, wide awake, I realised that I had thought and written only about what he may have been as a boy, as a young man, both scarred and spoiled, as the man in his marriages, in his role of a prisoner, the kept son-in-law, of the innocent tied to public scandal; what I had not done was recall our life, the actual, utterly isolated life of his last years that he and I led together in rather eccentric circumstances of ungenteel poverty in quite grand surroundings in the depth of the county. I was about seven when it began, he must have turned sixty, I believe (children did not ask their parents’ age in those days), still very handsome, still well turned out – those pre-1914 suits and shirts last for ever – and as I have said; isolated, cut off, alone. He saw no friends, no women. The house, in those parts called a château (twenty bedrooms, a considerable collection of Renaissance furniture and objets d’art, one bath), contained three inhabitants: a stranded man of the world; a bewildered, later acquiescent, somewhat know-all child; an elderly, good-hearted, deeply religious, hard-working village woman. The reason for all this was simple – no money. That had gone, radically so, when my mother left. It was her money and she had bought the château for her husband, my father, and let him keep it. That was a generous deed. It created a somewhat paradoxical situation – candles instead of electricity bills, masculine cast-offs (children’s clothes do not last), claret in the cellar and at table but no cash for butcher’s meat. (Hence decades into my adult life I would choose sirloin steak rather than Elizabeth David’s gratin of courgettes.) The complete true tableau of my almost prehistoric origins appeared to me quite suddenly one evening in a public place, at dinner, with friends, noise, conversation, flooding over me, wine making thought glide on … ‘This could be told, this is how one could make a book begin; “Antecedent: Germany”.’ Next morning I did begin. The substance was flowing as though it was already on film; as ever, alas, I had to look after the words.
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