A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  The feature that was most her own was Flavia’s eyes, blue eyes, and they too were changeable: at times screwed up against the sun or in concentration; at others, large, dilated, almost dark.

  She had already slipped into the water—she was not one to waste unnecessary minutes on dry land—swam, swam out, went still, went under, floated—solitary—struck out again, let herself drift. Now the little wheels inside the skull had ceased to spin, there were no more words, only weightlessness, mindlessness, that cool fluidity and the sky.

  Afterwards she clambered up the hill, groggy, sea-sodden. At her mother’s rented villa the key—a custom of the country—was under a flowerpot. Here, too, there was not a living soul in sight. The woman who came to clean and wash had gone home hours ago. In the ugly dining-room, blinds down, it was reasonably cool; a cover had been laid for Flavia on the oil-cloth, and a dish, some mess of vegetables, rice and egg, left on the stove. Flavia lit a flame under it and went to comb her salty hair. When the food was hot she carried the earthenware pot into the dining-room, poured a splash of red wine into a tumbler and filled it up with cold St. Galmier water—scholars do not drink in the middle of the day—propped up the week’s New Statesman, helped herself and ate. She ate ravenously and with pleasure, and she did not leave a scrap. There was also a platter of boiled artichokes, a fresh white cheese and a bowl of fruit. Flavia mixed herself a pool of olive oil with pepper and a squeeze of lemon, and attacked the artichokes. They were meant to have come first but she was usually too hungry to begin with anything so fiddly and besides she liked artichokes too much. (Flavia was still capable of saving up some treat, a habit she had been able to form during the suppers of her early years eaten on empty hotel terraces and off trays in upstairs rooms, nursery suppers of not exactly nursery food and without benefit of brothers, sisters or a nurse.) As she ate, leaf by leaf and one by one, she began to read Y.Y.’s middle. At the fruit—cherries and green almonds—she had reached the novels. Flavia read the New Statesman from editorial to weekend competition without haste or skipping, rationing herself to make it last for several days, and she paid for the subscription out of her own allowance. She regarded that paper much as Christians of solid faith used to regard heaven, the place one hopes to get to. The concept of personal salvation is indeed of august magnitude and it is not easy to think of oneself as worthy. The alternative, however, is damnation; the dwelling in outer darkness ever after instead of walking in the company of the elect. Thus Flavia was privately hopeful of becoming (in the fullness of time) a contributor to the New Statesman and Nation. The book reviews, while she found the political leaders more interesting, fascinated her particularly; she had heard it said—she hoarded such tags of information—that the fiction bin was the comparatively humble gate through which one entered the kingdom. Down from Oxford with a good degree (so the fullness of time had not so many years to go) one was given (if one wrote well enough?) a batch of novels to review. For that chance one was paid and it might come to as much as two pounds ten a week. (Some made an extra guinea by selling the books themselves in the Charing Cross Road, but Flavia was not convinced that anyone could really bear to part with their review books.) With those earnings added to the small income (one somehow managed to have) there was time and freedom for the next stage on the road to the literary life, the writing of one’s first novel. Not that Flavia had much impulsion to write that work. She envisaged it as a discipline, a part of the novitiate, and had no notion what it was to be about, except, she promised herself, that the novel would be as little as possible about people and of course not personal. She had even less desire to write autobiography than straight fiction; she did not see herself as a future novelist; ideas were what she believed that she was after. Aldous Huxley, and also Michel (the man my mother is going to marry), professed that ideas were more interesting to them than men and women, and Flavia was sure that she agreed.

  What she hoped to write (talent and acquired knowledge permitting) were essays, books of essays, proposing changes in government, economics, law and general conduct; rational changes, effected by good will, technological advances and the lessons learnt from history, and conducive to increase in happiness, non-violence and ease. Utopia by consent. (Once that attained, one might give oneself some day to the attempt of creating a work of art; but that, to her, was still as remote and veiled as death itself.)

  Meanwhile, to learn, to think, to write (when properly trained) about public affairs was a good and sane and useful way to spend one’s life, and of course a very happy one. Meanwhile, one must work hard.

  Flavia carried her luncheon dishes into the kitchen, rinsed them, a precaution against ants, stacked them tidily. Then she made herself a minute quantity of intensely strong black coffee in a little Neapolitan tin machine. To muttons. She locked the villa and walked back to the tower through a few hundred shadeless yards. There inside thick walls she found, at the tail-end of the siesta hours, a deeper coolness, another dimension of peace, and she was buoyed by the sense of her own solitary wakefulness. She loved that time of day as she did the early morning and sometimes the night—to feel oneself alone, what source of energy, what balm! Perhaps after a childhood that although also essentially solitary had been much exposed to grown-up human emotions such abeyance of pressures satisfied an instinctive need. With a will she settled down again to her tasks.

  •

  By six o’clock Flavia shut up shop. She went back to the sea—the sun had gone from the rocks—for another, shorter, bathe, a sustained fast swim to wash off indoors, books, the heat. When she got back to the villa it was evening. All the rooms except the dining-room and her own bedroom were unused and shut up. Flavia rather quickly went upstairs to tidy herself for going out. She changed into another pair of trousers, freshly laundered and beautifully pressed—the cleaning woman whom she scarcely saw did her very well—a light blue shirt of Egyptian cotton and a silk neckerchief of conventional design. Rope-soled shoes, stiff chalk-white, dark blue jersey over the arm and she let herself out again, put the key under the pot and walked down the hill. It was still broad daylight. She carried a book. She did not carry a bag. One of her trousers pockets held loose money, notes and coin, the other a comb, a clean handkerchief and an automatic pencil. She also carried on her the weekly letter from her tutor, a man in London whom she had not met, as a kind of talisman. At this hour Flavia had to hold on a bit to her morale; she became conscious of sticking to a part. Reading and swimming were things she had done and loved as long as she could remember. Now was something else.

  The much painted waterfront of St-Jean had not become a car park then. The boats in the harbour could be seen: fishing-boats and sailing boats and some trawlers, and the line of pink-washed, blue-washed houses with four cafés almost in a row. People on the quay-side were doing things with ropes and baskets, clusters of men were standing huddled over that static game, there were plenty of people in those cafés, but there were no hordes.

  Flavia bought herself a French newspaper at the kiosk and firmly made her way to a single café table. She ordered a Cinzano, watched the waiter slide a lump of ice into her glass and work the trigger of the soda syphon. The syphon spluttered, gurgled, shot dry air. The waiter shook it and produced another. Flavia thanked him, took a sip and unfolded L’Oeuvre. She read the opening of Madame Tabouis’ column and looked up again, looked about her at the boats so quiet on the water, at the comings and goings, at the evening sky. She was conscious of not enjoying any of this as much as she might. In her mind she rolled over one of the phrases with which she used to amuse or scare herself as a child: The situation is fraught with perils.

  Presently a man a couple of tables away caught her eye. He was middle-aged. “Toujours seule?” he called.

  All alone. Flavia had become used to dealing with that opening over the last months.

  “Indeed, yes,” she called back cheerfully.

  “I hope you have good news of your mother?”

  Some said,
maman, some said, madame votre mère. He had used the latter. Her own preference depended on the speaker. Flavia had the kind of ear that picks up languages and makes a mimic, and she was much more curious about people and better at taking them in than she was aware of in her own bedazzlement with systems and ideas. Whether she welcomed it or not, the novelist’s touch was there.

  She said, “Yes, fairly good news, thank you.” A postcard with a view of Ronda, sent from somewhere else; a poste-restante address. A letter, a nice letter, from Michel, some time ago.

  The woman who was with the man, and was in fact his wife, put in, “Still with her family in Italy? Her father is not improving then?”

  Fraught with perils. “Not really,” Flavia said.

  “And she doesn’t send for you?” They were residents, not summer people, retired and come South from some other part of France; their name was Fournier. Flavia’s mother during her first winter in the place had spent some evenings playing cards with them.

  “I’ve got to go on working for my Oxford Entrance.” She had learnt the uses of French banter, so she added, “I’m nursing my career.”

  They laughed. “Come over and join us.”

  Flavia said that she was just finishing her drink.

  “Then you must come to lunch on Sunday, you must, you’re not working Sundays.”

  “But I do work on Sunday.”

  “In St-Jean that well-known academic center?”

  A satisfactory answer to that Flavia felt could not be shouted across a row of tables, and a satisfactory answer it had better be.

  She went over and accepted a chair. “Well, you see, I’m not supposed to have distractions, and then my course is set for me in England and it would mean a lot of fuss getting the books sent to Italy, they’re always getting held up in the customs by the fascists.” Lewis Carroll’s Message to the Fish: I said to them, I said it plain, It would be better to Explain. Was it?

  “But if your mother can spare you and the books are in England—why stay at St-Jean?”

  A piece of logic. Flavia volunteered more information. “My mother hopes to be back here some time later in the summer; she will want me with her then.”

  “Oh, she is coming back then? Do you hear, Albert? Mrs. Herbert is coming back. So it must be true about the house? She has taken that old mas inland?”

  “Yes, we’ve taken the house.”

  “But it isn’t ready—you’re not living in it?”

  “There’s a good deal that will need doing,” Flavia said, “that’s why we kept on the villa.” Last thing she wanted brought up was her own living arrangements, was Michel’s tower: was Michel’s name.

  Mme Fournier said, “Are you making a start getting workmen in? We’d only be too glad to be of help. When did you say you were expecting your mother?”

  Her husband cut in, “How can the poor girl say? Doesn’t it all depend on the old gentleman’s health?” It could have been meant kindly, though irony, that staple conversational prop of the French, was lurking in his tone.

  “Oh, quite,” said Flavia.

  Back at her own table, she remained safe from further intrusions; and after a few more minutes it was decently time to put money into her saucer, bow once more and go.

  In the back-street restaurant where she ate her dinner six nights a week, Flavia was happy again. The hour of constraint was over. Chez Auguste was a place that flourished also as a cookshop, and children and old women kept pushing through the bead-curtain with bowls and dishes to be filled. Customers who ate on the premises were working people and a few unmarried clerks. The atmosphere was respectable but not cheerless. Flavia was looking forward to her food and drink. She was a boarder, which meant that she paid weekly in advance and a franc was knocked off the price of the set meal and they kept a napkin for her in a numbered ring.

  Dinner usually started with some substantial and high-flavoured soup, fish soup, bean soup, mussels; the other courses were made dishes, Monday—pot-au-feu; Friday—aiouli and brandade de morue; on other days, according to what was cheap and good (not necessarily best) in the market, tomates farcies, friture de poisson, gratin d’aubergines, paupiettes de veau or civet de lapin, the kind of menu that these days is commonplace in every other London bistro. At Chez Auguste the cooking was honest and without attempts at elegant variations; it was cooking meant for people who ordered, ate and paid for these dishes because they knew them, liked them and knew what they were entitled to expect. The wine provided was good wine of its kind, a red eleven-degree of last autumn’s vintage, decently made, that came from a family property in the Var.

  There Flavia sat on her wooden chair behind her thick white plate, open book in front of her, but she did not read. This was the time of the sounding thoughts, the flow of words in the mind. She spoke to herself of the great mundane issues—that was the term she used—of peace and war, violence and political choice; of the curable ills of humanity, uncured for these thousands of years. Crime was not necessary, hunger not necessary, nor war, the infliction of pain. . . . She thought spoke of remedies—change of institutions by individuals (experts, detached, disinterested), subsequent change of individuals (in the mass) by changed institutions; she spoke of controlled finance (no more profit motive), capital punishment (abolished), disarmament (total), electoral reform; she spoke of her own life dedicated to such glories, and saw it, her whole life, stretching before her, the order, purpose, tranquillity; the pleasures; and she was overwhelmed. Oxford, the word made flesh—tutorials, poetry read aloud, going on the river, learning to make a speech, a glass of wine in my rooms, sitting for Pass Mods., a gown. And later, much later, dual summum bonum, publications and a fellowship in one’s college, goal and beginning—a lifetime in the company of one’s peers and betters, hard work and leisure, books, more books and talk forever, the common-room, mellow evenings, the year divided into terms and long vacations, by the Mediterranean (in my mother’s house), finishing a book; travel, architecture, painting. The life of the mind and the sensual life (again her terms), the sensible choice of what existence has to offer. To offer to those in luck. Luck of disposition, abilities—heredity, then? Is it immutable? Luck of environment, a modicum of privilege—well, yes. Minimal privilege that could soon be made, one would work to make, universal. The rest, the personal life (I shall never marry), the emotions, are delusion, wasteful indulgence, a futile cross. Emotions can be disregarded. Surely the personal life, also, is not necessary? So Flavia, seventeen, told herself at Chez Auguste, eating slowly, refilling her glass. Domination, jealousy, possessive love: in the world they lead to war; in private to . . . confusion, misery, embarrassment. One can be civilized, one can be free. One will have friends, one will have lovers. These were part of Flavia’s vision of the sensual life, disembodied future apparitions, urbane, agreeable, vague; what the sensual life spelt out for her most vividly were picnics, lobster salad, hock and seltzer, and going to the opera, in Italy, in summer.

  •

  Even in the monastery, even in prison, there is a break of routine within the routine. Once a week Flavia gave herself a half-day off. On Thursday afternoons she took the bus into Toulon to do errands. She chose Thursday, the French schoolchildren’s half holiday, because she liked the day and because it was one of deliverance for her, on Thursdays she sent off her weekly essay and work report to England. The essay took all Wednesday, was all effort, anguish, agony. It meant writing, the real thing, and she experienced an almost physical impediment to commit a sentence to blank page. The choice scared her: nothing seemed good enough, nothing that could not be made clearer, better, richer. Thoughts, words, arrow-strong, flew in all directions; they did not flow into sentences and paragraphs. Pacing the circular room, Flavia suffered and despaired. The discovery that writing was extremely difficult for her had come as a surprise and shock. She believed that it was merely some form of beginner’s cramp, a thing one can overcome from one minute to the next like ceasing to wobble on a bicycle; she could not be
lieve that for herself it would be permanent. (There, as in how much else! she was wrong.) The work report, by contrast, she was able to dash off on Thursday morning in a rapid personal telegraphese.

  At Toulon she collected a supply of money. Being under age, she was not able to have an account with a French bank. “Can’t she keep it under the mattress as you are all supposed to do?” Constanza had asked, but Michel got round the difficulty by arranging for the use of a safe deposit box which Constanza stuffed with cash. “Take out what you need, darling, and don’t forget to pay the rent.” But Flavia did not choose to run it in her mother’s way. She insisted on a fixed sum for her keep (boarding Chez Auguste was her own idea) and on sticking to it. Learning to handle money, as she put it to herself, learning to do well on relatively little is part of the training for a life of independence. No weight of overheads, no clutter of possessions—no pot-boiling, no uncongenial work. So at the bank she counted her personal allowance off a wad of franc notes; this was the pocket and book money she had enjoyed, increased every few years, almost as long as she could remember. As naturally she was not expected to pay for her school-books the arrangement provided opportunities for nice decisions. “Mummy, I’ve ordered the new François Mauriac and Those Barren Leaves and I’m putting them down to education. I hope that’s not too unfair? I am paying for the Guide Michelin.” Into a second envelope went the living allowance which did for the cleaning woman’s shopping bills and wages and her own dinners. She locked the box again, and after the bank there was the post office, a quick haircut, some soap to buy (good soap, one cake), and the day was hers.

  Bookshops. A stroll on the port (When are we going to scrap all those battleships?). And presently it was time to give herself the treat of the week, dinner in a good restaurant, a classic French restaurant (once more, her term). She experimented now and then but her steady choice was Le Sourd, gilt, white and quiet. Elderly men dined there alone, unaccompanied young girls did not. As it had not occurred to Flavia that eyebrows might be raised, eyebrows, probably, were not raised. Even on her first appearance no one had tried to fob her off with Barsac and meringue. Flavia got on with waiters, they did not smile on her quite in the same way as they did on her mother, but they smiled. At Le Sourd the waiters were old; they talked menu to her and gave advice which she took willingly if not every time. Her aim was to strike a balance between trying out new things and having what she already liked. If she ordered a sole with an elaborate sauce she might follow it with a cut of red meat, straw potatoes and watercress; if a grilled Mediterranean fish, by a fowl done in cream, going on to a piece of roquefort or brie and ending with wild strawberries. All of it was lovingly enjoyed, but the big interest of the evening was wine. (My one expensive taste.) That once a week Flavia drank half a bottle of good claret; nothing that she would have felt to be outrageous, nothing like Haut-Brion or Lafite, but something in the order of a third or fourth growth of the Médoc. She had tasted Lafite, pre-phylloxera what’s more; Anna always insanely hospitable had fetched it up one day perhaps for love of Flavia’s father. (Anna . . . the principessa . . . my grandmother . . . she thought of her, dodging between these names, she hardly thought of her, so recently estranged, so recently among the dead.) She had heard much of her father’s great fondness for wine from an early age, and of him she did think as she sniffed her ’26 Château Beychevelle or Pontet-Canet. Flavia, too, had loved wine from childhood on. She loved the shapes of bottles and of course the romantic names and the pictures of the pretty manor houses on the labels, and she loved the link with rivers and hillsides and climates and hot years, and the range of learning and experiment afforded by wine’s infinite variety; but what she loved more than these was the taste—of peach and earth and honeysuckle and raspberries and spice and cedarwood and pebbles and truffles and tobacco leaf; and the happiness, the quiet ecstasy that spreads through heart and limbs and mind.