Jigsaw (10 page)

The house had neither mosquito nets nor screens which made for fuss and inconvenience in the night (mosquitoes being a much greater plague in those days before the Allied Armies had done something drastic, or so one is told, with DDT); one had to undress in the dark if one wanted to keep the window open, and before that one either had to spray with a substance called Flytox, as noxious to humans as it was to those elusive buzz-diving pests, or fumigate. We used little brown cones, Zampironi, which we stood up and lit in saucers where they glowed then crumbled into dust filling the room with acrid smoke. My mother, an insomniac, took more and stronger sleeping pills. Veronal was one of the most potent on the market then and one could get it without prescription, two
cachets
at a time. The chemist allowed my mother four. (Good nature? Carelessness?
Not
profit: they were a few pence apiece; I never knew. That chemist played a painful part in our lives later on.) I went for the veronal, I ran most of the errands. The veronal induced heavy, sometimes alarmingly heavy, sleep. Once or twice I came home from the beach at two p.m. and found
Alessandro
saying, I can’t wake her up. This would be when the evening before they had talked of his need to go away, go to Paris, go to a city, to see a man, to see a woman who might buy a picture or want her house doing up.

I spent much time in the sea (and loved it – summers without water: salt water, rock-pools, open bays, calm pellucid depths, breakers and spray, were like prison to me), I swam as one might stroll, a slow quiet 
drifting towards horizons not counting distance or hours. It was then that I did my dreaming, shaped what I had seen and thought into sentences, cadences, meaning (so I hoped) –
words
at great speed were running … I was writing in my head. It was intoxicating and elusive. When I sat down before that sheet of paper, it was gone. I never wrote in my youth. I was not one of those novelists who filled notebooks lying on the hearthrug when they were tots. For me that struggle (it is that) long postponed, came later.

On Port Issol, our small beach, one could hire a basic kind of canoe, both flimsy and clumsy but a pleasant means of getting out far and swift. One afternoon as I was about to launch this contraption, I bumped into a child who was splashing in the shallows, a fair lanky girl, with straight short hair, of about twelve or more, nice-looking in a boyish way. I wasn’t much adept at social intercourse with people of or near my age, but here we were in the sea. I offered her a ride. She got herself into the thing all right and we struck off, I doing the paddling. The sea was glassy flat, the girl very slight, the going was not too heavy, land began to recede. Annette (names, too, come easily in the freedom of the sea) was smiling; or was the smile a little fixed? The way she crouched and clung might make one think that she was putting on a brave act. What about? True the canoe was badly balanced and none too buoyant, it did capsize quite frequently; what of it? One would right it again and after a refreshing dip clamber again aboard. I was about to impart these cheering facts when Annette emitted a weak sound,
Maman
. I looked round and saw a form, still recognisable as female, on the shore, frantically hopping to and fro signalling like a tic-tac man. Annette, still contained, hung her pretty head, ‘
Je ne sais pas nager
– I ’ave not learn to swim.’ Heavens … Gingerly I turned us round, tiptoeing, as it were, with the paddle, got her safely back into her depth and on to land, only to run into a human storm. The first encounter with
la bourgeoisie française à sa proie attachée
! Madame Panigon –
Maman
– knitting dropped, arms raised
au ciel
, vast in wintry clothes, was furious and let me have it. My own mother had appeared – we were only a stone’s throw from that beach which had become a stage dominated by a gorgon in full spate. Her voice vibrated: 
Madame! Votre fille est dangereuse
…
Cette gamine
, she called me, I had tried to drown her child … I had done it on purpose. Another figure hovered, another daughter, about my age,
not
in bathing-dress, clucking and moaning, weakly striving for peace; and so did my mother, employing her social graces. It was not a quick process. (Madame Panigon’s tirade, my mother later said, had not been lacking in a certain grammatical elegance … Imagine an English or Italian mother’s syntax in a similar situation.) I apologised for the anxiety I had caused,
not
on purpose, I had not known the facts while there leapt into my head: Now I
do
– frogs can’t swim. (Where had that come from? Oh, the multiple sources of chauvinism!) Eventually we all became good friends, after a fashion.

The only other break in our social isolation that summer came when we heard that one of my mother’s friends of other times was staying at the Hôtel des Bains at Bandol with a young and glossy mistress (I had seen her). It was Ernst Toller, the playwright and poet. He was a communist then and in exile (Paris, not yet Hollywood and New York where he eventually killed himself), having lately served a two-year prison sentence in Germany (pre-concentration-camp Germany) for his part in some subversive action, and had published a poem written in his cell (like Oscar Wilde, I thought). I was awed – had it been unbearable? Would it show? I was also agog to meet a writer. He came to supper at our bungalow one night (without the mistress, without Alessandro, too, as it turned out, he was spending a few days in Marseille trying to see that man about a job). Home before dusk, still in damp espadrilles and bathing-shorts, I found a youngish man – not yet thirty? – sun-browned, healthy-looking, handsome, sitting on the verandah with my mother. I had offered to do the cooking, and they presently joined me in the kitchen. I remember that he seemed a nice man, an animated talker, even jolly in a gentle way, and he made a nice evening of it, against odds. I do not remember what we, what
they
were talking about, what a poor cheap thing it is, one’s memory: Toller, that doomed and talented man, much loved by his friends, and all that I am able to tell about him at first-hand is his niceness about my own foolish predicament. Which was that we got 
nothing to eat; or rather: little, very late. I was trying to make us a dish of gratin dauphinois, once taught me by my father: finely sliced potatoes cooked in light cream with a touch of garlic and black pepper. The potatoes must be well washed and dried, and arranged in a neat pattern in their dish, and it looked promising enough as it went into the oven. Our kitchen stove burned wood; firewood in the South of France is either pine which makes a quick flambée then dies, or olive, often green, which is slow to ignite then dies and smokes. Need I say more? I still have the strip cartoon Toller drew afterwards for my mother. It shows a series of an anxious figure – me – bending in a cloud of smoke over a tepid stove under a clock (drawn not quite round) displaying the advancing hours. ‘Not
quite
ready …’, say the balloons from out of my mouth. Under the last image, showing midnight, he wrote, ‘But it was delicious all the same.’ (Not true: it was shrivelled and still not
quite
ready.)

There are some actual words of Toller’s that I can recall – probably because my mother used to repeat them – lamentably they are a remark about myself. He had asked, That your book? (It was
Les
Faux-Monnayeurs
.) Then to my mother, Funny kind of girl you’ve got here, comes in from making sand-castles then reads André Gide.

To my surprise if rather against my will, Madame Panigon began to treat me as an inseparable companion of her brood (this was something to be met often among the French: a great verbal roughing up at the beginning followed by showers of charm and goodwill; one might nearly get thrown out for expecting a table then end up dinner with brandy on the house), I was being drawn into the family bosom. We met mostly at the market or a café (oh not the beach) where my mother often joined us. Madame Panigon was full of bourgeois wisdom, common sense and gossip, and she was far from reticent; my mother found her excellent value. She was the wife of a
notaire
at Montélimar (she revealed, seated, hands never idle, in the Café de la Marine) who was still detained by
les affaires
– she’d left the cook with him,
naturellement
, you know:
men
– but was soon to join his family at Sanary where they annually spent the summer holidays. Conscious, like Mrs Bennett, that in due course she had daughters to marry, she 
diligently tried instilling strict and cynical
sagesse
into
jeunesse
; her dicta about
l’amour
really shocked my mother being herself – it struck me – a headlong romantic who loved deeply, unwisely and for ever each time it occurred. Madame Panigon however, was increasingly treating her as a crony. I did not mind consorting with her brood. I liked Annette who had some pluck; Cécile, the dumpy sister who looked like the future replica of her mama, I found rather tame and wet (I was quite wrong); if Annette was like a colt, Cécile was like a pretty heifer. There was also an uppish elder brother, Frédéric, a clever fiend, quite well set up, who had his own fish to fry. Most of the year those three were being crammed with Racine, Corneille and Molière at their
lycées
; en vacances they were allowed some dissipation. Many nights I found myself, chaperoned by Madame Tricoteuse, dancing javas, foxtrots and the quick waltz to a concertina with Cécile and Annette. We were looked on as children and rarely asked to stand up with a youth or man (Frédéric too was undisguisedly not interested in the least). We drank tisanes, lemonade or a
bock
, the small measure of light beer. I enjoyed the dancing and did not care with whom.

So that first summer was not all bad and it went fast. Hardly into September, my mother and Alessandro began brooding over moves to make; the first step being to part with me. One day I was taken to Toulon, not to Sanary-cum-Ollioules, to Toulon from where the fast trains went, not in the bus but in Monsieur Panigon’s Renault car. My mother saw me off. Give my love to Jack and Susan, she said as the train was about to pull out, And what did you tell me they were actually doing now? Inspired, I asked, ‘Mummy,
did
you meet Susan and Jack on a beach?’ She did not have the grace to blush, she had the grace to giggle. ‘Well – more or less …’

I was back quite soon. At Christmas in fact, a rarity, we kept moveable feasts. I found them in a villa with a wide view on the sea, in an easy mood. Each day there were hours of warmth around noon, real warmth, we ate our luncheons out of doors on the terrace in
shirt-sleeves
. 
I had brought a book for my mother, by a new English writer she had not heard of, expecting he would astonish and please. She read him in one go.

Much had happened to me in the last short three months. I would sum it up as friends, new writing, law courts. The friends I made by chance, the first friends of my own, elders and betters they were, had to be, it was too late to form a bond with contemporaries. I walked into a second-hand bookshop off Bond Street one afternoon, when I couldn’t find what I wanted I left my name with an assistant, it was my father’s name and she said, I used to know someone married into that family quite well – she mentioned the house in Berlin – are you the granddaughter? I said, no these were connections of a first marriage, the one she was talking about I knew only by hearsay. She remained interested – well and what was I doing …? By myself and all that? I told her that I was living with friends in Hampstead and was educating myself. She asked me to tea the next week.

For one thing I had made a mistake going into that bookshop as they sold only first editions and rare books, nor would I have left my name with the unremarkable middle-aged woman if the beautiful tall young man who might have come out of a Greek poem (Bob Gathorne-Hardy in his youth) had not been engaged with a customer. This is by the way or not so by the way when one reflects on how chance operates. I nearly did not get there, to tea with Rosie
Falkenheim
. The address was somewhere near Baker Street, there was a fog, I got off the bus too soon, her number seemed not to exist, I turned yet another corner, tried basements, passers-by were strangers and hurried on … I felt at the edge of a panic. This still besets me in situations such as these. Impervious to own reasoning, I lose my nerve feeling that I shall never reach my destination but remain lost on some alien road or platform without ever seeing a known face again. I did not throw myself into Miss Falkenheim’s arms but must have transmitted a glow of the storm-tossed wanderer’s grateful relief when at last I entered her well lit bed-sitter. A tea tray stood at the ready (bespeaking thoughtful preparations); conversation began, easy as skating. It might have been a stiff one-off visit had I not been unstrung and open in my post-panic 
deliverance. My hostess treated me as though I were a guest and equal, heady stuff. I felt I had plenty to say. Rosie Falkenheim was a woman with a long, sallow, vaguely simian face, some hard crinkly hair, small brown eyes that were humorous rather than sad, and a not very good figure. Clothes hung badly. If you stretched the definition you might just have called her a
jolie laide
. What was not immediately apparent was that she liked, and had a way with, men. She must have been in her upper thirties then; I came to be one of the very few people who knew her story, which was an unusual one. Presently all one could assume was that she had not started life in a bed-sitter in Marylebone. There was fruit and Gentleman’s Relish as well as cake for tea. Before I went, Miss Falkenheim proposed to take me to her sister’s sometime soon, her sister who was married to the bookman who had recently opened the shop I had strayed into. If Mrs Robbins will allow you …? I forebore to say that Mrs Robbins did not expect to be asked. I left with a book I had been lent under my arm. A rare book? A new book – the kind she read herself. It was
Antic Hay
.

Mrs Nairn – Toni – and her husband lived in a minute flat above the garage in a mews behind one of the Nash Terraces in Regent’s Park. A patron, an American book collector, absentee tenant of the front house, had let them have it for an indefinite time. Toni was very pretty in a fragile way – an exquisite small head and pouting profile in the style of Queen Nefertiti (as she
had
been told); there was however a generic likeness to her elder sister (which grew over the years). Toni’s figure, too, was imperfectly put together. They talked, drawing me into their private jokes, Rosie’s gently dry, Toni’s of unexpected ruthlessness. They got on to music: opera: Toni had ‘a voice’, a teacher whose method she did not approve of and some hope (forlorn, if I read her sister’s neutrality). I was probed just a little – most tactfully, but I recognised the undertow: And
where
does your mother come into this? The subject though that was pursued most ardently on that afternoon was poison. Administered by murderers, murderesses preferably. Contemporary cases, nineteenth-century cases, Toni had them at her finger-tips. Toni, not Rosie; Rosie looked aloofly amused. Was Toni interested in other forms of homicide as well? (It sounded out of a 
phrase-book.) She was. Less so, but she was. Then
I
had to ask. Had she heard of our family murder – my father’s brother done in by his wife – a mere shooting? Indeed. Moreover, she and the convicted woman bore the same first name, Antonia. Your aunt Toni, she said. All of this in the quietest of tones among the teacups, rather grand teacups (got out this once).