Jigsaw (3 page)

They were puzzled, they were kind, they did not try too hard to understand; I was not punished. My sister tried to bring some of the enormity of my conduct home to me – my poor father: the many forms of anguish I had caused him. I closed my mind. My future was not discussed, or so it seemed, perhaps I was closing my mind to that too. At any rate I was not shipped back at once, day after day slipped by and still there I was.

And where was I? Once more admitted willy-nilly into an adult world. Wiesbaden town and spa must have been pretty unique in the Germany of that post-war period: it was flourishing. There was work, there was food in the shops. Life and money was kept flowing by the occupying French and more fantastically by white Russian émigrés, grandee refugees at their first stage with jewels to sell still in their baggage before they turned to Paris and to driving taxis. My sister’s husband, whose mother had been English, was on excellent terms with the occupying forces and said to be discreetly plotting for a separation of the Rhineland. (For this he paid dearly twenty years on: the Nazis executed him.) He was a man with much musical knowledge and a flair for the theatre:
l
es spectacles
. As deputy mayor his functions included the administration of the state opera, the ballet and the fireworks. At home he kept open house to three categories of guests, and to these only, senior French officials, Russian émigrés, singers and musicians. Every evening they came. His hospitality and
connoisseurship
… my sister’s youth, vitality and chic … (That marriage did not last either.) Although a bedtime was supposed to exist for me, I saw a good deal of it all, and it seems to have been my lot to have known only the more uncharacteristic enclaves of German life. I was dazzled. The singers sang, the musicians played. For the first time I heard Brahms and Schubert and ‘Voi che sapete’; I also heard Stravinsky. (All Voss Strasse and my father had produced between them was Caruso on the gramophone.) A young Hungarian tried to give me piano lessons, a huge old gentleman, a cousin of the late Czarina, gave me ices at the pâtisserie. I was allowed to go to the opera, one night I 
saw the fireworks. I was taken to the races where someone kindly explained to me the workings of the tote, and let loose about the tennis club all morning. I managed to get work – ecstasy! – as ball girl on the courts.

Treats, long days of treats. Because, it became clear, I was to be sent back. I had only to stay
resolute
, I told myself (like the Red Indians), then it could not happen. They could not drag me back against my will. What was necessary was to tell my sister. If you don’t send me back, I was going to say, if you let me stay with you, I’ll give up all the rest, the opera, the social life, the tennis: you can send me to a strict day school. That part I had pat but I had no words for the rest – the
Why
not to send me back. My sister was hard to get hold of on her own, she slept late in the morning and after that everybody streamed into her room with the breakfast tray; every day I promised myself to talk to her on the next. When the bad morning came, it was still unsaid. All I could do was go limp and howl. They did drag me down the drive … they did take me back. That journey was accompanied.

We are at table at Feldkirch, we are having dinner upstairs in the room we now use in the winter, that used to be called the
morning-room
. My father sits at the head, he is carving, Lina sits on his right, the dogs are beside us, expectant. What he is carving is a smoked leg of mutton – thin curly slices like raw ham. It is his invention, made from our sheep, killed and cured at home (we don’t have money to buy ham at the grocer’s), in our way, in his way, we live off the land. My father serves Lina first, though a good deal is whisked to the dogs, I come next. The smoked gigot is very good, even Lina admits. (The rest of the village look askance. South German farmers raise sheep only for wool, they do not touch the flesh of mutton or lamb.) We also have a hot dish, some potato or flour mess of Lina’s making,
Pflutten, Knöpfli, Spätzli
– her cooking is atrocious though my father politely directs her. He is a perfect cook, of simple things too (he must have been well ahead of his time); he had taught himself in his youth, watched the French and Italian chefs of the Eighties and Nineties, sat 
in their scalding commodious kitchens, made friends, drank iced champagne with them, straight swigs from the bottle (imperial pints: easier on the wrist), later simplifying, refining the dishes he had watched. Now alas he can no longer grill or fry, or cook anything over a range at all, ours burns wood and the fumes bring on his asthma. So he cooks by remote control or over a spirit lamp in his dressing-room – exquisite egg dishes, goose liver in foaming butter … I, too, am coming on nicely, he has taught me not to overcook vegetables.

In front of each of us stands a large clear glass with a stem, my father lifts the decanter by his hand and pours precisely – each glass is one third full. Lina is about to add water to hers and mine, my father stops her, Water in Bordeaux,
quelle horreur!
I sniff mine, take a mouthful slowly, twirling the wine in the glass, as he has told me to do. He is serious about this as he is about anything involving ritual and skills, but he is not fussy or anxious. Enjoy your wine, he says, and I do. At midday we drink cider – cider made in an old wooden press from apples grown in the orchard; we drink claret at night. We don’t have to worry, he says, we have a decent amount left in the bins. He has taught me to pronounce the names on the labels and to look at the pictures of the châteaux, he has been to them, has met the owners. What shall we drink tomorrow? I am sent to fetch up the bottle. I am proud of the job, but when it’s late in the day it fills me with terror – two flights down from the morning-room, across the large dark hall filled with crucifixes and statues, down another flight into the cellar; in one hand I hold a candle, in the other I shall have a bottle (
bring it up gently
); I shall have no free hand to cross myself if the ghost appears. He is a bishop, Wessenberg was his name, and he is said to have done a foul deed in this very hall. Lina has taught me an incantation to use if, Heaven forbid, I should see him, a German jingle,
All good ghosts praise God the Lord
, yet crossing oneself is of the essence. When I’m home and safe upstairs in the lighted room with the right wine and the candle has not blown out, my father often gives me a piece of
gingerbread
or a few coins. Danger-money. For he professes to believe – believes? – in old Wessenberg as he off-handedly calls the ghost and claims to have found him occupying the chairs he is said to favour in 
the library and the Renaissance room, chairs I give a wide berth to, the dogs won’t go near them, I’ve seen their hackles rise. Well, once the wine is safely up, it is stood somewhere to settle – that room’s too warm, keep it well away from that stove! – and next day I am allowed to cut the seal and, unless the wine is very old, draw the cork, wipe the neck inside and out. The decanting is done by my father, my hands are not strong enough yet to do it properly.

And what do we talk about over our wine, at table and later when we sit by the lighted stove, a beautiful stove made of sixteenth-century tiles? Lina does not say much. She has confided in me that eating with my father scared her desperately at first (
he
said it was the right thing to do in these new times, revolutionary times), now she is getting used to it. Her ambition is to end her days as housekeeper to a priest. My father makes conversation as though Lina and I were real ladies. He tells us stories. About his youth; about Paris; about Monte Carlo and ways of breaking the bank. ‘And did you?’ ‘Oh no! But one
can
. Systems … one needs capital …’ He tells us about the pair of chimpanzees he kept as a young man first on Corsica then at his villa at Grasse where they used to rush out in the morning to feast on the neighbours’ peach-trees. When he married, the Merzes made him give up his monkeys, dirty apes, unhygienic, ‘though, you see, they were actually very
soignés
’. He tells us about the time he spent with a group of Mesmerists in a castle in central France which belonged to a Polish count, a queer fellow, who claimed that he could raise the dead.

If my father was not good at showing affection, neither did he show hurt or reproach. When I came back after running away, Lina had scolded, kissed and wept; my father let it pass. To me a curious thing happened; the sadness was gone, vanished; I settled down at once. I missed my sister (I did that for many years after wherever I was), the interlude at her house became paradise lost, a dream. Some time again, I promised myself, there would be piano lessons and tennis; meanwhile I was resigned, better than that: without quite realising it, I was content. My attitude to my father had not changed, I was
contemptuous
about his prohibitions and fears – I was sure I knew better – his minute protection of me made me rebellious, not grateful, and 
there was an element of mutual evasiveness in our intercourse. Yet detached as I was from him, I lived in his stories (I played with bits of wood which were the horses he had had as a boy and young man), I looked forward to our evenings – the claret helping? – and was open to the skills he taught me.

When I say that my father did not reproach me, I mean that he never spoke of my having deserted and exposed him (my mother for one, inevitably hearing of the escapade, treated it as a huge joke in her letters); he did scold me about having left the house unlocked, a prey to thieves and marauders. What with the changes brought by the end of the war and the setting up of the Weimar Republic, he saw himself surrounded by an almost entirely hostile environment. Monarchy with its concomitants of courts and protocol was if dull – at some early point in his life he had done his stint as ADC – of the natural order of things: it was
safe
. My mother’s defection did not help; nor did our poverty, our being ruined he called it. He felt himself betrayed by her, by his parents-in-law, by the times, by social forces he could neither understand nor name. And by me, God help me. (Are all young children unregenerate creatures? Incapable of moral responses? responses of the heart? Can these be awakened? Mine were not. I was unregenerate and self-absorbed.) What about that poverty of ours? Was it real? Or was it self-protection? Was it relative? I think it must have been all three, and at any rate very bitter for a man in his sixties who had been brought up not exactly to money but to the sweetness of life. (In a moderate, very civilised way: not for him the Merz opulence; his taste was too good, his fastidiousness too great, in their house he held himself aloof like a prisoner of honour at the victor’s banquet.) The little money he had inherited he went through early, afterwards the money came from his wives. When the first one died, the Merzes made him an allowance which continued after he married my mother. Now, my mother was gone and Grandpapa Merz was dead. He had died in his nineties at Voss Strasse before the end of the war – I was there:
a death in the house
. The Merzes had been believed to be very rich but the old man had long ceased to look after his affairs and when he was gone there was barely enough left for Grandmama 
to carry on in that huge house: my father, like many other of their pensioners, was left out in the cold. He still had Feldkirch (bought by my mother) and his collection of objects, to these he was enslaved, the house was a necessary setting to contain them. Were they beautiful? What he was after, ever since he began as a young man to stalk the sales-rooms, were craftsmanship, rarity, decorative quality, not art. He had bought few paintings, and he spurned anything much after 1600. Here too he indulged a gloomy, even macabre trend. Gothic carvings, altar vessels, mediaeval chests, rows of pewter mugs, fifteenth-century bronzes, Renaissance chairs, fragments of tapestries – we lived inside a museum, one that nobody came to see. (If he were here today, could he have borne to turn public?)

How
did
we exist? Well, by barter up to a point; and here my father, being country-bred, developed some ingenuity. For we had no land to live off, only park and lawn, and courtyards and drives where the nettles stood waist high. He had some grass ploughed up (a man and horse came to do that) and put it under potatoes and poppies. The poppies were to make cooking oil, poppy-seed oil – Lina and I had to crack and shell the pods, and my poor father deploring it all, sadly talked of olives. What was left of the lawn was used by sheep and geese. Our cooking and heating was done with wood from the park, and there was enough left to trade in for the donkeys’ feed and the fowls’, and flour for our bread. We had nearly three hundred apple-trees, good strains and known to be so, both eating and cider; these too were traded: for milk, for cream (we churned our butter), for honey and man-hours. Every few months a butcher’s assistant came out from the market town to kill a sheep or a pig. We had poultry, we had eggs, we grew vegetables, and grapes on a south wall. From these in October my father made a small quantity of fine white wine. So much for our table. My father’s wardrobe – suits, greatcoats, shirts, boots – was inexhaustible; mine was not replenished. For every day I wore a kind of overall, trousers and apron in one, or my Red Indian outfit, a relic of Merz bounty not yet too badly outgrown. To mass I wore one of my old dresses and over them, as they became shorter and shorter, one of my father’s jackets, Lina having adjusted the sleeves and little else. We 
took in one paper, a local one, chiefly for the agricultural ads;
that
must have been paid for in cash. So must some other items – salt, soap, candles, matches; and being on main electricity by now, my father’s mind was much exercised by future bills. The thing that cost most, he told us, was switching on, as the current had to flow in from so far. So we kept lights burning in the morning-room and in my father’s suite and went about the rest of the house candle in hand. (I tried to save candles by melting and remoulding the ends but found no way of managing the wick.) I quite enjoyed playing the Robinson Crusoe game, yet in my unfeeling way I was irritated by my father’s groans about money. Again, I knew so much better – he’d only have to sell some of the stuff, a few pieces from the collection, and we’d be all right again. Poor man, I fear that this is precisely what he must have done, secretly, agonisingly, in minimal instalments. He would never allow a dealer to come near the place (some prowled), but there were days when carrying a Gladstone bag and looking aloof he drove to the station in the donkey carriage and took the train to Freiburg or Basle. He’d come back in the evening inscrutable, bearing presents for Lina and me. I am sure now that this was the way the electric bills were met and Lina’s wages got paid.