I had not felt weighed down by such stony desolation since the time in my early childhood when it compelled me to run away from my father’s house. I recalled this now and looked back at my own ruthlessness in horror – I had been unhappy, so I was driven to escape not counting the cost: to him, who had loved me. At least I was no longer capable of that; or so I thought. My father … The life I led in that country, Germany, which I instinctively turned my back on … It was a long time ago. Now there was nowhere to run away to: then I believed I had arrived in an earthly paradise, now I had been returned from one.
The Nairns were good to me, far above my deserts; I told them nothing. The story, so freshly happened, seemed untellable. I should not have known how – with its farcical elements – to put it across. Besides I feared Toni’s disapproval, her sour intolerance. (Here I did her an injustice; later, in the predicaments of my adult life, she often gave me the benevolent sympathy she had lacked when dealing with her sister or her husband.) Rosie I should have liked to consult and was held back by the fact that, in spite of the immaturity I stood accused of, I was her confidante, a shred of self-esteem I could not afford to give up. All I said was that I had been foolish and been thrown out of the house. Sent away, I put it. They asked no questions.
It was Jamie – a man to whom one did not talk – who brought solace. ‘That girl is in trouble,’ he said to Toni, and set out to find me some work I could do.
I would have thought it impossible that giving lessons in French conversation and translating booksellers’ and auctioneers’ catalogues would assuage my feelings, but in a measure they did. The French lessons were fun, the translating, laborious and exacting, needed disciplined concentration. Earning money proved delightful. For the French I was paid 3/6d. an hour – for the unqualified 2/6d. was the going rate but Jamie’s connections were generous and rich – the catalogues came to a very small sum per column; it all added up. (If I saved enough, I might be able to return to France on my own some day. That didn’t bear thinking about yet.) One obstacle in my new working life was my atrocious handwriting, due to natural inability or to never having been properly taught. I learned to draw clear figures and wrote words in block letters. A laborious job indeed. It kept me busy.
On weekends the Nairns still took me to their cottage. Visits to Finchingfield were not a source of unmitigated relief, the pastimes and flesh-pots, the atmosphere were too like, and yet not, Sanary. The loss of self-confidence – needed in that milieu – did not help. There were other barriers. I had become aware of the perils of divided loyalties. Toni’s antagonism and passive resistance had borne fruit: A.J. and his wife and friends had come to regard her – and her over-loyal sister – as tiresome nuisances, negligible appendages to Jamie whom they frankly tried to compensate for his dull home-life. In theory the sisters had a standing invitation; they only went as often as required to avoid an open breach. Jamie did not go to Finchingfield for every meal, when he missed one he usually went immediately after. When he did this again one Sunday after lunch (out of tins ‘prepared’ by Toni – I was too depressed to cook) there was an outburst. I had heard bigger and better; judged on its own it had substance and volume, variations – molto agitato, tempestuoso – on the theme of being a man’s kitchen drudge. When she had stumped upstairs for her afternoon rest, Jamie and I crept about, quietly washing up, scrubbing the kitchen floor, laying a careful table for tea. In whispers he asked me to bicycle over to Finchingfield for the loan of some cake or petits fours, and himself stayed at home for the rest of the day.
Jamie was very fond of his wife; he was just not, as I must have made clear, a demonstrative or – domestically – a very noticing man. He liked being with her, eating the food she put before him, listening to the gramophone; he also liked his masculine life at his book business and among his bookish Finchingfield friends. What I – and probably he himself – was less aware of was that he had come to feel at ease with the Finchingfield women who paid him much attention without making any apparent demands. It struck me that he used less often the German diminutives taught him by Toni, and that the best stories he brought home from work were saved for his weekend parties.
Toni during those months was left a good deal on her own. (Rosie could not be counted on, the Judge was spending more weekends in London.) My company was welcome for which I was grateful in turn; I was bound to join Jamie less and less at Finchingfield. When the weather turned bad in November with fog on the roads and the cottage colder, Toni stayed put in London while Jamie would be given a bed from Saturday to Monday by A.J. Naturally, I could not go with him.
Finchingfield friendships flourished on propinquity, shared days, shared games, shared jokes; there was no real place for the outsider or occasional guest. My contact with them slackened during that autumn – subsequent events cut it off altogether – as it happened it was not renewed in later life. I lost little Garsington and, perhaps, vistas, opportunities …
My time in London was tied to the convenience of my pupils, not laggard children for the most part but busy bright young men preparing for service or commerce abroad. I discovered that I enjoyed teaching – modulating my accent from French-French to Anglo-French according to requirements – and found that I had some aptitude for it. Other hours were filled grappling with the catalogues, learning trade terms, converting inches into metric sense and back again. I no longer went to galleries, law courts or museums. For the rest I was back in the old insulated life of afternoons with Rosie and evenings with Toni.
Rosie was well; her equable contented self. Jack’s worries, she told me, had receded. He seemed less troubled. She did not know what it had been about. Once he had said, I’ve been lucky.
‘You can’t mean –?’
‘Oh no. Not that. He has not been near a bookie or a gaming club. When a man like him gives his word …’
I took hers for it.
There had been no communication with Sanary. This was ordinary, letters in my family were a matter of good intentions. Had I any? Ought I to make the first move? What should I, what could I, say? No explanations please, was still ringing in my ears. On some days I felt mutinous. And let down: I had seen a side of my mother that I wished did not exist. Most days I was only unhappy. I felt much guilt about Cécile (the whole thing), none whatsoever about Oriane. How I wished though that she had remained my secret. (Ah yes, discretion …) Oriane did not bear thinking about. And her, too, I wished to see perfect. Actual absence was not so painful as I felt it ought to be; it was almost a relief. I shrivelled at the thought of how she’d look at me in my present dingy circumstances. My one emotional extravagance was persuading Toni to sing Mozart, a sweet sad indulgence I should not have liked to hear my mother’s comments on.
I cannot say that time flew. It passed. Three months had gone when the olive branch arrived. It came in the form of a letter from my mother in her own hand. It had a beginning, a middle and some postscripts. This I learned after I opened it which was not at once. It had come by the second post; when I saw the envelope I began to shake. I bolted out to Rosie’s next door. She had just come in.
‘What is the matter?’ she said when she saw me.
I began to stammer, then brought it out, ‘I got a letter from my mother.’
‘Yes –?’
I had to explain that it was the first … well, the first … Without a further word Rosie did a sensible and unexpected thing – she behaved like a man – she took me to the pub up the road and ordered me a small whisky and soda. It did wonders.
After that I was able to open the letter, in my room, by myself. It began, ‘Dear wayward daughter, why don’t you come to us for Christmas?’
You never do, do you? We’re not proper Christians … This year we’re planning to spend the worst of it at Arles so that we can get to that midnight mass at Les Baux, I hear they sacrifice an actual live lamb at the offertory, that ought to be pagan enough … and the drive through that Dantesque landscape at night, Alessandro says the
re will be a moon, should be stupendous. Why don’t you join us at Sanary the week before, then come back with us and stay on. Alessandro could have written you about plans, but he tells me that I must write to you myself. He says I behaved badly to you. Perhaps so. One does. You ought to know my beastly temper by now. I still think you are a goose, but a dear goose (sometimes). Anyway much is forgiven and most is forgotten.
She had also forgotten to sign it, the letter went straight on into postscripts.
PS Philippe Desmirail often calls, enquiring tenderly about you. That eccentric saint likes you very much, he really does. We don’t see Madame Bovary – if you permit me to call her that – perhaps she is in hiding, maybe Philippe has given her a dressing down. More likely she is plotting some spectacular crémaillère for their new house which is supposed to be finished early next year. It’s sheer white cubes and terraces in the centre of their olive grove, and I have to admit that it fits rather well into the landscape.
PPS Louis the Satellite has been granted a stay of execution by his parents, he’s even been allowed to go skiing with the Desmirails at Christmas. Have I not mentioned that they will be away? Don’t bristle: that has not been part of my plans. They’ll be back early in January and you will have plenty of opportunity to see them should you so wish.
PPPS Did you see – or have you become too insular? – that, sadly, the Briand Government fell in October. All the right-minded people here gloated. That mindless, sheep-like right–left divide of the French is deplorable and so entrenched, it’ll be their undoing. Will it ever come to an end? Now they have Tardieu God help them, not that he will last.
PPPPS I must stop. I hope you’re pleased with such a long letter, and I do hope we shall all be civilised when you are here, and that you haven’t taken to harbouring resentments. I don’t think you will. You have such a gentlemanly nature.
* * *
My feelings were mixed. Relief, tears, exasperation, rage, fond laughter. In the end, relief won and fond laughter.
Ma mère est une femme impossible, I said to myself in French, I must try it out on my pupils. I giggled. It was a long time since I had.
* * *
Well, and so I was back. No longer exiled. The whole of that stay, as she had wished, was civilised and very very pleasant (with a residue of unease, I think, only in me). All as before between us, or so we tried to make it. Alessandro’s converted villa was finished, turned into a liveable house, delivered. Its new owner was pleased enough with it to have got him another commission, a ruin of a mas in the back country between Bandol and La Cadière. My mother was to do the furnishing, not this time in rustic Provençal. So the Peugeot had outlived its utility, there was now a brand-new Ford convertible, American-built. It was black, a smart colour then. Alessandro let me drive it. We went to the midnight mass at Les Baux – which was a touch for les touristes, and the lamb was led out alive – slept at Arles and walked next morning in the Cloister of St-Trophime, then on the Pont-du-Gard and to Le Nôtre’s Garden and the arenas at Nîmes – the three of us happy in places we loved. On the third day we went down into the Rhône delta to Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer and Aigues-Mortes, and felt subdued by an eerie emptiness of winter. On our way to Sanary we were basking again, eating lunch on the Cours Mirabeau at Aix, sitting outside in the Café Les Deux Garçons in the mid-December sun. At Les Cyprès, Emilia had laid a fire of olive logs, which my mother lit. For kindling there were cypress cuttings, the chimney smoked a little but the smell was delicious.
Social life was in abeyance, the Kislings as well as the Desmirails had gone skiing. Sister Annette, the youngest Panigon, told me when I ran into her on the port, that Frédéric was away doing his service militaire. New Year’s Eve we spent at home on our own, eating oysters from la mère Dédée, followed by boudin blanc, drinking Cassis which was then the liveliest, most aromatic dry white wine to be had in Provence. At midnight Emilia joined us, and my mother made us perform superstitious rituals recalled from her diverse origins, ending as the Romans do by breaking some glass. We each made a wish (undisclosed). My mother said, ‘May we all live happily ever after.’
On New Year’s Day – which in France was the day of the Christmas season for eating as well as presents – we were bidden to a large déjeuner the Panigons were giving for their cronies. The long menu was well composed and far less heavy and indigestible than what would have been unavoidably put before us in Britain. We began with a platter of fruits de mer: palourdes, claires, écrevisses, oursins, followed by quenelles de brochet as light as feathers, then some dindonneaux, small young turkeys, roasted unstuffed in butter, served with their own unthickened roasting juices and accompanied only by a creamy chestnut purée and a sharp salad of watercress; some carefully chosen cheeses and a bombe à glace. We drank Cassis with the shellfish, Pouilly-Fuissé with the quenelles, Bordeaux with the roast birds, burgundy with the cheese, and champagne (sec not brut) with the ice pudding. Brandy, eaux-de-vie and liqueurs – how not? – with the coffee. My mother and Monsieur Panigon fenced politics, from opposite viewpoints, with light-handed give and take, never clashing, never conceding. Cécile’s continued absence from home was much commented on.
Voyons, leaving her parents even for les vacances … This sudden devotion to an aunt … no, a great-aunt …?
‘Yes,’ said Madame Panigon, expanding, ‘we couldn’t understand it at first, a daughter of mine turned into a sister of mercy! Now,’ (archly) ‘we can guess the real reason why Cécile left her comfortable life with us … My daughter is a deep one …’
We all looked up.
‘She is more astute than I’d given her credit for. She’s one to look to the future.’ Madame Panigon smiled smugly. ‘My husband’s aunt est une femme aisée, there’s a pretty fortune. Une tante à héritage – Cécile is making the sacrifice of her youth looking after her … Need I say more?’
A few days into the New Year, the Desmirails were back. No moves to be worked out, we soon ran into each other on the port. Oriane didn’t treat me like a long lost friend, she treated me like a friend who hadn’t been lost at all. Another status quo ante: I was restored to my place as a minor possession. I tried to hang about her less; she was less irritable and provocative, her general tenor playful, affectionate. She still teased; as she had every right to as I was still besotted and it showed. Most times she liked it to show, I knew this now; much as I was inclined to admire, I no longer admired all the way. Feelings were made still more complex by my fondness for Philippe, and for Oriane and Philippe as a couple.
They brought back snapshots from their sports d’hiver: on skis too they looked like cut-outs, elegant shadows; Louis beside them was flesh and blood, handsome flesh and blood.
The Desmirail bus line, La Compagnie des Transports du Littoral was to be formally opened on January 15th. Everything was set up. Seven old buses of the lumbering noisy kind, doors and window-frames rattling, engines and brakes and tyres put into perfect trim, maintenance and repair shop complete with petrol pump and empty lot where the ancient vehicles could spend their resting hours. The timetables, impeccably synchronous, were printed and so were booklets of tickets. Oriane had designed and Louis executed posters announcing the birth of the Company. And there was the staff: Philippe was going to be manager and his own chief mechanic with the donkey-man and two lads under him. He had found, trained and briefed nine drivers who were to act as conductors as well. They were local men, and not to wear uniform except for white and blue caps displaying the letters CTL. Each bus was to have a number and fly a small house flag – sewn by Oriane – from its bonnet.
‘Who will bet that she’s going to launch them with champagne?’ my mother said.
I became fascinated by the economic and organisational details, and sat in on the discussions. The drivers’ pay. (Monthly according to French custom, English workmen are scoffed at for not being able to manage their expenditure for more than a week at a time.) Most of them were married men, and Philippe offered
a generous living wage which was accepted without comment. The majority of Sanaryans, usually including the mayor, were Communists; on the other hand few if any had truck with a union. Philippe also insisted on paying for substantial accident insurance for his drivers (well above the requirements of the law) and that too was accepted with no more than a shrug – Well and good, and more fool he. So, how to balance overheads with income? How much would passengers think right to pay? How much was needed for them to pay? Should there be a surcharge after 9 p.m.? 12 p.m.? Season tickets for the commuters from La Seyne? Then there was the argument about the secretary’s salary – they’d taken on Josée, a local girl, trained dactylo and rather pretty, who was to do the letters and bills, receive and count the cash in the drivers’ money bags. Now French women, especially young ones in that kind of job were as a rule not paid a living wage, the assumption being that either they didn’t need it as they were living at home, or if not, that there were always ways for a reasonably attractive girl to make ends meet. Oh nothing as crass as prostitution, just an arrangement with a steady older man who’d naturally come forth with the occasional or regular cadeau.
Look here, Philippe, they told him, she doesn’t expect it, her father runs a very nice ironmonger’s business … Don’t be absurd, nobody pays more than eight hundred francs … Well, some go as high as twelve, and that’s exaggerated …
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