Early negotiations went forward with consummate ease. The four of them returned to London together, stopping on the way to pick up four suitcases from the Grosvenor Hotel. Dolly and Hugo were permitted, even encouraged, to consider themselves a couple. In Maresfield Gardens a more reflective mood took over. The top flat was empty and entirely denuded of furniture. Dolly had to beg a bed, a table and chairs from Hugo.
‘Can’t they bring their things over from Paris?’ enquired Toni, rather annoyed.
‘You forget, Mother. The Germans took everything.’
‘But surely they got it all back? One hears that the Germans behaved rather well in Paris. Apparently Hitler told them to.’
‘If you say so, Mother. In the meantime they need somewhere to sleep. And a table. Chairs,’ he added guiltily.
‘Oh, very well. That spare bed in the dressing-room will have to go.’ That spare bed was the one formerly slept in by Arthur Ferber, now no more than a memory, and sometimes considerably less. ‘And ask Nanny to let you have that table in the nursery. And ask Dolly to come down here when she has a moment. If she is not too busy.’ This was said ironically. ‘I haven’t seen her for a day or two.’
Harmony was maintained, by means of considerable sacrifices on Dolly’s part. She was aware that she would have to serve an apprenticeship before Toni would give her son in marriage. Every afternoon she left her own mother, sitting forlornly in their empty living-room, and went down the stairs to the ground floor flat to keep Toni company. She remained there until Hugo came home for dinner, when she was allowed to greet him, after he had greeted his mother. If she stayed for the evening she was given a lesson in bridge, at which she made disconcertingly rapid progress, as she had done in English, which she now spoke with the merest trace of an accent. Her speech was always more rapid than that of a native Englishwoman, more emphatic; by comparison my mother, and ultimately myself, seemed slow, reflective. At eleven o’clock she kissed them both, went upstairs, and climbed into bed with her mother, hugging her for warmth and for comfort. She knew that the last stage of her apprenticeship was adumbrated: her mother would have to go. Fanny’s eyes were now so bad that she occasionally bumped into their table or knocked over one of the two chairs. Besides, she was lonely (they were both lonely); this was no life for her. By great good fortune Dolly, before leaving Paris, had obtained the name of Les Hibiscus, a select retirement home on the outskirts of Nice; by even greater good fortune she had heard, in a letter forwarded from the rue Saint-Denis, from Lucette, now installed in a maison de tolérance in Nice itself. On the management side, as she made clear. Dolly wrote back to her, outlining her plans. The reply was immediate; a room had been reserved for Madame Fanny at Les Hibiscus. Lucette would be delighted to see her old friend again. Dolly could get married, get on with her own life, and bonne chance.
It was a brave decision, and it turned out to have been the right one. Fanny Schiff lived happily in the sun until the age of eighty-eight, her days enlivened by the company of Lucette and her new colleagues. The pain of her daughter’s absence was severe, but she had seen how that daughter’s future was to take shape, and had acquiesced in the arrangement. As for Dolly, she was never to forget her mother, who remained the greatest love of her life. This I understand. Fanny’s departure signified the onset of an era of greater coldness, the onset of a belated adulthood. Subconsciously she blamed Toni for her mother’s removal, whereas in fact it had been entirely her own idea. But the arrangements, which had seemed so hopeful, had begun to stagnate, and something had to start them up again. Hugo, she realised, was not particularly anxious to get married now that he had both Dolly and his mother at his beck and call, vying with each other to satisfy his every whim. Dolly, of course, saw this, and began to feel for him that faint contempt that she was careful never to show. Every evening one of Toni’s unattached male friends came in to make up a fourth for bridge. Every evening Dolly was obliged to go upstairs to bed. This she did not mind, for Hugo did not attract her sexually, but she felt slighted. Finally, after a year of filial obedience, she managed to activate Hugo into making a proposal. Her face radiant, but this time her expression determined, she announced the news to Toni and her bridge partner, an elderly Austrian dentist. This time, in front of a witness, there was no going back.
They were married quietly. Why quietly, I asked my mother, when both Toni and Dolly were so fond of display? Apparently Toni had insisted on a quiet wedding, which she now saw as an occasion for less than rapturous self-congratulation. An antagonism had grown up between Dolly and herself. Dolly continued to address her as ‘Maman chérie’, although it cost her a great deal to do so, while Toni, for her part, tended to give orders, now that she could no longer dismiss Dolly to the upstairs flat. There were house rules, and the rules remained those of Toni Ferber. Another six months of filial obedience followed. Finally, now that she had traditional means of persuasion at her disposal, Dolly prevailed upon Hugo to apply for the Brussels post which he had described to her in all innocence. Hugo was undoubtedly less adept than his wife. However, he too was sick of Maresfield Gardens and the company of so many women, that of his sister and Nanny Sweetman as well as his mother and Dolly. They left with enormous pantomimes of regret. Toni watched them from the window, her face set in that stony expression which I remember from the time when I so briefly knew her.
We seek to form attachments where no attachments properly exist. Toni accepted her disappointment, which mirrored exactly her disappointment in both her father and her husband. Unlike most people she had learned something from this. When Hugo, her last love, left, she concentrated her considerable resources on living alone, although my mother and Nanny Sweetman remained a guarantee against total solitude. She dressed carefully every day, was in regular attendance at the hairdresser, and played cards with her friends in the evenings. Gradually she went out less and less, and preferred her own neighbourhood, where the shopkeepers knew her, to any other. She knew now that she could expect little from Dolly; the removal to Brussels had told her that. She gradually came to see that Dolly had never liked her, but had used her, as she in fact had hoped to use Dolly. She was a lonely woman, but too dignified ever to admit to this loneliness. Hugo telephoned from time to time, but never often enough. Dolly wrote, in a wild scrawling hand, giving details of their life, which seemed to be exciting, and ending with protestations of affection. When they came back to Maresfield Gardens for Christmas she felt she hardly knew them. Their conversation was full of names unfamiliar to her. ‘Whom did you say?’ she would ask. And Dolly would later remark to Hugo, ‘I’m afraid Maman has aged a great deal. Don’t you agree?’ He saw no difference in his mother, who had always seemed to him to be the same age, but by that date he accepted his wife’s views on everything, from force of habit, as he had once agreed, half listening only, to his mother.
Nevertheless Toni’s first visit to Brussels was a moderate success. Her heart beat like a girl’s as the taxi drew up in the Rue de la Loi: it had come to seem like a great adventure. She was congratulated enthuiastically on having made the journey, as if she were a hundred years old; several times she caught Dolly, her head on one side, with a fixed sentimental smile on her face. Clearly she was to be regarded as no more than an elderly relative, someone venerable but not quite up to the mark. Hugo, when he returned from the bank in the evening, joined his wife in profuse expressions of delight. Apart from this there seemed to be very little to talk about, although the litany of unfamiliar names, now longer, formed the burden of the conversation. Dolly seemed older, more settled. She was beautifully turned out, beautifully coiffed and manicured, but she seemed to Toni to have lost some of her zest, to have become glossier but more watchful. Once more showing her genius for adaptability, she even managed to look Belgian: there was a higher colour in her cheeks, and she carried herself with a kind of added consequence which was not entirely characteristic.
Toni felt a pang of genuine regret when she remembered Dolly’s younge
r self. She felt an even keener regret when she contemplated her son, whose once golden curls had become sparse and were grey above the ears, and whose once lithe figure had thickened disadvantageously, so that he now had a little round stomach, of which he seemed rather fond, for he tended to give it free rein, sitting slumped in his chair, his chest caved in, his stomach well to the fore. Toni sighed and realised that she must now be considered old herself, although until now she had not been conscious of age. When she thought about it at all she congratulated herself on putting up a good fight. She was forced to admit that Hugo was not putting up half so good a fight, but when he looked up from his soup, which he had been drinking rather greedily, and smiled at her, as he had smiled at her when he was a young boy, her heart smote her and she made a pretext of tiredness after the journey in order to weep a few tears in the privacy of their spare room. She spent a sleepless night watching a square of moonlight reflected in the tall mirror hanging on the dark blue patterned wall to the left of her bed and imagining that she was a girl in Vienna once again, sleeping in a similar bedroom, with a similar polished wood floor, and the same smell of beeswax fustiness that now came back to her with hallucinatory reality.
This bad night weakened her a little, so that she faced the following day with diminished enthusiasm. The maid, Annie Verkade, brought her coffee at eight o’clock, after which she trailed timidly into the dining-room in search of something more substantial. There she found Hugo, surrounded by the crumbs of several croissants, being berated by his wife. Conversation was abruptly halted when she entered the room, to be replaced once more by profuse expressions of welcome. She was given more coffee, and was invited to help herself to the one remaining croissant. She was then told that she would be left to her own devices that morning (‘Remember, Maman, you are on holiday!’) but that the afternoon was to be kept free, for a treat was to be provided: the person invariably referred to as dear Adèle Rougier was coming to tea. Annie would be rather busy all morning preparing for this event, and so Toni would quite understand if she, Dolly, were to make herself scarce as well. Dear Adèle had such a sweet tooth, and various items must be bought with which to tempt her always fickle fancy. In the end Toni opted to walk to the bank with Hugo; it was the only time she managed to get him to herself. Then she wandered around, gaining confidence, found a café, ordered and drank more coffee, and with a revival of her hopes and expectations made her way back to the Rue de la Loi in time for lunch.
The afternoon was not so successful. At five o’clock the living-room, where she had shyly joined Dolly after the rest she had been persuaded to take, was ready to receive Adèle Rougier, who seemed to have assumed a phenomenal importance in Dolly’s life. Toni detested her on sight. Adèle Rougier was a tall vague elderly woman, brilliantly dressed, perfumed, coiffed and generally ministered to in a concerted effort on the part of her friends, minions, and hangers-on to conceal her very real ineffectuality and incompetence. Toni saw at a glance that whereas she herself was comfortably off this woman was massively, helplessly rich. The Congolese mines which had provided her family’s fortune had no doubt also yielded the diamond and sapphire brooch pinned to her left shoulder, the diamond and sapphire earrings that peeped from below the dry bronze waves of her hair, and the triple row of faultless pearls which adorned her long thin neck. Immediately a discussion took place as to whether Adèle Rougier should retain or discard her almost ankle-length mink coat; her hesitations and misgivings were met by endless praise and reassurance. Toni saw at once that she had been surpassed, utterly downgraded in importance by Adèle Rougier, to whom Dolly now addressed her energies as if she were that devoted daughter she had once been in reality. For Adèle Rougier needed an intercessor between herself and the menacing outer world: when she left the comfort of her home she needed to know that there was someone at the end of the journey—always made in her chauffeur-driven car—to whom she could recount her various tales of woe: her favourite scarf mislaid, no doubt stolen, a disturbing dream which she would insist on recounting in muddled detail, as she did now, her fork playing with the fragmented macaroon on the plate which Dolly had reverently placed before her, her fur coat laid on the back of her chair in case she suddenly decided to put it on again. Toni remembered her dream of the night before and smiled to herself ironically. To whom could she now recount such dreams? To whom could she confide that the presence of Annie in her bedroom that morning had for a moment confused her into remembering the silent watchful figure of Frau Zimmermann, whom her father had finally married, and who had persuaded him to retire to Lausanne, where they had both ended their days?
‘And how long are you staying?’ asked Adèle Rougier at last, making a heroic and visible effort at interesting herself in something other than her own concerns.
Toni watched Dolly take a tiny embroidered napkin and carefully adjust Adèle Rougier’s gleaming lipstick which had leaked from the corners of her discontented and childish mouth. She made a rapid decision.
‘Three days,’ she said.
‘But Maman,’ Dolly protested. ‘You promised us a week.’
‘I’m rather tired, my dear,’ said Toni, playing the old lady card. Suddenly she could not wait to get home.
‘Then we must take you out tomorrow,’ said Dolly.
Toni noticed how she was now the guest not of Hugo and Dolly but of Dolly and Adèle Rougier, a woman who could not even tidy up her own lipstick. Had she been less phlegmatic she would have been violently angry. But by now she was a cold woman, cold in her disappointment, and her doctor had warned her that she had a tendency to high blood pressure. Therefore she merely smiled enigmatically, held out her hand to Adèle Rougier, and went to her room.
The next day was spent in Adèle Rougier’s car, or rather in the back of it, crushed between Dolly and the woman who was now apparently her hostess, and suffocated by that same woman’s asphyxiating scent. Any scenery she managed to see was glimpsed through misted windows, for the car was heated, even uncomfortably so. Nevertheless Adèle Rougier wore her mink coat. Toni wore her travelling coat of grey lamb, which she thought much more suitable.
‘Poor me,’ said Dolly, ‘in my old cloth coat.’
It was to Adèle Rougier’s meagre credit that she took no notice of this remark.
On the evening of the second day Adèle Rougier came for bridge. She was an inveterate gambler and a bad player; nevertheless Hugo continued to lose to her. She gathered up her winnings in a dry red-nailed hand and put them in a small purse of gold mesh. She then turned jerkily to Toni and proffered the same hand.
‘So nice to have met you,’ she said, in the English her governess had taught her. After which Toni had felt herself dismissed.
She loved and mourned her son, who had seemed to her to be as good-humoured and as distracted as he had always been but simultaneously spoilt and diminished. He had accepted her presence as inevitable, but had not seemed particularly pleased to see her. In this she was mistaken. Hugo loved his mother, but was under the influence of his wife. Used to being dominated by a woman, he accepted, perhaps ruefully, that he had made a choice (or that it had been made for him) and that he now took his lead from Dolly, whom he sometimes took to be his parent, a replacement for that original parent who was now so far away. Whatever frustration this state of affairs occasioned Dolly was only visible in her quick bright angry smiles, her fidgeting impatience, and her increased social ambition. The beseeching look of anticipation—‘Love me! Save me!’—was no longer to be seen.
It was consciousness of this last fact that sent Toni off once again to Brussels, two years after her original visit. She was not entirely heartless, and she thought her son might need advice. But once again she was subjected to the company of Adèle Rougier, and a day in the back of the car, this time filled with three fur coats. It was understood that an excursion of this nature was something of a privilege: another was decreed for the following day. This she could hardly bear to contemplate, but the alternative was to be lef
t in the flat with Annie, who this time struck her as laconic to the point of insolence and somewhat dirty in the mornings. She longed for the peace of Maresfield Gardens, for the discreet company of her daughter, now a quiet and agreeable young woman, whose wedding she must organise. (My parents relieved her of this duty by walking to the Registry Office one sunny Friday morning.) When she got home, after that second disappointing visit, she sank gratefully back onto her own feather pillows and vowed never to travel again. And I know she never did. That was the beginning of Toni’s reclusion; her mind remained active but she aged in body. Perhaps she mourned her son prematurely; perhaps she always had. At any event when he died she was dry-eyed and stoical. She realised, after that disastrous visit to Brussels—belated in every sense—that Dolly had removed Hugo from her, but that Dolly was not perhaps as pleased as she might have been with the exchange. Yet the marriage had lasted; it had even lasted for a respectable number of years, a fact more to Dolly’s credit than to Hugo’s. When he died there was nothing more for Toni to feel. She endured, she continued, but she had become silent, strict; she did not welcome interruptions. She was not pleased when Dolly turned up after the funeral, accompanied by Annie, her fur coat, and several pieces of luggage. It seemed that she was prepared to stay, but where? The top flat which she had once occupied with her mother was no longer empty.
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