Jigsaw (19 page)

This is how I see her (some photographs I have bear me out). Kisling painted her often, mostly when she was very young and not yet fully herself, sitting for him more as a model than a portrait subject; the paintings, good Kislings, if immediately recognisable, are not terribly like Renée: too stylised perhaps, too slick, prettified. Her laugh was huge; her speaking voice gentle, low, fastidious; her language racy or lyrical in turn. When she was talking of a bird, a plant, a dish,
the sea
, she could use inflections that reminded one of Colette and may indeed 
have had a similar source, a farmyard and orchard childhood in a literate and cherishing family with whom the passion for nature, cookery and French literature played an everyday and equal part.

Her parents might be labelled bourgeois with a slight military flavour (however antithetical that sounds when applied to Renée); her father, dead, had been a Commandant of the Garde Républicaine. For her too the first move towards
affranchissement
had been to get to
Montparnasse
, on her own, very young. There, like others she took up with, she painted, earned a little here and there and as a model, shared the exhilarating hand-to-mouth existence and camaraderie of artists and beginners. I imagine her at that stage – farouche, incorruptible, devoid of inhibitions of any kind, giving and devouring pleasure.

When Kiki and Renée first lived together and during the early years of their marriage, they were often miserably poor, destructively poor (one has only to think of Modigliani – whom Kisling took into his own studio, at 3 rue Joseph-Bara, 5
^e
gauche, when he was ill,
moneyless
, in fact dying), so poor that there could be whole weeks when credit had run out, when there was nothing to eat. Kisling survived, and it was chiefly Renée’s strength that pulled them through. She had the loyalty, courage, high spirits and tough
débrouillardise
, and she put her hand to anything. It is said that she once got a job helping out in a circus.

Renée – again like Colette – adored her mother,
Maman
. Nothing – defection to Paris, the shifts and wildness of her life, the sexual notoriety later on – seems ever to have clouded that exquisite filial relationship; Renée was and remained a devoted daughter, looking after her mother’s every need in the years of her own prosperity. (When
Maman
died, in reasonably old age, Renée distraught, flung herself on the floor, howling with grief.)

Equally, she was a good mother, bringing up her two little boys with a wild beast’s protectiveness and tender care (and some strictness). When we first knew the Kislings, the boys, Jean and Guy, must have been about a small three to five, brown as nuts, agile as monkeys, clever, naughty, tough and not averse to using charm. They spent their summers in the sea and part of their winters in the snow (
not
at 
Sanary: they were sent skiing). They bore no resemblance to the studious, pale-faced French child expected to swot indoors, for the
lycée
, the
bachot
, the
grandes écoles: their
childhood was spent in brilliant physical freedom.

A good wife? Depends on how one looks at it. What had doubtless begun as a huge love affair modulated to a married couple who had faced the world together and were now enjoying it in perhaps slightly different ways. Renée, if hardly domesticated in the ordinary sense,
was
a home maker. On large and simple lines; no chi chi – much style.
Unlike
Colette, her talents went into life only (her painting stage did not last), into the arts and skills of living. The Kislings’ hospitality has become a legend: for its generosity, the vigour and authenticity of the food, its ambience of healthy sensuality. Renée was not just a very good cook – with her own hallmark, nourished like a good composer’s by tradition – she was one of the best of the handful of the very best I’ve known (and I did seek them out); coevals and youngers were her disciples, her influence on my cookery and eating has lasted to this day. (The best known, and professional, of the heirs must be Richard Olney, who ate at her feet as it were in his young days in France.)

Renée in the kitchen, Renée
à
table
… there was also Renée in the sea – perhaps that was her greatest passion – she was a tremendous swimmer, diver, sailor, she ran her own fishing boat … The sea –
la mer
: salt water, waves – was her natural habitat; perhaps she was what she sometimes looked, a sea monster.

Kisling bathed a little, splashing about with the boys (who swam like fishes), I’m not certain even that he
could
swim. He worked extremely hard; during their halcyon times at Sanary as well as in his Paris studio (the large studio attached to the small flat four flights up). He seemed always pressed to produce enough to fulfil his contracts with the dealers; one felt that he couldn’t afford to let up. As soon as done, a painting vanished; there were weeks when there was not a single canvas of his on their walls. At the same time he played hard – the big nights, the long nights out, with
les copains
, with beautiful girls, with wayward girls, at the Montparnasse cafés and
boîtes
, the
bals musettes, faire la bombe
as one called it in those days (not any longer). Bounce, vitality: 
drink till dawn, at work by dawn, was one of Kiki’s things; another was to make big play with women. The joyous cries of welcome –
Voilà les belles filles
– of appreciation, the bear-hugs, these expressed how much he loved them, how desirable they were to him. It added to the mutual glow, it flattered (as Alessandro’s quieter but equally automatic, if abstemious, demonstrations flattered), that was how his circle saw him, how he saw himself, a part of his charm – he
was
lovable – his charisma. Renée when she was present, she often was, smiled her serene wide smile. It was also all a little pat, a little loud, a little public. Whereas Renée … We are back at the good wife question.

She had been, she could be, a rock to him; and goodness there was a bond. At the same time, her infidelities were frequent, unconcealed, casual on the whole, often concurrent. If they were not flaunted (their very naturalness prevented that), they were certainly not discreet. Renée did not flirt, Renée did not flatter, when she wanted to go to bed with someone – man or woman (
far more
men than women), friend’s husband, student, sailor – she made it clear. Then she did. This was accepted. By their milieu, that is, which shared her attitude, and by Kiki (or so it was presumed). If Renée stood out, it was because her actions, as in everything else, were so instinctive and her appetites were larger.

That permissiveness, partly founded on a love of living here and now, and on an entire absence of religious qualms, was, quite
consciously
I believe, a moral one. A blow struck against possessiveness (bourgeois), jealousy (ungenerous). You don’t own anyone, you don’t begrudge pleasure to anyone and if it is your own love or lover, let it be. We are friends.
Les amis
, that was the key notion,
les camarades, les copains.
It had applied in war, now it went for money as well as sex. (Something not so dissimilar had been going on,
mutatis mutandis
, in Bloomsbury. Of that
I
knew nothing as yet.) Nineteen-twenties
Montparnasse-South
of France attitudes were good-natured: antipodal to the chilling, cruel and ultimately anti-human permissiveness of the eighteenth-century French aristocracy as reflected in
Les Liaisons dangereuses
. There pleasure was a means to subjugation and
humiliation
, the ends of conquest vainglory, power, revenge. One might give a thought to the fact that Choderlos de Laclos’ libertines preceded
the French Revolution, while those I am talking about followed the First World War.

Much of what I am trying to piece together about the Kislings and their lives and ways was not clear to me all at once during that summer when I first came into their presence; some came gradually, some in retrospect, all the same I drank in a good deal.

The living en fête in the evenings, their maxims of good behaviour. A principle was summed up for me in one not particularly elegant sentence I heard at table one night, sitting – figuratively – at the low end as children and young persons do in France, unsegregated to nurseries or juvenile resorts, expected to take part by listening and speaking up intelligently as the occasion arises. They are not elevated to pretence adults, they’re treated as rational children and young persons. I cannot recall who said it – it may well have been Renée herself – but I can hear the sentence word by word, ‘
Si on est amis, il n’y a aucune différence si on fait l’ amour avec
.’ Which, in a non-literal translation, said to me, ‘If it’s a friend, it’ll be all right to make love together.’ It made a great impression and I salted it away for future use. I liked the easy sound, the niceness of it, and there was the contrast to what I was afraid had shown in Toni Nairn’s outburst about her sister’s life. That the Kisling doctrine took no account of
chagrin d’amour
nor the pangs of threatened loss (indeed most of the facts of human nature) escaped me. Well, I did not know much about these (except from books).

Or
did I
?
What about my mother? Wasn’t it odd that I didn’t make a connection. Not having been brought up exactly in, say, bourgeois sexual orthodoxy, did I really need the Kislings’ exhilarating liberation? Was there not the memory – somewhat remote – of the afternoon I spent in my infant’s pram in the hall of the Danish novelist’s bachelor flat? And before that, long before, the ‘renunciation’, a key point in her life, when she gave up a man she found entirely right for herself, because to leave an ill and older wife would have been vile, and so
recast
her life by accepting my father. Now, all that was history, my mother’s history; however much she let one into it, it belonged to her 
and to another time. A taboo remains. One listens; one believes it happened; one does not believe it has a reality applicable to oneself. My mother’s past was my childhood’s bedtime tales.

What about
chagrins
– and
acharnements – d’amour
I had seen with my own eyes? O, serious, courteous, dignified in retreat; young Alessandro in pursuit with melancholy fire, desperate at times; her dash to Venice from which nothing, not six children in a lost property office let alone one child in a comfortable hotel, could have held her back; her desolation on that winter beach. Those events were part of my reality yet in an idiom that was a far cry from Sanary’s sane and easy ways; they were on my mother’s scale. They, too, were in the past; now was the present, I wished to believe that it should and could be maintained; like peace.

That year I
was
writing to Rosie Falkenheim; or rather she wrote to me and I answered promptly. Of course I had told my mother, that was irresistible, and she showed all the expected interest in the story. It was not treacherous, Rosie must have supposed as much and my mother promised secrecy.

Easy, she said, there was no one here to tell it to.

‘Madame Panigon would have sat up at what she’d call
un scandale
, but as she doesn’t know the first thing about the English ins and outs –’

God forbid, I said.

The Panigons of all the old Café de la Marine befrienders were the ones we had kept up with most. (Monsieur Panigon had shifted his practice from Montélimar to Toulon, and the family now lived at Sanary in a house they’d bought.)
They
kept up with us. Once they had really met Alessandro they became fascinated by my mother’s marriage – the difference in age showed, always had, and my appearing to grow up did not help. They acted impeccably oblivious of such facts at the Sunday luncheons and boules (returned by less regular dinners chez nous) which had become a fixture. What they said behind our backs 
was a different kettle and easy to imagine; even to my face Monsieur’s irony in referring to Alessandro as
votre cher papa
was transparent.

God forbid, I said again. They mustn’t even hear that a friend from England is arriving, once Elise’s (that was Madame; we were on such terms now) curiosity is aroused …

‘Don’t you worry, my little Hermes,’ my mother said, ‘your protégés will be safe with me. And I shan’t tell even Alessandro – though he’s not very good, as we know, at telling stories, you never can be sure about what may slip out from someone to whom it isn’t important. You have to have a very strong motive to keep a secret.’

‘
You
haven’t even met Rosie?’

‘My motive is
very
strong: lack of an appreciative audience.’ She added, ‘And I want to please you – and your friend. It’s a wretched situation to be in. You must do all you can.’

And so it was decided that
I
must do the booking. It’s all quite simple, she advised me, behave naturally: go there, say you have friends coming from England, these are the dates, these are the names, rooms not too far apart would be all right – the rest is not their business. French hotels are civilised in such matters. ‘And whatever you do, don’t forget to ask about the prices,
that
would raise suspicions.’

It went as she had said. In due course Rosie arrived, the Judge to follow the next day as arranged (the hotel would send a taxi to meet his express at Toulon). I met her train and settled her in at the La Plage. She appeared confident and calm. We agreed that it would be best to avoid all local contact. No, she wouldn’t come to our house, thus she’d not meet my mother; whether I would see her was left undiscussed, we were more formal with each other than we had been in London. I asked after Toni (to whom I
had
sent postcards). Rosie smiled. ‘Toni has decided that I’ve gone on holiday in the South of France by myself.’ I smiled too. Whereupon she asked me to stay and have a drink.

A couple of days later a note from her was delivered at our house: Jack would like to meet me and was asking me to lunch with them at their hotel next day.