Jigsaw

by Sybille Bedford

  At first impact, people convey no more than their present face-value; more is revealed as one begins doing things together: pieces of their past – what may have shaped them, what they have lived – become known gradually, a remark here, a statement there, supplied by themselves, by third persons, by gossip, imagination, deduction. Of the sequence, the future: what will become of them, what they will become, new friends know nothing.

  One thing was true, so much my mother could tell me, they were going to settle here, they’d begun building a house in an olive grove a few hundred yards up the road from us. Walls could already be seen beyond the trees. They looked, she said, as if they were going to do, God forbid, a Le Corbusier.

  One afternoon a few days on, the Peugeot stopped halfway between Sanary and our house. It was not a good car. Alessandro and I had been up the hill encouraging the conversion of his client’s villa that was going into its tenth month by then. We got out, Alessandro opened the bonnet, set to fiddling with carburettor feeds and sparking plugs to no effect. A car drew up behind us. It was not the black beetle hip-bath, it was the low, high, clean-lined vintage car, and the man who got out of it was one of what my mother so annoyingly persisted in calling my Heavenly Twins. He approached us, made a slight bow and introduced himself. Of course we failed to catch the name. ‘Je crois,’ he said in light pensive tone, ‘que nous soyons un peu voisins.’ It struck me as charming shorthand for: We shall be practically neighbours once our house is finished and we’ve moved in. (There was also the subjunctive.) ‘Vous permettez?’ he enquired of Alessandro, and plunged long clean hands into the Peugeot’s belly.

  Eh bien non, it was not the petrol flow nor the allumage, it was, he feared, something – spelt out to Alessandro – that would have to be dealt with at some length. For the moment though, je peux vous dépanner. Alessandro proffered tools, he waved them aside, went over to his car and brought back an impressive kit. (Is he a mechanic then? I thought.) Quite soon the Peugeot guttered into faltering life. He took charge: if you’re quick it’ll take you to the nearest garage – they are robbers but no worse than the other lot, and not bad at the job. He’d follow in case the Peugeot stopped again as well it might. Then he would give us a lift home. Perhaps la petite – that was me – would like to come in his car now.

  At the garage, he negotiated with the patron (whom he addressed with tu not vous), we learnt that spare parts were likely to cause trouble; our still nameless rescuer proposed telegraphing to someone in Paris who would put the pièce on the next train. All this was executed with calm and rational competence, as though his own time were of small account and helping strangers out the most natural thing in the world.

  On our way home, riding high, first relief gave way to a new dismay. The Peugeot, however special its treatment, would be out of action for more than a matter of hours. Tonight? Alessandro and I cried simultaneously, looking at each other.

  Ah, said our friend, you too are going to see Topaze.

  We were. Toulon has a municipal theatre of respectable size and attainment. That night a guest company was performing the comedy, now a classic, about administrative goings on in Marseille by Marcel Pagnol (author of Marius, Fanny, César, Jean de Florette …). How were we going to get to Topaze? (Toulon was unreachable, worse, unreturnable from, by public transport in the evening.)

  He would have proposed to offer us a lift, he said, as he and his wife were going (that put paid to the Heavenly Twins and the incest gossip in one swoop), were it not (more subjunctives) that he had promised to take his mason and family – Marcel Pagnol had huge popular appeal, more than half of Sanary were going. We shall have to think of something. He left us at the gate of Les Cyprès, getting out of the car to shake hands. Something must be arranged, I shall let you know. There is not much time.

  Hurry or not, I could not forbear to ask, ‘What is the name of your motor car?’ ‘It was designed by De Dion-Bouton in 1911,’ he said. ‘The carrosserie is by Gallet.’ I all but bowed.

  An hour later he was back. My wife thinks it might be ‘amusing’, he uttered the word as if he were slightly distancing himself from it, if we took everyone to Toulon in a private bus. He happened to have a bus. She was arranging to invite the commerçants and anyone else who wished to see Topaze to go in our bus. He would not come in now, there were things to organise, but we could count on the bus being outside Les Cyprès at a quarter to eight tonight, and he hoped that Madame votre Mère – whom he had not met but had the pleasure of having seen before – would do them the honour … he was off.

  And so it happened. The bus appeared, a long, narrow, open-roofed thing, painted tarnished green, a crocodile of a bus, far from new – all their vehicles, I was to learn, were idiosyncratic. It was still daylight. He – in overalls – was at the wheel, she had the seat beside him – in a white off-the-shoulders dress – doing the honours. The bus was already half-filled with miscellaneous Sanary figures. We recognised Monsieur and Madame Schwob with a glowingly nubile daughter, the Benechs of the wheel-of-gruyère shop with son and aunt, and surprise – how had she come to consort with those snobs from Paris? – Madame Panigon with her two girls and their brother Frédéric who looked grown-up and not unsmart in a dark suit. No one of the Kisling crowd appeared. The Third Man, the young god seen on the port, was there, making himself useful finding seats for elderly Sanaryans at the further stops.

  A genial hilarity had been generated; we sat in the row next to the driver’s, and from behind us came the flow and thrust of animated French cross-conversations. The crocodile was on its way. Young male members of the outing began by shouting jocular encouragement which changed to sighs of appreciation as our speed increased. Never have I sat in bus so smoothly and adroitly driven, and so fast.

  We alighted in the Place du Théâtre, our host drove off to park and reappeared ten minutes later in the stalls having taken off his overalls.

  Topaze, the play, was a tremendous success, we all laughed till we ached, not least of all my mother. Well after one a.m. – French plays even in the provinces do not begin nor finish early – we made our way in several groups on foot up to the boulevard. Word had gone round: Rendez-vous à la Brasserie de Strasbourg. It was the after-theatre supper place in Toulon, and renowned for its choucroute garnie. There we assembled, happy and hungry, at one long table pulled together for our party running along an entire wall. There was no placement. I noted that our host, who came in late, put himself next to my mama. I, for my sins, found myself next to Frédéric Panigon, Cécile and Annette’s elder brother (the boy to whom it didn’t occur to dance with us at the Café de la Marine – that was three years ago) who was usually away beavering at his lycée. Apparently no longer so, he had entered university reading law at his father’s wish, as he was trying to tell me. He wanted to be a painter, did I think …? My mind wasn’t on it. Peintre-artiste, he said. I was trying to watch our maîtres-de-plaisir even though I couldn’t catch what they were saying. He was talking quietly to my mother; she, though she sat next to the young god – who kept performing small services such as filling her glass, with nothing more than Evian water I noted – was talking rather insistently across people and table, acting very much, a touch too much, the animatrice of the occasion. (I would have liked looking at her in repose, which I imagined most became her face. She was high-pitched when she ought to have been still. Then I scolded myself for such carping.) At any rate, a good time was being had by all.

  The ride home, under the open roof, through the cool air and early dawn was an enchantment.

  Well, my mother said next morning, well …! It was splendid, I said. Topaze was, and extremely well acted, she said, but the whole thing … Yes, that was splendid too … A shade too much so.

  ‘You enjoyed it?’

  ‘Oh yes. Everybody enjoyed it. Madame Panigon seemed quite won over.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘There was something of a stunt about it, contrived – the bus out of nowhere, the wholesale seductio
n of the populace … Too literary to be true, like a charade out of Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel – gens du monde coming down from heaven.’

  ‘I’ve read it.’

  ‘You would,’ my mother said. ‘But did you understand it?’

  ‘He was not much more than my age when he wrote Le Bal.’

  ‘And died almost at once. He, my dear, was a genius.’

  ‘I haven’t …’ Alessandro said.

  ‘Heard of Raymond Radiguet,’ my mother cut him short, making dishonours even. Then she said very sweetly, ‘Believe me, both of you, there was a Comte d’Orgel flavour about last night …. It must have been all her doing. I’m sure she dreamt up the whole thing. He’s a quiet man; probably very patient.’

  ‘The cavaliere servente business,’ Alessandro said.

  ‘Do you mean the young man?’

  ‘He means the young man,’ my mother said.

  Alessandro, speaking as a man, said, ‘But she’s got no sex appeal.’

  My mother, speaking as a woman, said, ‘There’s not much of it in him either, I’m referring to her husband. I would qualify that to: not yet. There is something … suspended about him. One can’t tell why. As if for the present they were both playing a part. They are extremely attractive. He’d be a difficult man to know; I think he’s got principles, more hardened than you would expect from his age and manner. I’d say there was something unusually disciplined under all that urbanity and …’

  ‘Charm?’ said I.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘Grace.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Topaze of course. We agreed that beside the fun it’s a good play. I asked him if the goings-on at the Marseille city council were really as hair-raising. Pire, Madame, he said, Worse. Councils in France were run by scoundrels, des escrocs was his word, petty scoundrels compared to Marseille, there I must think of Chicago. He’s awfully down on politics, politicians, des salauds, the lot of them; he’s rather like the Kislings there though I very much doubt that he has any liking for les gens de gauche. What he seems to stand for are clean hands, disillusion, withdrawal. The war has left us all bankrupt, he said, and he did not mean it in the financial sense. One could see him as a monarchist – if restoration weren’t such a cause perdue in France – he’s far too intelligent for that kind of faith.’

  ‘He is intelligent?’ I asked.

  ‘Very much so,’ said my mother. ‘One wonders what he’ll do with it.’

  Their name was Desmirail. Philippe and Oriane Desmirail. Despite their air of kinship – underlined then by their comportment – they were not blood relations. Nor were their origins Parisian; they had been educated, and spent a portion of their adult lives, in Paris. She had been through lycée, he through lycée and a grande école: Condorcet and Polytechnique. (The latter, the bastion among other disciplines of science, mathematics and high IQs, is not to be confused with any current British polytechnic.) Philippe was the descendant of a family of grands magistrats who had served the administration of their country since Louis XIV. Their ancestral home was a fortified Romanesque château in the Ardèche still lived in by his parents at the time I am writing of. His father had been a president of the highest constitutional court of France. He was an avowed agnostic and had been a Dreyfusard at the time when it was hardest to stand up and be counted. His mother was a devout Catholic and iron-clad anti-Dreyfusard. For some years their domestic life, dutifully adhered to, had been under strain. This, however, was some time before Philippe’s birth.

  Oriane was the daughter of a grand industriel from the North. The family had been marginally ennobled under the Third Empire, something that had to be lived down or could be dropped into the conversation according to the company. Her mother was an amiable chatterbox, her father a member of that pinnacle of intellectual distinction, the Institut de France. He had a large and discriminate collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and contemporary painting, a collection begun at about the time when Philippe’s mother was a member of the public who had to be restrained from taking the sharp of their umbrellas to Impressionist canvases. Both parents doted on Oriane, who was an only child, and who beside her looks pleased by being bright.

  Philippe Desmirail had three elder brothers, all reputed brilliant, virtuous and attached to one another. The long holidays of their childhood and early youth were spent at the château in the Ardèche and on the property of a cherished grandmother near Biarritz. The brothers, one after the other, were killed in the 1914 War. When the third was gone by 1917, Philippe was still one year too young to be called up. He was a delicate adolescent, shattered by his brothers’ deaths. He joined up all the same. It was said that his mother, who subsequently never went out of mourning for her sons, told Philippe that it was fit for him to offer himself to his country, it was now his turn. He was not killed, he was not even wounded, he caught pneumonia after some months in the trenches, was gravely ill for a long time and did not fully recover until some years later. Eventually he resumed his education but afterwards declined to embark on any official or orthodox career. Instead he joined the forward-looking Maison d’Editions of Bernard Grasset, a publishing house in which it can be said that interesting things were happening. (It was young Bernard Grasset who in 1913 had brought off the coup, that left so many red faces in the French publishers’ and critics’ world, of publishing the rejected Du côté de chez Swann; rejected through the good offices of André Gide by the NRF which later had to buy back the rights of A la recherche du temps perdu at the expense of a very great deal of face and money.) At the time Philippe joined Grasset, some of his own friends such as Jacques de Lacretelle were making their name as writers. He, though not a sedentary man and without any literary ambitions of his own, enjoyed his brief publishing career very much, and never quite severed his connections with Bernard Grasset. Brief, because it was soon found that his health would not stand up to confinement in a city; he was ordered out of Paris and recommended to live in the country, preferably in sea air. A prescription he has adhered to till today. This cannot have been his parents’ choice: this excessively gently mannered man had inherited his mother’s iron will. It seldom showed. In fact it was imperceptible to most.

  At first they went to live alternately and impermanently on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts. They, because by the time Philippe left Grasset, he and Oriane were married.

  They had known each other for some years. They moved in a milieu of highly educated, upper-class, post-war young, who had lost ideals and aims but retained their manners. (And the scruples which these comprise.) They had turned – privately: they were no socialists or reformers – against patriotism, militarism (that above all), religion, bourgeois values; they still believed in individual good behaviour. They wanted a good time – what else was left? – and sought it in amusements they devised themselves: fêtes costumées, motor rallies, dawn sorties into the country to catch a view of a cathedral in a certain light, hoaxes of a sophisticated nature. Unlike Evelyn Waugh’s Bright and Young they wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving unpaid bills or burning cigarettes on other people’s carpets. They drank little. Alcohol – apéritifs, pastis, even wine – was felt as part of a gross national heritage. Abstemious was more elegant. (I am writing here of a small and ephemeral coterie of the Desmirails which they had already left behind by the time they moved from Paris. Some of its spirit lingered.)

  Besides such an outlook, Philippe and Oriane shared many tastes. Their three major interests at that time were the new French literature, tennis and motor cars, on Philippe’s side to the point of taking them apart and putting them together again in his own way. His friends said that given a pram, a tea-kettle and a clock, he could make them run. Philippe’s mind was trained, precise; Oriane’s mercurial. To her father’s and her teachers’ disappointment, she had not wanted to go on to university, no career or employment had been envisaged, thus a quick, sharp, able, and soon restless, mind remained unharnessed to any defined or useful pur
pose for a good many years; decades in fact. Philippe had shown no great desire to get married to anyone, Oriane had shown a great desire to marry him. Somehow they got engaged. To the distinct approval of their friends and their respective families. Philippe insisted that there should be a year of reflection, Oriane agreed. Granting mutual freedom was part of their modern values. So they went on, he with his publishing, both as ringleaders of their petite bande. When the year was up he told her – quite casually and coolly it was believed – that they might as well call it a day. Perhaps he was not made for marriage, perhaps he was not ready for marriage, and so he supposed was she – there was not much point in marriage as an institution if one did not wish to produce, if one felt one ought not to produce, children: children in the world as it was were cannon fodder. Slightly to his surprise, Oriane now turned her back on modern values and became unhappy and upset, using the weapons that are at hand for a woman in her situation. Philippe was a man who would not willingly inflict a hurt; among his many principles was that of honouring one’s word (however conditional), he readily gave in. He liked her very very much and they got on extremely well. Their friends – who were fascinated by that visual illusion of their alikeness – proclaimed that they were made for one another.

  In an early period of their marriage they fell among a serious tennis set at Biarritz whose mainstays were three of his boyhood friends. Serious is an understatement. Philippe’s chums, the three young players in question, were Borotra, Brugnon and Lacoste. When as youngsters they had started learning tennis together, Philippe, who was a few months older and advanced in chess, began by beating them quite easily at the beginning of the holidays; after a few weeks they had drawn even, by the end of the summer it was hard for him to get a game, he was outclassed; for ever. This did not mean that when they were united again at Biarritz, Philippe did not make an acceptable partner; he might have reached top-class himself had it not been for his lack of physical stamina. At one time he was ranked in the lower half of the Seconde Série de France; Borotra & Co. were of course at the top of the Première Série.