Jigsaw (35 page)

Not with me at that point, nor with Alessandro – they took little interest in us (as Maria told me later). Alessandro was like one of those men she did not marry when she lived in Italy as a girl. I was a young person at the end of the table. (Did I mention that I knew Aldous’s books almost by heart? I kept awed silence.) About the only thing Maria said to me during that first visit was, Our little boy will be here with us for his summer holidays, it’ll be nice for you to meet each other. (When in due course Matthew arrived, he turned out to be nine years old.)

That evening we heard the red Bugatti (the sports model Maria drove with splendid skill and speed to Aldous’s delight) snorting briefly outside Les Cyprès: Maria was leaving some tuberoses and a loaf of the delicious brown bread for my mother. A typical gesture: kindness with some teasing thrown in (and a grain of rebuke).

A note on the phenomenon of fashions. Maria had been wearing trousers, white sailor trousers with wide bottoms; my mother followed 
suit next day, Alessandro was sent into Toulon to buy trousers at the Bazar des Mécaniciens on the port. I didn’t lose hours doing the same.

At Les Cyprès we jogged along through May. My mother’s twenty-four hours’ cycle followed a fairly even keel, if even keel is the right term for heavy late waking over-clouded soon by despondency (Alessandro bore the brunt of that), relieved – after the first injection – by mild euphoria silent or loquacious, followed through luncheon by irritability and strained waiting, relieved again by euphoria and so on through the third injection to the midnight dose of veronal. She struggled to remain kind to Alessandro and objective about their predicament, and most of the time succeeded. Even during the waiting hours – ‘It can’t be only half past five!’ – she was able to make jokes about herself. It was seldom that I could hear – Les Cyprès was a
well-built
house – a voice raised.

Alessandro and I were waiting on her in a state of suspended hope. If I was helpless, he was doubly so. Bound by his own feelings which I guessed to be between guilt and longing. Did we behave like ostriches? It would look like it. We were learning, but we were learning in the dark. There was no one to ask. We were both quite ignorant about drugs. They were something one read about in adventure stories (Sherlock Holmes, Chinese opium dens) and the gutter press (
fashionable
young women sniffing cocaine in night clubs). My mother’s treatment was medically obtained (we avoided talking much about Docteur Joyeu) and administered by a kind of nurse’s routine, a meticulous process, tedious if you had to follow it three times a day (we tried to keep it down to that). The needle and the glass syringe (no disposable ones then) had to be sterilised, that is boiled for some ten minutes in a little saucepan, kept covered, allowed to cool, assembled again. At first Alessandro had done this on the kitchen stove – la Signora’s medicine as far as Emilia went – when it continued he became discreet, bought a spirit-lamp, kept the paraphernalia in a locked drawer, carried out the process in their bedroom.

He had two conversions on his hands, Le Lavandou and La Cadière, my mother no longer much helping; both were nearing 
completion, he
had
to be out of the house some of the time. So, as my mother had suggested, he taught me to give her the treatment, prepare the syringe, open the little ampoule with the miniature file provided, apply the disinfectant, give the actual injection. It is not something one likes doing, I recognised it as unavoidable and minded every time.

We instinctively knew that we must keep people from knowing. For my mother that meant above all the Huxleys. Seeing them did her a great deal of good, she made efforts to keep up a façade, with them she was at her best. (Which meant careful timing.)

Though Aldous kept utterly regular working hours – two or three in the morning, at least two more in the afternoon – he and Maria were quite social. They had people for lunch and often dined out or had people to dinner; when the house became properly habitable (with three guest rooms) they generally had friends (interesting and charming) to stay. Then there were the picnics, the hilarious Huxley picnics, on beach and cliff and wind-swept plateau, nocturnal picnics with Aldous’s planter’s punch to drink, Maria’s eccentric food – she was fastidiously anti-food but fed children and guests – fried rose leaves, fried zucchini and rabbit, quince jelly to eat, games to play. These and music at night – Aldous’s Beethoven records listened to in hammocks in the garden under the stars and leaves – were sheer enjoyment, giving in to the moment. (Over, when my mother felt the first twinges of restlessness.)

As I said, we jogged along through May. At the back of our minds there must have been a belief in an eventual solution: the
Alessandro-Doris
situation would end … the need for the treatment cease …

Alessandro? Did he have moments of remission on those outings, listening to Artur Schnabel playing the First Piano Concerto? It was precisely at a soirée where the maestro in person had been playing that he and my mother first met. Then they sat out the music. Now he was receiving letters from Berlin through the poste restante. Where he read them, if he destroyed them, I did not know. What came out was that absence, as my mother had foreseen, was not working. Presently, Paul proposed an opposite remedy. 

Paul had taken it both badly and well. He was very unhappy, he still wanted to marry Doris. He insisted on going on supporting her grandmother and on Doris accepting his allowance. He tried to take it as a coup de foudre that must be allowed to run its course. He went on seeing Doris, was kind, made no demands. What he suggested was that Alessandro and Doris should go away together for a month or two … Travel. Doris intimated that she would be content with this – a stretch of time with Alessandro, limited happiness. Ultimately he only loved my mother, he would never give up his marriage (he had as good as told her). As to Paul, she did not want to think beyond her time with Alessandro. She might remain single, living only in the past … (This reminded of Cécile Panigon:
she
was in Paris by now with the blessings of the difficult rich aunt, studying art; single or not, one had not heard.)

Gradually Alessandro enlisted my mother’s support for Paul’s idea of cure by proximity. He tried to persuade her that this would be the solution – some weeks, a couple of months perhaps, on their own: it should be enough – such things run their course, he wanted to go to bed with Doris, not make a life with her. He thought he knew himself enough, he knew men …

Here my mother quoted some lines from the 129th Sonnet.

Alessandro sighed. Could she not simply regard it as a kind of delayed wild oats? He
would
return.

All as before? How can it be?

Different. We can have a long time before us yet, he told her. A good time.

My mother’s first reaction was not favourable. What she called her bad incarnation came to the fore. There was a scene; I was called into their room by her; it was the first one I witnessed. Later, unopposably, she asked for the fourth hypodermic.

In the days that followed she became consistently more and more reasonable and sweet. It was truly extraordinary. ‘I must let the dear boy have what he wants …’ I was elated by admiration, Alessandro by gratitude. And in that spirit the actual plans were made.

My mother became interested – together they weighed up different 
countries, then decided on Spain. He had never been: my mother knew Spain well, indeed she and my father had lived a year or more in Andalucia – a closed, early nineteenth-century Spain of few foreigners and abominable roads. They had to leave – regretfully – because it was not considered safe for my mother to give birth there. (I was conceived at Cadiz: sherry and the Armada.) It was not a woman’s country; she remembered my father’s Spanish valet who whatever happened in the house never took her side. That was near Ronda – they had driven up there in a horse carriage, there was no railway, oh the dust in the air, the lack of springs in the carriage, but the nobility, the grandeur of the landscape … Alessandro … and Doris, must go to Ronda. Seville? Holy Week – incessantly noisy – there she had fallen for a small boy, very fair and blue-eyed, most unusual in Andalucia, who had danced in the ritual ballet round the altar with much grace; she had lit a candle and made a wish that her baby should look like him.

I didn’t come up to expectations, I said. She laughed.

Otherwise Seville was overrated, so was Granada, more essential to see Cordoba, and he
must
go to Madrid. Alessandro had already thought of it: the Prado.

He arranged to meet Doris’s Berlin train at Marseille, and go on from there. My mother had wanted her to come to Sanary first and stay with us for a few days. Alessandro prevailed in discouraging this.

They would travel in Doris’s Chrysler – what luck it was still here, parked in our yard – he would leave his car for my mother to be mobile. I was to drive her; I said I would. With great care.

To me he talked over money arrangements. He had been paid, or nearly all paid, for the two conversions, so there was a substantial amount in the bank; out of it would have to come outstanding bills to carpenters and masons – ‘See to it that she doesn’t do anything foolish, she’s capable of spending money like water.’ They had a joint account. (There was a small branch of the Crédit Lyonnais in the main shopping alley at Sanary which opened twice a week.) Alessandro would have liked to leave most of the money with me, but I was unable to open a bank account – still legally under age. ‘Would you like me to keep it in 
the mattress?’ On the whole he thought not. ‘She’s promised to let you take charge of the cash she draws, just watch out for her writing extra cheques on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’

I thought I ought to know, among other things, how much she had to pay Dr Joyeu on her weekly visit for the renewal of her prescription. Very little, Alessandro said, just what he took to be the going rate for a brief consultation with a country GP. He named a small sum.

The nearer we got to the date of his departure – early July – the more precarious my mother’s state became, the fourth injection being routine now. With that her control held; there were no more scenes. No blackmail.

Addresses needed delicate negotiation. They agreed not to
correspond
. (No postcards from the Alhambra.) Alessandro did not reveal an itinerary; he would telegraph
me
as they moved along, where to reach him, reach him in an emergency. He did not have to add
only
; he knew I was resolved to leave him alone.

Nor was there an explicit date for his return, some time in August seemed to be the understanding. Whether that meant beginning or end, no one said.

The first address he left me was c/o American Express, Barcelona.

When he had left, my mother, buoyed by her own magnanimity and courage, was almost in high spirits, and full of plans for our entertainment and occupation. She was going to give dinner parties, go on sightseeing trips – ‘We have the car’ – she might take up writing again. ‘I do have notes for my essay on Stendhal and Flaubert.’ It was the first I heard of it.

None of the plans worked.

She insisted on giving me dinner at Le Sourd, so we drove there. Le Sourd, elegant, not large, practising a restrained classical cuisine, was then one of the most expensive restaurants in Toulon. We’d been there before, taken by one of Alessandro’s patronesses. My mother 
ordered – there was no gainsaying – an elaborate and heavy dinner: I must have this and that and so would she … It was a Sunday; the place had undoubtedly been bustling at noon, now it was nearly empty with the waiters glum and tired; the French do not dine out much on Sunday night. My mother picked at the first course, some delicacy barely in season; the duck looked huge on her plate and she could not touch it. By the time they wheeled in the paraphernalia for the crêpes Suzette, she told the head-waiter she was taken by a malaise, and me to get her home without delay (she needed the fourth hypodermic). As expeditiously as I could, I paid for the uneaten dinner and drove her back at speed.

When I went to the chemist with the
ordonnance
, the weekly
prescription
, the pharmacist asked me to wait. The shop as usual was full of people. He beckoned me to step behind the counter and come into his cubby-hole.

‘
Mademoiselle
,’ he said, ‘I cannot go on filling these prescriptions – not week after week, not for these amounts … Docteur Joyeu exaggerates …’ He said it sadly, considerately, also with exasperated firmness.

I was dumbfounded. ‘But these are medical prescriptions!’

‘For
what
?’ he threw at me, ‘for what medical purpose?’

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘to calm the nerves.’

He looked at me with pity and more exasperation.

‘You must understand: pharmacists are controlled … There are laws …’ He talked about narcotics,
stupéfiants … la drogue …
Terrifying words. ‘That’s what your mother is playing with.’

‘She needs it,’ I said.

‘Yes:
now
she
would
need it.’ Again the anger and the pity.

This was panic. ‘What are we to do?’

‘
Je suis désolé pour vous, et pour Madame votre mère
. Her husband, I understand, is away?’

(And there is not going to be an SOS to American Express, Barcelona, I thought. Anyway, it’d be too late – What would
I
do if I went home now empty-handed?) Again I asked, ‘What are we to do?’

He would give it to me this time, he said, not to would be inhumane, 
and
dangerous. He would also go on until … until other steps could be taken, to honour a prescription every now and again. Meanwhile he advised me to try some other pharmacies.

There was only one other at Sanary, I interrupted.

Oh, he would avoid Sanary altogether. I must go further afield, Toulon, perhaps Hyères … And not to the same too often.

Bandol? Bandol was nearer, I said.