‘I spent the first week after the abortion in Melbourne with the friend of my mother’s who’d collected the money for her. She was an Italian woman whose daughter, of my age, had just died from heart disease. I was given this girl’s clothes.
‘My mother decided to go back home and collect Leslie so the three of us could live in Melbourne, away from my father. But my father was waiting for her and beat her for taking all his money. She tried to sneak away with Leslie on the early morning train, but he came after her. There was a scene at the station. People who saw it couldn’t say whether my mother threw herself in front of the train or fell into its path while struggling to get Leslie away from my father. The train driver had put his brakes on, but my mother was hit and it was fatal. The only thing the coroner was finally sure of was that my father hadn’t pushed her.’ Here she laughed bitterly. ‘In my view, even if she did commit suicide, he pushed her.
‘While the coronial enquiry was going on I stayed in Melbourne with my mother’s Italian friend, but I was afraid of my father coming and also of becoming this woman’s substitute daughter, so I tried to find somewhere I’d feel safe. That was how I came across Rose.
‘I know you disapprove deeply of my behaviour towards Rose, but I might have met anyone in the position I was in. Many untold futures lay ahead of me. I met Rose; Rose was important, but she wasn’t cardinal. Soon after I met Rose, I met two other people – through Rose, it is true, but there were many other ways I might have met them.
‘The first was your Uncle Nicola, and while I couldn’t speak his language, I could appreciate for the first time in my life that there were men of culture and grace in the world. Reasonable men who were also men of soul. He fascinated me. I loved him in a reverential kind of way. I used to ache for him to put a hand on me and bless me with dignity like his.
‘I felt I had to learn to talk to him, and so I did. We conducted our conversations in French and for the French, it is true, I have Rose to thank. But I also have Rose to thank for something else.
‘My ticket to freedom was not Rose, but Laurent’s uncle, Julius Lichtblau. Rose set it up. “Why not?” she said to me, “He’s so rich!” Well, he was rich, very, at a time when ordinary people were being reduced to working in sweatshops, or not working at all. My own mother had been reduced to beggary for a while.
‘I was a whore, if you like, Isobel. Fucking for money at fifteen years and eleven months of age – and I knew I was a whore. Rose seemed to think it was something in the general run of life. French men had mistresses – Julius was French by birth, he knew how to be careful, I was young and pretty and needed the money.’
‘She told me you were his secretary.’
‘Yes, she would.’
‘Rose might not know that was the case.’
‘Then again, Isobel, she might. As far as I was concerned I just prayed it would stay a secret. If it did not, I would deny it. I was going to get out of there, after all, and, furthermore, I was going to rescue my little brother. I was going to help him become what your Uncle Nicola was. You see, Leslie was talented, very, but he had no way of expressing himself. Freedom isn’t a birthright, it’s a social invention.
‘I kept my life in separate compartments. Julius and his surgery during the day and three evenings a week; your Uncle Nicola on Sunday afternoons and evenings. Before going to see your uncle I would take a bath and then a shower, as if I could wash myself clean of my rottenness. I would try to send Nicola mental messages that what I needed was his hand on my shoulder or on my head, or the nape of my neck, to cleanse me. I felt riddled with filth.
‘I would tell him about my little brother and how beautifully he could draw and he would tell me about Henry in Paris. My dream was to get to Paris and find a way of getting Leslie there, too. In Paris we’d be safe. Our father wouldn’t find us there and Leslie would be in a milieu that would favour him. He needn’t grow up into a life of relentless poverty. But, of course, I had a problem: I was too young to be eligible for a passport, and Leslie was not only too young, he was way too young. I had to ask Julius for help.
‘At first he was terribly reluctant. He didn’t want to lose his screw, and then he was supposed, by the Hirschs anyway, to be in love with me. That was my introduction to blackmail. Julius wasn’t very careful. He gave me presents. He even bought them for me in shops, when I was with him. I started to say I’d tell Orpah about his goings-on if he wouldn’t help me to get to Paris. So he helped me. He won custody of me in a court case against my father. My father didn’t appear; it’s quite possible he knew nothing about it. All Julius was obliged to do was put a notice in the paper. It was enough for the Italian woman to testify. It wasn’t quite what I wanted, but I was learning: it got me to Paris. I planned to send for or come back for Leslie when I’d fixed something up.’
Her head was bowed in what seemed like remembered pain. For the first time in my life I felt something for her and wanted to know more. I wanted to hear about Paris. I wondered if it could possibly have been Viva about whom Dadda was talking that day long ago in the Pantechnicon, the day of the double-spouted teapot and the cellophane butterfly, when he said he had been in love in Paris when he was my age. When I was nineteen and he was fifty.
Surreptitiously I’d been seeking the identity of this person, piecing together the Paris of the time, comparing my speculations with fact, thinking that if I should discover who it was, my father might be redeemed, or at least reprieved from callousness. I didn’t understand how he could have left us the way he did and still be judged a good man.
TWENTY-NINE
Paris
ONE THING I will say of Viva is that she knew herself. She was very well aware of the frailty of her emotions. I have thought over our conversation for a long time, and I can see that there was more depth to her than the words of the story told that day at the beach house would have implied.
When Viva arrived in Paris in November 1934, the sixth French government in four years had just fallen. Standing on the steps of his residence in Avenue Foch was Gaston Doumergue, ex-president and ex-member of the Cartel des Gauches, attired not in presidential nor ex-presidential garb, nor indeed in any manner of dress which would have identified him as the left-wing Liberal he had always claimed to be, but in the beret basque of the Croix de Feu, whose ranks were parading past him. The fingernails of his right hand grazed his forehead in a gesture of salute. History might have pulled his arm out straight, with palm extended, catching up with the new fashion in Germany, but History was too busy to worry about the details.
A wave of happiness swept over Viva, not because of the duplicity of Gaston Doumergue, whose name she did not even know, but because Paris was Paris, undeniable even in winter, both lived in and pampered, spat upon and reviled. Here was the Paris of comfort and the Paris of pain, Balzac’s city where people plotted and played each other false, where love sent unlikely couples scurrying to trysts, where fates were sealed and feelings were trifled with, where there were intractable confrontations and, most of all, where there was art.
Viva was in love with Paris before she reached it. Her visions came from talking to Grace Lonsdale and borrowing books from her and her francophile friends. Viva had studied the Indicateur des rues with such close scrutiny that Baron Haussmann’s city grid lay in her mind like a cradle from which she would one day rise up, civilised and sophisticated. She had already worked out how to get from where the Katzes lived in Boulevard Raspail, Montparnasse, to St Germain des Prés, Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Opera, the Madeleine and the Arc de Triomphe, all of which had figured one way or another in the books she’d read.
She had arrived at the place Rose had left on her journey to Milan twelve years before, and just as Paris had folded away for Rose into a two-dimensional city contained in an encyclopaedia with gold-tipped pages, so it opened out for Viva, an elaborate greeting card into which she could pass from dream to reality.
Though the Katzes had written telling her to let them kno
w when and where her train would be arriving, Viva had only forwarded the date to them, saying she would use the opportunity of her arrival to see if her French could get her from one side of the city to the other. She had practised her opening lines on the train journey, and was proud of herself when she arrived at mid-afternoon in Boulevard Raspail at one in particular of the ubiquitous six-storey stone buildings under grey Mansard roofs, the one housing the Katzes and Corettis.
Not only had she given the directions correctly, she’d also made a phone call to tell her hosts she’d arrived and was coming and, further, she’d managed a better than rudimentary conversation with the cab driver on the way.
It was Rose’s sister Simone who had taken her phone call and it was she who was waiting in the lobby of the apartment building when Viva arrived. Simone, though quite good-looking, was not as attractive as Rose. There was a heaviness about her, accentuated while she was helping Viva heft her luggage into the dark, tiny birdcage of a lift. Simone chatted the whole time, eyeing Viva up and down in smiling appraisal, as if to say ‘so this is what you look like’.
So old was the apartment building, and the parquet floor so walked upon, that it dipped in valleys from its height at the skirting boards to its trough underfoot. It was sepulchral on the landing. Thin light leaked up the light well and the stairs that spiralled around it. There was a double door to the apartment that lost some of its grandeur as Simone, rattling, sighing and twisting knobs, ran a gamut of locks to open it.
The apartment, when Simone had managed the door, was full of light, the shutters thrown open to reveal struggling greenery on the balconies and glimpses of the winter filigree of treetops in the Luxembourg Gardens beyond. Rivkah Katz, a short, rotund, spirited person, leant out the door of her kitchen. Then, crying, ‘Ooh la la!’ came pattering out, wiping her hands on her apron, to greet Viva affectionately and show her the room she was to share with Allegra.
It was in a suite of three traversing the end of the hall that divided the front of the apartment from the back. Bridging Allegra’s room at the back with Henri’s at the front was a small bathroom. The suite was almost self-contained, its three doors opening into a little rounded vestibule that could be closed off, although it never was. Henri slept in what had been a library and, before that, at the time of the Second Empire, probably a servants’ preparation room. It had front-facing windows, visible through the slightly open door.
Allegra was not there but the room, which looked west and thus into one of those shafts down which plumbing hurtles into the abyss between back windows, was quite large, large enough for two beds, two wardrobes, one writing desk and a great many boxes. These, Rivkah explained, contained papers Allegra was proofreading or translating, or letters that had come through the Antifascist Concentration to which she had to compose answers, letters asking for money or, far less frequently, offering it. The paperwork was relatively safe in the Katz household – whereas the Concentration was subjected to occasional raids, either by police at the behest of the Italian Embassy or by secret service people trying to sabotage the antifascist effort in various ways.
Between the sitting and dining rooms was a pair of grey marble fireplaces, back to back, above each of which were large, gilded mirrors, somewhat spotty with age and inclined to impart a champagne tint to whatever was reflected in them. They made the apartment look warmer than it felt, there being no fires in the grates due to a scarcity of fuel.
The sitting room was walled with books, among which Viva noted a section for contemporary works: Colette, whose works she’d read in English, and Gide and Valéry, whom she promised herself she’d read in French.
‘Do you have anything in Italian?’ she asked, thinking that if she could read French, what was to stop her learning to read Italian? She could probably find out more about Henri and Allegra if she could read Italian.
The Italian books were kept in Henri’s room, she was told. They were largely political and better kept out of sight of people who might be more curious than was a good thing. Rivkah thought to warn Viva that Grandfather Grafman was a case in point, not being a fellow traveller. With him, it was better to sit in the dining room out of sight of books in any language, so if he wanted to argue he could, without Grandfather Katz resorting to the printed word to catch him out.
Viva was delighted with the dining room, not that it was anything more than a space filled by a large table and chairs for ten people. There was a Jewish candlestick at one end of the otherwise empty tabletop, and at the other side of the table from the fireplace was a substantial, mirrored sideboard. What charmed Viva were the drawings and paintings on the walls. They were the work of Henri, beautiful, inventive, light, bright work that someone had taken the care to have mounted and hung.
As Viva marvelled and Rivkah crowed about Henri’s artistic adventurousness and growing finesse, the gamut of locks was run again at the front door, this time disclosing Claude, Rose’s little sister.
Viva had not prepared herself for Claude to be beautiful. Next to Rivkah and Simone she had felt herself to be elegant, graceful and accomplished; all the work she had put into herself was borne out. Rivkah and Simone, though friendly, were none of these things. Claude, on the contrary, shone like a bright dark stone. She was tiny and beautifully made, a happy, smiling girl on the brink of womanhood. More exquisite than Rose and easy in her manner, Claude gave Viva the feeling of having been beaten at something. Perhaps at life. For Claude was blessed. Viva had recognised it straight away and had betrayed herself to the others, momentarily aghast. She would need to learn how to handle Claude.
Thus confronted, she had to admit to herself that she’d been planning to sweep Henri Coretti off his feet. It made her realise in her heart of hearts that Henri had played the leading role in her imagined Paris, that everything she’d accomplished, she’d accomplished to show him whose reputation had come to her so glowingly from Uncle Nicola.
How easily her subconscious plans unmasked themselves and could make her, if she let them, the object of her own derision.
She would meet Henri that evening although it would be another day and a half before she met Allegra, who had gone to Brussels on some work for the Paris Concentration. Lev and Henri turned up after dark, Lev to eat and Henri to bolt down food before going to his painting class. He greeted Viva quite warmly, but was obviously anxious to get moving, his thumbs fidgeting wildly and making their growling sound. What was it to him where she’d come from, what languages she spoke and how many social barriers she’d crossed just to be here? He was at ease with his life as it was. Her appearance on the scene hadn’t pulled him up short. She knew herself to be in love with him without knowing who he was. She thought, somewhat enviously, that perhaps he was still ignorant in love. No doubt Simone and Claude were too, though they were probably not, as he was, sophisticated in their understanding of the world in which they moved. His knowledge of politics was particularly noticeable in his exchanges with Lev across the table. They spoke of things French, in particular of Doumergue’s seeming treachery; they spoke of things Italian, in particular of the new inane regulation that Italian schoolteachers had to teach in fascist uniforms. Though Viva was only a couple of months younger than Henri, she felt outclassed and, though she could get the gist of the conversations, it was a strain to keep up with the aural ambush of French.
Uncle Nicola had told her of Henri’s work with the Concentration. Since the death of Filippo Turati and Carlo Rosselli’s arrival in Paris, Dadda had become very useful, particularly as he was becoming an expert at forging documents which helped to get some of the refugees out of France and into countries where there was some future for them. Even if he had been ugly it would have made no difference to Viva’s feelings, but he was beautiful, and not just beautiful but charming, amusing, passionate and optimistic as well. Instead of his seeming like a human being in the thick of life and practically unaware of her existence, he appeared to Viva as an almost impossible challenge.
His days and nights, she discovered, were very full. By day, he was all over Paris collecting information, distributing money, taking material to and from printing presses, and so forth. By night, in addition to studying art he also proofread manuscripts and, she was to learn, served as one of the Paris contacts for those involved in smuggling propaganda into and out of Italy.
When Viva’s dream faltered in the face of Claude’s undeniable beauty and Henri’s daunting elan, she felt the smallness of her life attempting to fold her into it as if into a walnut shell. But she resisted, and two days later was in bliss once again, for Allegra had returned from Brussels, and Allegra lived up to all that had been said of her.
It was Allegra from whom Henri acquired his fair-haired, clear blue-green-eyed looks. By way of personality, Viva hadn’t known quite what to expect. She knew Allegra had been an opera singer, but that conjured up loudness and considerable poundage, whereas Allegra was slim and small, just as Viva had been told. Hers was a soprano voice, clear but not very strong. Before Henri was born she had been in demand for child parts. Afterwards Maestro Toscanini, not very pleased that she wanted to keep on working and be a mother at the same time, told her she was only good enough for the front rows of choruses. This Allegra told Viva without the slightest embarrassment, adding that on one occasion when he had lost his temper he made her stand at the back of the stage on a barrel, because when she was in the front row her smallness emphasised the rotundity of everyone else.
Mad Meg Page 43
