Sybille Bedford

by Selina Hastings

  It was from this moment that Sybille’s disillusionment with Catholicism began. Over the coming months, although she continued to accompany her father on Sundays, she began to turn against the Church, to dismiss what she was being taught to believe. When she was told by some of the villagers that her parents, because of their divorce, would go to hell, she became even more obdurate in her objections. “I made my first Communion in a state of smug rebellion,” she wrote. “I did not like what I was being made to hear—mortal sin, hellfire, finicky Church commandments. So I took against religion, simple as that: disliked it, didn’t believe it, didn’t want to.”

  As the weeks passed, Sybille became increasingly aware of a painful sense of isolation; when not at school or engaged in housework, she was often left to herself, reading, riding her bicycle or knocking tennis balls against the wash-house wall. Domestic life was busy but it was also bleak. Lina, brisk and efficient, was no substitute for Lisa, while Maximilian, sunk in gloom, remained impenetrable and out of reach, the pessimism and intense anxieties to which he was always prone now weighing more heavily than ever. “One could never tell, he used to say, what one might find upon returning from a journey…My father loved me very much,” Sybille recalled, “but he couldn’t show it.” The only occasions when she experienced any real connection with him were in the evening after the day’s work was done. Sometimes there was a game of roulette, and often over dinner Max would reminisce about his past, his country childhood, his periods abroad in France and Spain, gambling in Monte Carlo, his beloved menagerie, even his career in the army—although with no mention of any scandal.

  For Maximilian one of his few pleasures was his fine cellar. All his life he had been a connoisseur, with a sophisticated palate and an expert knowledge of the great vintages and chateaux, over the years accumulating a substantial collection, part of which still remained. Now every evening his daughter was sent to fetch a bottle for the following day. The brick-lined cellar was deep belowground, down a steep and narrow flight of steps, the dark, subterranean vaults a terrifying place for Sybille, who, candle in hand, felt she was entering a sinister kingdom peopled by ghosts. When she had safely returned, she handed the bottle to her father, who put it aside to settle. Once seated at table he took up the wine decanted the day before, pouring a careful half-glass for his daughter and for Lina, before tasting it himself with great concentration. Sybille watched him carefully, imitating his every gesture and expression. “I sniff mine, take a mouthful slowly, twirling the wine in the glass, as he has told me to do…He has taught me to pronounce the names on the labels and to look at the pictures of the chateaux, he has been to them, has met the owners…Next day I am allowed to cut the seal and, unless the wine is very old, draw the cork, wipe the neck inside and out. The decanting is done by my father, my hands are not strong enough yet to do it properly.” For Sybille these sessions were important, remembered as the only real communication she ever had with her father. Perhaps predictably, his love of wine inspired a lifetime’s passion, a subject about which she was to become extremely knowledgeable and which she was to pursue with dedication throughout the years to come.

  Yet in every other area Sybille felt she remained at an impossible distance from her parent. She was aware of his unhappiness, his increasingly fragile health—he had grown very thin, with a bronchial cough that sounded throughout the night—and yet she felt unable to love him or show compassion. Much of the day Max sat smoking and staring into space; his fury with Lisa remained unabated and he spent hours brooding in an angry silence. There was an aura of defeat about him. As the weeks passed, his daughter found it increasingly difficult to cope; at first she was impatient and annoyed, then overwhelmed by depression, by an acute sense of desolation which seemed to come from nowhere. Craving warmth and affection, she longed for her sister, for Katzi, the one person who demonstrably loved her and who seemed to understand her. Sybille decided to run away.

  Katzi was living in Wiesbaden, where her husband, Hans Erich Borgmann, was Beigeordneter, or deputy mayor. The journey, of over 300 kilometres, would be complicated and so her plans were made with care. Money was no problem, thanks to a generous tip Sybille had received from one of Lisa’s lovers, to which she now added some notes discreetly removed from her father’s wallet. The main difficulty was how to leave the house without anyone hearing her go. The gates were locked at night, the front door bolted, the ground-floor windows barred; the scullery door, however, had a modern lock, easily opened, and thus very early one June morning Sybille crept silently downstairs, out by the back door and climbed over the garden wall. “I then proceeded to walk, not run, at a good pace…I carried a purse and a book, a book about Red Indians, and nothing else…When after an hour or so I got to the railway station I went straight in and asked for a single ticket, half fare, fourth class…I first took a local to Freiburg then changed to another slow train to Karlsruhe…[where] I changed again…I read my book; I felt no hunger, and I felt quite calm.”

  Once arrived in Wiesbaden, Sybille asked directions to the Borgmanns’ house. Here she found her brother-in-law at home and the whole place in an uproar. Her absence had been discovered not long after she had left; Max, frantic with worry, immediately contacted the police and telegraphed to the Borgmanns. Katzi had been out playing tennis and on her return was shocked to be told what had happened; she was visibly distressed, warmly embracing the runaway while at the same time explaining to her the fearful turmoil, emotional and practical, that her disappearance had caused. Within a couple of days Max himself arrived, looking so shaken that the Borgmanns insisted he stay for a while to recuperate. “My father did not reproach me, asked no questions,” Sybille recalled. “With me—we were seldom alone—he showed little beyond an aloof sadness.” The missing money was never mentioned, Max’s sole reproach to his daughter, “Billi—you left the house unlocked, open to enemies and thieves.”

  The few weeks spent with the Borgmanns were purely pleasurable. Unlike the rest of the country, Wiesbaden was flourishing; the Rhineland had been occupied by France since 1918, and as a consequence of the substantial French presence in the town trade restrictions had been abolished, and there was plenty of food in the shops and little unemployment. Borgmann himself was, like his wife, a Francophile; he spoke excellent French and was almost as sophisticated a connoisseur of French food and wine as his father-in-law. The house on Parkstrasse was comfortable and well run, the table excellent, and almost every evening there was a lavish soirée, usually with a recital given by both singers and instrumentalists. As deputy mayor of Wiesbaden, Borgmann was responsible for the running of the state opera and ballet; a serious music-lover, he had many musician friends, who attended his parties, as did a sophisticated circle of well-to-do White Russian émigrés and French army officers. As hostess, Katzi charmed them all with her prettiness, vivacity and chic.

  For Maximilian, Parkstrasse provided an essential period of recuperation. It was also in a sense a return to his way of life as a bachelor: here he was able to idle away his days smoking French cigarettes, visiting the casino, enjoying the company of charming women and an excellent standard of French cuisine. For Sybille the experience came as a revelation, “the most stimulating period of my life so far.” She was dazzled by her new environment and the unaccustomed freedoms she was granted. Now thirteen, she was allowed to stay up for the evening concerts, enthralled by the music of Bach, Brahms, Mozart, Stravinsky; she was taken to the opera, to watch the fireworks, and taught to play tennis at the local club. She came to like Borgmann, accompanying him to the races most afternoons, and she was intensely happy to be reunited with her sister, even if Katzi had little time to spare: as sociable as ever, she spent much of the morning in bed or with her dressmaker before going out to meet friends in town. Katzi had had a daughter, whom she treated with affection, although, as Sybille carefully noted, “not the quality of the affection she had given to me spontaneously from birth.” The chil
d had been born at the end of the first year of her marriage, by which time Katzi was already out of love with her much older husband; before long she began embarking on a number of affairs with men her own age, very much as she had while still a girl in Berlin.

  The weeks passed quickly and soon arrangements were made for the Schoenebecks’ return to Feldkirch. Sybille was appalled when she learned they were leaving, but there was nothing she could do, and almost before she realised what was happening she found herself with her father on the train to Freiburg. When they arrived at the schloss, Lina welcomed her with tears and reproaches: “How could you have done this to him?” Although she had been miserable yet again to part from Katzi, Sybille soon resigned herself to the inevitable, settling back into the familiar regime, “hard-working days filled with bucolic tasks carried out cheerfully and not badly, accepting contentment.” From time to time, and to her great joy, Katzi herself made an appearance, arriving in a big chauffeur-driven Panhard and always bringing with her some delicious pâté or chocolate. Ostensibly she came to spend time with her father, but in fact these visits were essentially a pretext, a chance for her to go off for a few days with her current lover.

  Whereas before at Feldkirch it had been possible to survive by hard work and some simple bartering, now suddenly it was not. In order to keep his little household going, Max was obliged to start selling part of his beloved collection. From time to time he would disappear into his library to select one or two small but valuable items, for him a painful process, although his demeanour gave little away. Early the following morning, the two donkeys would be harnessed to the carriage, and Max, his slender figure immaculately dressed in hat and tailored greatcoat, gloves in one hand, Gladstone bag in the other, was driven by one of the local farmers to the station. In the evening, having conducted his business in Freiburg or Basel, he returned. Nothing was said about the events of the day, but from his bag would be taken little treats for Lina and his daughter—chocolate, gingerbread, salted almonds. A few weeks would pass and then the exercise would be repeated. And so it went on—until suddenly everything changed.

  Since Lisa’s departure, she had kept in touch with her daughter by letter. Now Lisa suddenly decided that she wanted Sybille to come and live with her for at least a year. As she was legally within her rights, Max had no choice but to consent. Timetables were consulted, clothes packed, and an escort engaged to accompany Sybille on the journey.

  At the end of November 1925, not many weeks before Sybille was due to leave, Maximilian suddenly fell ill with appendicitis and was taken to hospital in Freiburg. The operation was successful, but soon afterwards he suffered an attack of bronchial asthma, and on 4 December, at the age of only sixty-two, he died. “My strange, defeated, formal father vanished,” wrote Sybille. “This was indeed the point of no return: my father’s lightning death.”

  Katzi and Borgmann, who had arrived a few days earlier, had taken Sybille with them to stay at a hotel in town. After the funeral Borgmann gave several formal dinners for local dignitaries and then the three of them returned to Wiesbaden. From here shortly afterwards Sybille set out to meet her mother. She was never to set foot in the schloss, her childhood home, again.

  three

  FROM ICY ENGLAND TO THE WARMTH OF THE MEDITERRANEAN

  Following the harrowing few weeks surrounding her father’s death, leaving Feldkirch and parting from her beloved Katzi, Sybille might well have felt apprehensive about the future. Now aged fourteen, she was about to embark on a new life, in a different country, in the care of a mother whom she barely knew and who had never demonstrated much affection for her. Instead, as the train moved south out of Germany, through the Austrian Alps and towards the Italian frontier, she felt her spirits rise and she found herself filled with an intoxicating sense of freedom. “[I] experienced a state of sheer joy, a fulfilment of a longing that lies dormant in many of us whose birth has been into the rain.” Once over the Brenner Pass the train stopped at the border and the chaperone departed, her place taken by a young woman, Doris von Schönthan, a recent acquaintance of Lisa’s whom she had hired at the last moment to accompany her daughter. The two of them were to travel to Merano in the South Tyrol, where mother and daughter would be reunited.

  For Sybille, Doris von Schönthan, from an impoverished but aristocratic Prussian family, was of an entirely new species, a member of the jazz-age generation of the Weimar Republic. Idealistic, full of hope and ambition, Doris was determined to make a career while at the same time enjoying herself to the limit. Her talk was of nightclubs and parties, of young poets and painters, of communism, expressionism and avant-garde film. Doris herself had applied for a job with a film company, talking excitedly of her prospects in a world of which Sybille knew nothing—“Needless to say I had never been to a cinema.” The journey passed quickly, and once arrived in Merano the two of them found a message from Lisa telling them to wait at the hotel where she would join them in a few days’ time. Comfortably settled, they were delighted to have the chance of exploring the town, window-shopping, strolling through the immaculate public gardens, and after dinner setting out on moonlit walks, Doris alight with her ambitious plans for the future.

  Sybille was enthralled by her new companion, grateful to her for providing a buffer against her unpredictable parent. When her mother eventually arrived she seemed curiously abstracted; when questioned, she was evasive, saying only that the future was always uncertain. After a couple of days Lisa decided to move to Cortina, taking Sybille and Doris with her, but soon after they arrived she announced she again must leave, and vanished without explanation. A day or two later Doris, too, departed, having finally been offered the job with the film company for which she had been hoping. Thus Sybille, recently turned fifteen, was left entirely alone to wait for her mother’s return.

  Yet far from feeling abandoned, Sybille felt pleased with her new independence. Hotel life she found most agreeable: she had a comfortable room in which Lisa had left a large number of books, all Tauchnitz editions of English language literature; the staff were kind, and she enjoyed sitting by herself in the dining room. “Waiters, young and old, were charming to children, especially so to a child who liked to eat.” At a corner table for one, hands washed, her short fair hair carefully brushed, a book open by her plate, she studied the menu with care, always including in her order a small carafe of wine—inevitably judged inferior to the contents of the cellar at Feldkirch. Her only problem was the inquisitiveness of her fellow guests, who, suspecting scandal, were constantly trying to probe for details about her mother’s activities. “They knew perfectly well she was off with somebody she shouldn’t have been with, and they kept saying: ‘A little girl like you, alone, won’t you come to our table?’ ” Nevertheless when one week, then two, passed with no word from Lisa, Sybille began to feel anxious. Fortunately, after a few more days her mother returned, “not unduly disconcerted to find me by myself,” and finally explained the situation.

  Since leaving Max, Lisa had led a peripatetic existence. Not long after her divorce she had received a proposal from a wealthy German painter, Otto von Wätjen, previously the husband of the artist Marie Laurencin. Lisa had agreed to marry him, but at the last moment had changed her mind, much taken by a young man she had met by chance during a concert at a private house, a recital by the pianist Artur Schnabel. Neither she nor the young man was musical, and the two came together after each separately succeeded in escaping the performance, discreetly leaving the salon to take refuge on a balcony overlooking the garden.

  Norberto Marchesani, always known as “Nori,” a young Italian of outstanding beauty, had instantly fallen in love with Lisa. One of a large family, Nori had been brought up on a farm at Bolzano; his father was a university professor, he himself was on the point of completing a degree in architecture. Within a very short time, Nori had proposed to Lisa, and she, charmed and flattered, was at first inclined to laugh it off, but so
on found herself completely smitten. The obstacles in front of them were considerable: Lisa had to break off her engagement to Wätjen, while Nori was faced with trying to placate his family, who were appalled that he was intending to marry not only a divorced woman, but one who was Jewish by birth and nearly fifteen years his senior. A further problem was that Nori had no money, while Lisa’s income had severely diminished as a consequence of the German inflation. “I was never quite clear about my mother’s finances,” Sybille admitted. “From having been well off she appeared to have reached a point where she had to be very careful (this was not in her nature).” Eventually everything was settled, and Lisa and Nori were quietly married in September 1925, three months before the death of Maximilian.