Jigsaw (36 page)

‘Too near.’ He hesitated, hesitated again. ‘Docteur Joyeu is reputed to be … to be somewhat free …’

I caught on that it would be prudent to go to places where Docteur Joyeu was unlikely to be known, and to produce a better reason, if asked, than
nerves
.

‘What
is
it prescribed for?’

‘Pain.’

‘Yes.’

‘After accidents, wounding in war, operations.’ There were other conditions for which it might be required. ‘Now if for instance your mother suffered from attacks of a certain kind of asthma, it would be given to relieve an acute state.’

He did not make it very clear to me, as I think he meant to. ‘You are saying it would stop an attack?’

‘Definitely. It can be very useful, in some cases necessary.’

‘You mean
if
my mother had such attacks …?’

He suggested that she talk it over with her doctor.

So what was I going to say handing in a prescription at Toulon or Hyères?

‘You might say that the patient is suffering from heart asthma – this is far from correct but they wouldn’t expect anything more precise from a young lay person like yourself.’

I thanked him.

He handed me a week’s supply, the flat cardboard box with the two layers of twelve ampoules each inside, and a few extra ones in what looked like a half-packet of cigarettes.

I thanked him again.

‘And do try not to let your mother take more than her ration.’

‘She’s been very good,’ I said, ‘she’s not asked for more than four a day for several weeks.’

He threw up his hands: ‘Didn’t you know that the dose has been
increased
? Twice … Once in April, and again last month.’

Contemptuous of my stupidity, he talked milligrams. ‘That’s why I can’t go on, that’s why I had to warn you.’

Finicky man, my mother said. Very well, you must go to Toulon, there are two pharmacies to every street.

When I repeated what I had been told about attacks she thought she really ought to see Joyeu about them. ‘I’m afraid he’s not a really
first-rate
diagnostician.’ She must have done something of the kind because shortly after she began to talk quite seriously about her dreadful heart condition.

The threatened dinner parties did not take place, in fact we saw little of our friends. In certain moods my mother began to fight shy of them, in others she would hare off on impromptu calls. That had become one of my worries, her sudden vanishing on her own. I’d come home from market or the sea, and she was gone without Emilia having seen her leave. Emilia these days was rigidly minding her own business. (She had most kindly though at Alessandro’s request postponed her holiday this year until the autumn.) Once or twice my mother had just gone to and blithely returned from Toulon (on the Desmirails’ bus pass) with her arms full of presents for me, more trousers from the Bazar, books. Sometimes I suspected, and she denied, that she had been to the bank. Another day she walked all the way to the Villa Uley dropping in to tea with the Huxleys. Maria brought her back in the Bugatti, implying a routine lift after a pleasant visit: Maria was the soul of tact. I was aware of what she must have seen – the staggery walk, the glitter in the eyes, the erratic make-up.

Was it, or was it not, all right for me to go for outside advice? Whom
could
I tell? was one of the questions revolving in my mind. Maria? Aldous and Maria were my mother’s friends. Oriane – unthinkable. 
Philippe? A rock of strength. Yet there was that unassailable rectitude: what steps might he not take (had I not been told that there were laws …)? Moreover he had no real love for my mother. Renée? She would have been the warmest, the most absolving to turn to, but then she like Philippe had no rapport with my mother. How could I bring our tale to any of them? A sense of disloyalty, betrayal, blocked the way.

I tried – more than once – to talk to my mother herself.

‘It isn’t good for you. It can’t be.’

‘Yes it is. Very good.’

‘The way you are feeling in the mornings and whenever it wears off?’

‘That’s why I have to take it. It’s then that it does me good.’

‘You wouldn’t have to take it, if you hadn’t begun to take it.’

‘You know why I did,’ she said sharply.

‘Please, please, think of your health.’

‘I have other things to think about.’

The Panigons (minus Frédéric who was still away doing his military service) asked us to one of their dinner parties. My mother accepted. Recklessly primed, she sailed through the evening without disaster: nothing worse than a high degree of animation, poor appetite, flagging towards the end. She touched on Alessandro’s absence with exactly the right tone and length: he was travelling in Spain on his art-dealing concerns. When we got home she started to cry; it was the first time and she cried bitterly and long. She told me how frightful it was, what had happened between her and Alessandro, how unbearable his absence and what he was doing during the absence. Up till now she had hardly mentioned him, more concerned, I felt, with what she called her magic spells, her snatches of euphoria. Helplessly I tried to comfort her.

Presently she asked me to give her another hypodermic. I protested. We won’t be able to get through the week as it is, I told her. ‘Oh just go down to Joyeu, tell him my attacks are getting more frequent.’ She was so unhappy that I had to give in.

I did not think much about Oriane these days. If love can cast out fear, the opposite happens as well. Looking at her could give me a pang; when she wished she could still cast a spell; the intensity though was gone. Did this mean that my feelings had been any the less – any the less what? True? Glorious? Devastating? Real? Or did it show them up as immature, mistaken, presumptuous, an irrelevant luxury?
They had
existed
. Here were questions I would learn to work out. Some time,
not now
.

The Desmirails had moved into their new, their ultra-new, house, all cubic, spacious, cool and white with huge shutterless windows – Venetian blinds keeping out the sunlight – and scarcely any furniture except bookshelves, large dinner table, Philippe’s large desk, some not uncomfortable chairs. It had unique amenities (unique for Sanary) such as oil-fired central heating, bathrooms en suite, an electric
cook-stove
, built-in cupboards, twin beds, a refrigerator and a telephone. (The Villa Uley also possessed the two latter which when I happened to mention it distinctly annoyed Oriane.) They had named the house La Pacifique (with reference to the ocean?). Like all our houses including the Villa Uley it was not exempt from the endemic summer water shortage.

Oriane was going through a phase of conventional chic. Cousins with distinguished-looking husbands were staying at the Grand Hôtel at Bandol, the women spectacularly turned out. Oriane herself had given up the Desmirail twin look and the sublime simplicities of designer’s workmen’s clothes and chalk-white espadrilles for the more orthodox trappings of couturier elegance. Philippe showed no sartorial changes, Louis occasionally was made to appear wearing long trousers and a shirt. Oriane had become bored with buses: she was seldom seen at the headquarters of the CTL where Philippe with the help of the donkey-man and the over-paid (according to Oriane) staff was beavering on. Oriane and cousins would be off for days at Antibes or Juan; she’d stop me on the port to talk about the fabulous things she’d been engaged in. Nevertheless she appeared restless and put out.

I was introduced to the cousins, patronisingly shown off as one might a clever and devoted stray dog who followed one about. In 
point of fact I could no longer follow her about, even if I’d wished to or been invited to join the fabulous engagements, because it was getting more and more unsafe for me to leave the house. I went for very brief swims and turned over the little marketing there was to Emilia. My mother finding settled meals irksome, preferred to eat, if at all, off trays at odd hours. La Signora is not very well, I had to mutter in explanation to Emilia who replied, ‘
Se vede
.’ It is seen. My mother had grown thin lately, unbecomingly thin. Her quiet or benevolently animated hours were getting shorter and this meant more frequent demands for a hypodermic which I tried to resist or rather stave off for an extra hour or half-hour that would be filled with threats to me and abuse of Alessandro. She had begun to turn against him, speaking of him, calling him names, in a way I had not thought her capable of before. Asperity, home truths, temper, these I was used to and able to accept. What she uttered now, during bad hours, was violent spiteful malediction that would have shamed a Madame Panigon. When, horrified, I tried to stop her, exclaiming at injustice and sheer lack of truth, I was shouted down. Ungrateful brat, you’re on his side! Sooner or later, more often sooner, I gave her the screamed-for hypodermic.

Once I tried to stall with the excuse that the syringe had not yet been sterilised. (The spirit-lamp
was
slow in getting water to the boil.) You are lying, she said. I was.

After the deed was done – how I hated it – when new peace had settled on her, she would give me a sweet smile. Have I been very horrid? You have. Do forgive me. I melted.

‘I told you,’ she said, ‘I am condemned to have two sides now.’

What frightened me was the increasing dosage. Five in any
twenty-four
hours by now was not unusual. There was the perpetual worry of getting the stuff in time; far too often we were near running out. It seemed I was always en route to Joyeu or trying to find a complacent chemist. The routine at Joyeu’s consisted of my stammering out
something
about
ma mère
and another attack in the night, his looking at me bleakly from his opaque and shadowed eyes, heaving a sigh and after a 
pause, a long pause, slowly writing out a prescription. Once in a while he would say, ‘
Dites-lui de faire attention
’, mostly he would say nothing. I would utter the customary formula (French patients pay on the nail at the door),
Combien je vous dois, Docteur?
He would name the unvarying modest sum. I had it ready. ‘
Merci.’ ‘Bonsoir, Docteur.’ ‘Bonsoir, Mademoiselle
.’

I was losing my nerve about going to the pharmacies and so exercised perhaps unnecessary care, hesitating, saying a prayer on the doorstep, asking for toothpaste and aspirin along with the prescription. I was never turned down (intense relief each time) nor was I ever asked to produce the rigmarole about heart asthma.

There was one brutish occasion at home when I dropped the syringe, a glass syringe already primed with the precious contents of an ampoule, on the tiled floor. It shattered. My mother crouched down trying to retrieve fragments with her fingers. Then she flew at me, pulling my hair. I did the most sensible thing I could, ran out of the house, started the car and drove down to the chemist, our friendly chemist. Fortunately it was neither siesta hours nor night. From then on we kept two syringes in the house.

Every five or six days or so, I received a telegram from Alessandro with a new address. Valencia … Toledo … Madrid … A very old bent woman acted as telegraph boy in Sanary then; I had become adept at intercepting her. My mother developed a second sense: a few hours later on those days she would ask, Where is he? I had to tell her. Make him come back, she would say.

Renée Kisling’s car overtook me as I was driving back from a Toulon chemist. We both stopped, ‘One doesn’t see you, mon coco,’ she said. ‘You didn’t come out dancing with us on the
quatorze
.’ When I looked stupid, ‘
le quatorze juillet
.’

‘When is it?’ I said.

‘Last week.’ She gave her big laugh. ‘You didn’t hear the fireworks? You must be in love.’ She looked me over. ‘Not going well.’ I hadn’t been out to sea for weeks, would I come with her? I didn’t think I 
could, I said sadly. She asked no questions. I wished she had. We resumed our cars and drove our ways.

They had been building a casino on the port at Bandol for the last year, a proper gambling casino authorised, if not for roulette, for its mini-cousin, boules (nine holes for the little ball to trickle into instead of thirty-six) and a salle privée for baccarat. This establishment was about to be opened by the Prefect of the Var with a gala dinner and a cabaret of
grandes vedettes
from Paris such as Maurice Chevalier and the aged, perennially fascinating
diseur
Mayol. Not only Oriane and her entourage had been talking of this event for weeks. Admission to
L’Ouverture du Casino
was by invitation only. We received one, the Huxleys received one (the net was cast fairly wide). It said
tenue de soir
which for the men was understood to be anything from the
Préfet
’s white tie and the
Maire
’s frock-coat down to a dark suit. Aldous, one might be surprised to hear, elected to go, so did my mother. In both cases it was mainly to hear and see Mayol once more weave with his extraordinary hands in the famous performance of the chanson ‘Les Mains des femmes’. Aldous also went because he was at that time amused by local goings-on; my mother because the Huxleys had asked us to join their table.

For me (among other problems) there was the vexing question of clothes. I was
not
going once more into pale blue chiffon yet I had nothing else that could be called
tenue de soir
. Maria – having
meanwhile
had some second looks at me and realised that I was not nine years old and that any friendship with their Matthew, a very nice little boy indeed, would have to wait – Maria, prompted by some process of divination, offered an old mess-jacket of Aldous’s that he had needed when they went round the world a few years before. We tried it on: it reminded me of my father’s coats I had been given to wear in church when I
was
Matthew’s age; my father had been a tall man, Aldous was taller. Maria, not abashed, undid seams: there was nothing beyond the wit of a little back-street tailor to take in. So it was. After a couple of sessions of pinning and adjustments, the mess-jacket was transformed into a nice fit. With it – again guided by Maria – I was going to wear a 
plain long black linen skirt (run up by a back-street seamstress).