A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “But why, mama? For God’s sake, why?”

  “That is the hardest part,” Anna said solemnly. “I have thought and thought. . . . I have come to the conclusion that I should not tell you. You have always known me to respect the truth?”

  Constanza thought she had.

  “Well then, you must believe me now that there is the gravest reason. Your father has done something very, very dreadful——”

  “Something I don’t know?”

  “Something you had far better not know,” said her mother. “Your father has acted like a villain, a faithless man. I shall not speak of it.”

  Something so dreadful, asked Constanza, that they could not go back?

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t think of anything dreadful enough for that. Papa hasn’t murdered anyone?”

  “My dearest child.”

  “If he had, we should have to help him and it would be he who would have to flee the country. No, mama—I cannot understand it.”

  “I am not asking you to understand; I am asking you to believe.”

  At length Constanza said, “And I? I am not to see papa?”

  It was best so, Anna said. At least for some time. “And it is my wish.” She did not reveal that she had legal sanction to enforce it. She began to cry.

  “I do see that it’s all very dreadful.” Constanza suspended her own feelings; she needed time. She quickly told herself that there was a way out of everything—if it came to the worst one could always run away. She said, “My poor mama.” Anna responded.

  “But are you sure you’ve got it all quite straight? Two heads are better than one. Why don’t you tell me about it? I’m used to knowing things.”

  Anna said, “I don’t want you to know this about your own father.”

  Presently Constanza said, “But what will we do? What is going to happen to us? I suppose we shall be going to America.”

  Anna, who had not yet turned this over in her mind, said instantly, “We are not going to America. I shall never go back to my native country. Return now? Inflict this shame on my family? You do not realize our new position—everything will be different. We are no longer. . . .”

  “No longer what?”

  “What we were. We are——”

  “Outcasts? Mama, will you be a divorcée?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Constanza tried, “Déclassées?”

  “Alone,” Anna said. “Two ladies alone.”

  “As long as we are not maiden ladies,” said Constanza.

  “Mother and daughter,” Anna said, “mother and daughter,” she repeated as if she liked the sound of it, “in exile.”

  Gradually she became calmer. They might as well live in England, she said. It did not matter where they went.

  “We could go to Brazil,” said Constanza.

  They—that was she—would live very quietly. For herself, life was over.

  “Oh, no,” said Constanza earnestly.

  “And for you, my poor child, it will be different from what it might have been; you have your father to blame for that. This utter change, this break—it is very hard on you, and I shall do my best to make it up in any other way I can. When I was young I was very happy in London.” She changed to a note of cheerfulness. “Now what do you think you will be doing with yourself?”

  “I think I’ve finished with education, don’t you?” said Constanza quickly.

  “Well, one’s never quite that,” said her mother. “You mean no more lessons?”

  “What’s the point? If I’m not going on with it . . . I’m not going to have a career?”

  “Not unless you very much want to.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Constanza. “I can’t see it. People are supposed to regret it later on, but I’ve never met anybody who had one, I mean a woman.”

  “Miss Hill.”

  “I don’t count governesses.”

  Anna made the automatic rebuke.

  “Yes of course, mama. I only meant it doesn’t apply to me.”

  Anna winced. “One doesn’t have to put such things into words,” she said. “At any rate our circumstances have altered. Perhaps I ought to warn you that we shall be a good deal poorer.”

  Constanza said, “Too poor for me to marry?”

  “Darling. I only mean we shall not be able to live in quite the way we used to. Which reminds me, you ought to carry some money.” Constanza never had; clothes were sent to the house, she was known everywhere, besides she was no shopper; when she did want some cash she turned to the nearest parent who would dish out a handful. “And you had better have some charge accounts,” Anna said, “at Harrod’s and one or two places I will tell you about, it’s quite easy.”

  “All right, mama.”

  “Very well then, no more lessons. You know that Jonathan is at the National Gallery now?”

  “Benvenuto di Gentile,” said Constanza. “Good for him.”

  “And dear William is at the British Museum.”

  “Which he is going to show me, no doubt.”

  “It might be as well for you to cultivate some interests,” said Anna. “As things are, you may not have the same round as other girls your age. It will mean more leisure for you, more freedom, and of course more responsibility. People over here, as you will find, have rather large ideas about many things and are quite strict about others. I’m sure that you will always know what to do. I should like to see you develop a certain independence. You will know when you can go out alone and when you might take Mena or another girl. I do not believe in chaperones. I find the system degrading. I am sure you can rely on your own judgement and good sense. And when you are not certain ask me.”

  “Is it all right for me to go to restaurants with Mr. James?”

  “Quite all right. And now you must think of what you want to do with your time.”

  Constanza said: “I’d like to hear a debate in the House and go to Oxford next Saturday to Monday and I want to meet some interesting people and I want to hunt.” She left out the race-meeting.

  “Blood sports,” said Anna. “But very well, darling, hunt if you want to, I know you’ll be good at it. It sounds a nice programme. Do anything you like, my angel, only keep up your reading.”

  When Constanza was gone her mother was left with the conviction that she still had something to offer to the world.

  Constanza, for her part, was left with a good deal to think about.

  •

  This utter change, this break—Anna had called it. It was all of that. Yet in Constanza’s case there were some factors which modified its nature. The first of these was a misconception, puerile enough at first, but the effect upon herself she was never quite able to shake off in later life; it was a misconception about her father’s guilt, the dreadful thing he had done that was too dreadful for her mother to divulge. Now Constanza was nothing if not a girl of quick intelligence and one who was in many ways forward for her years; she knew life as it went in a Roman slum and on an Italian farm and life as it was seen in a Roman drawing-room, and life in books, but there were gaps in her experience, vast gaps. She lacked some raw materials and so she had to attack some human problems with the logic of a child.

  Giulia and her father, and the tales of her father’s attachments to attractive women, were within Constanza’s range, they even added to the bond, made an under-current to the affectionate pride the prince and his daughter took in one another; she could not remember a time when she had not known, and hardly one when she had thought about it twice or thought about it in terms of her mother’s place within the pattern; this was part of that unexplored half-knowledge children, even uninhibited and lucid children, keep aloof from when it is about their parents, part of the tacit accepted half-knowledge shared in such circumstances by the persons most concerned; it was more than that, it was in the air, it was part of the general half-knowledge, half-acknowledgement, of society, part of the great Italian split between sensuality and the Church
, between doing one thing and believing in another, of saying yes to two views of life. That her mother could have kept herself wholly outside that circuit, appeared to Constanza, now tackling it at last, incredible. That her mother was an outsider, was in a measure “different,” she was well aware; the true extent of Anna’s frigid distastes, of Anna’s complex edifice of self-delusion, Anna’s insatiable demand on life at an idealistic peak, was as yet beyond Constanza’s faculties.

  The talk that had buzzed round her during the last hours before leaving Rome, she had taken to be roughly the truth; now she became convinced that it had been far from it. She could see her mother outraged, wounded, difficult, kicking up an unholy fuss; she could not see her mother—a just woman and attached to the train of things—smash up their lives because she had found out about an old infidelity. Such action, for such reason, appeared to Constanza, at that age, as entirely improbable. The very dreadful thing, then, that had driven them from home must be some crime. A hidden crime, she hoped for her father’s sake. And kept hidden with the help of mama. One thing she had said gave the clue: “Perhaps I ought to warn you that we shall be a good deal poorer.” It was money. Papa had taken money. Mama’s of course—who else’s?—and she was covering it up. He must have changed something on a paper or given a false signature, perhaps to pay a card debt, but no, wives had to pay these openly, and papa never gambled much; perhaps he had taken it, this large sum, this capital (for Constanza it was already that) to be on the safe side or to put something by for Giorgio later on, perhaps he had bought some land or given it to a woman. Fraud. And this explained it all. People could be carted off to a filthy prison for picking up a five-lira piece, and in America if you were in business and did that kind of thing, you were finished—Constanza was able to see that to her mother it was a shattering blow. She had helped her husband; she could not forgive him. Constanza herself had been inclined to hold that tampering with money was outside the pale, now she saw how wrong one was to think in abstract terms. Papa must have had his reason, must have wanted the money—there is but one life to live—and mama, as became daily clearer, did not miss it or at least needed it a great deal less. Constanza was very, very sad for him to have been found out. Yet if she did not judge her father, she did not judge her mother either, for her unforgivingness nor her flight, it was the way she was made, paziènza. Constanza was grateful to her for not having exposed her father, rather admired her courage, and for her, too, she felt sad.

  As to herself, Constanza resolved that she also had better keep her mouth shut, and for the rest to bide her time.

  She sat down to write her father some explicit reassurance but, once before the paper, found that this was not within her powers, then that it was not necessary. So what she sent was a brief loving message.

  •

  Soon it was November. There were fogs, the days were short, the light was always grey. December came, blustering, misty, wet. Constanza hardly noticed it. Climate was nothing to her; she had soaked up enough Italian sunshine to last her through some years. Constanza hunted. She had not before experienced anything equal to that strenuousness, that abandon of limb and blood and mind, and it seized hold of her. Part of the time she was talking her head off to a score of new acquaintances, but her main absorption, her passion, during all of that first winter was the hunting. She went from country house to country house, asked by her contemporaries, mounted, cosseted and admired by their parents and their parent’s friends, a mascot in the library and field. Her hybrid status proved an advantage rather than a hindrance. Her beauty was still slightly epicene and so she could be treated by who wished as one of the youngsters, a precocious child; others took her for older than she was and stuck to the notion that she had been out in Rome. In any case she was a foreigner, a guest and the daughter of a highly valued mother with eccentric views, a fugitive now from some mysterious tragedy.

  Anna, acquiescent, told Constanza that she could not go on sharing other people’s maids. “And if you insist on continuing with this activity you ought to have at least one hunter of your own.”

  “I’d love one, mama. But can we afford it?” She was asking out of curiosity rather than concern.

  “I’ve written to Jack.” The principessa’s brother-in-law was one of her trustees. “We’re trying to make some changes. I may have to go into capital.”

  “Should you?”

  “There are many demands on my income,” Anna said, looking uncomfortable.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But do get that horse. Get a decent one. The horse is a drop in the bucket. Where are you off to this week?”

  Constanza told her. “It’s in Gloucestershire.”

  “I know them well.”

  “Mama, darling, why don’t you come?”

  “The skeleton at the feast.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I don’t consider it fitting.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “No, my love. But the situation of a woman in my position is a delicate one.”

  “Why?”

  “You know very little yet about the world.”

  “Mama, you are not intending to spend the rest of your days at Brown’s?”

  “I am not quite alone. I have my visitors. One or two faithful friends from the past.”

  Years later, Constanza used to say: “Of course it was fantastic. I don’t know what got into her head. It was all above mine; and alas I was too busy then to sort it out. I believed her. I didn’t help her much. Not enough. Perhaps it comforted her to add social eclipse to her other woes. But there was nothing in it—she could see whom she wanted—and in her own fashion she did—the only ones she did not see were the people she kept deliberately away. She had a notion that she was no longer persona grata with the older women, so she asked men only to her conversazioni, as if she were a famous actress, or worse. They came in droves, you can’t imagine how charming she looked, even then. . . . Yes, utter nonsense, pure imagination. Oh I’m not saying there wasn’t a breath of scandal: between my efforts to cover up my guilty knowledge and mama’s dark hints, I don’t know what people thought! There were all kinds of rumours, all a good deal worse than what it really was. And there were still a few houses—remember it was before the war—where a woman would have been dropped for having left her husband for whatever reason. But not mama. Mama always had a special place, and it was just in the eyes of those people that she could do no wrong. There were others, naturally, to whom mama at Brown’s Hotel was not the same as mama the Roman hostess; but there were plenty of pickings left even for those, it wasn’t as if mama ever went back to calling herself How-land or anything like that, in spite of her not being able to pronounce my father’s Christian name. Oh, she became more Italian every year. Brown’s and the furnished houses later on were her own choice.” Constanza added: “Like so much else.”

  •

  Constanza got her hunter, picked for her by two of her new friends, and the maid arrived as soon as Mena had telegraphed for her. She was Mena’s sister’s child, whom Mena was glad to place. The girl was not much older than Constanza, and on their journeys it was Constanza who had to take her by the hand and look after her, but she could sew and pin and keep in bounds Constanza’s already then extravagant untidiness. Her name was Angelina; she, too, had never been out of Italy before and she, too, took to England kindly. It would seem that the pangs of Mediterranean longings are mainly felt by those of Northern birth.

  In the spring the principessa allowed herself to take a house for a few months at Regent’s Park. Hunting was over, Constanza plunged into London. When she had first arrived, sheer material novelty had made her younger than she had been in Rome; now she was growing up fast. Her first English summer was nearly as exciting, as delirious, as had been her winter. It was made by people—every kind of people, new people, points of view, tones of voices: undergraduates, riding partners, authors in their prime, colonels who had loved her mother, young men who we
nt off to work in the City and young men who already spoke of nursing a constituency, K.C.s, radicals, fast girls, spectacular old women, aesthetes, dons. At odd moments Constanza missed her father and thought of him affectionately, ruefully, as a child might think of nanny during a wild and glorious holiday. For exercise, she danced.

  2

  ONE AFTERNOON as Constanza slipped in to change her clothes, she found her mother on the landing saying good-bye effusively to a retired brigadier and his exceedingly plain wife who had been having tea.

  Constanza flung herself into a chair. “Goodness, mama, why do you keep on seeing these dingy people?”

  Anna said, “They’re on my side.”

  Constanza looked about the room. She did not easily notice things of that kind but the room did not look right to her, it looked dreary. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I couldn’t lunch today. Have you had someone nice?”

  “Only Humphrey-Kerr.”

  “He’s on your side all right. Darling, you do choose the dowdiest confidantes. I wonder why. What’s the matter with this room?”

  “The flowers,” Anna said. “It’s those lazy English servants.” Nobody could run a house more exquisitely than Anna, but she was not running this house.

  Constanza got up and gave her mother a kiss.

  Anna said, “I had to see Grace and the brigadier today. There’s been another,” she pinched her lips, “communication from Rome.”

  “About me?”

  “Through the lawyers. A certain person has given up molesting me directly.”

  “Mama, when can I see my father? I must. I want to. I will.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Anna.

  “What is there that you can tell those dried-up people that you cannot tell me?”

  “He and Grace have a great experience of life.”

  “I doubt it. Mama, I’m beginning to believe that it’s you, and only you, who wants to prevent me from seeing papa.”