Mad Meg

by Sally Morrison

  ‘Apparently, while we were on our way back to Paris, Nello and Carlo went for a drive to Alençon, a town down the road going to Couterne. They visited a patisserie there and had some coffee and cakes. The killers overtook them on their way back to Bagnoles.

  ‘They got some distance ahead and faked a breakdown, with the car blocking the road. They had their bonnet up, and when the Rossellis stopped and got out of their car, they shot them. Nello must have survived the shooting, because when the bodies were found, he also had stab wounds.

  ‘At first the police suspected Italian fascists, but bit by bit it became clear they were French. A hairdresser from Bagnoles had been riding her bike past the place where it happened and she saw a Peugeot take off at high speed, and blood on the road. The bodies weren’t far away, but they weren’t found until some man was caught short on the road and nipped in behind the Rossellis’ parked car to relieve himself.

  ‘The hairdresser knew the killer’s car, of course, and she started to receive threatening mail. That led the police to the Cagoulards. Apparently they’d done it in return for the delivery of a hundred semiautomatic Berettas from Italy on Mussolini’s say-so. They were going to stage a fascist-style coup d’état in France. It was fixed to take place in early November, but they couldn’t raise enough support from inside the army and someone dobbed them in. The leaders were arrested. Their trial dragged on until well after Henri and I had left France. By the time the war broke out they were in jail, but they were let out because they said they wanted to fight. More than one of them ended up in Vichy fighting for Hitler. There’s a certain brand of make-up I never buy because one of the Rossellis’ assassins escaped to Spain and was instrumental in setting up the firm. Some of the others found work through him after the liberation.

  ‘The first inkling Henri and I had that anything was wrong was when we arrived back at rue de la Glacière from Bagnoles and found it milling with gendarmes. The Icebox had been ripped apart and Allegra and the concierge had been badly hurt. We never knew if the two attacks were linked. Perhaps they weren’t at all, but someone else from Giustizia e libertà was roughed up at the same time and it was obvious someone wanted to silence us. It didn’t stop the next edition of Giustizia e libertà carrying a front-page denunciation of Mussolini, all the same.

  ‘Later that night – it was terribly hot, I remember, and the nurses in the hospital waiting room were ill-tempered and unsympathetic, they said we were terrorists and deserved what we got – the concierge died. Allegra had been beaten around the head and had contusions. She was drifting in and out of consciousness, but it seemed she would pull through. She managed to tell us to get out and go to Nicola in Australia as soon as we could.

  ‘Even though your grandmother was very ill,’ she said, her voice under strain, ‘all I could think of was I’d won. It sounds horrible, but the thought of Henri coming to Australia with me put every feeling I had for anyone else out of my mind. I was almost gay. Your grandmother was dangerously ill, and I was gay!

  ‘We went to live in a cheap hotel near the Katzes. I went through the motions of disgust and outrage. I even felt generous letting Henri say goodbye to Claude.

  ‘He wanted to marry her and bring her to Australia, but Lev Katz said no. When Henri got his Australian citizenship she could go out, but not before. It was so far away. Henri was twenty, but Claude was still only seventeen.

  ‘Only seventeen! I thought, only seventeen! – I’ve been only seventeen, I was only fifteen once. I was so jealous of Claude, so jealous! She had everything: beauty, protection, love. Then, when I went to see Allegra before leaving for Australia, she said, “Don’t lose your heart to Henri, Viva.” It put me in an agony, knowing I must keep to myself till he felt he’d said goodbye to Claude. If I really had won, the prize would be a while coming.

  ‘Well, we went to England, took ship and sailed. Your father was downcast for the whole journey. I had to pretend sympathy. However, after we’d arrived in Melbourne to a very warm welcome, I felt the tide had turned and I’d mastered something. Henri was smiling again. My only problem seemed to be Julius, but I told him I was in love with Henri and he could see I was: or perhaps Orpah had extracted a promise from him. Whatever, he let me go with no fuss.

  ‘We lived at Rose’s. It was really good for a time, and of course Henri became a great favourite with the Lonsdales and other people we knew in Australia, but still I hadn’t seduced him. Sometimes he would hold my hand or put his arm around me affectionately, but only because he thought I was showing sisterly concern.

  ‘He wrote to Claude for a long time, but he had to wait five years before he could become a citizen and by then, of course, we were in the middle of a war, and France had fallen.

  ‘One letter got through for Rose from Lev, when the invasion of France was imminent. He said the Germans would never bring the French to heel. The national climate in France was something they wouldn’t understand. The will to fight had evaporated since the First World War and the loss of two million Frenchmen, which, when you think of it, was a third of the male population between the ages of twenty and fifty.

  ‘Allegra had made quite a good recovery, despite having had her skull fractured, and was living back with them at their insistence. She was still working for what was left of the Concentration, but the Rossellis were an appalling loss and everything was in dreadful disarray.

  ‘It was after France had fallen that Henri found it all too much to take and began sleeping with me, but it was like a palliative to him, and if he could have turned me into Claude he would have.

  ‘The only person who loved me for myself was Leslie. He was called up during 1941, though he hated the whole idea of it, as did we all. Leslie didn’t show much interest in women. I kept thinking it was because he was young, but Rose, whose morality was much freer than mine, said she thought he might be homosexual. I dismissed this at first but then Harry Laurington, whom I did not then know, virtually abducted him, coerced him to desert and set him up as a painter, here in this house.

  ‘Rose sat by and allowed it to happen. Homosexuality was, of course, illegal then. It carried terrific social opprobium and severe penalties for those who were caught.

  ‘I was outraged. I suppose as much because of the danger involved as because I saw Leslie’s actions in the light of my own. I’d been a rich man’s moll, after all, and quite a lot of that was driven by the thought of saving Leslie for a better life. Now he was a rich man’s moll, and the situation was ever so much more dangerous than Julius Lichtblau’s fling with me.

  ‘Your father tried to persuade me that Leslie’s sexuality didn’t matter, but to me, and to most people at that time, the thought of an older man keeping a younger one to have sex with him was criminal. And then, what would happen when the affair ended? Did your father or any of those people care? Leslie was a poor boy, there was no rich family for him to fall back on. When Harry grew tired of him, there would only be me. I can tell you, I tormented them. And the more I did, the more they closed ranks on me, determined to make me capitulate.

  ‘In the meantime, Harry joined forces with Rose and Laurent and went ahead with his cafe-restaurant. The first Siècle was in the basement of the boarding house. They opened three or four nights a week. It wasn’t ever going to be legal because it didn’t conform with fire regulations, so they ran it as a kind of open-house bistro for their friends. Laurent and Rose did all the cooking, but the war made the menu rather unpredictable, with rationing and what have you. And, of course, they didn’t have a wine licence though they served wine. A certain group of people came, and Siècle was known among the painters. I worked there infrequently. They would give me a share of the take but basically I earned my living doing a war job.

  ‘People liked Siècle, I suppose because it was exciting, being illegal, and it took their minds off fear. Sometimes they couldn’t run to a main course and once Rose did wonderful things with tripe, but none of the Australians could eat it.

  ‘O
n Sundays Henri and I would come down here to see Leslie. I could see everyone else “making do” and “making the best of it”, and sometimes I’d feel part of the whole thing, but at other times I’d think, “at whose expense?” Because it seemed in a way to be at my expense. Henri was using me as a substitute for Claude and Leslie was letting Harry have sex with him in return for being fed and hidden from the Military Police.

  ‘We spent Christmas Day 1941 down here; there was me, your father, Leslie and Harry. They say Christmas is the time when family members murder each other. Well, I felt hostile towards everyone. Harry and Leslie tried to placate me, but I wasn’t going to condone their affair. And then Henri told me I was being impossible, and I had a huge fight with him, following which he hitchhiked back to Melbourne, went to Rose’s and told her he was leaving. He said he wanted to clear his head and he was going to go where his feet took him for a while. He told Rose of his love for Claude and of his affair with me, and that he didn’t think it would be very helpful to stay around me because he didn’t feel for me what he felt for Claude.

  ‘Well, I remembered his protracted farewells to Claude in Paris and was mortified by the memories. To me, my lovemaking with Henri was the consummation of my feelings for him. For him, it was substitute love. I felt I had nothing. No thing. Except, my period didn’t come. I didn’t know where the hell Henri had gone, he’d just vanished, but my period didn’t come. Second month, my period didn’t come. Third month.

  ‘We thought we were about to be invaded any day by the Japanese and here was I, going to have a baby.

  ‘I had things out with Harry. I told him all my fears. At first, I hated him and said so. But Harry was a kind man. He is a kind man. If I could not patch things up with Henri, he said, he would marry me and adopt the child. It seemed he and Leslie had decided something, perhaps they had decided things would work out better if Harry married me. I asked what would happen about sex between them. Harry said he didn’t know, the attraction between them was very powerful. I said he would ruin Leslie if the sex continued, he ought to give him a chance, Leslie hadn’t even experienced sex with a woman yet. And Harry agreed. Leslie ought to be given the chance to live an orthodox life.

  ‘I gave Henri six more months, by the end of which I had only days to go before my confinement.

  ‘We were married here, in this place, Harry and I, on the 4th of September 1942. Checkie was born in Geelong, on the 11th. She was christened Cecilia Viva Laurington, Cecilia being your grandmother’s confirmation name. Henri didn’t even know she existed.

  ‘There are worse fates than being born into the Laurington family, Isobel, and Harry’s relatives were absolutely delighted to think he had a wife and child, so I left it at that.

  ‘Henri was still in Australia. Nicola would get cards from here and there and everywhere, but there was never a forwarding address. He said he’d be back, but wasn’t sure when. Nicola didn’t know that Checkie was Henri’s child. I don’t suppose he ever thought about things like that, taken up as he was with his politics. I didn’t think it was in anyone’s interests to tell him, so he always assumed Checkie was Harry’s.

  ‘Rose knew, of course, and told Henri when he got back to Melbourne early in ’43. He gave Rose the paintings he’d done while he was away and she gave them to me for Checkie, but he wasn’t going to interfere with our lives.

  ‘The next I heard of him, he was going to marry some bank teller!’

  This obviously hurt Viva a great deal, as she had to clutch herself and reel around and make as if to clap her hands to her ears.

  But I also felt something. I was suddenly overcome with a deep surge of love for my mother. ‘She’s not some teller,’ I said to Viva. ‘You have a life, Stella has a life. You’ve shown courage when you’ve been called upon to show it, but you haven’t much compassion. Stella has. No doubt it’s cleverer to be courageous than it is to be kind, but Stella’s whole life is kindness, even when she bungles it.’

  ‘Is that enough?’ she asked bitterly.

  ‘No more than courage is. I guess it takes courage to overcome the taboo on killing, yet people kill in the name of ideals. At least the motive for kindness is kindness itself; courage may have the vilest of motives.’

  ‘And kindness, the worst of outcomes!’ she cried. There were tears in her eyes now. ‘No, I’m not kind. I never was kind, but I did love Henri, and I had to bear your grandmother saying to me, “Don’t lose your heart to Henri, Viva. Henri will always be in love with girlishness, and you are a woman.” She said it as if I were capable of sharing the sort of dignity she had. All through my life, I’ll remember our visit to Fortuny’s. When I said I wouldn’t model for them in spite of the huge temptation, they gave me a blue silk slip and a scarf. A magic scarf, made with secret dyes. I used to dance with that scarf in your father’s loft, and they’d draw me while that slip clung to me as if it were a lover. Or a child. I stole a bit of Henri to make Checkie, Isobel. She was a sweet baby. I compensated myself with that; she had your grandmother’s gorgeous blonde hair, but the eyes were mine, the face was mine. I could read history in Checkie, the coming together of separate strands, the expunging of the pain of my past.

  ‘We met once on the street, by accident, Henri and I, just before his wedding. I cursed that I didn’t have Checkie with me, it might have won him away from your mother. He said he was going to marry someone who had experienced much the same sort of loss as he had. We knew Claude was dead by this time. The same sort of loss.’ Viva shook her head and wept.

  ‘And then to have him call his first child Allegra! I hated him! Oh, God, how I hated him! But he’d left some paintings with us and I was determined to keep them. I was going to show the world who his true wife was. I understood him. I knew him. What did your mother know? And then, when I met her by accident, you two sitting there with his eyes copied into your faces, and she so heedless, so damned blithe! The day she married the man I loved, my brother walked into the sea and drowned himself because his own situation seemed to him to be morally impossible.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  Homage to Bruegel

  LESLIE’S DEATH WAS Viva’s business. It certainly did not happen through any fault of my mother’s, nor did my mother wish to do anyone harm by marrying my father. All she knew was an antiquated sense of honour that she took on as an obligation. Mottean honour was clumsy and crashed into things, apologising as it destroyed. With foresight and self-restraint, however, these people might not only have been honourable but provident as well.

  However, if respect for other people and their stories doesn’t follow on from protection, then what is protection for, if not self-aggrandisement? The Mottes restricted their respect to things that had been well made. They imagined themselves to be the kings and queens of taste and that the world awaited a pat on the head from them for its skill and obedience.

  Our father knew he wasn’t the world’s spindle and that destiny could depend on more than kindness. Sometimes your fate could be in other people’s hands entirely. And that’s what happened eventually to the Katzes.

  I did not understand how Dadda knew Claude was dead before he married our mother. I’d never spoken to Rose about the loss of her family; it was probably too painful for her to tell, but sometime after my night with Viva she let me piece the story together with her help. I filled in the gaps later, in Paris, when I visited the place where the Italians held most of their important functions, the Masonic Lodge of the Grand Orient of France. I went there to look up the Italians, but found instead books commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the round-up of the Parisian Jews.

  The news that Claude Katz was dead reached Uncle Nicola late in 1942. Uncle Nicola, undaunted by the inevitable collapse of the Paris Concentration, was attempting, with his friends and other interested Italians and Australians, to form a new movement which would dedicate itself to the establishment of a free and democratic Italy at the end of the war. I read in his diaries that there was a big meeting abou
t it in September at Melbourne’s Savoy Theatre. Uncle Nicola proposed the movement be called the Movimento Garibaldi, but there were some newly arrived Jewish-Italian refugees who said the name Garibaldi, associated as it was with anti-clericalism, would alienate the Catholics; a better name was Movimento Italia libera, a name not tainted by past politics.

  These Jewish-Italians were members of the Paris Antifascist Concentration who had been smuggled into England by the Resistance at the end of July and given jobs on a ship carrying Italian prisoners of war to Australia. One of them, Moishe Petrucelli, knew Lev Katz and his family fairly well. He was also acquainted with Allegra through the Concentration, had known Emilio and recognised immediately who Uncle Nicola was.

  He told how he and his wife and children had gone to a meal at the Katzes soon after the invasion. Allegra was there. She had made a remarkable recovery, though there was a long, shallow depression in her forehead where her skull had been fractured. At the meal also were the two grandfathers. While Grandfather Isaac Katz was deploring the way the government of Paul Reynaud had just fled Paris while urging everyone else to stay behind, Grandfather Dan Grafman was saying it was the only good move the Reynaud government had ever made, specially as the scoundrels had taken their mistresses with them. Fate had decreed that Reynaud’s mistress, the unspeakable Mme de Portes, had got what was coming to her. On his flight into southern France, Reynaud had had to slam on the brakes and de Portes had had her neck broken, fatally, by a flying piece of her own luggage.