Her strongest card, and she used it quite unconsciously, was her refusal to take work – any work – seriously. She implied, without words, that work was not her sphere, that she was, in fact, destined for another life, that she was an object of luxury rather than of labour. If Fibich went into the room shared by the two typists to ask for a file or to wonder why his letters had not been done, he would find her brewing up tea, with many a dainty shake of a braceleted wrist. ‘I’ve told Jill to lie down,’ she would say. ‘She’s not herself today. I’ve given her a couple of aspirin. I think she should go home when she’s had a bit of a rest.’ For gradually she had seduced the other typist, a younger girl, into a protective observance of her own interests, so that both of them would spend the day discussing new ways of doing their hair or answering questionnaires in magazines. A low burden of continuous conversation issued from behind the door of their room. At the threat of the onset of work one or other of them would consider herself a trifle unwell. Neither Hartmann nor Fibich was brave enough to ask what the matter was, since a look of reproach usually preceded the announcement, as if all women’s ills could rightly be laid at the door of men. As Yvette was the stronger personality of the two she usually ensured that Jill would declare herself incapacitated and in need of her ministrations. Fibich, kept waiting while the tea was dispensed, and even cajoled into drinking a cup himself, could not help admiring Yvette’s white hands with their rosy nails, her thin gold bracelet on her spotless cuff. ‘Now then,’ she would eventually and tolerantly ask. ‘What can I do for you? Of course, this has put me out. You’ve got to take into account that I’m virtually single-handed here. I can’t be expected to do the work of two people. I really need a junior.’ Fibich would end up taking the letters home with him. Fortunately he had a friend with her own typewriter and she would rattle them off in the course of an evening. Work often got done this way.
In those days women did not labour out of any sense that the work itself imposed rules and laws superior to their own personal inclinations. Those who did were thought unlikely to get a man. It was Yvette’s very frivolousness – expressed in her blithe indifference to the demands of a growing business – that seduced Hartmann, that and her excellent presentation. The trail of scent, the spotless cuffs, the white hands, and of course the enhanced awareness of herself that promised an exalted deployment of her attributes, all amused him, beguiled him, and though he privately thought her rather absurd, not altogether serious, and perhaps even a little pathetic, there came a point beyond which he could no longer deny himself the pleasure of her company, or rather, the spectacle of her personality. The working day was too short, it seemed to him, to contain the enigma and the fascination of Yvette. After remarkably little hesitation, and with a shrug at his own weakness, he married her.
As it turned out, Yvette’s genius was equal to Hartmann’s own. Never, in the course of their lives together, had he seen her in a state of dereliction. From dawn to dusk, and, more important, from dusk to dawn, she remained a pleasure for the eye, and for the senses, or for most of the senses. The promise of the rosy nails and the spotless cuffs had been kept, had increased, gaining, with each new access of prosperity, orders of magnitude which had in themselves something hieratic, celebratory. Nor was her care confined to her own person, although that continued to come first. She was a competent, even a creative housewife, who could be trusted with Hartmann’s tastes and pleasures. Her interior was lavish and yet comfortable; her cooking elaborate, rich, and reassuring. She remained convinced of herself as an outstandingly worthy cause. She frequently expressed surprise at women who claimed equal rights with men, for she considered that women had everything to gain and men everything to lose where their interests were concerned. She tended to pity men for their natural and inevitable inadequacies.
All this was an entertainment to Hartmann, who, contemplating the high standard of comfort to which Yvette had brought him, considered the promise magnificently kept. On her more intimate incapacities he kept silent, for she was unaware of them herself and would not in any case have believed him had he informed her on this point. Indeed, part of her happiness, her unaltered sense of her own superiority, was due to a sense of virginity preserved, or at least prolonged, and anything more robust, more Dionysiac, than her usual reluctant performance she would have dubbed an unimportant concession that some women, not necessarily those of whom she approved, were forced to make to men in order to gain their consent on a matter of detail. She herself, she thought, evolved in a higher sphere. She despised profoundly women who betrayed the slightest flaw in their appearance, as if this advertised a sluttishness in their dispositions at which she would instinctively and fastidiously shudder.
This curious position, not uncommon before the great awakening that was to overtake women in the years of liberation, had its causal derivation in a circumstance which Yvette could scarcely remember, for, like Hartmann, she had no interest in the past, and whereas he had made a knowing selection of his reminiscences, subjecting his early life to an extreme form of censorship, Yvette behaved as if the history of Yvette (‘Who is she? Who is that marvellously groomed woman with the blonde hair?’) had not existed before the time when she herself had assumed control of it. There was, however, a picture in her mind – she could not call it to memory for she could not understand it: it was more like a dream, in that she could contemplate it from outside, almost from another’s point of view – that she had been forced to verify, incurious though she was, by means of information gleaned with difficulty from her mother, Martine. In this picture she was a tiny child in a train which she somehow knew to be speeding south. When she asked her mother about this she saw, from the expression on her mother’s face, that the older woman had been woken into grievous life by the reminiscence. And as she heard the story she realized why she could not remember it, for it belonged not to herself but to her mother and to her mother’s life. As Yvette understood the story, her mother, Martine Besnard, had been travelling from Paris to Bordeaux to visit her sister, Alice. The picture that Yvette had in her mind was of herself, tiny, in a pleated skirt, docile, tartine in hand. She heard her mother say, ‘Mange, mange, ma fille’: she felt the shadow of her mother bending over her to smooth back her flyaway hair. She later learned that her mother, a young widow, had been forced through lack of money to take refuge with her sister, who had married well, and to throw herself on the generosity of her brother-in-law. Yvette was charmed by this fairy-tale beginning and listened to the story as if it were indeed a romance, with herself at the centre of it, although from the high colour that invaded the older woman’s cheeks as she told it the adventure had been unwelcome, distasteful, hazardous, and indeed so grave a risk that Martine’s face flushed as she recounted it.
To Yvette the story had no resonance except as a novelette, the kind in which she believed implicitly, despite her relative sophistication, and this too was a common position among women in the days that preceded enlightenment. And yet something remained of it, enough to give her a heightened sense of the necessity of material comfort, of the security she was now able to extend to the mother whose early words, ‘Mange, mange, ma fille’, had been accompanied by the cast shadow of her protective body.
The truth was slightly different, as Hartmann was to learn. On that occasion, the occasion that Yvette remembered as essentially picturesque, Martine Besnard had been fuelled by a desperate and unyielding purpose. She had fought hard to contain two overriding impulses: to feed the child and to go to a place where she might be guaranteed sustenance. Her sister, Alice, had married a substantial man in the wine trade. When the exigencies of keeping the child in Paris, in an apartment designed only for her icy mother-in-law, became too exhausting, she took off for Bordeaux, desirous of luxury, yet deeply reluctant to play the poor relation. The child’s pointed face reminded her of her late husband, whose activities, from the outset of the Occupation, had caused her such grief. He had been killed while she was still wondering how to
divorce him. On that point she was uncharacteristically vague. The relief of his death had been considerable, although with him disappeared all her subsistence. Had it not been for the little stock of money she had seen him hide under a floorboard both she and the child would have starved. It was with the last of that money that she had bought the train tickets to Bordeaux.
Only one hope sustained her: that she would meet someone, as her sister had done, who would give her a better life. The flush of effort in her cheeks could, she knew, so easily deepen into an ailment, an affliction, and who then would look after the child? So that when Edward Cazenove, the representative of an English wine shipper, came to Bordeaux after the war, and returned there on several occasions, she decided to marry him, although she did not particularly like him. To begin with he was unattractive, with a reddish face, flat hair, and uneasy eyes. That the uneasiness came from timidity rather than dishonesty did not, in Martine’s view, excuse it: a man had no business to be timid. But he was lonely, polite, and he appeared to be fond of the little girl, and Martine, thinking of the room she had vacated in the rue Washington, took courage and ended her connection with France. They married from Alice’s house and went back to his bachelor apartment in Manchester Square. The child cried a little, but not much. The high flush in Martine’s cheeks subsided, although privately she considered her new life inferior. One day, after putting a casserole of rabbit into the oven, she looked out of the window on to the silent square and admitted to herself that she would have done better to have waited a little. But waiting demanded so much courage, and she was not a brave woman. She had done what she could. Even now she wondered if she would ever be warm again: London was as bitter as Paris had been. It was at this point that she gave up hopes for her own life and transferred all her yearning to her child. If it lay within her power, Yvette would never have to make the same disappointing decision that she herself had made. Yvette would be happy, and, better still, protected. Yvette would have expectations like any other girl and would be in a position to fulfil them. From that moment Martine abandoned herself to the pleasures of food, such as there was, and good wine, of which there was more than enough. Yvette remembered her parents, or rather her mother and stepfather, of whom she became rather fond, as a passive, rather silent couple, with a high and steady colour, drinking down the good wine at every meal, and flushing further in grateful response to its unfailing benefits.
With that recital out of the way, relations between mother and daughter became amiable but distant. Yvette saw nothing of the frightened young widow in her mother, a substantial and normally uncommunicative woman with a thin mouth, her colour still high, who preferred these days to keep her own counsel, quite willing to off-load the daughter she had brought into safe harbour, as if the effort were self-limiting and had now served its purpose. She and Cazenove, to whom she had finally become rather attached, preferred to spend their winters in Nice, where they reverted to being French. Seated at a table outside a café on the Promenade des Anglais, they would watch disapprovingly as the first tourists arrived. ‘Nice n’est plus Nice,’ they would say to their favourite waiter, shaking their heads. These days the high colour spread down their necks to disappear beneath their collars. When they window-shopped in the rue de France, Cazenove carried his wife’s handbag. They managed, modestly, but quite comfortably. Hartmann helped.
Yvette regarded her mother’s story with complaisance. She did not see it as tragic or even fatal, one of those throws of the dice that change lives; she did not consider that she might have evolved differently had that accident of going to Bordeaux not taken place. She continued to regard it as something of a fairy tale, part of the myth, the charm that she had always claimed for herself and that had landed her safely in the serene waters of her own marriage. What she remembered, typically, was her own contribution to this happy state. Childhood was an irrelevance: what was of passionate interest to her was the way she had designed her life as a woman. Self-love had saved her, when she was the poorest girl at her Swiss school, Les Colombes. Too much to drink had by that stage had its effect on Cazenove’s career, an occupational hazard which was nevertheless unsympathetically dealt with. In the years that coincided with Yvette’s adolescence he sat at home in Manchester Square, and the money came from his rapidly diminishing savings and regular donations from Martine’s sister, Alice. The finishing school had been Martine’s last effort to secure her daughter a future, made in the teeth of opposition both from Cazenove and from Alice. With resources so slender and so hazardous, Martine had indoctrinated her daughter with a need to succeed, a purpose which a young girl like Yvette could hardly take as seriously as her mother appeared to do. But, luckily or unluckily, Yvette thought of herself as desirable and possessed to a high degree that amorous disposition that young girls usually turn towards a favoured adult. But there was no favoured adult in Yvette’s cosmology; she no longer felt ineluctably attached to her mother and her stepfather, to whom she had never seriously considered herself related. Her amorousness was therefore devoted entirely to herself. Scanning her face in the glass, she saw not the fine skin, the strong but widely spaced teeth, the fair hair already rising high on the forehead and giving a hint of future recession, but her secret possession, her perfect body. It was the knowledge of its perfection that sustained her, that enabled her to look in the glass and think, ‘I am the best’. It was a body that might have been designed by a Salon painter of the Second Empire, by Baudry or Bouguereau, one of those legendary hourglass shapes that bloom extravagantly but harmoniously above and below a narrow waist. When other girls went out to drink chocolate in the nearby town, she stayed quite contentedly in the school dormitory, buffing her nails or washing one of her two cashmere sweaters, themselves passed on to her by an unknown French cousin. Few clothes meant strenuous and vigilant upkeep, and sometimes she was bored. But when her spirits momentarily fell, she knew that she could always raise them by walking lightly in her nightgown between the rows of beds, as if she had forgotten something in the bathroom, and see the faces grow discontented as her splendid breasts passed by. Further display she planned only for the delectation of a husband, that same husband to have received discreet advertisements in order to help him make up his mind. It was only when he was safely in the net that he would discover that its promise was not kept to any recognizable extent by its performance. Yvette herself was never to perceive this, for the evidence of her splendour was always there for her to admire. Nor did she wonder that her so splendid body gave her such scant information. She was, to a surprising extent in one so endowed, ignorant of sensual impulses, chaste. It was monogamy she craved, as the one adventure in her life that would enable and entitle her to live as she pleased for ever after. It was in this fashion that her mother lived on inside her. And the smile stayed on her face, for she never doubted her victory.
It was this assurance, together with her bustling fastidiousness, that had brought Hartmann to her side, and on the whole he was not disappointed. He appreciated her more as the years took their toll than he had when they were first married. She still amused him, and she was still unaware that she did so. She had seemed a little frightened as a bride, and indeed she had been woefully inexperienced, for her mother’s efforts had been all in the direction of preparedness and not at all towards that of pleasure. The finishing school had been followed by a few weeks taking lessons in typing and shorthand from a retired secretary who lived on the top floor, under the roof, of the next building. Yvette had hated these lessons so much, had hated in fact the greasy hair and the muddy complexion of the retired secretary, that she had taken in little of what the woman was trying to teach her. Hence her unwillingness to work when her mother had found her the job with Hartmann and Fibich, had found it by dint of going to an expensive employment agency and doing all the interviewing herself, while Yvette, appalled, had listened to the clattering typewriters and wondered if she could ever pass the test that they were going to inflict on her. She passed it, but
only just, and then took the only job that called for general office duties rather than typing and shorthand. Nevertheless, Yvette described herself to her friends as a secretary. Fibich shook his head, but Hartmann found himself quite touched by her pretensions, by her appearance, and by the occasional blank look of absence on her face, in her eyes, as if she were waiting for someone to rescue her from a dilemma which she did not fully understand. Ariadne on Naxos, he had thought. So he had been Bacchus.
Latecomers Page 3