Jigsaw

by Sybille Bedford

  In due course that screen went blank; the rural phase had reached its sudden end. My mother claimed me (her legal right; not exercised for long because of the complexities, one surmised, of her own life). Within days of that claim, travel arrangements were made and I was whisked into Italy. That was then, now I had to go on tending my book – there still were years to cover before my entry into that French fishing port – memories in another key had to be tapped to bring sense and movement into my chronological past. Overcoming reservations, refusing to face that these were bound to become more serious as the tale went on, I set to work on that next stage necessary for balance and cohesion. Italy. My mother. The one character I wished to keep minor and knew all along that it could not be done. I remembered her as intellectually rigorous. This I approved of and admired (and am for ever grateful for); I had also been aware of her lack of interest in children and took it for natural – which indeed it might be for more women than we are nowadays taught to believe. I am not sure how she came out in my version of our Italian encounter. I can hope that she would have done what she nearly always could: laugh at herself.

  After I was hustled out of Italy – Sicily to the Midlands, direct – I had to manage another kind of literary hurdle: the banality of my first experience of England and the English. Middle class and middle-class bohemia was my initial lot, so novel, so strange to me, so flatly familiar to a potential reader. Not that I think of them – readers, that is – as a rule, my precept being that a writer should not look beyond his page, his work. Hope of approval by a handful of elders and betters: yes; aiming at sales, fashion, success: no. However, I do not wish to bore. I was hampered by this likelihood when I began describing my early English past. Parlour maids, icy bedrooms, sodden vegetables, Australian Burgundy, pony traps, Boots’ lending library, the butcher calling, the crystal set … At the time of writing, not all of this had definitely vanished, and a butcher’s van could still occasionally be seen, whereas by now, our now, the turning of the century, so much of English social and domestic life of the 1920s has receded into an historical past. Not certain of this yet, I had decided to lighten my trite circumstances by introducing an alien element into the Anglo-Saxon scene, the Sisters’ Story – not from Moscow, from Berlin – a story I had often wanted to write: adult lives displayed to my barely adolescent self, their story true to a high degree, and originally conceived as a novella. As I got into it, I saw that it would fit well into this novel, a kind of counterweight, a link between the English and the French action of my jigsaw.

  Did I say French? I did. We’ve got there at last. I have arrived in France, we shall get to the core of the action. I began, meandered into topographical descriptions … It was at this juncture that I got seriously stuck.

  One day there came a nasty letter from my American publisher. (I had accepted – and used for living – an advance; how many years ago?) The letter gave me a jolt. It was not enough.

  The dilemma remained: blocking future progress. This was not an articulate decision; I did not discuss the impediment with anyone. I didn’t discuss it with myself I did not think ‘conscience’, ‘betrayal’, ‘bad taste’, I just had the feeling of being up to a wall like a horse refusing a jump while avoiding to give it even a glance.

  Now that I have – given it a glance, and more than that – the obstacle can be defined in simple terms: it could not be right for me to tell what caused my mother’s undoing; my mother could not be left out of the book; my mother could not be in the book if one left out the sequence of factors/events that had led to that undoing. (Caused as usual, as I see it, like most misfortunes by a concatenation and logic of character, circumstances and – a big item – chance.) La ronde, the circle. If one stayed caught in that circle, there could be no book.

  It resolved itself. Without any discernible push. Overnight, as it were, the writer had won over whatever we might call it: filial duty, decency … I wanted to write this book, in this way, and I did.

  I already owed my mother a very great deal, not in conventional ‘maternal’ terms, but for the articulate private education with which she imprinted on me her unshakeable rejection of war, nationalism, social injustice (the latter theoretically), her passion for literature and art, good literature, great art. Due to her I was able to clutch a book earlier than I might have reached for a doll. Such talent as I may possess must have been directly inherited from her, writer manqué herself. I shall always be grateful, although, sadly, I was not often able to love her; and now I owe her for Jigsaw as well. How would she have taken it? my exposure of the tragic – at times comical – misfortunes that overtook her? As I said, she was able to laugh at herself. How far could it hold, her belief that the written word carried its own absolution?

  Enough. Right or wrong, the book got done. Expeditiously. One fine bright cold January day, my (later) friend, then future English publisher, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, gave me luncheon – something he does with supreme elegance and lightness of touch. We were at his window table at Chez Hilaire. Well then, your novel? (Elaine Greene, my agent, had paved the way some time ago.)

  ‘I think I got beyond page 84 …’

  ‘I see …’

  He didn’t; but he couldn’t know. With Christopher one begins, at lunch time, with a Bloody Mary or with Krug. One drinks (and eats) well and wisely. One is at ease, elated, and one is still so when one leaves: ready to take on the day. Never a ruined afternoon. We parted on the pavement of the Old Brompton Road, we shook hands, then we embraced, an accolade à la française. I had just said, ‘You’ll have your novel by the beginning of June.’ He did.

  Aftermaths. Within weeks of eventual publication, a very unexpected light was cast on a prominent player in the sub-plot, the Sisters’ Story. He was a judge, a real live High Court Judge, well-known in his time as brilliant, eloquent, somewhat controversial: great fodder for the Press. What was heard off the bench on a morning could often be read in the evening papers. In fact, the Press knew nothing, but nothing, about his private life. Today it would have bloated the headlines. A few people must have known something; each would have come across one or another fragment of the truth. I, by the oddness of his circumstances, got to know a part of what seemed the core of it, the ‘Judge’s Story’, such as I told it in the present novel. There, I strictly stuck to what I knew at first hand; which was little enough, if enormous in terms of the Judge’s position and career. These I saw as safe – he had died in the early 1930s, and indeed for the next fifty years nothing of my end of the story appeared to have surfaced. Not so after Jigsaw. A friend, a very sharp-minded QC, confronted me with a straight inquiry. I was summoned – dinner at the Reform – cross-examined: the judge in the novel must have been, could not have been other than, unadulterated Judge X. He, my QC friend, put a few data together; I conceded. He was right. (And not going to proclaim it from the roof tops. One may feel smug enough knowing something others don’t.) We sat on, speculating on the wonders of the cover-up. However, this was far from being that was that. Within days I was approached by a young woman who baldly declared herself, name and all, to be our judge’s great-niece, professing affectionate memories of her uncle and no knowledge whatsoever of my facts about his life. She proposed to come and see me. We settled for a day and time. She would bring a surprise, she said, a big surprise. I would be unprepared – she would not prepare me.

  When the bell rang, there were two strangers on the doorstep, a young woman and a man, a pleasant, quiet man, he turned out to be, a retired civil servant, of nearer seventy, one guessed, than sixty. She introduced him as the Judge’s natural son. And here we had the pivot of another hidden story – one judge, two stories, parallel much of the time, two halves each ignorant of the other. No whiff of the son’s existence ever reached the sisters, none of theirs ever reached the son. Now he had read Jigsaw and I, the sisters’ surviving witness, soon read the typescript of the son’s autobiography which tells, and tells it well, his half of the tale of what must ha
ve been quite a feat of double deception by an attractive and well-liked public man.

  I got to like the son – he shares his father’s first name (which will not be found in the book) – I talked to his wife. Sadly, he died early. I still hope that his autobiography, which contains a good deal more than his parents’ story, will be published. All of this has left me with a puzzled sense about the relativity of given truth.

  Books are apt to engender correspondence. I do not mean mere letters and their polite acknowledgement, but a good continuing exchange about some minor matter (and the more absurd the subject the better). The prize that time went to an elderly English gentleman established in France who wrote to me accusingly that the tramway line serving Sanary–Ollioules–La Seyne which I had mentioned (very briefly) had never existed. I wrote back to say that although the line had been defunct at the period described, I had seen, admittedly, no tram, but the actual tracks. He wrote back citing his authority; a vast tome entitled L’Annuaire des Tramways de France depuis 1898. I replied that I had actually stumbled, nearly turned an ankle, on one of those tracks, unmistakably trams’. He wrote back; I replied; it went on: never acrimonious, just obstinate and sure of our facts – Les Tramways de France v. my own feet … Who says that writing even an unaccommodating novel does not yield its pleasures.

  SYBILLE BEDFORD, 1999

  About the Author

  Sybille Bedford was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, in 1911, and was privately educated in Italy, England and France. She published her first book, The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey, in 1953. By the time it was reissued, seven years later, as A Visit to Don Otavio, it had won a reputation as a classic of travel writing. A Legacy appeared in 1956, and three other novels have followed: A Favourite of the Gods (1963), A Compass Error (1968) and Jigsaw (1989), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

  The Best We Can Do (1958), an account of the murder trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams, was the first of Sybille’s writings on the law at work. She reported on some of the most important criminal trials of her times, including those of Jack Ruby and the former staff at Auschwitz. The Faces of Justice (1961) collected her observations on the courts in England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. As It Was (1990) brought together further essays on justice as well as her celebrated writings on food, wine and European travel. In 1973 Sybille published a two-volume, authorised life of her friend and mentor Aldous Huxley. Stephen Spender called the book ‘one of the masterpieces of biography’.

  For the last twenty-five years of her life, until her death in 2006, Sybille lived in London, where she was a vice president of English PEN. In 1981 she was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1994 was elected a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Dogged by difficulties with her sight, she nevertheless continued to write and in June 2005, less than a year before she died, Sybille published a memoir, Quicksands. Bruce Chatwin saw her as ‘one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose’.

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  Copyright

  First published by Hamish Hamilton in 1989

  First published by Eland Publishing Limited

  61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL in 2005

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Sybille Bedford 1989

  Afterword © Sybille Bedford 1999

  The right of Sybille Bedford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–906011–74–1

  Cover Image by Luciana Arrighi