If at that time I had been pressed to define our relationship, I might have put it: two brothers, like each other, serving – in different ranks – in the same regiment.
I am saying so much about our family life because it must not be thought that, taken as I was by the Kislings and their circle, we were really intimate or spent so very much time with them. Twice a week was about it, fitting into the routine of summer life. We (my mother had known Kiki in Paris) were regarded as friends, tangential friends: outlook and habits were different. (My mother would not have dreamt of joining them when late in the night they proposed carrying it on in a dancing or bal musette; she had never drunk deep or made la bombe, and she’d decline for the three of us.) Both Renée and my mother can be called unconventional women; they were not unconventional in quite the same way. What is more, I believe that they did not really like each other. My mother was amused by Renée and liked to hear and tell stories about her outrages; she did not love her. As I did from the beginning. Renée, on her side, had not much use for my mother, for her she was too ‘intellectual’, a great fault in the eyes of someone who knew what she chose to know by instinct. Later on she told Maria Huxley – she was much too protective of a filial relationship to tell me – that she had always found my mother too cool, too cerebral, too literary. My mother would sooner talk about a plant than grow it. Incidentally Renée held the same view, in stronger measure, of Aldous, and used to commiserate with Maria, who saw her point. Those two women were growers of plants.
There was an intellectual astringency in my mother, she was serious not merely about books but about the world and the people who had to endure it; and this for all her laxities and omissions injected a certain mental discipline – quite absent in Renée’s living – into our life, however uprooted. And I felt an allegiance to that.
I had also come to feel that Sanary was the true South, and that Sanary and the French were for me. I had fallen for it and for all that it had offered already. Here was my home, here I was going to live (with a necessary foot in London, indefinably acquiring what it would take to become what I should be), and here, the gods willing, I was going to write my books. There was one more thing which set this summer apart from the ones that followed. It was my last as the young person at the low end of the table; I was growing older, I would become a participant.
8
In England also I was presented with a widening of the social scene. It came about in this way: almost parallel with my mother and Alessandro, the Nairns were relatively prospering. Jamie had been offered a partner- and directorship in a distinguished book-dealers’ firm bringing with him the goodwill and stock of his own shop. Debt paid off, a salary coming in, Jamie and Toni found themselves securely and nearly comfortably off in a matter of weeks. The first thing Jamie did was to take a cottage in the country to spend their holidays and weekends in, something he had longed to do. On my return from France, Toni and Rosie were already trudging round second-hand shops, warehouses and stores trying to acquire cheaply furniture, curtains, floor-covering and anything else needed. They’d been told to keep to bare essentials; essentials, however bare, tend to be numerous and varied, so for the sisters it was quite a task. Jamie went out on Sundays to do some plastering and painting, and I accompanied him to help. We made an adequate job of it, no more (compared to Alessandro). The cottage was in an Essex village, in decent repair, roomy, dry and rather pretty. It had a garden, well stocked with raspberry and gooseberry bushes, a lawn Jamie looked forward to mowing, and a strip of orchard. There was a scullery where he proposed to keep a small barrel of cider and a small barrel of beer. I had a long look at the cook-stove. It was years before bottled gas. Toni? I said. Jamie looked surprised, then thought she should manage, anyway he would be bringing in the coal.
Shortly after Christmas the cottage was more or less ready for habitation and we were able to spend a first weekend. It was mid-winter; indubitably. We did not spend days and nights in extreme discomfort – there were good fireplaces downstairs and small ones with pretty grates in the bedrooms, Jamie did keep us supplied with plenty of wood and coal. The lavatory was indoors, there was a boiler and an airing cupboard, cold water laid on and a supply of paraffin lamps, in a word all the comforts of the English country. It required some work, not hard work though, and took up much time. Jamie was happy; evidently, if silently; for the Falkenheims already come down from steam-heat to electric fires, it was another matter. If they suffered, they also remained silent. Not ineloquently so – Rosie kept on her fur coat (Berlin relic) during meals urging Toni to do the same. Toni withdrew behind her princess-on-the-pea look. Meals. I decided that we’d reached a point where I must induce Toni to come to terms with some of the basic elements of cookery: this was not the time and place for delicatessen food which anyway was running out. The stove was lit (by me) and going, which included a nicely heating oven, I was able to point out the simplicity and wonder of the baked potato. From where I led on to further steps: chops in the frying-pan, a vegetable – Look, just a little water on the boil. Toni, stiffly, bowed to fate and duty. She could not be gentled further into making soup. There were tins. My turn to bow. Jamie, who as I said was happy, did not or preferred not to notice; he was used to his mother doing everything and his wife a little.
Respite was at hand. A literary man, a friend of Jamie’s, had a house at Finchingfield the village next to ours. He was A. J. A. Symons, the bibliographer of Yeats, the future author of The Quest for Corvo, a founder member of the Wine and Food Society, and married. He asked Jamie over for drinks on the Sunday morning, to bring his wife and friends and stay for lunch to escape the horrors of the first days in the new home.
We went, we stayed, were given a very good lunch indeed, drank claret, played games into the afternoon. The house was Jacobean, filled with objets d’art, sybaritic. It was also filled with guests, well read, amusing, not particularly accommodating men, two or three fast women (or so they appeared to me). Our host was wildly erudite and undisguisably eccentric, his wife chic, slim and ostentatiously made-up. There was another new milieu, one I had wished for and imagined: English, the educated, the literate English whose horizons embraced France, Italy, Greece and beyond. At the end of a short bicycle ride in Essex I had arrived at a side-stream of the English literary world. I had found my first Garsington.
The analogy should not go too far. At Finchingfield the accents were, besides books and talk, on very good wine and games. Heavy bridge (and possibly, I think, house-party affairs) for some of the women, for the rest their version of the war game – a combination of strategic planning and strenuous hide-and-seek to which the convoluted house cross cut with unexpected staircases exactly lent itself – played with bravura, utter devotion and mostly in the dark. It was enormous fun.
It could also be eruptively noisy. One was apt to fall out of broom cupboards or down some backstairs, and there were the whoops of joy of the winning side.
Toni winced at the very idea of these rough and stupid games and would not participate. That at the outset of a social life was a mistake. Rosie must have seen it – she knew a thing or two about accommodating oneself – but was too loyal to her sister to do anything but side with her. So when the light went out, a safe retreat had to be found for the two timid women, a small sitting-room where presumably they sat munching chocolate biscuits, shuddering at the pastimes of the English goys, and reading. (Toni had come armed with Thomas Mann, in German, how else; Rosie snatched up a Siegfried Sassoon of A.J.’s, a sign perhaps of her not undivided allegiance.)
A.J. liked Jamie and Jamie liked A.J. Finchingfield became a fixture. We were asked over for luncheon or dinner or both at least once a weekend, and in the Easter and Whitsun holidays Jamie walked and I bicycled over almost every day. A.J. (always addressed so) was impersonally, informally hospitable, one joined in whatever was going on, food appeared. (One didn’t notice any servants or an absence of servants; there must have been some village people who came and we
nt.)
I was tolerated probably because of my enthusiasm (still much the young person at the low end of the table), Toni was accepted as Jamie’s wife, and Rosie – when she did come down – as someone in her wake. Toni did not shine at Finchingfield. She rejected what was on offer covering her antagonism by a ruffled aloofness: polite refusals all the way, No Thank Yous ringing out when the Château Palmer went around. It irritated and enraged me because it diminished her – and Jamie; Finchingfield did not see what she had to offer, what they saw was a namby-pamby outsider who made no effort. In that situation – it had to be seen as one – Jamie’s weapon, or just nature, was unawareness.
Jamie was expanding. No money pressures, success in his work, he had his two and a half days a week in the country, pottering in the garden, long walks, a part – a not unlively part – in the pleasurable round of Finchingfield. What Toni had hoped for, but not uttered, was a month on her own staying with friends in Berlin, instead the money had gone into the cottage and a slightly newer Morris-Cowley. What she had was two and a half days a week in the country – the cook-stove, the fires, the washing-up, and the social round at Finchingfield. For the present she remained quiescent.
Rosie, for her part, was complaining about Jamie, he was letting Toni do far too much, Toni ought to speak to him about it – Jamie was the most selfish man on earth. (Was not that what Toni had said about the Judge?)
All seemed well in that quarter. France had done Jack so much good, Rosie was telling me, he got through the last Law Sittings without getting so restless and bored.
Bored?
It’s been terribly frustrating for him these last years, but I believe he’s feeling much better now.
I had to ask what she was talking about.
‘I thought Toni would have told you about it. She knew.’ And then it came out. It was a midweek winter afternoon and we were having tea in her room, she was not going to join him that evening so we had planned to have a bite together at an ABC later on. She was smoking – Turkish – I was not.
‘It was dreadful,’ she said. ‘The worst thing that ever happened. You see, I had his note, he had posted it to me. For three days I didn’t know he was alive. There was nothing in the papers – I could do nothing – I didn’t dare ask anyone.’ She spoke drily and quietly. I sat still. She got to the beginning.
‘He is a gambler – a real one. So that winter,’ she gave the year, ‘he was getting more and more depressed and anxious. I knew he had worries but he wouldn’t tell me what they were. Then one day he did: he was owing a large sum of money, more, far more, than he could pay.’
An old, old story – could it happen to a judge? For some months he had been losing, and losing again: horses and cards. (He gambled in private houses, never at a club, though abroad he played in casinos at whatever was going, chemin de fer, roulette.) He was owing his bookmaker, he was owing friends, people who trusted him. But now he thought he could see a way out, there was a race coming up, he had been told of a horse … He would scrape together such credit as he still had. Rosie pressed her savings on him, he took them – they weren’t much, every hundred counted, he told her, with that horse: if it won he’d recoup himself.
It didn’t. The week after he told Rosie he was going away for a few days to sort things out in his mind. He left her thinking that he was going to stay with some of his cronies in Gloucestershire. Instead he went to a country hotel and took an overdose. By a miracle he was discovered in time, rushed to a nursing home and eventually revived; another miracle, the whole thing, suicide attempt, gambling debts and all, was kept out of the press, hushed up with the help of colleagues, connections, friends. Other friends stumped up the money. The whole of it. He was alive, he was free; rumours there had been, yet his career was intact.
They made him give his word never to bet on a horse again, never to touch a card.
‘He hasn’t, of course. He can’t. At first he was so relieved … That awful threat gone. Everything again before him … That did not last. Now he misses it most of the time. It is very hard.’
I thought about my father’s make-believe roulette we had played at Feldkirch – had it been make-believe to him? I thought of his anecdotes about men shooting themselves at dawn in Monte Carlo. So such things really happen, I thought.
‘Poor Jack, poor poor Jack,’ she said, ‘and I … I thought I had lost him.’
‘Now put on your coat, I believe it’s got quite chilly.’ I did as told and out we walked into the dankish night and the ABC in Baker Street.
The next thing Jamie did was to buy a dog, to take on his walks. When it arrived it was an upstanding rough-haired terrier puppy called Tommy, a sturdy, steady fellow. Not for long. The Falkenheims, who had never had a live animal in the house, fell for him with injudicious rapture. I had not seen them so demonstrative, so willing to perform hand-maidenish tasks. Never was dog so petted, so walked at all hours, so brushed and combed and dried, so rushed off to the vet; the prettiest basket, the softest cushions, the finest mince, bowls of creamy milk, shares of their own biscuits. They trembled for him when he had to cross the road, meet a strange dog or God forbid attempt to chase a cat. If need arose they would have protected him – heroically in their case – from a mouse. Jamie shared their devotion to Tommy but tried to make them exercise constraint. In a matter of weeks the dog had become a timorous, nervous thing.
Not so timorous and girlish though that he would not have enjoyed a go at the war game when the fun began (the Finchingfield dogs got kicked out of the way, only the Pekinese held its sofa place). Toni absolutely forbade Tommy’s taking part, the noise would be bad for him. So she and Rosie would crouch in the back-room with the wretched dog, trying to stop his ears.
It made them all look ludicrous. I was irritated and unwise enough to try to get this point of view across to Toni. I was not in her best books at the time; she was displeased about my rushing off to Finchingfield at every opportunity, hinting even that it must soon be time for me to go back to France (this reminded me that I was their guest in Essex and that this might cease). After Rosie’s stay at Sanary, Toni had tried to turn me into her friend first and foremost, something I had to treat with tact, particularly as Rosie, considering herself the lucky one in the major aspects of her life, was prone to give way to her sister in all else. Then Toni, smouldering, was confronted with my infatuation with Finchingfield which I conducted without any tact at all. So when now I criticised her comportment there, she told me that they were superficial literati, not artists, spoilt into the bargain, that the men gossiped like washerwomen (they gossiped) and that anyway the place was not at all suitable for me; she felt like writing to my mother.
What about?
For one thing, they drink far too much.
They do, I said, and I love it. What else?
Immorality, she said in a clipped tone, and would not say further.
Perhaps I was right about their having affairs? I thought. There was an aura of eroticism at Finchingfield, not all the time, not when the more austere men held the talk, but when the lights were off and the game was on there was a whiff.
Unsuitable, she said again.
I shall be eighteen next year, I thought, but did not say.
9
I saw them again! In bright sunlight, less than ten yards from me on the port in early summer, my first days back at Sanary. It was not the long high car that had aroused such disapproval among our café friends, it was a dwarf-size, improbably antiquated three-seater, one might have said three-wheeler, looking like a cross between a sundulled black beetle and a hip-bath. They stepped out of it with the utmost grace.
I was standing outside Chez Schwob, where I’d left a vegetable basket, sheltered to see without being seen. She had been at the wheel, now she stood up. She wore a short blue linen skirt and a little faded cotton top, a beret clung to a side of the narrow well-shaped head; in full day too, the structure of the face, all profile, evoked the paintings of the Florentine
Renaissance; the colouring was matt olive set off by a brilliant splash of lipstick, the hair cut very short was sleeked and darkened by the application of a transparent substance then the rage sold as (Josephine) Baker-Fix. His head was bare, the hair brown and straight, he was in canvas trousers and an open short-sleeved shirt. They wore their rudimentary clothes with incomparable elegance and neatness. At close range, they looked akin rather than alike: his profile was equally clear-cut, smooth-textured, yet, although still youthful – they were both approaching thirty – it was stronger (and became pronouncedly so in middle and old age), some Frenchness had modified the Piero della Francesca look; in him there was much Clouet – and a great distinction; unlike Clouet’s sitters he was extremely slender and moved with feather lightness; together they projected a dreamlike amalgam of an historical past with an ultra post-war modernity.
And now they were three: from the back of the hip-bath there arose a young man like a hunk of Greek sculpture from the sea. He was of more solid clay: compact, bronzed, muscled, an unambiguous Mediterranean archetype; and beautiful in the way of the very young. He was in bathing shorts and a narrow singlet that left his torso almost bare. All three wore true Basque espadrilles, close-fitting like ballet-shoes, stiff with dazzling whiteness.
I think I must have run most of the way home to Les Cyprès. Mummy – they’re back. Who? She began, and relented.
‘I’ve seen them too … the mysterious strangers of the cinema, your Heavenly Twins.’
Who are they? I said.
We did not find out in a day. We did not find out in a year, the years; some of it is taking a lifetime. To begin with, though, we met them. Quite soon.
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