Jigsaw

by Sybille Bedford

  Then there was the gramophone. When Rosie wasn’t there; she really disliked music. Jamie played his Elgar and his Bach and Handel, Toni chose Rosenkavalier. What really sent her, as we would now, not inaptly, put it, were the voices of great singers. Once she got lured into putting on Caruso and a rare recording of Emmy Destinn, a soprano she revered. It sounded ghostly, remote and cracked, with some beauty coming through. For Toni it was an ecstasy she ought to have been allowed to have in private.

  They were good, those evenings in the mews at Regent’s Park. Not just for me. In spite of the smouldering discontent, Toni was stimulated; in Rosie, whatever she was doing, one was aware of something quietly purring away; Jamie was just quiet. Not on the surface only, I feel sure he liked his home life.

  Rosie and I did things together: afternoons at the National Portrait Gallery, the Wallace Collection, Dulwich (on top of my own, at one time almost daily, hour at the National Gallery). The plays she chose for us would be anything good between Shakespeare and Coward. – She greatly admired the actor Gerald Du Maurier. – We took train day trips to Canterbury, to Ely …

  On Sundays, when the weather wasn’t too vile, we drove into the country, the four of us in Jamie’s Morris-Cowley, Rosie and I stuck in the open dickey with a square of oilcloth rigged above our heads in case of rain. Jamie liked country walks, and so did I. The sisters chose to stay in the car, smoking, nibbling chocolates. These outings, picnic and all, were one of Toni’s concessions to being a good wife. (How little she liked those Sundays, she later told me.) On the way back, as a reward, Jamie would stop at a tea-shop.

  About once a month Toni and Jamie went to his mother’s for Sunday dinner. I believe she lived in Surbiton. (Jamie took his mending.) Hardly a word was said about these visits – Toni was loyal – yet one gathered that mother and daughter-in-law were poles apart in every respect. I never learned much about Jamie’s background or early life – though he and I remained on affectionate, if casual, terms for some fifty years. (As Toni so often said: a taciturn Scot.) I knew vaguely that he had been something of a wanderer, that his father was a lay preacher at some time, that Jamie had not gone to university, that there was no family money. A brother somewhere, I think; no sisters. Mrs Nairn’s home, Toni’s first in England – after their marriage, she and Jamie lived at his mother’s for about a year – was the epitome of an English way of life she shuddered from and feared: cosy-spartan England of parlours, yellow soap in the bath and no warmth in the bedrooms, where dad was served first and had his chair by the fire (a cut or two below my own first English experience with the Robbinses’ people). That year in Surbiton, if it was Surbiton, must have been a great trial; the more so as it was utterly unexpected: Jamie the happy suitor in Berlin had given her no indications. If anyone was inept at living down being the foreigner-married-to-the-son it was Toni.

  Disassociation from her husband’s family goes some way to explain the social isolation in which Toni lived during those years. Why no new friends of her own? deigned not? could not? Lack of opportunity I suppose, compounded by shyness, choosiness and pride; in her disillusion with the English she looked rather too often down her small nose. Then there was Jamie failing to bring home his professional friends (pretty glamorous – by which I meant articulate and bright – from what I absorbed on visits to the shop). A simple instinct to keep his masculine world apart? Brief exceptions were attempted once or twice, not doomed to success – Toni’s unadjustable attitudes, her housekeeping, their slender means. (At that period no drink was kept in the house.)

  Yes, but Rosie. She was not shy; she loved the English; her feelings about London were much those of Dr Johnson, yet she too appeared to know nobody besides myself and a woman schoolteacher from Watford who faithfully came to tea once a fortnight on her half-holiday. They’d met on some trip. A nice woman, though hardly, I felt, a congruous friend for Rosie.

  5

  One morning in mid-March – it was at the end of my first winter in Upper Gloucester Place – a blustery cold morning, I went out early for some reason or other. I seldom did, mornings were for ‘study’. Going up the street I saw Rosie Falkenheim walking ten yards in front of me making for her own door. She was wearing what I can only describe as trailing evening dress, not a mere long skirt, unmistakable chiffon swirls under a short day coat. She turned into her house. It must have been about half past nine in the morning. She did not see me.

  Barely a week later I went out early again (one of those coincidental things that happen to most of us: one hasn’t been near some place for years then returns thrice running). Passing Baker Street tube station I saw Rosie emerging from the entrance, trailing dress, day coat, evening bag. It was about ten o’clock, bright daylight. This time she saw me. And that I’d seen her.

  Good morning, she said.

  Good morning, I said in a tone much less assured.

  I’m on my way home, she said, and where are you off to? (Was there a twinkle in her bright round simian eyes?)

  I told her with as much composure as I could and fled.

  Later that day I found a note in the hall suggesting we might have a bite of dinner together in Soho – it was a Saturday – something we had done once or twice before and she knew I liked tremendously. We went. To the small Escargot. There were two restaurants called L’Escargot in Greek Street, opposite one another, both French in the Soho style. The larger Escargot was quite elegant and expensive; it still flourishes (with what is currently perhaps the best American wine list in London); small brother is no more.

  As usual she let me take over. We discussed what we were going to eat. I decided the wine.

  I had started on the snails I’d ordered for myself (there is a stage in one’s gastronomic evolution when one believes that one likes snails very much), when Rosie said in a decisive tone, ‘This has all been rather silly.’

  I stopped the movement of my fork.

  ‘You see, it’s all because of Toni.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No.’

  ‘Toni doesn’t want you to know. She doesn’t want anyone to know; she doesn’t want Jamie to show that he knows.’

  I took some bread and mopped up the little pool of garlic butter in which one of my snails had sat.

  ‘You know,’ Rosie said, ‘I have a friend.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes?’

  ‘He lives off St James’s Park. It’s a service flat in a block. He likes me to change in the evening.’

  That night, and on other nights, I learned some of the facts that make up their story. The beginnings and the present; some of the future I witnessed myself (from side-lines). I shall tell only the much of it that I heard and the little of it that I saw; I could expand my knowledge by looking up obituaries and old clippings, they would yield more facts, they could not give a complete truth. I prefer to leave it as it is, a fragment of private human behaviour. I shall not name names. The Nairns were not called Nairn, nor were the Falkenheims (any more than the Robbinses were the Robbinses). Why, might one ask, after all those years and in our tell-all age? Chiefly because they are people seen only through my eyes: it would be impertinent and in some cases hurtful to publish my, necessarily one-sided, view of people who though they themselves be dead may still be held in affection and esteem, let alone seen in different lights, by their descendants, friends and colleagues.

  As far as Rosie Falkenheim’s story is concerned, the reason for ‘covering up’ is stronger: I only heard two sides of it. Of the motives, commitments, feelings of the third and principal protagonist I know nothing, or next to nothing, at first hand.

  In the summers, the summers before the First World War that was, the widowed Mrs Falkenheim took her young daughters to a comfortable resort in Switzerland. There between lake and mountains they spent six weeks or more in a good hotel. Rooms with a view, rooms with balconies … Palm-court music, excursions, animated social life among an international clientèle. One year they met a good-looking young barrister from England. Not
too young – Toni was eighteen, Rosie in her twenties, he, a generation or so older, somewhere in his thirties – old enough to dazzle with conversation and an experienced charm. He was, one understood, already very successful at the Bar. He was un-English enough (a touch? more than a touch of Irish?) to show that he enjoyed the company of pretty women, and attached himself to Toni who, when things were right, could be quite a flirt. They played tennis, they went out on the lake, they danced in the evenings … A summer flirtation and seen as such by their hotel acquaintance: the good-looking barrister from England was Toni Falkenheim’s beau.

  Next summer came round and who happened to be at Vevey, Pontresina or Gstaad (if I was told, I don’t remember which): the barrister from England. Again he slipped into his role as Toni’s chief attendant. Did she take it seriously? (They knew he wasn’t married.) Rosie, who was never able to ask, thought Toni could not have. He may have turned her head a little, but it was all so evidently a pleasant public pastime with a rather worldly man outside her sphere, not a courtship. She couldn’t have taken it seriously, her real life was already conditioned by Berlin, her music, the spoiling uncle; her crushes so far were for opera singers. All the same she was flattered, he was so intelligent, so entertaining, so many cuts above the other single men at the hotel. Besides she liked him, she liked him very much; he was, Rosie said, a charmer who had much more to offer than his charm. So Toni had the best of it in the mountain days and evenings …

  Next summer the Falkenheims left Vevey or Gstaad earlier than had been their habit; the good-looking barrister from England, the Courts not having risen before August, did not come at all. That summer was 1914.

  There is one thing not mentioned in this account of the previous years. After the orchestra had packed up their fiddles and the lights been put out in the chandeliers, and upstairs Toni had taken off her dancing slippers, the barrister from England slid into Rosie’s room and spent the night with her. Their rooms were on the same floor, she left her window open, he had become quite good at moving like a shadow along a row of balconies.

  They corresponded during the whole of the war by way of neutral Switzerland. To write or receive letters from an enemy alien, as each was now to the other, was a serious offence. Their post-box or go-between must have been safe for they got away with it. The obituary I did not read might tell whether he served in the war or did some important law work, as it would give the date of his taking Silk. All I know is that in the early nineteen-twenties he was made a judge. A judge of the High Court in the King’s Bench Division. When it had become reasonably possible again for a German to travel, he arranged for her to come to England. Rosie left Berlin, family and job for good and settled – with her own furniture – in that bed-sitter in Upper Gloucester Place.

  Their affair had to be kept entirely private which in his position meant secret. Astonishingly perhaps, it remained so.

  * * *

  It took time to get a few of the questions answered, not least because most of them were unaskable. Yet once Rosie had begun to talk, she talked again.

  Quite soon she told me his name. I realised that he was not one of the judges whose cases she used to point out to me. I had never seen him on the Bench. Yet what he said in the morning often got into the lunchtime edition of the evening papers. He was a quotable judge, a witty judge, a talking judge – some said too much so – who did not shun controversy. He was keen on some reforms – on liberal social lines – with which Rosie concurred.

  How did Toni take it? (We got round to that too.) When she found out, when you told her – you must have had to tell her when you left Berlin? Or did she know before?

  ‘She did not know before,’ Rosie said.

  ‘All those years when you never saw him?’ (What my mother had gone through in Sorrento – for how long? a week, two weeks?)

  ‘And you could only write letters?’

  She said she wasn’t sure that she had wanted to talk to anyone. ‘And I could not tell Toni.’

  ‘It might have,’ I said, ‘well … prepared her?’

  ‘It would have been the same. Toni has her pride. You must have seen enough to realise that. A terrible pride.’

  ‘She was made a bit of a fool of.’

  ‘Well in a way; not really. Jack says she was so very pretty then.’ (Jack was what Rosie called the Judge though his first name was not John.) ‘He enjoyed flirting with her.’ She said this with the utmost equanimity. ‘We could have laughed it off together.’

  ‘But Toni didn’t.’

  ‘Toni didn’t. She went white. I first thought: rage. Now I’m not sure. She left the room. I can’t forget what her face looked like. We never talked of it again.’

  ‘Never?’ I said, thinking of the loquacious ways my mother had trained me in.

  ‘Not in any real sense – she knows I see him. That’s unavoidable. But she won’t speak of him, she never wants to see him again. She can’t bear to hear his name.’

  I thought of what Toni had said to me about those unwritten postcards.

  ‘I often think it was shock,’ Rosie said, ‘that dreadful first reaction. Sheer shock. My leaving her, my leaving Berlin was terrible for her.’

  I did not say: But you did. We just sat and let it sink in.

  ‘Toni and I are …’ she hesitated.

  ‘Devoted …?’ I put in.

  She hesitated again. ‘One might say we were tied one to the other … It started when we were children, we had to make a front against our mother. Toni was the pretty one, but it was on her that most of the demands were made – Toni is spoilt and vulnerable. What I feel about her is anxiety … I’m always afraid for her.’

  ‘And she? She is very fond of you?’

  ‘I don’t know. As I said, we are tied. She can’t bear it when I’m not about. When I first went to live in London, she wrote to me every day.’

  ‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘Real letters?’

  ‘Not real letters,’ said Rosie. She added, ‘I’m not sure that she likes me. She disapproves of me.’

  ‘Is it … is it because of the Judge?’

  ‘That comes into it. One of the worst things is that she’s not happy here. It’s not right for her here.’

  ‘England?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘But Jamie –?’

  ‘Oh Jamie,’ she said.

  ‘You mean she shouldn’t have –?’

  ‘I mean she wouldn’t have.’

  Married him if it hadn’t been for her, Rosie’s, going off? Was that what she was saying?

  ‘At the time she met Jamie, Toni was still besotted with that tenor,’ she named an internationally known singer well beyond his second youth.

  ‘Did she know him?’

  ‘Years ago when our uncle was still alive, she made him introduce her; the three of them had tea together or something. Once, for all I know. He’s grossly fat too. And married. It was just nonsense. All Toni wants to do with a man is to worship from afar or flirt.’

  ‘But she got married?’

  ‘Oh, Toni flirted with Jamie all right. Trouble is, that’s not enough.’

  I nodded.

  ‘There are things you don’t know much about yet, my dear,’ she said with a not unkindly look.

  I was left to wonder whether what Toni had wanted most had been a good-looking man of her own to carry her off to England.

  Now that I had the key, Rosie’s routine became revealed. With some exceptions – such as the Judge being on circuit – she went to his flat every evening from Monday to Thursday or Friday. She went by underground from Baker Street to St James’s Park, and returned, as I had seen, the same way in the morning. She had his keys, came and went quietly, made sure that the lift was empty, avoided seeing a porter too often. On some evenings, by no means all, they had their dinner à deux in his flat; more often she came later and waited for him to return from dinners with his friends or some function. He had a wide social life. He would be wearing a white tie or a din
ner jacket, always the latter when they were dining together alone. Hence – on his request? on his taking for granted? – her matutinal evening dresses. Token evening dresses, one might describe them: she dressed conventionally, but not well. Her figure, one must bear in mind, was badly put together and she bought her clothes ready-made. (She once asked me to accompany her to Swan and Edgar’s.)

  Weekends the Judge spent out of London. He had connections near Bath, a nephew in Gloucestershire, was asked to country house parties, was a good shot. She went to his court rarely; when he had an interesting or sensational case, his clerk would arrange a seat for her. Otherwise she never saw him outside the St James’s flat. They did not go anywhere together, not even to a cinema. He had not introduced her to any of his friends; they, like his relations, were in complete ignorance of her existence. So with the exception of his clerk, the man who served their dinners in the flat and an occasional porter (she left before the housekeeper arrived in the morning) she had not met a single soul he knew.

  About her finances she was entirely reticent. She had no job; from Jamie I gathered that no Falkenheim assets had been resurrected in the German post-inflation. She did not appear to have money worries – she didn’t appear to worry about anything much, except her sister – although she lived modestly she did not live badly, indeed with much less restraint than Toni and Jamie to whom she offered treats; she never hesitated before going to a theatre or on one of her architectural trips; in season, though she stuck to éclairs, she had strawberries for me. One had to assume a regular source of income.

  An allowance –? hand-outs –? a settlement –? from the Judge? I never knew.

  High Court judges’ salaries were what seemed to me enormous, and certainly a great deal higher, in real terms, than they are today (just as judges themselves were considered more exalted, indeed sacrosanct, beings). Rosie’s Judge was known to have a not insubstantial private income as well.