He stopped when he saw her. “Flavià, bon soir—Bon Dieu, ce que vous aviez les mains sales.”
“Haven’t I?” she said. “Perfectly filthy hands—I’ve been doing dirty work. Bon soir, à demain.”
“Ciao,” he called as he had learnt from her.
Flavia went indoors, cleaned the saucer, washed her hands. All evening she said nothing. In the morning she got up early: she opened all the windows in her study, then sat waiting. When she heard her mother call for her break-fast tray, she went in.
“Constanza, I’ve been thinking of something. What will you tell Mena afterwards? She will expect to be told what was in the envelope she gave you.”
“I cannot tell her the truth. I cannot put that kind of thing on her. As it is, she has enough on her mind.”
Flavia said very deliberately, “We must substitute a perfectly harmless envelope.”
Constanza did not catch the reference to the incident in her daughter’s childhood which had left its mark.
Flavia now produced a manilla envelope. “What Mena will find inside it, is the letter from Florence that warned nonna to leave Italy.”
“That is a good idea,” said Constanza.
“And now, mummy, I’ve got something to tell you. Something rather awful’s happened. I’ve just come in from a paper-chase. The wills, both of them, blown out of the window.”
“But I left them under a weight.”
“I am sorry. That was my fault. I had been looking at them again.”
“You went after them?”
“Of course. Not a trace. I think they must have been blown right into the sea. I don’t think they’ll turn up again.”
Constanza said, “They may. Or they may not. It is best so. I am glad. It’s been left in the hands of the gods.”
Flavia said, letting this pass, “Which reminds me: your ring?”
“Mr. Baxter has sent the money he’s advancing me. He thinks it’s for a pressing debt. He wrote me a very stiff letter; he hopes I am not falling into mama’s footsteps. The ring ought to be here any day.”
“And so will Mr. James, mummy.”
Constanza had the grace to look confused. “Would you do something for me, darling?”
“I might,” Flavia said amiably.
“Would you mind looking after Mr. James for a bit? He always enjoys the youngest generation. Would you mind looking after yourself for a bit? You see, I think I should like to go away for a time; perhaps a change would be best.”
“Già.”
Constanza took a breath. “I thought I might go to Paris.”
“Paris, Constanza?”
“It is rather absurd at my age not to know it properly.”
Flavia lifted a piece of fruit off her mother’s tray. “Oh quite,” she said. “Well, the Calais Express: It is for you after all, Constanza.”
But Constanza said: “Actually, I thought I might drive up. It would be pleasant to see something of the country.”
“How not! And those big open touring cars are so convenient for that.”
“Michel has very kindly offered to take me. He asks if you would like to have the key to the tower while we’re away? You will find a book or two in the house.”
A COMPASS ERROR
1st gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2nd gent. Ay, truly, but I think it is the world That brings the iron.
—Middlemarch, Chapter IV
Le passé est une partie de nous-même, la plus essentielle peut-être.
—Victor Hugo
“You are young, sir,” he said, “you are young; you are very very young sir.”
—David Copperfield
INTRODUCTION
I HAD TAKEN it for granted that at one time or another I would write a sequel to my novel, A Favourite of the Gods. The characters—dead or alive—invited further consequences of their actions, if not necessarily in a straightforward way. What these would be, healing? destructive? I was confident that I should know in time. Time, as it happened, lengthened into several years, hard-working, nomadic.
For different reasons in each case, I had come to take on a row of journalistic assignments; the most taxing of these had been two interminable trials, first reported by me on site, later written about at length. This, besides great emotional involvement, had entailed much travelling and long absences from whatever was home base.
One was the trial of Jack Ruby for the murder of President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas, Texas, in the spring of 1964. That trial was a mess—clownishly conducted, long-winded, hysterical, at moments grotesque. It dragged on day after day, week after week. . . . For the spectators, the world press crammed into insufficient space, it was not merely tedious and exhausting, it devalued the awe and grief in which many of us had begun approaching our task.
Here is not the place to go into the prosecution of twenty-three men—plucked out after nearly two decades of anonymity or hiding, who had served as staff (innocent word) at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, tried by a—wholly exemplary—German court at Frankfurt in one hundred and eighty-three court days spread from the end of 1963 to the summer of 1965. What was revealed there, extracted, proved, step by patient legal step, the suffering at that camp (and other camps), of a degree and scale inconceivable to normal minds, is too immense.
•
Here, I am supposed to tell about the writing of a book which is a story about people and events belonging to a day-lit world. A world perhaps sustained by some illusions but also by not unjustifiable hopes. They were felt to be such by people who were allowed—thanks to chronology, geography and chance—to lead their lives not as the victims of deranged atrocities and war, but as individuals free (within the, always tricky, human condition) to shape their own achievements and misfortunes. I did want to write such a book again; I wanted to give another turn to the story of that favourite of the gods, but could not easily or quickly make the transition from giant misery to the subtleties, passions, pleasures and minor wickednesses of reprieved private lives.
Many novelists, from the greatest to the meretricious, have chosen to write about the vast dimensions, now tragic, now squalid, of human destiny in the mass. I have neither the talent nor the desire to write epic fiction. I can at the most imply. I am not a stranger, though, to the consciousness of ever-lurking horror—I was brought up with the rise of Fascism on our (Italian) doorsteps; moreover, I was born of partly Jewish descent, and in Germany which by a chain of coincidences I left—while the Weimar Republic was still footling along—early and for good. This makes me an escapee, a survivor. And so would I be had I been born by another throw of the dice, like incalculable numbers of men and women in Russia, say, or China or parts of Africa. I do not forget it.
•
By the time I actually tackled this novel, it took on a shape different from the one it might have had if written sooner after the end of volume one. It became an offshoot rather than a continuation. The protagonists of A Favourite are indeed evoked; except one, the youngest, they are never as it were on stage. A Compass Error is a juxtaposition of two tales: one, a new story, Flavia’s, faced alone with a new life and an onslaught of new people; the other a version, a compressed repetition, not a summary for “new readers begin here,” but rather, as painters allow themselves to do, the same subject taken in a different light and on another scale. It is a retelling by a seventeen-year-old girl of what she saw, heard and experienced of a family life governed by mutual misunderstandings—now vaudeville, now tragic—which is playing a part in determining her present behaviour. This she seems not to be aware of. I decided that it was necessary for the reader to get to know by way of Flavia’s narrative (both precocious and naïve) one or two données such as the girl’s solemn love and fierce protectiveness for her mother.
•
Flavia’s autonomous life begins almost exactly at the time and place the favourite’s novel ends. That had run for well over half a
century; the compass error is set in under two summer months in a year of the late 1920s. What was the Error of the title, which suggests that at some key juncture Flavia made a mistake that blew her life off course? Does it refer to her sudden striding into a sexual orientation? Hardly; though that comes into it. The matter is left unclear. We are not told whether the girl’s first experiences were juvenilia or forerunners of definite adult form. (In which latter case the compass could not be said at fault.) The deviation, driven by call it infatuation or involuntary first love, is a falling short of her staunch childish code of conduct with its result of damage, permanent damage, to the lives of those who are most to her in the world.
Flavia can only be accounted guilty if she knew, and we must ask ourselves if it was possible that at several crucial moments she had no suspicions, never came near to question Andrée’s, the dazzling schemer’s, real identity. Did she abandon her vigilance? Or was she truly unaware of ambiguities?
She might have picked up one or another of the clues I slipped in, detective-story fashion. Why is it that no one ever mentions a giveaway surname? What about introductions or the lack of them? And how does Flavia manage to get to the right hotel suite for that dinner? (There could have been a way; I chose to draw no attention to the problem.) How does it strike a reader? One, a friend, a barrister (I have a penchant for them) confronted me at once: the whole thing, he thought, might have been brought to a stop at that reception desk: the girl would have smelt a rat. One answer to that could be, she did not want to—smell a rat.
The novel contains a brief leap into the future, a prologue (three sections: two dialogues, one soliloquy) when the adolescent of the story that follows has turned fifty. There she is: sane, composed, established (a place in the world). Little is given away. We get some sketchy allusions to those long-receded summer months we have yet to read about: a name, a line here and there about the men and women—all defunct—who were the life-blood of both novels, A Favourite and Compass. The prologue is inconclusive. “It takes two to tell the truth,” Flavia says. One for one side, one for the other? “No,” she says, “one to talk, one to listen.”
The truth? What do I, the author, make of it? Now, as I am writing, another thirty years on, from another perspective, I am not Flavia: so I do not know.
I am not Flavia. Indeed. As I said elsewhere (in a recent introduction to A Favourite of the Gods) nothing in that novel happened to me; the plot—entirely—and the characters once assembled from their various sources—observation, hearsay, books and let’s hope a pinch of imagination—are fictitious. For the record (conjurors sometimes enjoy unveiling their own props), Flavia’s grandmother has some attributes I think I can see in Lady Byron and in my own grandmother; both ladies underwent a sea change by fictional transplantation to a joint New England origin. By contrast, in A Compass Error, I began edging towards, not autobiography, but autobiographical fragments. Things that happened to Flavia happened to me, in a fairly similar form (more overtly told in Jigsaw later on). Most did not. I have known an Andrée, and she played a part, several parts, in my life, but not that part. She got me into trouble, passing trouble; and if she was capable of villainy—she was—she did not go as far as the elaborate act of betrayal mounted by her fictional alter ego, that self-invented femme fatale (she would have quite liked to have been) who played for high stakes, not just for feline pleasure. The “real” Andrée had many talents (under-used), great courage; and was capable of deeds of generosity.
•
So Flavia and I share some youthful adventures, and of course many thoughts, aspirations, tastes. (I gave her the relief map of the vineyards of France I invented for her and still wish that such a map could be made for me and all who follow the siren lure of these names, la Saône, le Rhône, la Gironde . . .) Here I am speaking of the very young Flavia, adolescent Flavia, not of Flavia aged fifty at her brief appearance in the prologue: I did not have her self-assurance then, nor her ease of repartee (nor her, apparent, literary success). Then what about a present Flavia, another thirty or so years on? Do I know how she would have made out? I still have her aspirations and her joyful tastes—those still compatible with my age—I have not achieved her detachment and a simmering sense of guilt is more diffuse.
•
The publishers asked me to write introductions for the reissues of my novels, something about why and how and where I worked on them. Not much about the books themselves (except for a bait or two and a little teasing). The trouble is that this one is the fourth introduction in a row and I am tired of talking about my somewhat complex life and changing habitats. The, much abbreviated, facts are that, once started, I wrote Compass rather fluently, for me, and quickly (under a year) in perfect and stable surroundings and an unhappy domestic situation. I—we—after Essex, after London, after an unsuccessful attempt to settle in northern Italy, at Asolo as tenants (by a generous favour conferred) of the Casa Browning no less (seven salotti, and one semi-bath built into a cupboard for the Duse in 1915), neighbours, across the lorry-shaken main road into the walled city, of Freya Stark—too much rain, too many English, not all of them retired Ambassadors, too many restrictions: gloves expected and gardening by a gardener; after flight—not soon enough—to the South of France: a year in a cool spacious rented house in quiet country, a winter in a (hideous, agency-run) flat in Cannes; after a prolonged serene stay with brilliant and Epicurean friends—two garçons—in their large and beautiful house on a vast olive estate on white-truffle soil midway between Florence and Rome, working between the table-talk in an isolation wing on a paper about English judges in action; after France again and the last impermanence in a charming femininely decked-out pavilion lent by an open-hearted hostess of those parts, we finally accomplished the move into the first place of my own in my adult life.
In that snatch of c.v., I left out—apart from travelling and displacements for my journalism—uncertainties, anxieties, apprehensions about expiring leases, homing landlords; packing . . . There had not been enough money for a long-term acquisition: now there was. Fittingly enough it came from Texas; the richest (or is it the second richest?) state of the USA. I have never been paid so much as I was for reporting that trial (the actual dollars came from Life magazine for their longest, so they said, prose piece so far) and I was sensible enough, against many pleasurable temptations—an imperial pint or why not a magnum of champagne now and then? Christies’s grand sale of fine claret lying at Bordeaux so near?—no; sensible and firm enough not to touch any of the hard-gotten gain before the bureaucratically drawn-out tax demands—USA v. UK—had been met. That took about two years. So now I was going to be able to live, as the French say about their respectable neighbours, dans nos meubles.
The place we moved into was good. I would not wish for a better. Right for the time: its needs and capacities. As things went that “permanence” lasted for barely ten years. We did not know this then.
We were living on Allanah Harper’s land, an olive grove—enclosed, out of sound of the communal washing trough and a scatter of peasant dwellings, less than a mile from a village, less than six from the sea—in the back-country of that coast. The one vulgarly called Côte d’Azur—not Flavia’s half, west of the Esterel Mountains—with a slightly softer landscape: mimosa slopes, lemons ripening in some sheltered bays, less mistral, more rain, more spoilage, near abolition of a once natural world of dignity and space. Then (the latish 1960s) the first villas were just appearing into sight in our enclave, it having been spared—for not much longer—by a serious local scarcity of water; prospective incomers had to plan in terms of tea-kettles, not swimming-pools. Where we lived there was cypress, and an enormous heavy-bearing fig-tree one could eat under in the midday sun, scented climbers, bushes—jasmine, honeysuckle, ipomea, cascading geranium, thyme—and all around us there were olive-trees, very old olive-trees, protected by law from saw and axe. Indoors there was order, coolness, space and quiet: whitewashed walls, polished red-tiled floors, book-shel
ves ceiling-high, daytime penumbra: shutters closed from dawn to sinking sun. There was a place for my wine, mostly shipped straight from the Médoc, the Loire and Alsace, in a dug-out between wall and rock. There was work; there was a sea life, there were friends . . .
Most of this was due to Allanah Harper, eccentrically generous, instinctive protector of artists and writers, who let us live in a part, converted (to my directions), of her own more Kensingtonian house. In thirty years, Allanah and I had managed to spend at least a few months of each living near one another. And now here we were.
Yes. But . . . in the midst of this, nothing was well for my dear friend Eda Lord, the American novelist. At that point we had lived under the same roof, as it were, for ten years. (We actually met long before the War, when we were both young, and she just returned from China and a disastrous marriage to an American oilman.) Something—discouragment? depression? despair?—had come down on her. A culmination of an emotionally and at times physically destructive life? Aftermaths of having grown up under American Prohibition, of having been a virtual prisoner—résidence force, Gestapo next door—in Occupied France during the War? One could not ask. If I asked, there was no answer. That wretchedness was neither admitted, nor discussed; it was concealed. The sitting mute in company, the wild drivings off in a random car, were observed—no one liked to comment. I need words; Eda needed cover. I retreated into the writing of my book.
Into Flavia’s life, on the other side of the coast. So when I recall what my life was like during those months of shaping her story, what I see and feel—vividly, clearly—are not the different, somewhat traumatic, events we were each locked in, but the daily existence we shared. That is the reality that strikes now with an almost physical force—the luminous dawns we liked to wake in, the sea that held us, the slow moving through the heavy herbal stone-warmed air of noon, the renewal of the first evening hour, the sounds of tree frog and cicada and the acerbic scent of the Mediterranean night.
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