Jigsaw (24 page)

I am apt to see men and women in terms of paintings; the likenesses meant to be generic rather than exact. To conclude on a more factual plane about my mother’s appearance: she was by no means short without being noticeably tall, her figure was very feminine, with a certain well-carried opulence; her arms and shoulders were rounded, her hair chestnut and her colouring olive (which made her having a blue-eyed, very fair child – pinko-Aryan she called me when in the mood – surprising to her, my father also having been dark); her hands were pretty and a little too small. She did not bother overmuch about what she wore, in fact she could dress quite badly, apt to fling 
on, buttons the wrong way, something she’d acquired because she’d seen it look good on someone else. It did not matter. She had radiance, she had presence.

Near the end of June we were sought out by a reappearance from what was to me already a remote past. A car drew up outside Les Cyprès, a smart Chrysler roadster. A young woman got out, very thin but quite smart as well. She asked if my mother lived here. I recognised her. She had looked a waif and she still looked a bit of a waif in spite of the Chrysler – sallow and large-eyed and flat-chested. It was Doris von R., the girl from Berlin, my mother had met goodness knows where and who had been supposed to look after me at Cortina d’Ampezzo on my first stay in Italy, and instead vanished lured by a film test. It was only seven years or so ago. She took a bit longer identifying me.

She had always wanted to meet my mother again, she said, and now here she was giving her sweet grandmother a holiday in the South of France. (The grandmother, I remembered, who had brought up this orphaned stray and tried to make ends meet by running a pension in Berlin where all the guests were friends and out of work and seldom paid and got fed all the same.) Doris said she’d left Mammerl at the hotel for a rest after their journey, the Hôtel de la Plage by the sea (I noted: the Judge’s hotel, the best, a good sign). At this point
Alessandro
appeared. Here Doris was quicker off the mark if jumping with surprise. ‘Dr Caligari, I presume?’

‘Shsh,’ I said. ‘Not any more. They are
married
.’

‘Your mother married
him
?’

‘She did.’

‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘How very nice.’ Pause. ‘He’s changed less than you.’

Well: my mother joined us, Emilia was asked to provide tea, before long Doris was telling her life story and presently Alessandro turned the Chrysler for her and the two drove down to fetch the old lady up to our house. When they came back he was at the wheel (‘she drives abominably,’ he said aside to me). The grandmother, as thin and more frail than Doris, turned out not only sweet but witty and wise. They stayed for dinner, the next day we had dinner with them at their hotel, 
we took them to beaches and into Toulon, showed them the sights and so it went on for the rest of their stay which was just under a week. During it we learned a good deal about Doris, past, future and present.

She had been a gallant girl when she fetched up in Northern Italy, left stranded by the American script writer to whom she acted secretary. She must have been more or less the age that I was now. She was still gallant. She needed it when she got back to Berlin and the pension and a life of uncertainties and excitement. Inflation, poor health, boring jobs, underpaid, attempts and failures at the stage, talented friends, freedom, ideas and ideals. Love affairs with adorable and impossible young men (her description) – actors, poets, writers – that fizzled out if they did not end in disaster. Flirtations with radical causes. More than one of the impossible young men had been Communists or
near-Communists
. The only thing for decent people to be now, she told us; Germany was getting disgustingly nationalistic, we could have no idea how horrible the right-wing people were becoming, openly attacking the Weimar Republic, ‘They even speak of
war
.’ Her friends said the Republic was weak, split between the Democrats, the Centrum, the Social-Democrats, the Communists.

My mother’s old left-of-Fabian leanings were stirring, she asked whether they were still talking of Rosa Luxemburg whom she had always admired. ‘Oh we do,’ Doris said, ‘and the officer swine who murdered her.’

Had she, Doris, ever been a Party member?

Not quite. She nearly did at one point … But now … Well now that things had so changed for her, now that she was engaged – she didn’t think Paul would like it. Paul was her fiancé. Not, she reassured us, that he wasn’t on the right side – he had voted Social-Democrat – only he didn’t believe in revolution. ‘He’s much older than most of us, he’s in his
thirties
.’

We listened.

He was an architect, the kind that builds department stores and hotels, but we mustn’t think he was a philistine, just because he’d got so much money.

We said of course not. 

The facts were that he was a serious man, and very much in love with her. They were going to be married. As soon as they could that was. He had to get a divorce first. Oh that was all right – he and his wife were quite in agreement, they were very good friends and she too was going to marry someone else. No one was hurt. It would have been very wrong to break up a marriage – one didn’t do
that
– wouldn’t we agree?

The three of us said yes.

Weimar had made the German law quite civilised; there didn’t have to be guilty parties any more – it could all be done on incompatibility. The law was sensible but it still took long, bureaucracy … the courts were slow … It’d take a year, perhaps more, before she and Paul could get legally married. Meanwhile he wanted them to be fairly discreet – politeness towards his wife. He had given Doris the car – ‘it belongs to me’ – and suggested taking her grandmother on this holiday. He had given them so much money. ‘You can’t imagine how good he’s been to Mammerl – he wants her to close down the pension and live with us. He’s building a house by a lake in Bavaria. And he’s so good to our friends, he’s finding them jobs and giving them things, he’s changed our lives. I’m very fond of him. But it’s strange to be suddenly so rich; I don’t know if it’s right.’

The evening after they’d left, we talked them over. My mother said how much she had liked Doris – a good girl, a brave girl … Oh yes, quite silly at times, and rash – the kind that comes to grief. All looks so well for her now, yet somehow one fears …

Did they think she was attractive? I asked.

My mother looked at Alessandro. He reflected. ‘She’s got more sex appeal than Oriane.’

‘For you?’

He laughed. ‘You know, I don’t really like those skinny women. Besides she’s too young.’

My mother laughed too. ‘She’s about
your
age, I would say.’

‘At least two years younger,’ he said with contempt.

‘I do wish her happiness,’ my mother said. ‘I hope to God it’ll all 
come off and she’ll marry that possible man. I’m afraid he’s a bit too steady for her. She may even do something quixotic about having too much money.’

‘She drives so badly,’ Alessandro said gloomily, ‘she’s got no idea how to handle a car – not that she’s clumsy, or very reckless, just fatalistic and vague. The risks for the poor old lady!’

‘The risks,’ said my mother, ‘for the poor young girl.’

A combination of circumstances persuaded my mother to leave Sanary for a few weeks. She was the kind of nomad who prefers not to budge. The senior of her trustees had long been nagging her to agree to a personal encounter – there really were things to be signed, discussed, decided – he was prepared to meet her at any mutually convenient place, somewhere in Switzerland, say. For a time she deferred. (All he wants is to rub it in about my declining fortunes.) This was all too true. Yet as Alessandro was continuing to earn a reasonable living, her apprehensions of being told about her future diminished and she began to think that she might even be able to charm the old devil into a further decimation of her capital. At any rate he would pay (out of her capital) for the journey and stay in Switzerland or wherever. She recalled some resorts on the Lake of Lucerne that were rather pleasant in the height of summer. She had been told she’d been staying far too long at sea level. This gratuitous advice had been tendered by a doctor who entered our house briefly once or twice when Alessandro ran some carpenter’s tool through his hand and for my occasional bad throat. The doctor was recommended by a pharmacist, the same who used to supply – and still did – my mother with sleeping pills. I say gratuitous because I was not aware that she’d had a consultation. He must have taken an interest in her as he was being shown out, on the doorstep as it were. He told her she looked run down to him and ought to be thinking of a change of climate.

My mother did not pay much attention to her health, therefore nor did we. She treated it rather like her clothes, careless, if open to 
suggestions. There
was
her insomnia; we were used to that and she dealt with it – reading late, sleeping late, more often than not with some soporific.

The doctor, the pharmacist had chosen, was a man of depressing appearance. Gaunt as a starving horse, yellow-faced with
darkly-ringed
, sunken eyes and a few strands of flat black hair, dressed winter and summer in a greasy black suit – in short he looked straight out of a bad horror film. His name was – I cannot help it, that
was
his name – Joyeu, Docteur Joyeu. One can predict the jokes. Behind his back they called him Docteur Lugubre and they were fond of saying that he was not as jolly as he looked.

Because of his advice or not, my mother became charmed by the idea of Swiss mountain lakes. Emilia was due for a month’s holiday, this fitted in, so on the first of July they both departed, my mother for a few days with her trustee at Lucerne followed by some weeks of
rest-cure
further up the shore, Emilia for her native Tuscan village, leaving Alessandro and me alone for the first time under the same roof.

Not for long. Not for long in any twenty-four hours under our own roof. Such was our friends’ and neighbours’ concern for our state – abandoned by wife, by mother, abandoned by the
cook
– that we were being asked for elevenses at the café, for luncheon, picnics, apéritifs and dinner.
Les garçons
, they called us, the bachelors, and Sanary strove to improve our lot. (They seemed somewhat amused by our position.) Alessandro and I took to the whirl like ducks to water. We gave up any pretence of housekeeping. A
femme de ménage
had been secured for us; she did not turn up regularly, nor did we pay attention to her comings and goings, give any orders or get in provisions. All was well as long as the house looked reasonably clean (not Emilia clean, that was not expected), and if returning at some late hour after an evening with the Kislings at the
bal musette
, we found our beds had not been made, it hardly mattered. On the rare occasion when we had not been asked out for a meal, we took each other to the bistro.

I also gave up any pretence of work (Alessandro, always
conscientious
, went on supervising the converting villa). Up till then, summer months and all, I had set aside a few hours each day 
ploughing through books, writing précis, trying to master miscellaneous grammars. (Someone at Finchingfield had come up with the apparently sound idea that one thing I might be eligible for in spite of my lack of formal education was an interpreter’s certificate which could be obtained then from some branch of the Chamber of Commerce by sitting an exam without having attended any preliminary school or course. This seemed tailor-made, and was welcomed by my mother as a means to appease my guardians. So one day I had put my name down at an office in the City, I forget exactly where, was given a leaflet with recommendations and told to present myself for a viva and a written examination in some two years’ time. I took it lightly, except for the closer look at grammars.)
Not
so now. No grammar, no books, during those weeks Alessandro and I were on our own.

We swam, we played tennis. Some of it with the elder young Panigons, Frédéric and Cécile, who seemed to be a good deal under foot. Well, their parents gave us some jolly good dinners; whatever fun we made of Madame Panigon, she knew her food – not in the Kislings’ Homeric style of hospitality, but in the established mode of French provincial cooking south (not too far south) of Lyon – and Monsieur was the only man we knew who had anything like a cellar. We played
belote
, we played
chasse-coeur
, we played mah-jong. Philippe liked card games, though never played for money; I saw to it that we didn’t miss a chance of going to the Desmirails’. Oriane would sit by, sewing.

Even Louis asked Alessandro to come up to his cabin and be shown his paintings. We went. What did you make of them? I asked
Alessandro
afterwards. He doesn’t work enough, Alessandro said.

‘Because of Oriane Desmirail?’

‘Who else?’

‘It isn’t
her
fault,’ I said.

‘Oh
fault
,’ said Alessandro, ‘things just happen to people.’

It was as if the good days could never end. And what are we doing today? we’d ask each other, happily, when we met in the morning. We still made our own café au lait.

We seemed to be growing younger, as though we were living a second youth; or perhaps Alessandro was growing younger and I was growing up.

As we arrived at the building site one Saturday morning, we found that the villa had reached a stage of near-completion. The masons’ work was done. The new doorways and casements were in place though not the actual doors and window panes, the verandah and entrance hall were still roofless, open to the sky. There were no stairs up into the house, so the workmen had laid a gangplank. They had gone the night before leaving everything clean-swept and bare; tools, buckets, concrete cleared away – what we had before us was the shell of a house, empty, bare, a skeleton: a place for children to play in.