A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error

by Sybille Bedford

  “Then there was the day she told him that she had read his books. That shook him, though he made light of it. To please him, I said, ‘What’s more she really admires them. You have such a lucid style. Your ideas disturb her—they are open to misconstruction.’ He looked dazed—he who is always so unruffled, so controlled—he muttered something like fancy her being interested in that kind of stuff. I bridled (I shouldn’t have), ‘Because she is a woman?’ (The other night I had asked him if he didn’t think they ought to have the vote in Switzerland, and he said it was irrelevant.) ‘What about myself then?’

  “ ‘A taste for abstract ideas is common among people under twenty. It wanes. It is not difficult, as you will learn, to find readers; it is dangerously easy to find disciples; it is extremely hard to find anyone you are personally attached to who will care two hoots about your work.’

  “I thought then of the wife, the difficult woman with the nerves St-Jean was talking about, whose caprices and demands had made his life so impossible. Perhaps that story, too, was inaccurate. I hoped so.

  •

  “Constanza and I did not really talk about Michel. She had told me, quite sharply for her, to drop that silly name we used to have for him, the man of principle. When one morning she told me that they were going away, I can’t say that it was a surprise. The way she put it was that Michel had very kindly offered to drive her to Paris, which she had never seen properly (Simon used to grumble so about not being able to take her because of the war). Did I think I would be able to manage for a while on my own? (with Mena, and Mr. James in the offing).

  “I didn’t even want to ask anything. I only said, ‘Constanza, go; have a lovely time.’

  •

  “Before they went off, Michel and I had a talk. He gave me the keys of the tower. ‘It’s a good place, it’s yours. Use it.’ Then he said, ‘You know we are going to get married.’ After I had congratulated him, I said, ‘You mean you asked her and she said Yes to you at once? She didn’t say she wanted to wait?’

  “ ‘It was just a decision we came to. I believe it was your mother who said, ‘Wouldn’t it be the best thing?’

  “ ‘She asked you? Like the day outside Cintra’s Bar?’ I could not forbear to congratulate him once again.

  “ ‘As a matter of fact I’m afraid that we shall have to wait.’ He had neglected, he said, to press for the completion of certain formalities. ‘The issue seemed academic.’ To put it bluntly, he was not really divorced. It was a matter of time, most steps had been taken, ‘We are leaving St-Jean to avoid talk; we shall have to be reasonably discreet for the next few months or so.’

  “I said, ‘It will be good for her to get away from here. Michel, you are a responsible man.’ He said he hoped he was and I embraced him.

  “After they had gone (they left one evening after dark, Constanza having said that there was one thing Michel refused to put on me—he will have to learn to be a bit less scrupulous, poor lamb—so that she would have to do it, and it was not to let on: ‘Tell our friends I’ve gone to Italy to look after my papa; as for Michel, he’s God knows where, you don’t know, it’s nobody’s business and they’re used to his comings and goings.’ I said to count on it, what else?) So after they had gone I began to use the tower. I made myself the timetable you know. At first I thought about it a good deal, naturally, and the more I thought the more I liked it. I have a feeling it will do. I love Michel. I have a feeling that this time it will be all right for her. When she was younger she thought she knew what she was waiting for. Now in a queer way, a looking-glass way you might say, she seems to be getting it. One is always warned about the perils of wishing—perhaps Constanza won’t be in trouble because she is not getting her wish literally. She used to be drawn towards political life, she dreamt of the English statesman, yet when Simon went for office she was against it. Isn’t Michel a politician in reverse? His life is political theory, politics minus self. He has chosen obscurity? privacy? independence?

  “Half her past life with Italians, half with the English, now it will be new ground as she has said. Michel’s told me a few things about himself; he comes from a family of lawyers and administrators. There’s always been land. His father and mother are dead. One brother is a magistrat in Paris, the other farms. (Experimental farming on Michel’s persuasion and advice; it’s not doing well and the brother is taking fright.) His sisters are married to the same kind of men. He, too, married a girl of his own milieu; they’ve been separated for many years. No children. A part of his inheritance has gone in a number of ventures; his books make about two-and-six a year. ‘Unlike Mr. Crane’s. I told her to think twice.’

  “ ‘Then you haven’t got a jealous disposition?’

  “He said coldly, ‘Of all human failing jealousy is perhaps the most deplorable and most dangerous.’

  “ ‘Not worse than cruelty?’

  “ ‘It leads to it.’

  “What else did he tell me about himself? When he was young he loved horses.

  “ ‘La chasse à courre?’

  “ ‘Jumping.’ ‘Do you mean show jumping?’ ‘Oh, I gave it up ages ago.’ When I told Constanza, she who has a memory for these things said, ‘Good Lord, not M. J. Devaux who came over with the French team after the war?’

  “So they have that, too.

  “It is curious that it should have happened, that Michel came upon the scene the very instant she was really free for the first time in her life. I suppose from day to day Constanza always did pretty well what she pleased, but Anna was always there. ‘I don’t think mama will approve of that.’ ‘I daresay mama will be glad.’ ‘They sent the bill, I must forward it to mama.’ That’s all over. Michel thinks she will be in for a bad time when she realizes it. He will be there. It is a new life, nothing less. She has signed the long lease for the house inland, it will be for both of them, Deo volente, as she would say.

  “When? I don’t know. I pass by the house now and then but it doesn’t seem awfully real to me yet. I’ve stopped thinking about that part of the future, I’ve stopped worrying about her. We can all start out now on our own.

  “Michel wrote to me some time ago—not from Paris—that they would be away a good deal longer than they originally planned, complications having arisen. Nobody except his lawyers and myself know his whereabouts or have an address and it might be as well to leave it at that. Constanza has added a scribble, ‘We’ve been running into a rather nasty situation. I keep telling Michel that nobody is in the slightest doubt that we’ve run off together, but the fact seems to be that as long as there’s no actual proof, it can’t hurt us. So, darling, keep mum about where we are. I know we can count on you. Let’s pray we shall be back before you have read ten thousand books.’

  “So I will not tell—not even to you—in what country they are.

  “When it’s all done and Michel has made an honest woman of her, Constanza wants us to go to Rome, the three of us, and pay our respects to her papa. She says Michel and I will be able to sustain each other. For a minute I liked the idea, now I don’t. Isn’t it a bit late to acquire a family, that kind of a family? What could I say to my grandfather? Very likely he expects a bambina—even Constanza found they didn’t speak the same language any more. Oh, I know the prince isn’t a fascist, he’s got nothing but contempt for Musso; Constanza says her father was never a man who had much faith in any trains running on time; but he is a man who can still get favours from the régime. It’s different for Constanza, she’s got so much affection for them. For me, it will be . . . awkward . . . unnecessary? And to think what it all meant to Anna.

  “I don’t want to think about that, I don’t want to look at the actual scene, I’ve got over it, haven’t I? . . . the way she died . . . and all that went before. It doesn’t have much to do with me. Just because she brought me up. That was because of the custody. Very well, I loved her. I did do that. Now I want to get away from it, that is the truth. That is the reason I sent Mena away a
nd kept Mr. James from coming—I know it now, I can see it now, this instant.”. . .

  Flavia became aware of her voice and that it was loud, aware of herself on her feet rapidly walking the floor at first light.

  “It was their story, everything in it seems to have led to the next thing—now it should have a stop! I want no more of it. I can become an English don and . . . other things besides. It is over, it cannot touch my life, it is not part of my story. Therese—tell me it is not?”

  But Therese in the bed was peacefully lying asleep.

  •

  Flavia flung herself out of the room. For a minute she remained on the landing, shaking with humiliation and rage. Then she took refuge in Loulou’s bathroom. Tears rolling down her face, she turned on the taps. She threw handfuls of Loulou’s bath-salts into the hot water, then emptied the jar. There. A dash of eau-de-Cologne for good measure. Lying in clouds of scent in the sunken tub filled to the brim, that streak of equanimity she had asserted itself. She began to giggle; ruefully. And all of it in English! Poor Therese. Perhaps just as well? Just as well.

  4. SOME WEEKS

  1.

  IS EVERYTHING only what we remember it to be—neither more nor less? Where, then, and when is truth? Does it take two to tell it? Flavia herself that morning had slept late. And when she had woken and eaten everything the femme de ménage had left for lunch plus some extra eggs and some ham, she was no longer certain what had taken place the night before.

  Can I have said all that? She did not actually remember herself as talking the whole of the time—could there have been silent passages when the words were only reeling through her mind? And when had Therese dropped off? Had she herself perhaps dropped off at one point? She was not able to tell.

  Nor Therese, too likely. Flavia was resolved not to ask. That, never.

  “You are late, coco, à table, you’re going to have baked pigeon tonight.” That was the opening of the following evening, the evening to be faced. And when they were alone, in the same room, there was no indication whether anything at all had reached Therese’s mind. Flavia, once more and very firmly, told herself, tant mieux.

  And after a week or so she found herself able to tease.

  “See you tomorrow, coco?”

  “How not? For dinner and bed. No extras.”

  “I keep asking you to come out in the boat, you say you have to work. What are you laughing about?”

  Flavia kissed her hand. “I will go in the boat. Tomorrow?”

  That was not Therese’s way to treat the sea. “Tomorrow there may be mistral. Today is right.”

  “I can’t, it’s my essay day.”

  “You ought to have a holiday.”

  “A holiday must be declared in advance, like a law.”

  Flavia stuck to her guns and when she turned up next morning was told by the Loulou boys that she didn’t know one wind from the other. No boats out today. Mama has driven to Toulon.

  “To buy fish, papa is arriving.”

  “He does eat a great deal of fish?” said Flavia.

  “Stupid. He paints it.”

  “Doesn’t he do mostly portraits these days?”

  The three little boys danced about her. “Portraits of fish. Dead fish—nature morte, get it? When papa’s away he paints ladies, at home he paints fish, stinking fish, rascasse, red mullet, sea spider, octopus, at night it goes into the icebox, table and all, it stinks all the same. It de-com-po-ses.”

  Having gathered so much about Loulou’s working habits, Flavia walked home by way of St-Jean. On the waterfront she ran into the most assiduous of her mother’s winter acquaintances, who greeted her with an exhibition of surprise.

  “Well, well, our bookworm in person. In broad daylight what’s more—and looking very charming in it too. To what do we owe the honour?”

  “I’m having a holiday,” Flavia said.

  “I fully understand: the day not being Sunday.”

  Flavia gave him marks for memory.

  “What excuse have you got to offer for not coming home with us for lunch?”

  Flavia hesitated.

  “Caught you. My wife’s shopping over there, let’s get out of the sun.” He steered her towards an awning. “We can look at the ships from here.”

  Albert Fournier was a slightly paunchy man, probably in his fifties, with silvery hair and a soft, handsome and not unintelligent face marred by a fatuous smile. He might have been a minor orator, not quite in the senate, nor yet on the stage, more likely at the Bar of some prosperous provincial town; in fact he had made his early and relatively modest pile in some wholesale business. He was a well if conventionally educated man, and a man of various interests and hobbies. Flavia spent a not uncompanionable quarter-hour with him talking mast ratio and tonnage. He drank a pastis, she a citron pressé. When Mme Fournier joined them, Flavia rose and relieved her of her market basket; Fournier did neither.

  She was a plumpish woman, about ten years younger than her husband and still moderately pretty. She had a fine head of chestnut hair, protruding eyes and an upturned nose; she wore patches of rouge on her cheeks, high-heeled sandals (to Flavia’s disgust) and a tight cotton dress. The whole looked a good deal less awful than the parts. She, too, greeted Flavia with exclamations and innuendo.

  “So mademoiselle is no longer burning the midnight oil? La vie de bohème seems to suit you, you’re en beauté, ma petite.”

  Flavia automatically scowled.

  Fournier said, “Bohème? I’d call it la vie de millionnaire.”

  “Les artistes restent les artistes,” said his wife.

  Bouvard et Pécuchet, Flavia said, not aloud.

  “A little bird tells me—oh, St-Jean is full of them—you are dining every night at that great barrack of a house.”

  “Peinture à l’huile—cuisine au beurre,” said Flavia. “Comment?”

  But her husband laughed.

  “And do you have any news,” she said—he gave her a look, “Oh, news, I mean new, you know—”

  “Too much of it in the papers,” he said.

  “Indeed,” said his wife.

  “Which ones do you read?” said Flavia.

  In her own house (a villa furnished to the last square inch) Mme Fournier changed into a punctilious, even formal hostess. She addressed her young guest with civilities suitable for a personage of advanced years and uncertain appetite. Just the simplest little déjeuner à l’improviste, you must excuse us. May I persuade you—another morsel? I’m afraid there isn’t anything very exciting to follow. Flavia responded like a well-behaved little girl. Fournier, more relaxed himself, observed them with detachment. When he had had enough he said, “Ça va, Rosette,” and started a conversation.

  It was an ordinary conversation, not an interrogatory; for the first time since Flavia had known the Fourniers, they did not try to draw her out. If they didn’t keep off personal remarks at least they asked no questions; personal subjects were ignored or dropped. They did float up (because they were avoided?). Mention travel, and it led to a woman travelling alone; lending a novel, to a circular room full of books—there was that underswell.

  Fournier talked to Flavia about her own reading; she must promise to come back soon, they told her, they were expecting a houseful on the Quatorze Juillet, nephews and nieces, young married people, des universitaires, they will be interested to meet you.

  Flavia had a sense that they were trying to flatter her, butter her up; she didn’t like it, she didn’t like the Fourniers enough. She felt vaguely uneasy, wishing she had not come.

  One of their nephews, they told her, had just got his degree in agronomics, he was going to teach, he couldn’t afford to farm.

  “I thought farming in France paid well?”

  “For farmers perhaps,” Fournier said, “not for young men with theories.”

  “You need a fortune to farm with those, some people have all the luck. Well, live and let live, that’s my motto, isn’t it, Albert?”

&nb
sp; “As long as you can see them doing it, ma chère.”

  Just when Flavia felt that she could decently leave, her host said that he would like to show her something.

  “Oh, Albert, you’re not going to do that, she doesn’t want to see your bricks.”

  Fournier led Flavia through a back door to an outhouse. He opened the door to a large room completely bare except for a vast trestle-table that filled it from wall to wall. This table was covered with what looked like a toy village, or rather a toy landscape, for there were rivers and hillsides and boundaries and hundreds and hundreds of minute patches of green in every geometrical shape and minute model manor houses and châteaux and farms. Flavia stepped forward, looked: looked at her host, looked at the toy landscape—it was a homemade, handmade relief map of the vineyards of France.

  She ran a finger up the pale blue painted ribbon that was the Rhône, came to the Saône, touched the Côte de Beaune, the Côte de Nuits, bent to read the microscopic legends on the sign-flags, Corton-Charlemagne—Chambolle-Musigny—“Oh, oh, oh.”

  “. . . and it’s so . . . delicate. Oh . . . You made it yourself? It must have taken years and years—? Is it all there—? Is it accurate? Is it complete?”

  He said it had taken years. He was still making corrections; he was doing his best to keep it up to date.

  “May I?”

  “What, my dear?”

  “Look at it?”

  “You are looking at it.”

  “I mean longer . . . slowly.”

  He showed her the cases with other small flags on pins: these he used in the autumn to mark the beginning of the vintages, and the card-index where he kept the regional weather reports year before year.

  Flavia said, “It must be a bit like . . . being a don.”

  He handed her a magnifying glass. The sign-flags showed the average annual yields. Château Branaire-Ducru 100 tonneaux. Giscours 20 tonneaux. Lascombes 35.

  “A tonneau is four hogshead, isn’t it, about twenty-five gallons?”