Jigsaw (8 page)

It was my mother, sad to say, who did not quite fit into that gentle, balanced circuit. Perhaps it was her way of treating everyone as a conversational equal that misfired with these women of Italian peasant stock – her fluidities against their bedrock – she never shirked giving as good as she did not get, so her egalitarian sharpness was meted out however young you might be or ignorant or dependent. And there was her temper. Quick, violent at its peak, soon over. But shocking because such a breach of the ironic cool: the maids were afraid of her (as I had been, still could be). When china got broken or the stove went wrong, they’d come to Alessandro to act buffer. What was worse: they did not really like her. Curious perhaps as my mother thought of herself as a socialist (on Fabian lines). I lapped it up; Alessandro, who followed her lead in so many ways, poohpoohed it. There was a rankling episode when the three of us and a woman friend found ourselves at an hotel at Bologna while a waiters’ strike was taking place. My mother went into the street and marched with the workers and banners. Not a half bottle of
acqua minerale
was to be had at our hotel let alone a crust, and the restaurants and food shops were tight shut. We were cross and very hungry. My mother returned with shining eyes replete with the cause and human fellowship. Didn’t you get ravenous? we asked. Oh, the comrades had sustained her with delicious salami, fresh bread,
fiaschi
of wine … Did you bring some back? Oh, she said – I forgot.

Our own food was good, simple good. Pasta made at home, clear lean broth distilled from a scrap of beef and a barnyard fowl, vegetables picked out in the market in the morning, lemons and olive oil, in
those fragile green phials blown at Murano, always on the table; meat conceived as garnish more than hunk: aromatic fillings in
pomodori
and
melanzane
, slivers of veal done with a light hand; salads of tender leaves. And always the abundance of fruit, Sicilian oranges in winter and baked apples and pears; the apricots, green almonds and cherries of early summer; later peaches, figs, melons, at last the ripe grapes … It was wholesome food, genuine food, never played-about-with,
show-off
food, and its basic assumptions were honesty of materials, a feeling for texture and a nice attention to both plenty and thrift. (Indeed, we always ate up the scrap of beef and the barnyard fowl.)

I enjoyed that food, how not? We all did, having healthy appetites but, like the Italians we lived amongst, took it for granted. Now it would be regarded as pastoral, utopian and luxurious beyond the dreams of cuisine naturelle and the cost of health shops. What struck me then was the democratic pattern of Italian meals – everybody who had anything to eat at all ate (with regional differences) more or less the same. It was a very big more or less of course and I felt that I knew something about that too: about rich and poor, village life and château life, Susan hanging on by means of the pawn shop, and the ways Fosca and Camilla’s families scratched a living. I ruminated on what went on around me and derived pleasure from sorting out the contrasts. The proper study of mankind …? Food? I might have done worse. Food is as revealing as money and sex, and is revealed more often. People can’t wait to tell you that they mustn’t eat cabbage or have a craving for puddings; whereas how frequently do you hear, I’ve got ten thousand in my deposit account, or I can’t bear parting with small change? As for truth about sex … Anyway at that point I thought little about that and guessed less. I had a kind of unhurried sense that there was a side to adult life – possibly agreeable – that would disclose itself when the time was right, an odd incuriosity possibly prompted by my mother’s casual disclosures and my reading so much beyond my years. It simply
was
beyond my years. (A friend once told me that as a small boy – he was the son of Aldous Huxley and thus not exactly reared in an intellectually deprived environment – he had read through a French two-volume history of Anne of Austria under the unwavering
impression that the subject was a female donkey:
Âne d’Autriche
. But then the poor chap, like me, was brought up trilingual.) My interest in how people lived was nourished quite literally by the food I shared with them. Table customs, I had long realised, were divisive. What chasm between the aspic-upon-soufflé of our
haute-juiverie
in-laws in Berlin and the sodden starches and cold bacon of the German village. In England I had experienced the alternatives of the imperturbably ordained meals at the parental Midlands home and the casual
scruffiness
at Jack and Susan’s when fending on their own. We did for ourselves – still unusual in the 1920s for people of the middle-class even when badly off. Susan did the cooking, the rest of us took turns in giving or avoiding to give a hand serving and cleaning up. Nobody could say that Susan cooked well or much (though we were fed generously), sausages and rice pudding were about her mark; the bulk of our daily sustenance was convenience food, hideous term, and certainly not as varied or as pseudo-grand as it has since become. No deep-frozen
coquilles Saint-Jacques
: baked beans we had and bloater paste in little glass jars off the corner grocer’s shelf, Jello, jam roll, bread and Marmite for tea, fish and chips for supper, with tinned salmon and pineapple cubes as stand-bys. I devoured it all cheerfully enough; what I missed was wine. I had no idea for a long time, that the very best claret, let alone port, was shipped to and drunk by (a few of) the English; I only knew what I saw and that was that wine with meals was an exception not the rule, which happened to be true then for most people.
How
we have changed all that now that England has entered a golden age of wine! (With quality and variety on offer greater than in any other country in the world.) Let us count our blessings.

In Italy we had wine; everyone drank it naturally, liberally, every day, young wine, local and cheap. Ours was chosen by Alessandro or the cook with the same care, no more, as the vegetables and the fish. It was not discussed at table. My claret evenings with my father were part of the world that was behind. Someone sometimes was offered a small glass of vermouth; brandy was kept on hand, Alessandro might be called upon to seal some masculine deal with grappa, besides these there were no spirits in the house nor was there talk about drink orimpression that the subject was a female donkey: Âne d’Autriche. But then the poor chap, like me, was brought up trilingual.) My interest in how people lived was nourished quite literally by the food I shared with them. Table customs, I had long realised, were divisive. What chasm between the aspic-upon-soufflé of our haute-juiverie in-laws in Berlin and the sodden starches and cold bacon of the German village. In England I had experienced the alternatives of the imperturbably ordained meals at the parental Midlands home and the casual scruffiness at Jack and Susan’s when fending on their own. We did for ourselves – still unusual in the 1920s for people of the middle-class even when badly off. Susan did the cooking, the rest of us took turns in giving or avoiding to give a hand serving and cleaning up. Nobody could say that Susan cooked well or much (though we were fed generously), sausages and rice pudding were about her mark; the bulk of our daily sustenance was convenience food, hideous term, and certainly not as varied or as pseudo-grand as it has since become. No deep-frozen
coquilles Saint-Jacques
: baked beans we had and bloater paste in little glass jars off the corner grocer’s shelf, Jello, jam roll, bread and Marmite for tea, fish and chips for supper, with tinned salmon and pineapple cubes as stand-bys. I devoured it all cheerfully enough; what I missed was wine. I had no idea for a long time, that the very best claret, let alone port, was shipped to and drunk by (a few of) the English; I only knew what I saw and that was that wine with meals was an exception not the rule, which happened to be true then for most people.
How
we have changed all that now that England has entered a golden age of wine! (With quality and variety on offer greater than in any other country in the world.) Let us count our blessings.

In Italy we had wine; everyone drank it naturally, liberally, every day, young wine, local and cheap. Ours was chosen by Alessandro or the cook with the same care, no more, as the vegetables and the fish. It was not discussed at table. My claret evenings with my father were part of the world that was behind. Someone sometimes was offered a small glass of vermouth; brandy was kept on hand, Alessandro might be called upon to seal some masculine deal with grappa, besides these there were no spirits in the house nor was there talk about drink or 
getting drunk although there must have been the odd bucolic soak. Expressions such as having a drink problem had not entered civilised vocabulary. In America Prohibition was already in full swing; in Italy the excesses of alcohol were not yet a ‘socially’ expected topic.

Our life then during those Italian years was stable and domestic. Though perhaps not that domestic if seen through other people’s eyes. Domestic in spirit, say, rather than tangible fact. We never had the same address for long and we can’t have had anything near a usual complement of household goods. We certainly never lived, as the French were to remark about us later on,
dans nos meubles.
Why not? Some cautionary instinct to remain in transit? Reluctance to stake upon a future better left undefined? Was it the times? – less than a decade from one war, more than a decade still from another – I do not know. Our attitudes to possessions were not consistent. Alessandro’s material belongings were sparse and neat, he dressed with unmistakable if unflaunted elegance on very little; my mother’s were profuse, not often utilitarian, seldom to hand and prone to disrepair. While she thought nothing of our living year in year out in other people’s sheets and chairs, she seldom travelled without voluminous and unusual luggage. (Never shall I forget the horror, compounded by missed train connections, of her taking a goldfish bowl in live working order.) Still, in those days people did take trunks on railway journeys; my mother’s encumbrances shrink in retrospect when I consider that they must have comprised a very fair share of her entire worldly goods. As for myself I had already gone a fairish cycle of from rags to riches, or rather riches to rags because when I was an infant and dwelt in a nursery – the real thing: day nursery, night nursery, an English nanny – in the ugly opulent house of my father’s Berlin connections, the cupboards were choked with objects which could be said to have been mine. Doll’s house and stable, toy cook stove, toy grocery shop, toy village, clockwork toys, soldiers, puzzles, picture books, plush animals … The body of these treasures had been handed down, a few were lavish new personal offerings; I used the pick of them – with intense enjoyment – the rocking horse, the railway train, the building blocks, the tomahawk, the conjuror’s box, the 
puppet theatre, what grist they made for slow-laid, complex games (I nearly always played alone), what diverse lives they opened. At bedtime while I was being scrubbed or brushed I marshalled plans for next day’s work in earnest detail with serene absorption till switched off by sleep. It was heaven. Between the ages of three and a half and seven, as I now realise, I was able to lead a life given almost entirely to pleasure. By the time we returned to our house in Baden at the end of the 1914 War, that Aladdin’s cave had vanished. Few toys, if any – assuming that some must have been packed – survived our hazardous and protracted journey across a Germany in collapse and revolution, and although the cupboard when we reached Feldkirch cannot have been bare but stocked with relics of our pre-war vie de château, nothing would ever equal the glamorous profusion of the Merzes’ accumulated bounty, and in any case existence soon changed radically. My mother went, nanny not long after; what had once been my playroom was in a now unheatable part of the house too remote and spooky even in summer for me to visit ever again; my interests turned to outdoor and farmyard life. When there was time to play, I made my games with shapes I cut out from cardboard boxes, twigs and sticks and pebbles as well as the worn-out tennis balls. Meanwhile there was my father, chained to
his
possessions. The Collection: how I failed, being too young and know-all, to see any virtue or beauty in it (a catalogue of the sale by auction, turned up recently, shows that some of his things
were
beautiful); how I despised him for his attachment to ‘objects’, objects which I, conceitedly rational, wanted him to sell off so that we should not have to worry over being able or unable to buy other things. However unfeeling this was, the fact remains that the last years of my father’s life were almost entirely circumscribed, and not happily so, by his possessions. To this day I have to be careful not to look down on other people’s objects and would not own more than a minimum (a relative term) of them, serviceable ones at that, and would swap most potential acquisitions for the joys and comforts, ephemeral though they may be, of the day’s living. In my later youth, personal accumulations other than of a featherweight portable nature were not practicable or envisaged. I had a room of my own, 
blessedly, wherever I was staying. It was seldom the same room the second time round. If I left as much as a pair of tennis shoes, it would vanish. By the time I was thirteen I had attained to a state of possessionlessness appropriate to a monk.

What did we do about books, then, my mother and I? Well, we always had them. Florentine bookshops, parcels from England, finds off landlords’ shelves, the Tauchnitz Edition, those invaluable continental paperbacks of that time when even railway stalls would offer well-printed copies of anything from Dickens and Kipling to Temple Thurston and Conan Doyle. My mother’s bed was a-stack with books, notebooks, lists, letters: letters received, letters begun, long letters sometimes finished; the paper pond Alessandro called it, and only she knew how to fish it.
The Criterion
? Gibbon Vol. II? Your brother’s tailor’s bill? Here: under the tea tray, in that kitten’s paw (there were dogs and cats sitting on that pond in lieu of ducks and geese). No, we never lacked books, though the books too got lost, left behind, were replaced.