Jigsaw

by Sybille Bedford

  The real discovery, however, was Oriane Desmirail. They made much of her at Biarritz; the great Suzanne herself, Suzanne Lenglen, played singles with her. She showed big promise, they all thought, and began grooming her for world class. For some strenuous months Oriane’s abilities were harnessed to a purpose. Too much so. She had two things going for her, a chess-player’s mind and the will to win; it was her physique that was not up to it. Her coaches kept her training eight hours a day for weeks on end. One day she collapsed on court. It was diagnosed a heart attack. She was twenty-four. She recovered quickly, and it was not the end of tennis for her (her ranking eventually was near the top of the Seconde Série). But it was – definitely – the end of public tennis (and that settled purpose).

  The allure of the Biarritz tennis club had been the main reason for their staying on the Atlantic coast; Philippe, congenitally frileux, needed a warmer winter climate; their respective parents were pressing them to settle down; they both loved the austerity of the Provençal landscape and had liked Sanary during previous stays. So now there they were, having acquired their piece of land, watching over their house going up.

  The house, architect-built – not by Le Corbusier, as my mother had flung out, nevertheless by one of his French disciples – was a present to Oriane from Oriane’s father.

  Behind the young Desmirails there was a good deal of money. Solid old money on Philippe’s side: land, urban real estate, government stocks and bonds (not so solid); less, and less old, money but large present revenues on Oriane’s. As far as the young couple and their prospects were concerned there were snags. At the end of the war Philippe’s parents had decided that their surviving son must in no way be advantaged by his brothers’ deaths. Dispositions therefore had been made for one quarter only of the estate to come to Philippe, the other three quarters were left to charities. (With, it was said, Philippe’s entire concurrence.) His father also felt that it behoved Philippe – now that he was improved in health – to earn his living as best he might. Since he was not trained to be a country doctor or anything in that line, and that to attempt farming in the South of France where tiny parcels of land were held by rooted and tenacious peasants, would have been clear madness, the setting up of a business – some cottage industry? – was seen as a solution. It was a moral question for the Desmirails, not one of commercial success or gain. As soon as Philippe had devised some scheme, his father would provide him with the capital required. Meanwhile and since the beginning of the marriage, Oriane was receiving a large allowance from her father (supplemented by accounts at one or two maisons de haute-couture where most of her simple-looking clothes were made).

  And now there was the future house, Oriane’s present purpose.

  I had been wondering after that theatre night whether we – I – would be meeting the Desmirails again and, given the heterogeneity of the first occasion, on what footing. Some people are brought together by their dogs, with us it was fated to be cars. Alessandro and I were caught on a somnolent hot early afternoon on the quai at Bandol – deserted by the boules players now asleep – by Oriane Desmirail, also not keeping siesta, passing in a Citroën. Alessandro was trying – trying – to teach me to reverse on our Peugeot. Now that I was eighteen, he was teaching me to drive. Oriane stopped and watched my efforts which did not improve by observation.

  Dear children, she addressed us with what I must call a mocking smile (she was a master of that as I was to find out).

  ‘My dear children, don’t you know the first rule about learning to drive a car?’

  ‘This one has a tricky gear …’

  She ignored me. ‘The first rule is never to be taught by a member of one’s family. The second, not in one’s family’s car.’ Pause. ‘We must do something about this.’ She looked at Alessandro. Then, gaily, decisively, ‘I’m sure we’ve got a car for her to learn on – not this great big thing. Now listen to me: passing one’s driving test is quite a serious business in the Département du Var.’

  We listened.

  ‘Why don’t you come to us tomorrow at this sort of time, say three o’clock,’ she gave the name and way to the furnished villa in which they were camping. ‘We’ll get you properly taught and you’ll be able to get your permis in no time.’

  And who is going to teach me, I thought, aghast.

  ‘Not by our family either,’ she said as though she’d read me. ‘We’ve got just the right man for you, he’s a mechanic and driver, he does donkey-work for us. He’ll shout at you too, but in the right way … So, à demain,’ and she was off.

  I did not recognise it then for what it was par excellence, a Desmirail gesture. Desmirail gestures were always carried through.

  The first day was a débâcle. I arrived. I was wearing a white linen skirt especially washed and ironed by Emilia. The Desmirails were standing on top of their steepish drive debating with the man who did the donkey-work what car I’d better learn on. Philippe thought La Sarah, it was small and light and easy to turn. La Sarah turned out to be the black beetle, Philippe had not made her himself, at least not originally, nor was Sarah a whimsy name but an authentic make of car long defunct, which Philippe said had been underrated – and I guessed discontinued – in the 1890s. It didn’t have a self-starter, the cranking handle was a trifle obstinate, so I’d better begin by starting her in her accustomed way. They told me what to do. Loosen the handbrake, give her a good push, be ready to leap in as soon as she begins rolling downhill, shove into second gear, ignition on …

  The donkey-man made a demonstration. It worked.

  La Sarah was got back into place, engine switched off again. My turn.

  What I had not minded, in my various eagernesses, was that the car had been losing oil. There was a sizeable black pool on the drive. I gave my push, gathered for the leap into the car, put a foot into the oil, slipped, fell and lay floundering on my back in a greasy pool while La Sarah was rolling down the hill. Philippe retrieved her in one bound. To get me up took more time. For one thing the three of them were standing about laughing to split their sides. ‘She’s a clown,’ they cried, ‘un cloon!’ That’s how the French pronounce it. Eventually they pulled me up. I will not go into how I was cleaned and re-clothed – one does not improvise hot water in a rented villa in the summer in the South of France, and although I was young and thin, I was not thin enough to get into anything of Oriane’s.

  When it was over, they decided that I had better learn on the Citroën, not the big one, Oriane’s and the newest in the stable, but on the 4-Chevaux. The 4-HP was a little three-seater with a back like a canoe. It was smaller than the present and sophisticated 2-Chevaux. It had once been painted grey, boasted a strip of running-board, and again there was no self-starter. This was just as well, as, when doing your test then, you were required to be able to start your car by hand.

  Well, I learned to drive on that 4-Chevaux Citroën and I still hold it in affection. I was well taught by the donkey-man – a tough little chap by name of Baluzet, with meridional speech and gestures that came straight out of Marcel Pagnol – passed the test, practical and oral, which was quite a stiff one, and got my permis de conduire, as Oriane had ordained, in a couple of weeks. I still have it and I still use it – French driving licences are valid for ever – a pink square of cardboard much the worse for wear. The photograph was last changed – at the Préfecture du Var – in 1949.

  My mother wrote a thank-you letter to Madame Desmirail.

  All the same it was not quite the introduction to Philippe and Oriane that I could have wished. Cloon is who cloon is seen. The Desmirails had a penchant for the comic contretemps; it was their addiction to Chaplin and Buster Keaton that made them turn up at that cinematograph. They are reviving my moment of floundering in motor oil dressed in white linen to this day, it stereotyped some of my subsequent relations with them. I’m not a banana-skin type. I regard myself as fairly handy in many practical domains of living, in the context that is of other friends and places – with t
he Desmirails I can’t escape recess into cloondom as expected. I once fell off the quietest horse ambling quietly on a Sunday morning with Philippe in the heart of the Touraine; there was the incident of the backwards running electric meter on a journey with them in Portugal; quite recently I bumped down a length of their staircase smashing with me a whole tray of breakfast china.

  10

  In our Sanary corner, the next phase of that summer, 1929, the summer before the Wall Street crash, was uneventful eventful. Everyone was busy being energetic at a leisurely pace. The Desmirails were building, so were we in a modest way on that conversion (with many a piece of excellent advice from Philippe who in the teeth of his Corbusieran architect was designing his own plumbing), the Kislings were laying foundations for a fine large house planned by Renée on an incline above the Bay of Bandol. Philippe revealed his scheme for that future gainful occupation, he was going to start a – much-needed – bus line between Sanary and Toulon. The splendid open-roofed Panhard, le car du théâtre in the local mind, was the first of a line of second-hand buses he was setting out to acquire. It also explained Baluzet, the donkey-man. Philippe was looking for a site on which to establish shelter and a workshop for that coming fleet while calmly engaged in disentangling – not fighting – the red-tape involved in obtaining the necessary licences. Oriane found the project amusing and was throwing herself into it.

  As she did with their other new concern, the tennis club. For the first time in my memory of Sanary, tennis was to be played. There was one existing court, more derelict than not, and that Philippe and Oriane took over and restored to reasonable efficiency. They wanted to play tennis; this they could have done on the perfectly good courts maintained at Bandol by the Grand Hôtel, but they wanted to help kindle a little enthusiasm for le sport which was so lagging among the French. The owners of the court, running a melancholy hotel in a pine-wood côté de Six-Fours that was not doing well, were only too pleased by the prospect of life the club might bring. The Desmirails ran it in an informal way – it had no name, no changing-rooms, no subscription fee, no rules, no bar. (Tea or lemonade or an apéritif could be ordered at garden tables nearer the hotel.) One became a member when invited by the Desmirails. Here was a difficulty. That there was no player to stand up to them was inevitable (except for the dazzling apparitions of a star or two in transit from a tournament at Monte Carlo or La Ciotat), what they’d hoped was to train up some of the local young. Working lads did not bite: too busy, too shy. If they were to turn sportif, it would not be with this little white ball, tennis was still a bourgeois game in France. So the club had to consist of us, that is Alessandro who was good – and became more so, as one tends to when up against superior players – my mother who was quite good (when she put her mind to it), a colonel, British Army, retired, who had once played for the Davis Cup, the colonel’s wife, and myself who was no good at all. The only trainable French roped in were the young Panigons. Frédéric came because he liked trying something his family wasn’t doing, Panigon père having never played anything but boules; Annette, the coltish one, showed some talent; Cécile, whom the Judge had declared a ravishing young girl, hovered about the baseline in languid feminine fashion, uttering little cries as she missed yet another ball. She was worse than me.

  The Desmirails soldiered on – Philippe with exquisite politeness, Oriane with jokes, often sharpish – coaching us as well as they could. Doubles helped. Philippe with the colonel taking on Oriane and Alessandro achieved quite an exciting game to watch. What held me – and even made my mother come to the club more often than she might – was the way the two Desmirails moved about a court.

  I have not mentioned their third, the young god, their shadow. It is because he did not shadow them on tennis afternoons, Oriane ordained that he must work at certain hours. He despised games, or so he said (he would have looked ungodlike beside Philippe). He was a painter or trying to become one, and the son of a Parisian family much connected with the arts who were, according to Sanary gossip, not over-pleased with him at present. His name was Louis. Oriane had found him a cabanon in the back country, an abandoned goatherd’s hut, and rigged it up as a studio and a place to camp in. For a part of each day he was banished there, and from her presence. For the rest of the time he was seen following the Desmirails wherever they went, looking out of the back of their cars, a pace or two behind them when they walked. Sanary was delighted about him and the situation. They called him the cavaliere servente, the cicisbeo, the amant en titre; some said it (the situation) was a ménage à trois, others that Philippe was a cuckold, others a complaisant husband, still others that Oriane was an allumeuse who kept the poor boy dangling. (These speculations came to us by way of Madame Panigon who was unable to decide which version pleased her most.) What was evident was that Louis, in spite of Alessandro’s dictum that she had no sex appeal, was besotted about Oriane and only took his eyes off her to scowl at anyone who dared to do the same. He was a dark-faced young god who would have bitten as soon as barked; Oriane kept him in bounds. What she felt was not known, what she made evident was that he was her property, public property at that. (People did pause and stare when these three miraculously handsome people passed.) What happened in private – Louis, twenty? twenty-one? was a consenting adult – one could guess at, no more. Philippe Desmirail’s dignity, affability and calm remained impenetrable. There were subjects one could not speak to him about.

  Philippe treated Louis, who also regularly dined at their house, with the affectionate camaraderie a man might show for a younger man he liked. On the surface then they were three intimate friends who enjoyed – Louis did not always look unhappy – going about together, the heart of a petite bande.

  The Kislings did not join in the local gossip at all; there was little to gossip about. If Oriane Desmirail had a lover, well who had not? Nor did Renée come anywhere near to joining the tennis club. Me, to my joy, she sometimes took out fishing in the early morning. A message would have come the night before – the tide was right – I would be down on the port before the break of day, and we, she with Léon the sailor who looked after the boat, or just she and I, would go out on the dawn sea, still, flat and grey, far out beyond the sight of land: fish, then swim off the boat and swim again, and return before high noon. That was magical.

  The Kislings and the Desmirails – in different degrees and ways – had sloughed off pre-war values, led original and independent lives. They were on good terms, would join at a café table or a restaurant dinner, yet there remained a mutual lack of warmth. Also of approval. For the Kislings, the Desmirails, whatever their behaviour, remained gens du monde; the Desmirails’ reservations were less conscious and more disguised as they professed to like and respect artists (some years earlier Kisling had done a portrait of Oriane commissioned by her father). On the individual level the situation was even less favourable. Renée distrusted Oriane (she once told me so), and Philippe for her was just another of those poor cerebral creatures not much use in shipwreck or in bed. Philippe for his part not merely disapproved of Renée’s general conduct – her loud laugh, the large and pungent feasts of aioli and bouillabaisse, the left-wing sympathies, the undisguised couchages which included Léon the sailor – he actually, rare for him, detested her. Even today when she is long dead, he cannot speak well. (She was a sensualist all through; he, as far as the French context allowed, came nearer to a puritan.) It astounds and dismays me that two people of outstanding, if disparate, qualities could see nothing in each other.

  A similarly negative alchemy operated between Philippe and my mother. On good surface terms to the end, they did not like each other much. They did not say so; there just was not in either a spark of admiration (she once told me that a man oughtn’t to have too many virtues). That lack, too, grieved me. It had taken me a while to see it. I shall never cease to puzzle over that cat’s cradle of human sympathies, of attraction, non-attraction, revulsion. As a novelist I ought, at least sometimes, to get it right.

>   It occurs to me – a little late – that I have not said what my mother looked like. She was beautiful – a beautiful woman – this I have said, more than once, and left the idea afloat in the reader’s mind. Perhaps I did not attempt description because to me her image is inconstant and elusive. The face under the enormous hat bent over my pram is not the face of the mischievous parent I was landed on years later at Cortina d’Ampezzo, or the face touched with foreboding on the Sorrentine beach, the face changed – so lightly – in the station bus. The two most present, and very different, versions in my mind’s eye are the way she looked during that contented winter she and I shared in France, and a studio photograph by Man Ray taken in the early nineteen-twenties where she is presented as a formal dark beauty, dark hair, dark eyes, with an inward air of serene repose. She must at times have looked like that in life, though the photograph has not caught her vitality, her animation. What it did catch was a glow, the glow on the face of a woman painted by Giorgione.

  Later her face became etched with a tragic refinement such as one might see in certain Rembrandt portraits, with lines and features grown more Jewish now than Latin.

  I am apt to see men and women in terms of paintings; the likenesses meant to be generic rather than exact. To conclude on a more factual plane about my mother’s appearance: she was by no means short without being noticeably tall, her figure was very feminine, with a certain well-carried opulence; her arms and shoulders were rounded, her hair chestnut and her colouring olive (which made her having a blue-eyed, very fair child – pinko-Aryan she called me when in the mood – surprising to her, my father also having been dark); her hands were pretty and a little too small. She did not bother overmuch about what she wore, in fact she could dress quite badly, apt to fling on, buttons the wrong way, something she’d acquired because she’d seen it look good on someone else. It did not matter. She had radiance, she had presence.