The Joyce Girl

by Annabel Abbs

  Praise for The Joyce Girl

  “Abbs has found a gripping and little-known story at the heart of one of the 20th century’s most astonishing creative moments, researched it deeply, and brought the extraordinary Joyce family and their circle in 1920s Paris to richly imagined life.”

  Emma Darwin, author of The Sunday Times bestseller A Secret Alchemy, and The Mathematics of Love

  “A captivating debut about love, creativity, and living in the shadow of genius. Annabel Abbs recreates the extraordinary story of Lucia Joyce – James Joyce’s daughter and gifted dancer in her own right – in language as sensuous and richly alive as Lucia’s dancing.”

  Louisa Treger, author of The Lodger

  “The Joyce Girl is ambitious, insightful and fascinating on so many levels … A stunning insight into some great literary minds.”

  The Booktrail

  “Engrossing, … unusual and thought-provoking.”

  Wendy Bough, chair of judging panel, the Caledonia Novel Award

  “A heart-breaking book about devastating betrayals and broken dreams.”

  Caroline Ambrose, founder of the Bath Novel Award

  THE JOYCE GIRL

  Annabel Abbs

  To my husband, Matthew

  “There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait.”

  James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  September 1934

  1 November 1928

  2 November 1928

  3 November 1928

  4 November 1928

  September 1934

  5 December 1928

  6 December 1928

  7 January 1929

  October 1934

  8 February 1929

  9 April 1929

  10 June 1929

  11 July 1929

  October 1934

  12 August 1929

  October 1934

  13 October 1929

  14 November 1929

  15 February 1930

  November 1934

  16 April 1930

  17 September 1930

  November 1934

  18 March 1931

  19 May 1931

  20 Autumn 1931

  21 March 1932

  December 1934

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Book Club Questions

  About the Author

  Copyright

  September 1934

  Küsnacht, Zurich

  I stand on the deck watching the trailing seams of white foam. Zurich recedes into the horizon and I wait for Küsnacht to appear ahead of me. On the banks the trees are shaking off their curling leaves. There’s a shiver in the air and a thin odour of decay drifts across the lake.

  I’ve been seeing him for three weeks, in his square shuttered house at Küsnacht. Three times a week I come by boat and sit with him. And still I haven’t spoken. But today something inside me is stirring and my silence feels oppressive.

  The lake is alight with autumn sun. Beside the ferry tiny fish flounce and turn, their spangled scales flashing like fallen stars. As I watch them, something begins to creep through the soles of my feet, up into my ankles, my calves. I feel it skim along my spine. My hips begin to sway; my fingers start to rap out a rhythm on the railing. As if my dull plain body wants to be a thing of beauty again.

  Today I shall speak. I shall answer his tiresome questions. And I shall tell him I must dance again. Yes, I must dance again ….

  * * *

  Doctor Jung steeples his fingers in front of his mouth so the tips brush his neatly clipped moustache. “You shared a bedroom with your father until you were eighteen. How did you change your clothes?” His eyes are like small hoops of light that never leave my face.

  “I slept in my clothes.” I shift awkwardly, knowing what questions are coming next. And I’m sick of them. Sick and tired.

  “Why did you not undress?” His words hang in the air as I pull my mink coat tight around my ribs. That eager little housemaid had tried to snatch it from me at the door. Kept telling me how warm the doctor’s room was, how she’d laid the fire herself.

  “Rats don’t change for the night, do they?”

  “Rats?” Doctor Jung pushes back his swivel chair and starts pacing the room. “I’m glad you’ve finally decided to talk but you must explain yourself, Miss Joyce.”

  “We lived in hundreds of places … rooms … apartments. Italy, Switzerland, Paris.” Already I can feel my mouth stiffening, as though it’s had enough of all this talk, enough of the doctor’s endless questions. I run my tongue quickly over my upper lip, willing myself on. “We moved into Robiac Square when rich people started giving us money – my father’s patrons. Before that my brother, Giorgio, called us migrant rats.”

  “And your father called it exile.” Doctor Jung stoops, brings his face level with mine. And I wonder if he can see inside my empty, plundered soul, if he can see how they’ve robbed me and betrayed me.

  “Tell me about Ulysses. I confess I fell asleep when I read it.” He eases himself back into his chair, scribbles something in his notebook, turns his gaze back to me. “Banned for obscenity. How did it make you feel having a pornographer for a father?”

  Outside a cloud drifts across the sky and blocks out the sun. “Ulysses …” I echo, searching my moth-eaten mind for memories and clues. Fat blue spine … gold lettering … Mama snatching. “My mother saw me holding it once and took it from me. She said my father had a dirty mind and I could read it when I was married. Married!” I give a small mirthless laugh.

  “So, did you read it?”

  “Of course. It’s the greatest book ever written.” I don’t tell the doctor that I too found the plot dull, that the odd, unfamiliar characters eluded me, that I never reached the ‘filthy bits’ everyone spoke of. Instead I blurt out my question about Babbo, the question still gnawing at me after all these years. “Doctor, is my father a perverted lunatic?”

  Doctor Jung looks at me through his gold-rimmed glasses. His eyes widen as the breath escapes noisily from his nostrils. There’s a long silence during which he nods his head gently, as if expecting me to speak. “Why do you ask, Miss Joyce?”

  My mink coat is now so tightly round my body that my rib cage contracts and the air catches in my throat. “I saw it in a newspaper. They called him a perverted lunatic. They called Ulysses the most obscene book ever written.” As I speak my voice detaches itself from my body and slips away, as though the words, the sounds, are nothing to do with me.

  “Why do you think your father chose a chambermaid for his wife?” The doctor leans across his desk, pushes his glasses onto his forehead, prepares to inspect me again.

  “He doesn’t like intelligent women. He said that once.” I don’t tell him I know exactly why my father chose a chambermaid. There are some things that can’t be spoken about. Not to fat Swiss men with pocket watches who are paid by the hour, like common prostitutes. Not to anyone.

  Doctor Jung nods and chews thoughtfully on his thumb, always watching me, staring at me, trying to climb into my soul. Then he picks up his pen and I hear the nib rasping as he scribbles in his notebook. I stroke my mink coat, so soft, so comforting. Like a pet dog curled in my lap. Already Mama’s face is dissolving in front of me, all of her fading away – her eyebrows like the feathers of a crow, her thin lips, her downy cheeks with their maze of broken veins. “I don’t want to talk about her anymore. It was she who did this to me.” I tap the side of my head three times with my index finger.


  He stops writing and frowns for so long the muscles round his eyes twitch. “Tell me about your relationship with your father, before you shared a bedroom.”

  “He was always writing. He barely spoke to me until Ulysses was finished.” I lower my lashes, look at my new shoes of softest Italian leather, feel my toes curling inside them. No need to say any more. Not yet …

  “You were competing with a lot of people, real and imaginary, for his time.” Doctor Jung’s eyes are like pinwheels now, boring into my head.

  “I suppose so.” I run my fingers through the fur of my coat, teasing it out and pushing it against the grain as I think of my greedy siblings. All those characters wandering round Dublin. Yes, greedy siblings that had taken Babbo from me. I hold the doctor’s gaze in a way I hope is bold and confident, but beneath my coat sweat is trickling slowly down my cleavage.

  “What’s the point of me being here?” I need to get away from his interminable questions. Time is running out. Work in Progress is still not finished. Babbo needs my help, my inspiration. What use am I incarcerated in Switzerland? My feet start jerking to and fro, desperate little jerks like gasps of breath.

  “You are here at your father’s request, Miss Joyce. But as you haven’t spoken until today we have a lot of catching up to do. Tell me about Giorgio.” Doctor Jung laces his fingers together, watches me, waits.

  And when he says my brother’s name, I feel a surge of love. For ten years Giorgio and I were inseparable, like Siamese twins. I examine my hands expecting to see the white imprints of his fingers from where he’d gripped me. To drag me away from the thin-ribbed cats I longed to adopt, to pull me up the steep streets of Trieste, to stop me falling from the omnibus. There are no marks, of course. Just the shiny puckered ghost of a scar on my thumb. But something else begins tugging and pulling at the edges of my memory. I pause, expecting it to swim slowly into focus. But it doesn’t. Instead I feel a dull ache rising slowly from the base of my skull. I rub my temples for several long minutes as the silence seethes and swirls in my ears and the ache blooms in my brain.

  The doctor looks at the fat gold pocket watch he keeps on his desk. “We’re out of time, Miss Joyce. But I’d like you to write an account of your years in Robiac Square. Can you do that for me?”

  “For you? I thought this talking cure was for me?”

  “It’s for me to help you.” He speaks slowly, enunciating each word as if he’s speaking to a child or an imbecile. He picks up the pocket watch and peers at it, pointedly. “Bring the first chapter of your memoir next time.”

  “Where should I start?”

  “You are twenty-seven now?” He puts down his pocket watch and counts the fleshy fingers of one splayed hand with the other. “You said a Mr Beckett was your first lover, is that right?” He nods encouragingly. “Start with him. Can you remember when you first saw him?”

  “Wait,” I say, closing my eyes as the memory floats towards me, bit by bit, struggling out of a shifting darkness. Faint at first … now bright and sharp. The smell of oysters and eau de parfum and Turkish cigarettes and cigar smoke. The popping of champagne corks, the cracking of ice in steel buckets, the chinking and clinking of glasses. I remember it all – the glare and rattle of the restaurant, Stella’s turbaned head like a small yellow pumpkin, the damp heat of Emile’s breath in my ear, the luminosity of Babbo’s eyes as he toasted me, the exact words of Mama and Babbo. Oh yes … all those words. Of birth and marriage, of my talent and my future. Life had seemed to stretch out ahead of me then, all rosy and golden and shimmering with possibility.

  I open my eyes. Doctor Jung has pushed back his chair and is standing at his desk tapping his fingers impatiently on the leather as if beating time to his pocket watch.

  “I know where to start my memoir,” I say. I shall start with the first stirrings of desire and ambition that pushed their way, like the greedy tendrils of a weed, into my young heart. Because that was the beginning. No matter what anyone else says, that was the beginning.

  1

  November 1928

  Paris

  “Two geniuses in one family. Shall we be in competition?” Babbo turned the jewelled ring upon his finger, his rheumy eyes still on the Paris Times. He was looking at the photograph of me, scrutinising it as if he’d never seen me before. “How beautiful you are, mia bella bambina. Your mother looked like that when we eloped.”

  “This is my favourite line, Babbo.” I took the newspaper from him and read breathlessly from the review of my dance debut. “When she reaches her full capacity for rhythmic dancing, James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father.”

  “What fierce and unadulterated ambition you have, Lucia. The next line is engraved upon my memory. Allow me.” He started reciting in his thin reedy voice. “Lucia Joyce is her father’s daughter. She has James Joyce’s enthusiasm, energy and a not-yet determined amount of his genius.” He paused and put two tobacco-stained fingers to his freshly oiled hair. “You gave an astonishing performance. Such rhythm and evanescence … I thought of rainbows again.” He closed his eyes briefly as if he was recalling the evening. Then his eyes snapped open. “What else does the incontrovertible Paris Times have to say about my progeny?”

  “It says ‘Her performances have made her a name at the Théâtre de Champs-Élysées – home of avant-garde dance in Paris. She dances all day long; if not with her dance troupe, she is studying dance or dancing by herself. When she’s not dancing, she’s planning costumes, working out colour schemes, designing colour effects. To top it all, she speaks no fewer than four languages – fluently – and is tall, slender and remarkably graceful, with brown bobbed hair, blue eyes and very clear skin. Such talent!’” I tossed the newspaper onto the sofa and began spinning round the parlour, turning in wide, emphatic circles. The applause was still ringing in my ears, the euphoria still tripping through my veins. I raised my arms and spun – past Babbo’s beloved ancestral portraits in their gilt frames, round the stacks of Encyclopaedia Britannicas that doubled as stools when Babbo’s Flatterers came to hear him read, past Mama’s potted ferns.

  “All of Paris is reading about me, Babbo. About me! And …” I paused and shook a finger at him, “… you had better watch out!”

  Babbo crossed his ankles and leaned lazily into his chair, watching me. Always watching me. “We shall dine at Michaud’s tonight. We shall toast you until the wee hours, mia bella bambina. Invite your dancing American friend to grace us with her presence. And I’ll invite Miss Steyn.” He touched his hair again, smoothing it against his head with a sudden air of preoccupation. “And I suppose you’d better ask the young man who composed the music.”

  “Yes, let’s ask Emile, Mr Fernandez!” My heart gave a little skip as I rose on the balls of my feet and pivoted, once, twice and then a third time before flopping onto the sofa. I glanced at Babbo. Had he seen the quickening of my pulse at the mention of Emile? But his eyes were closed and he was playing with his moustache, pressing the ends down with his index fingers. I wondered if he was thinking about Miss Stella Steyn who had been illustrating his book, or about whether or not to wax his whiskers before we went to Michaud’s.

  “Did the newspaper not mention the composer – what was his name again?” Babbo opened his eyes and peered at me, his pupils swimming behind his fat spectacle lenses like black tadpoles in a jar of milk.

  “Emile Fernandez,” I repeated. Would he hear the soft inflection in my voice? While working on my premiere Emile and I had become fond of each other and I wasn’t sure how Babbo would react. He had always been very possessive where I was concerned. Both he and Mama muttered constantly about how things were done in Ireland. When I remonstrated that we were in Paris now, and every other dancer had hundreds of lovers, Babbo would sigh deeply, and Mama would lower her voice and say “Strumpets, with not an ounce o’ shame!”

  “I’ll telephone Miss Steyn and you can telephone Mr Fernandez and your delightful dancing friend whose name escapes me.” He put h
is hand to his throat and carefully adjusted his dimpled bow tie.

  “Kitten,” I said. And then I remembered how Mama and Babbo stubbornly called her Miss Neel. “You know, Miss Neel! How can you have forgotten her name? She’s been my best friend for years.”

  “Kitten was bitten by an ill-starred bittern, bewitched by a catten after …” His voice tailed off as he dug into the pocket of his velvet jacket for a cigarette. And in the silence we heard the heavy tread of my mother on the stairs.

  “I’m thinking it might be to our advantage not to read the review of your debut repeatedly to your mother.” He stopped and closed his eyes again. “It is a peculiarity of hers, as you know.” He placed a cigarette carefully between his lips and fumbled in his pocket. “Indulge me with a last twirl, mia bella bambina.”

  I did a triple pirouette as quickly as I could. Mama didn’t like me dancing in the parlour and I didn’t want her angry words to mar my mood.

  She bustled in with her arms full of parcels, her broad chest heaving from climbing the five flights of stairs to our apartment. Babbo opened his eyes, blinked and told her we were all going to Michaud’s ‘for a wee celebration’.

  “D’ye mean to say there’s some money comin’ in the post?” I could see her scanning the room, making sure I hadn’t meddled with the furniture as I did sometimes when she was out and Babbo asked me to dance for him.

  “No, my mountain flower.” He paused to light his cigarette. “Better than money. Lucia is the toast of Paris and we must toast her too. Tonight we shall be toasting and boasting.”

  Mama stood there, still holding all her bags. Only her eyes moved, narrowing until they were no more than slits. “Not your dancing again, Lucia? Sure it’s wearing me out. You’ll be putting me in an early grave. Along with the lift that’s never working and all those stairs I’m having to climb.”