Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  It was out of season and there were few guests staying in the chalet. The owner had done them the honour of inviting them to take their evening meal at his table. He was alone, which meant there would be no opportunity to engage someone else in conversation, and Allegra was nearly caught out several times. During his English reminiscences she had to resort to statements such as ‘I much prefer Paris’, saying ‘All that smog!’ for the inevitable next question.

  Viva, though she’d never set foot in London, knew a lot more about it than Allegra did, and was able to tackle the ins and outs of the royal family to what seemed like the man’s satisfaction. To date, it was the one occasion when Viva had really counted, and she felt it. She was with Allegra now and not just beside her, thanks to a valued talent for dextrous, calculating talk, errors of expression aside. There was the resultant problem, nevertheless, of the man taking a fancy to her. When they came back unexpectedly to the chalet on the morning of the skis, he was there, red-faced and breathless, gesticulating at a coffee table in the morning room where he was wanting to treat them to coffee and almond pastries. It fell to Viva to get them out of it by saying she was feeling cold, and the only reason they were back was to go to their room for warmer clothes. With her useful cool, she thanked the man for his offer and said perhaps they might join him later.

  Allegra was grateful for Viva’s sangfroid, without which, she knew, her own preoccupation would have been more obvious. In their present situation the worst case would be if the contact in Chamonix had been roughed up or murdered by the so-called ‘Italian tourists’. If there were spies around, they could well be on the lookout for anybody trying to find the ski-shop owner. As Allegra saw it, she and Viva could take one of two courses of action. They could either stay and pretend to be bona fide holiday makers, come what may, or they could wait till the afternoon coach and get out as fast as they were able.

  Again it was Viva who provided the solution which would cover their tracks. They spent the rest of the morning on the beginners’ slope, Allegra teaching, and Viva learning. On her way downhill on one occasion, Viva saw someone fall and sprain an ankle, and it occurred to her that such an accident could serve as a pretext for getting them out of their situation. For a couple of hours she spent her time trying and failing to hurt her ankle and mystifying Allegra by her incapacity to carry out simple alterations to her technique which would keep her ankles intact. Time was running out when she launched herself at a big fat masculine learner and collided, managing not only to sprain an ankle but also to knock herself out. She had calculated very well: the large fat learner was hardly hurt at all.

  Viva had to be carried back to the chalet at about noon, when the hungrier guests were gathered in the foyer for lunch. The talk was of the search party, half of whom had returned, having found only one ski cap which might not have belonged to any of the lost group at all.

  Viva was taken to her room, where her ankle was bound by the chalet owner in person. He kept saying the injury wasn’t very serious, there was no need to go racing back to Paris on the afternoon coach, they could be his guests for a couple more days. Allegra was insistent, however. Since Viva was her niece and not her daughter, she must take her home, it was the only responsible course of action. What if a bone were broken? Allegra would be unable to face Viva’s mother for not getting expert attention as quickly as possible, and then there was the further inconvenience of having already instructed the porter to arrange transport to the coach and to book the tickets.

  Just as they were leaving, with Viva’s ankle lovingly wrapped in crêpe, the news of the ski-shop owner’s murder began to break. The rest of the search party had found his body in the snow, stabbed and shot through the head for good measure.

  Viva had been unsure how to take this death, not quite able to draw the correct conclusion about the murderers, but on the night of the altercation among the Katzes Allegra left it in no doubt. She was on edge because they hadn’t picked up the information drop at Chamonix, and she was still afraid of being traced.

  Furthermore, they could not now re-use the faked papers for fear of being identified as the two ‘Englishwomen’ present at Chamonix looking for the ski-shop owner on the day of his murder; and faked papers represented a lot of time and risk for the Concentration.

  ‘We ought to move, you, me and Henri,’ Allegra said. ‘We could put the Katzes in great danger by staying here.’

  Between them, Viva, Henri and Allegra had very little money. Staying at the Katzes had been cheap, comfortable living, so a move would be made with reluctance. Rivkah wouldn’t hear of them going. Emilio had been Lev’s best friend and besides, Lev was a known socialist, so the family was at no greater risk having the Corettis than they would have been not having them. If it was Dan Grafman Allegra was worried about, it had always been this way with him, and no doubt it always would be. He just liked to be annoying.

  But Allegra didn’t want to be responsible for harm coming to the Katzes, whose kindness and courage had already meant so much, and the problem exceeded the boundaries of family friendship. Antifascist French could get into trouble for harbouring Italian refugees. Rivkah must not forget that Mussolini had his first handout from pro-fascist French and the longer he was in power, the more support there would be for him in countries outside Italy. Some people – many people – came to confuse an entrenched state of affairs with a moral one.

  A couple of miles to the east of the Katzes there was a hotel full of newcomers and some of the poorest families of refugees. The Concentration was seeking help to relocate, clothe and feed them, a job better done where they lived than at the Concentration, which was already inundated with more requests than it could handle.

  The hotel was called the Icebox by one and all because it was in rue de la Glacière, the Street of the Icebox, and it lived up to its name in winter.

  When not preoccupied with the refugees, Viva and Allegra could carry on with their translating work at the relatively salubrious headquarters of Giustizia e libertà in rue du Val-de-Grâce, and Henri could carry on his work distributing propaganda.

  Because this move was bound to identify Viva and Allegra by their place of work, it was up to Viva now to decide whether to commit herself to the antifascist cause, when she could instead spend the rest of her time in Paris doing something less risky.

  Allegra didn’t consider it fair to expect Viva to take on the commitment without first knowing what else she might do to keep herself. Emilio’s name in the shoe trade meant Allegra knew certain boutique owners in Paris, particularly those who worked for Mario Fortuny, selling the wonderful pleated-silk Delphos dresses and the famous capes and tunics of printed velvet, imported from the Fortuny workshops in Venice. Just before leaving the Katzes Allegra took Viva to visit the Fortuny boutique, where they tried on some of the world’s most sought-after garments and had themselves made up by a woman who’d attended to the maquillage of both Lilian and Dorothy Gish. Viva remembered it as a happy day in her life, since it helped her realise the sort of beauty she possessed: a severe, classical, high-cheek-boned elegance, even at the young age of eighteen, an elegance to cultivate from that day on.

  The demand for glorious clothes was not high in 1935; Fortuny was struggling and couldn’t pay his models much money. Viva, however, had the right appearance for a model and could have taken a job, but she was swayed by the prospect of living in the same building as Henri at a healthy distance from Claude, and now she’d seen what she looked like when splendidly arrayed, she had something in her armoury.

  As the winter of 1935–6 came on, the rue de la Glacière plunged ever deeper into darkness and its denizens grew bronchial, not to say tubercular in a few cases. Indeed, there was a death from a lung haemorrhage in one of the basement rooms soon after Viva and the Corettis moved in. The undertakers couldn’t get the coffin down to the corpse so they had to get the corpse up to the coffin, the staircases being so precipitous, narrow and sharp-angled. It seemed almost that the hotel ha
d been built around its furniture rather than that anyone had been able to perform the miracle of provisioning the cramped rooms with bed, closet and dressing table.

  The living was just a step above squalid: crowded, cheap, evil-smelling, noisy and, every now and then, pestiferous. It was certainly a shock to the system after living with Rivkah and Lev. The noise went on all day long: tramping, rattling, shouting and non-stop talking.

  The cacophony in the Katz household had been of an altogether different intellectual order.

  To cater for the huge influx of Italians there were cafes and restaurants selling Italian food and wine. Locally, the refugees went to La Popote, down a dark alley, a large room with tables lined up in the middle, covered in floral oilcloths. The food was greasy, the service bad and the wine next to undrinkable. Viva, Henri and Allegra preferred to eat French and as their main eating spot chose La Rotonde, some distance away in Boulevard Montparnasse. There they shared a meal almost every evening, and a couple of times a week, Viva would go with Henri to the loft to talk art and see it in the making.

  Though Viva’s cheque from Julius Lichtblau came every month to the local post office where it could be cashed, all the other mail was delivered at the Katzes’. Allegra now wrote that it should come to La Rotonde instead. Uncle Nicola was not to worry: it was being done for safety’s sake.

  Uncle Nicola did worry, of course, and wrote back to say that as he was at long last an Australian citizen, he would sponsor them to come to Australia as soon as they could. They must not involve themselves in dangerous work; they must come as soon as their passages to Australia could be arranged. Perhaps they’d like to bring Viva with them. He had good news for Viva. Her brother had turned up, Rose was looking after him, and yes, he certainly was a talented young man. Rose and Laurent were doing everything they could to nurture an artistic consciousness in Australia. It was really very interesting, a great challenge.

  Uncle Nicola was excited about a speech he had given at the Congress for World Peace in Melbourne, and even though he’d given it in Italian, an Australian newspaper had reported his eloquence and commented that even his political enemies came to enjoy hearing him talk. He stood for something. Australia wasn’t quite sure what, but he had style.

  Soon Viva was writing regularly to Leslie, and receiving regular replies. He supposed their father was still mooching around the Upper Yarra, getting progressively more pickled. Leslie himself was happy to be with Rose, who took great care of him. By the way, Uncle Nicola gave the impression that the change of address in Paris meant the place was about to blow up. Leslie hoped it wasn’t so, and sent Viva a little gouache he’d done of St Kilda Beach for her to remember him by. Henri was most impressed and would pick it up and examine it as a matter of course almost every time he came into Viva’s room.

  Viva’s liberation from Julius Lichtblau now seemed a possibility, so she was able to cash his monthly cheques without a feeling of total revulsion. If she let herself reflect on him, however, she would want to cast off the parts of her body he had touched, and she would be driven from reflection towards a determination to have Henri at all costs. Now more appealing than getting Leslie to Paris was the prospect of getting Henri to Melbourne.

  The distributors of aid in the Icebox made a desk of Viva’s dressing table, a prized article of furniture which boasted a three-winged mirror. With the wings turned in certain directions it could be used both for rear vision, taking in the occupants of the inner staircase, and for street vision, policing the outdoor queue when one happened to form. In the event of an outdoor queue a buzzer for the concierge, herself an immigrant Italian, would be pushed and the fat old lady would waddle out, saying, ‘Shoo, shoo! No betting today!’ as if the overflow from the queue reaching up to Viva’s third-floor room consisted of inveterate gamblers rather than refugees in desperate situations. In this way the attention of the police, be they French or Italian, was avoided.

  On the third floor Henri had excelled himself in the concoction of identification papers and passports. Often the passports came from people who’d obtained them legally and had either died, disappeared or lost them. Blank passports were got in, one or two at a time, from England, France and Italy, and Henri had made his own range of rubber stamps and embossers to give these a legitimate appearance. He collected specimen signatures of customs and immigration officials from passports and dockets and reproduced them with an accuracy that made him the first choice of refugees coming for help at the Icebox.

  The Icebox also distributed money, which was kept in Henri’s room and removed in daily instalments. Some of the refugees would come again and again, barely able to cope with the day-to-day contingencies since they were not only unemployed but unemployable. Lice, impetigo and VD were common, so the Icebox was also in the business of handing out disinfectants, iodine and modicums of arsenic, the latter to deal with rats on the one hand and syphilis on the other.

  Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the Icebox was raided and they would have to safeguard the passports, the papers and the money. It was fortunate that the building was subject to dry rot, as a certain wainscot in Henri’s room which appeared sound on the surface was in fact hollow inside, allowing flat parcels to be concealed in it when the beading was lifted.

  Viva was in charge when the first raid occurred. Two members of the Italian secret police had joined the queue in an effort to catch her red-handed. It was one time in her life she had something to thank Mussolini for – his hatred of scalps covered in redundant outcrops of human hair. From the moment she saw these close-cropped men cross the street outside to join the queue, she knew what to do. All incriminating evidence was hidden behind the wainscoting and a fairly presentable but obviously sick young man was selected from the queue and made to go and lie down, shivering, on the bed in Allegra’s room. Viva put the dressing-table mirrors in an innocent position then, turning back requests for passports and papers, saying the Icebox didn’t do that kind of thing, she dealt out only medication.

  The two men arrived at the ‘desk’ together, asking for passports and papers. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘only medication. If you want passports, you’ll have to see the Italian embassy,’ and she handed them the embassy’s address, which Henri had had roneoed for exactly this purpose.

  Finding themselves not getting anywhere, the men brandished some identification papers that meant nothing to Viva and insisted they had information which led them to believe the Icebox was the source of false documents. Viva shrugged and allowed them to go over her room, in which nothing incriminating was stored. Then she opened the door to Henri’s room while looking nervously at Allegra’s door – an invitation to the men to open it instead. This they did, ignoring Henri’s room. They grew excited by the presence of the sick young man. Viva said, ‘He’s a very sick man, and can’t be moved. He’s very well known in the USA, and any attack on his person would cause the worst possible publicity for the regime.’ They had to believe her, but searched Allegra’s room nevertheless and, finding nothing, but very suspicious of the bed, they went away.

  Viva found that she could distance herself from her emotions so efficiently, she sometimes wondered whether she had any. Henri had only to show up, however, and she would instantly be back doing battle with both hope and jealousy. The Icebox offered virtually no privacy, and Viva would sometimes glimpse Claude coming to see Henri or going from his room, leaving little doubt as to what was happening. Claude was not a good dissembler; she tried to give the impression that she came to see Henri on sisterly errands, but no sister ever glowed so sleekly from brotherly love, nor threw such apologetic looks to her brother’s would-be lover on the stairs.

  Viva tried to reassure herself and exhort herself to patience. She drew comfort from the thought that Claude might not be too bright – it was rather hard to tell because people seldom asked cleverness of her. At every opportunity, during the occasional meals they took with the Katzes among the artists at the Dôme, Viva would try to
show Claude up, but knew at the same time she ran the danger of appearing sententious. She would feel sententiousness rising in her, and get rid of it with a laugh she’d borrowed from Allegra, which made the person laughing seem full of genuine delight. There being little quarter for delight in Viva’s life, however, she knew it was a pitiable situation to have to mimic it.

  When the Spanish Civil War began, Carlo Rosselli, furious with Léon Blum for not offering the Spanish socialists his support, formed a column of soldiers from among the refugees and took them to Madrid. The Italians in Paris had to try to struggle along without their leader. For Allegra, Viva and Henri it meant increasing responsibilities, and they found themselves working often as long as from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on endless tasks and difficulties, both grave and petty. They soon learnt how to plummet into sleep in those crucial pauses in the life of a great overcrowded city.

  In the spring of 1937, posing as apprentices to a French couturier, Viva and Henri did two courier runs into Italy, their propaganda wrapped up in cut-out dress patterns. Then they were sent with a consignment of newspapers to Bagnoles de l’Orne, a town in Normandy.

  They sat opposite each other next to the windows, Viva with her back to the engine, her hair in a new sort of chignon Allegra had shown her. She knew she looked striking, if not captivating, older than her twenty years. If she were to win Henri’s heart, it would have to be with her own best cards and not somebody else’s. They were to stay overnight in Bagnoles and, for once, she felt she had a strong hand.

  They were sharing the carriage with three youngish and rather dishevelled men who were wearing top coats, though the weather was warm and pleasant. Viva could smell the perspiration of one of them, which wafted past her face every time he leant forward, causing her to skip a breath in disgust. Henri, too, must have smelt something, because he started to wince at Viva sidelong. Shortly, he tossed his head, as if to say let’s go for a walk in the corridor. Out of sight of the men, they started laughing and blowing and shaking the smells out of their clothes.