And now an almost unbroken paragraph,
. . . best for her to go through it in that ritual way to which she was brought up. Alassio seems to haunt her all the more because she was not there . . . decided not to send for you, dearest girl, and I agreed with them . . . too late for you to meet your grandfather at this stage and much too late for him. How I wish you could have known him as I did, young Rico at Castelfonte . . . coming in from riding. . . . That was his home, his and Constanza’s. It was Anna and I, the barbarians from across the sea, who had the love for Rome. That was our home!
By the way, I am afraid there is the bad news that Castelfonte is now lost, that no-good brother of hers (much in evidence at present snivelling away in the family circle) has already pocketed millions and millions of lira from some nefarious concern that plans to turn the place into a casino cum resort with bungalows on the hills; nothing but an equivalent number of millions would make him change that tiny, greedy mind.
Flavia put down the sheets. The prince ill, getting better, or not better; Giorgio about to succeed; Constanza in Rome; Michel also in Rome, but apparently gone again. She was seized by hope. Recounting days and dates it became certain that they could have, that they must have, left Spain before the arrival of the plainclothes men. She was shaking, she was levitating with relief—then the record in her mind played clearly,
You don’t imagine that Michel and Mrs. H. will be able to cover their tracks after ten weeks in Almuñecar? Waiters, chambermaids, you know. You’ve heard how these things are done?
And yet, and yet? They might conceivably have had Flavia’s own telegram in time to make the waiters and the chambermaids promise not to tell. She could not see Michel, she could see Constanza doing this and doing it successfully—a conspiracy of loyal friends, a conspiracy of loyal servants. The world was still like that, the world was not Andrée’s. The hotel register? One can tear out a page when nobody is looking and burn it, and Flavia could see her mother doing this as well.
She sorted the letter into order and began carefully now at the beginning. Constanza, she found, had arrived at Roma-Termini eighteen hours after Mr. James’s own arrival. He had met the train and she had been taken immediately to a waiting car. Mr. James had hung back while she and Michel Devaux said good-bye. Afterwards the two men had walked to the Grand Hotel where Mr. James had given Devaux breakfast. They had sat about for a couple of hours until it was time to go back for the Paris train.
Devaux told me about the manner of their leaving Spain. They drove to Murcia where they caught a train that took them up the coast. They were obliged to leave his car and books in the small place by the sea where they had been spending the summer. [Here Flavia groaned.] And he appears to be anxious about their fate; your mother’s affects—you know how light she travels—seem to have presented less of a problem. At Valencia they were able to change on to a faster train which reached Barcelona at four o’clock the next morning, and from there they boarded the through carriage to Genoa at noon. In fact, Devaux managed to get her here most efficiently and considering that he would not allow her to fly by a Spanish line with the minimum of delay. Your mother, as you would expect of her, took the heat, fatigue and various discomforts of the journey with complete cheerfulness and I am sure that she was looked after by him à merveille.
Mr. James went on to say that he concurred with Devaux’s reasons for not hanging about in Rome.
He told me the nature of the business that was awaiting him in Paris and he had that look upon his face of a man who expects to come prancing back with a marriage licence in his pocket. What do I think of him? I can hear you ask the question. I’ve been told that you and he have taken much to one another, so what you would enjoy to get from me would be enlargement rather than plain confirmation. Well, what can I tell you who have spent weeks with him after my mere two hours of wandering in public places? They were, I can say, well-spent hours, I taking in (with such attention: we hope so much for those we love), he laying himself open to be taken in. He showed a simple joy in finding himself with an old friend of your mother’s, treating me quite unselfconsciously as one in loco parentis. (Like many people who set out on intellectually original lines he has a yearning for the traditional human ties.) I was charmed—how could I not be?—by so much grace of manner covering so much quality. He has what is well-named une grande gentillesse, that rare compound of patience, sensitiveness and great kindness. That he has a mind, you know; I would also guess that he has an ample reservoir of will, and that he is using it in what many people would regard a negative direction. The forte he has chosen is detachment and uncompromisingness. He is fastidious and does not conceal it, and the consequence of that is that he stands aside. There is an aura of defeat about him, his ideas are not likely to find echo or approval in his lifetime (if ever), and she has talked to me a little, only a very little, about the extreme moral and emotional strain he was submitted to over a long period in his private life. What impressed me about Constanza and Devaux—though, mind you, I only saw them together for a matter of minutes—is that they are less like people about to strike out together than like two people seeking rest. What we must hope for is that in due course they will be able to do the first after having found the second. Only the future can tell.
For the time being he has let himself become dominated by a set of prescriptions as how to regulate his conduct, some of them on the stiff-necked and quixotic side (a French agnostic intellectual with a non-conformist conscience is a force of nature, so far I had not been able to study one at close range); his standards of probity, responsibility and industry appear to me to be not short of the fantastic although, if personally idle, I do not belong to a generation that could be called permissive.
Your mother tells me that he refuses to verify any bill presented to him on the ground that to question the honesty of those one deals with is in itself a dishonest act. I asked her if this applied to bills in restaurants, and she said it did. “Can you not stop him?” “I don’t think that I want to.” She also told me that if he does discover some unreliable or dishonest act—one must wonder by what process?—his disapproval and rejection are absolute and formidable. It is a change for her, drawn as she used to be, I think I can say this to you without undue disrespect to your unusual, talented, and unusually unscrupulous father, to men with a strain of the opportunist or the buccaneer. Never to miss a pleasure in life at whatever cost to someone else was an almost philosophical concept with Simon; with Devaux, it is to do one’s duty at whatever cost to oneself, and he always sees his duty clear—which is of course more clearly than one’s duty ever can be seen. Oh, he has his faults, or if you prefer, his dangerous qualities.
Constanza sees them but—most unlike her—refuses to comment. It was Anna who wanted people to be what they were not, her daughter never tried to change (or hold), she saw her loved ones plain; but she talked of what she saw, she judged them. She judged Simon to the point that he turned away from her in order to regain confidence in himself. Now she is determined not to judge Michel Devaux.
Not even his political ideas. I can see that she is not at ease about them, about the long view he is taking. I, more frivolously, must confess to being charmed by his pessimism which I find refreshing in contrast to the half-baked nostrums so solemnly propounded by the run of the high-minded. Devaux’s theme is the spoliation of our environment on this planet by increasing population and rash use of new technologies; his nostrum, to by-pass greed, ignorance and lazy lack of foresight (Giorgio multiplied by myriads), unlikely to be changeable on a mass-scale in the present context of society, by excluding them from public administration and decision-making. He believes that this could be managed by selecting our custodians by “objective” tests—no believer he in universal franchise!—even by breeding them to specification like so many queen bees. He thinks that this may be possible, if not acceptable, in the near future. Not acceptable. Hence the pessimism. The old old problem, how to effect desirable changes
without employing undesirable means tied to the most basic problem of it all, desirable to whom? Devaux would say that as one must choose for children why not also for the remaining high percentage of the insufficiently mature (detected, no doubt, by more tests)? His world is Utopian, and Quality, not equality, is the dream. It all has little connection with any extant political right or left, to the extremes of each he has in turn been accused of belonging; his own dimensions, I should say, are severely vertical: from high to low. For one of my age, it is an exhilarating spectacle to see a man go so slap against his time. Your mother, I am sure, would like him to be less detached about the Bolsheviks and Fascists and the menace of that odious man in Germany, her point being, as it has always been, that it is upon us now to get people out of Siberia and off Mussolini’s islands and to stop rearmament (in my view mutually exclusive undertakings) rather than shudder at tomorrow’s ravages.
Flavia laid down the sheets in dejection. She had barely taken in what she was reading, none of it was now capable of firing her. Nevertheless, after a few listless minutes, she resumed.
The next paragraph did nothing to lift her spirits.
Needless to say that we did not go into all of that at RomaTermini (I have glanced since at his books and had various conversations with your mother), what we talked about, apart from the house they hope to furnish in the South of France and a tower of his that he intends to make over to you, was the boot-black and the traffic policeman’s gestures and Italian cooking. He told me that Constanza cooked for him in Spain. He literally couldn’t swallow Spanish food, he quakes when he talks of it. It isn’t because he is insular, it is more complicated than that; he does not like French cooking either but that, unlike the Spanish oil, appears to be a moral issue. He regards food as le vice français—in many ways he is one of nature’s Protestants—so he was perfectly happy with your mother’s pasta. (Neither she nor Rico ever properly appreciated Anna’s house-keeping, that was left to me, and later on to your father.) Constanza made it herself, what’s more, that pasta, rolling it out, getting food for her man for all the world to see in the kitchen of that Spanish inn.
Why am I writing to you at such length? Well, for one thing your mother has asked me to do so—you know what she is about letters—“Give her my love, tell her about everything.” She is concerned about you. “Do you think Flavia is all right?” I told her I was certain that you were, chasing no doubt a hundred hares. (Did you not make it clear to me, dear girl, when you last wrote, that you had no wish for company?) She spoke to me of the curious feeling she had when she passed along your coast in their train: it was early morning and she kept looking out of the window and for a few seconds she could see the bay of St-Jean. “What is Flavia doing at this hour—is she in the tower, reading? or perhaps swimming in the very sea below? It was a queer feeling, I had that impulse to wave to her, and yet it was so remote, so inexorable, I might as well have been up in the aeroplane Michel wouldn’t let me take.”
The morning, the time (if the dates worked out were right) when Flavia was weeping for Andrée, and Andrée was in the tower.
So you see, dear girl, that telling you “about everything” means a good many touches here and there. It is a long time since you and I talked together and it may be a longer one before we shall again. There are one or two things I should like to say to you, convey to you—I must try. I wish we were talking, though it is not that I lack time, your mother spends hours sitting with her father, and even if it were not for this confounded heat my time for running after the sights of Rome is past. I should have been content—more content!—never to have seen Rome again. What one has loved, one possesses. Return won’t do. It is unnecessary. The reality is too strong as well as too diluted by material cares and impacts. I always felt that Anna’s mourning for the City was mistaken; how I wish that she had been able to realize that it was hers. I do not expect you, my child, to follow me here. When one is young one needs the experience, the whole of it, in the round, in the flesh, not the imprint of it or, as it might seem to you, the shadow. When one is young one cannot imagine, literally not imagine, the changes that will overtake one’s spiritual digestion; one cannot see a future different in kind from the present, one can only see an extended now. It is later, when one has become different—and how much so—that we may be able to see (if we have taken care not to forget too much) the then and the now; and perhaps that double vision is the enrichment, the only one, that old age brings us.
Don’t be impatient. Do I appear to be talking about myself? Perhaps what I am trying to impress on you is that when you yourself will have reached the stage—as people of talent and imagination will—at which you can see both the now and then, it will matter immensely what the quality of the then, your present now, has been. Beware—I don’t think I need to tell you, perhaps I am trying still to tell myself—beware of allowing it to go meagre by failing to feel and to record. Train your memory, on all levels. The worst we can do towards the past is to let it go by default.
Again I wish that I were talking to you instead of writing and could be helped along by your questions; letters are soliloquacious work. But there it is; and forgive the trouble that you will be having with my handwriting—one is not getting younger. I am not brave enough, you will notice, to say I.
Perhaps I am affected by the spectacle of my friend Rico’s illness, a man my junior by nearly a decade. Rico has given up. He reminds me of nothing so much as a passage of Trelawny’s about Shelley bathing in the Arno (you will recall that the poet could not swim): having plunged in and sunk instantly to the bottom, he lay on the river-bed “extended like a conger eel, not making the least effort or struggle to save himself.”
Here Flavia cried again; not for her grandfather whom she had once been able to see so vividly and who was becoming more and more implausible to her, but for herself; for her isolation, her own inability to struggle—What can I do?—to save them, to save herself. Mr. James’s letter, including her so naturally, brought home the sense of her own exile: for her, the events described could not be taking place in the same world and time; she felt insulated from them, as insulated as Constanza must have felt when the train had swept her past the bay, they had no present reality for one so far from grace.
That she herself might move did not occur to her; if there was impulse to hurl herself into Constanza’s presence, it was paralysed by a sense of the impossible. She was not able to believe in herself, in Flavia, passing the gate of the dark house in Rome waiting for death, bearing her tale.
Presently she went and warmed herself a little food. She ate; then cried again. She told herself, speaking aloud in the old habit, I am losing grip. But the answer was only a quiet yes.
Dully she returned to the one task on hand. She unravelled another passage of the letter. It contained no fact of material or immediate reassurance. It was about Constanza.
You will find her changed. How can I describe her? Acquiescent? Placid? Rounder? Were it not for hubris I should be tempted to put down serene, or an even simpler word. Older? Yes, older. She has entered another phase. (The last time I saw her was a year ago almost to the day at the time of her flight with Lewis Crane.) Now it is as if she had laid aside half her brilliance and half her will and her immense claims on life like so much ornament (and armour—Anna is no more), almost as if she had deliberately dimmed herself. Perhaps she knows that by making oneself less one may be able to give more.
If she seems muted—oh, very comparatively speaking—she also seems at peace. She asked me if I could reconstruct for her some wintry lines of Hölderlin’s she once came across in a translation and which lately keep jingling in her mind, they go something like, Who has no house now/Will build never-more. “But I am building a house now,” she says. “Aren’t I?” She is certain that destiny—she won’t settle for less—has presented her with Michel Devaux, her second chance, or third or fourth, whatever her reckoning, to make up for the mistakes and omissions of the past. One smiles,
and fears. And yet—who am I to scoff when the name I so often gave her in my mind, the name I once heard Simon use in his way, lightly, was (she will not thank me for spelling it out on paper) a favourite of the gods?
It was almost with relief that Flavia turned to the second letter. It was from her English tutor, an acknowledgement, presumably, of her apology for having failed to do the weekly essay, and she opened the envelope without interest or anticipation. The opening, “You tell me that you have slipped into neglecting your work for some days and ask me to regard it as a holiday,” reminded her of the present identical situation: another note of apology was overdue. Ah well, it would have to be written; she felt nothing but reluctance at this demand on her to cope.
The rest of the letter was short and clear. The gist, set down in a large and well-shaped hand, sprang at her as it were from the single page: I am aware that for some months you have had no holiday, when most people would have had one. Was not that exactly what we had agreed on when we drew up your course? I was not in favour of the plan of your working on your own and without supervision. I am not saying that your work has not been quite satisfactory so far, however, you have too much ground to cover and too many gaps to make up to be able to afford any slackening off if you want to take the examination in October. You cannot afford to in terms of sheer time. I am surprised at your having apparently lost sight of this fact. Perhaps you will decide to work in England, or to postpone your going up for another year?
A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error Page 47