by Iris Origo
Rain, rain; one hung out of the window in spite of it (“You’ve got another smut on your nose, Iris”) and Tipperary came in; troops were marching down the street, so young that they seemed young even to me; and quiet, white-faced women lined the streets, watching them. There was greasy wool all over the house, khaki and dark grey, and I wound it and knitted (like everyone else, though very badly) Balaclava helmets and seamen’s mufflers, and the smell and grease of the wool got under one’s finger-nails.
Once, on my way to Miss Woolf’s class, I saw a blowsy middle-aged woman present a pale young man with a white feather, and knew, even then, that it was a very ugly thing to do.
In my mother’s flat, people came in and out; but not the Tommies and Eddies any more, for some of them were at the Front and some in the Cabinet, and some were dead. Everyone was resolutely cheerful, but no-one talked much at breakfast after reading the casualty lists; later on in the day, someone would come in, looking very tired, saying, “I’ve just been with Jack’s mother,” or, “Sheila is wonderful—she went straight back to the canteen.” And one day Irene brought us a slim, dark little volume, saying, “They’ve come—Rupert’s poems.”
Everyone who came in was working in a hospital or a canteen or an office, or else at Victoria Station meeting and allocating Belgian refugees, and then in the evening went home to the ‘Belgiums’ they had taken in, and later on told funny stories about them. (I formed an impression—which subsequent years have confirmed—that ‘refugees’ are not an amiable race, and that their hosts soon become unamiable, too.) The refugee in the house of Irene’s mother, my Aunt Constance—how they met each other I cannot say—was, very suitably, a Russian princess. She complained, too, though in another style; she had—although, I was told, so poor—the largest pearls I had ever seen.
It went on raining, and my mother went on catching cold, and eventually, soon after Christmas, she decided to take me back to Italy. I was miserable, both at being checked in my patriotic fervour and at being torn away from Miss Woolf’s enthralling classes. But we went. The Channel boat—on which I felt, even then, that my mother’s scarlet cloak was out of place—was crowded with troops and nurses and French civilians returning home, and we were all very sick and wet and cold; and at Boulogne, there were turbaned Indian troops on the quay, looking even sicker, wetter and yellower than we. And that was the end of my first glimpse—through a thick pane of glass—of war.
It was after our return to Villa Medici, where we spent the war years in a state of mental and emotional segregation which I still find very surprising, that my attitude to my mother began to change: I was becoming aware that she had interests and needs of her own, which I could not share or fulfil. Certainly by the time that I was thirteen or fourteen, I had begun to realise that, in the varied procession of friends who came to the house, what she was seeking was a stable and protective affection. Beneath her egotism, her brilliance, and her taste for sophisticated talk, she had preserved a very simple and English romanticism. When, in 1917, she told me that she was going to marry Geoffrey Scott, the brilliant young architect and writer who had been working as Mr. Berenson’s secretary, the turmoil of my feelings was instinctive rather than rational.
It was not that I minded, in itself, her marrying again. My image of my father was something so separate from daily life, so entirely my own possession, that I felt no resentment on his behalf. On my own account I was, I think, not so much jealous, as uncomfortably disturbed by watching my mother suddenly become both so much younger again, and also so vulnerable. But I tried to stifle these feelings and to believe that only happiness lay before her. My instinct, however, told me that her choice had not been wise; and of this confirmation came very soon. I have no intention of dwelling upon the complex causes which made this marriage unhappy, nor of setting down accusations against Geoffrey, whose friendship I kept even after he and my mother were divorced, and whom I continued to see in England and America until his early death in 1929. I think with much affection, after so many years, of his tall, ungainly figure, and of the mobile, ugly face lit by quick flashes of intelligence and laughter; the straight coarse black hair, eternally unbrushed and falling over his eyes, and the appealing, faintly bewildered look beneath his horn spectacles—the defence (sometimes misleading) of the shortsighted. He could be the most perceptive of friends, the most brilliant of talkers, and his disarming helplessness must, I think, have made more women fall in love with him than his brilliance. But he was not, by temperament, a husband—and, in any relationship, he was a disturbing human being, an iconoclast who had begun by destroying his own idols, a mocker filled with self-mockery. Moreover, the complete instability of his moods made him extremely difficult to live with; the uncertainty as to whether he would not awake, after an evening enlivened by his stories and his wit, to a morning blackness which, for three days, would envelop the whole house in a dank mist of silence and gloom. At such times, too, he became incapable of doing any work—an incapacity which my mother (whose own unflagging industry was only checked by illness) was constitutionally incapable of understanding. He had by then already made his name with The Architecture of Humanism and during the first months of his marriage he was contemplating A History of Taste which would certainly have been a fascinating and entertaining book. There was a great deal of conversation about it, and I still possess a large piece of foolscap which lay for many weeks upon the centre of his desk, bearing, in his fine scholar’s hand, the following words, and these only:
A HISTORY OF TASTE
Volume I
Chapter I
‘It is very difficult …’
So far as I know, the work progressed no further.
He was, however, writing at this time most of the poems—many of them, of great distinction and charm, published in two small volumes entitled Poems and A Box of Paints, and I remember the pride I took in being shown them as they took shape, and in even sometimes being consulted as to the choice of an adjective or turn of phrase. His chief work during those years was one in which he and my mother collaborated with great delight, his Portrait of Zélide. The idea for this book came to them on a wet November evening at Ouchy, where my mother was staying for one of her cures. All day the mist had blanketed the lake, the gulls had repeated their rapacious melancholy squawks, the guests of the Beau Rivage Hotel had been served their insipid diets in little individual green casseroles, and after luncheon Geoffrey, in search of the only distraction available, a new book, had taken the tram to Place St. Francois, returning from the Librairie Payot with a large volume under his arm, M. Philippe Godet’s Madame de Charrière et ses Amis. This he read aloud to my mother after dinner; the next day they ransacked the Lausanne Library for every work upon Madame de Charrière available—including her own novels, which later on my mother translated into equally elegant, formal English prose.
Within three days, the Portrait of Zélide had begun to take shape, and thus, by a curious irony, a woman whose own emotional life had been singularly unhappy, brought, for a few months, harmony to another woman’s marriage. In the absorption of bringing Zélide and Boswell, d’Hermenches and Benjamin Constant to life again, Geoffrey and his wife suspended the relentless analysis of their own feelings: they laughed and worked together. Perhaps, too, there was in all this a certain process of self-identification. Certainly Geoffrey possessed, as well as Benjamin’s wit and his passion for ‘reality of intercourse’, a somewhat similar cleavage between mind and temperament, something of the destructive ‘dedoublement Constantien’; certainly Sybil shared, as well as Zélide’s fine taste and love of learning, her unflagging zest. But the parallel must not be pressed too far; no other woman, perhaps, has ever been so relentlessly, unfailingly rational as Zélide.
Be that as it may, the result of these labours—Geoffrey’s Portrait of Zélide, dedicated ‘To Sybil’—was a remarkable and delightful book, a vivid portrayal of the life and vision of the eighteenth century, an acute and merciless portrait of a c
lever and unhappy woman. Here and there—as in most biographies worth reading—the biographer’s intuition was called upon to supplement the facts: some of Zélide’s own letters to Boswell, in particular, were lacking, and it was necessary to guess what they might have contained. In this case—with a good fortune which seldom falls to a biographer’s lot—the pattern was eventually completed. I had the pleasure of being with Geoffrey several years later, when, as he was sorting and examining the fabulous treasures that had lain concealed in trunks in Malahide Castle, he came upon Zélide’s letters and discovered that wherever he had only guessed, he had guessed right.
While this book was taking shape, I too had a small share in it—at least to the extent of eagerly listening to each chapter as it was read aloud and to the discussions about its protagonists—and I think it may be questioned whether so wholly rational an attitude to life and love, so much stark and chronic disillusionment, was desirable fare for a schoolgirl, especially for one who was, by nature, quite as naively romantic as her mother, and also desperately afraid of showing her naïveté. Often I would go upstairs, after an evening in which I had shown, I hoped, nothing but an amused and intelligent interest, feeling much inclined to burst into tears.
‘Is this what love is really like?’ I wondered—and then, with the immediate egotism of the young, ‘Is this really all I can expect of life?’
I was far more conscious, too, than was good for me, of the ebb and flow of emotion in the marriage before my eyes: I learned too soon to be tactful, and, when necessary, blind. By the time that my mother and Geoffrey had decided to part, I was myself engaged and, when their divorce took place, I was already married. In 1927, my mother married again—choosing this time an old friend, Percy Lubbock, and I felt a conviction (which the future entirely fulfilled) that she would find in him the protection and care that she needed. What, however, we none of us foresaw was an entirely different tragedy—the gradual increase of invalidism which (perhaps partly fostered by her husband’s uncritical, unremitting care) began gradually to change her whole personality, and eventually set up barriers which cut her off from everything that she had once valued. How much of this was due to physical, and how much to nervous, causes I should hesitate to say, nor would most modern doctors set the problem in those terms. “Sybil’s always ill when she can’t get what she wants,” her mother used to say of her in her childhood, with the decisiveness of a tougher generation and a simpler nature. But the grain of truth in the comment did not alter the fact that the illness was always real. My mother was genuinely sick on our Egyptian dahabeah—the only person, I imagine, ever to have been made so by the waters of the Nile; she genuinely crashed to the floor in a faint in the midst of a tedious party. She had an uncanny capacity, too, for picking up any germ that was about in its most virulent form: when I had a mild attack of measles she was laid up for three months; when we attended the procession of the Volto Santo in Lucca, she caught a form of infective jaundice which kept her in bed for the whole winter. My most vivid memory of her later years in Fiesole is of her figure lying in her sea-blue bedroom, hung with curtains of the same colour and adorned with Chinese prints—a room as fragrant with exotic flowers as the tropical hothouse at Kew, and of much the same temperature—but still, as she sent out directions to every member of the household, with her hand firmly grasping the helm.
The suddenness, too, of her attacks was as disconcerting as it was inconvenient. In retrospect, I seem to have spent a great deal of my girlhood at the telephone, changing the plans which some sudden minor illness had destroyed. “Mummy has such a bad headache today,” I would say to an irascible elderly uncle or a distinguished foreign writer passing through Florence, “could you possibly come to tea tomorrow instead?”—“No,”—this was to Cook’s, “I’m afraid we shall not be able to use our reservations for Taormina next week. My mother …” And so on.
Up to her early forties, these sudden eclipses were followed by equally sudden and complete resuscitations. One day she would be lying in bed in total darkness, the air pervaded with eau-de-cologne, and the next morning, entering on tiptoe, I would find her sitting on the edge of the bed, with her maid grimly handing her her stockings, a map open on her knees.
“Such a lovely morning, darling! Just the day for a picnic, and there’s a new road in the Casentino … You were lunching with a friend? Oh, just call up and say that you can’t come, oh, and darling,”—her voice rose as I was closing the door—“ring up Marchesa X too, and say that I won’t be able to see her next week, as I shall be in Sicily.” So the cavalcade would set off again.
It was only very gradually that her friends realised that the periods of illness had become longer, the recoveries less frequent and less complete. In Ceylon—where she went, with Percy, on her last journey to the East—she may have picked up some infection which accounted for her prolonged and debilitating intestinal attacks, causing fits of intense chilliness alternating with sweating attacks so violent that all her nightclothes and sometimes her bedclothes had to be changed two or three times a night. A night-nurse became a necessity, her diet became more and more restricted, and the number of days diminished in which—even wrapped up in a fur coat and with a footwarmer—she could go for a drive. But far sadder, to the observer, was the corresponding change in the responsiveness of her mind and heart. In the past her eager curiosity, her quick sympathy, had never failed to respond to any new stimulus; now, although not yet wholly muted, her responses were subordinated to the preoccupations of ill-health. The doctor’s visit, the daily processes of digestion, the position of a pillow or a lamp—these came first. Gradually the objects which had been the means to comfort—rugs and hot-water bottles, soft carpets and cushions, fires and screens—became not her servants but her masters; they dominated her life. Gradually, relentlessly, the body took command over the spirit.
Then the Second World War began. From the moment when it became evident that Italy would soon be drawn in, it was also plain that my mother must not remain there. It might perhaps have been possible to obtain permission for her and Percy to live with my husband and me in our country-place, La Foce (instead of in one of the remote mountain villages of the Abruzzi or Calabria to which many interned Englishwomen were sent), but even if she stayed with us, how could we be sure of providing the luxurious food and tropical warmth that she needed? England too—the England of Churchill’s ‘blood, sweat and tears’—was plainly no place for her. With much string-pulling I succeeded in obtaining permission for her to leave, only three days before Italy’s declaration of war, for Switzerland. Here, at Vevey and, in the summer, in a villa on the slopes of Mount Pélerin, she spent the last years of her life—and here, in the winter of 1941, I was able (thanks to my American passport) to pay her a visit.
I went to the Grand Hotel at Vevey from a country already at war, already bombed and short of food; from work in the P.O.W. office of the Italian Red Cross, from interviewing (after the Allied advance in Africa), day after day, women imploring for news of their husbands or sons—killed, wounded, or captured—from the soup-kitchens of Rome for hungry refugees, from the bombed cities of the Campagna. I found Switzerland as prosperous, smug and well-fed as it had ever been, with every table in the well-heated, well-appointed dining-room filled with elderly, well-dressed, rich refugees. Every day they took little walks by the lake in the mornings as far as the newspaper kiosk, to buy The Times, Corriere della Sera or Figaro; at lunch-time they would exchange the news, or gossip about any new arrival, and complain about the food; in the afternoons and evenings they played bridge. Sometimes one of them would go for the day to Geneva, to return from his Consulate with scraps of news which he would impart to a carefully chosen group of friends.
“Of course this must go no further, but the secret weapon …” “Know it for a fact, a chap in the Consulate has a cousin who …”
Sometimes the Queen of Spain would come over from Lausanne for tea and bridge, providing conversation for the next two ev
enings.
“Poor Queen Ena! My sister used to live in Madrid, and she told me …”
They were the scavengers of War, more belligerent than any combatant.
And upstairs, in the midst of all this plenty, my mother was starving. This is not a figure of speech. Whether the intestinal infection she had caught in the East had really become much more severe, whether a body exhausted by years of alternations between sedatives and purges or stimulants had simply ceased to react or whether it was her nervous system that had broken down, is surely irrelevant. The simple fact was that the wish to eat, as well as the capacity to assimilate, had left her. Her fingers, always long, had now become so slender that her rings dropped off them; her arms and body were as thin as an Indian famine baby’s. In the first year, on very fine days, she was sometimes wheeled in a chair down the long passage to the lift, and Percy and the chauffeur lifted her into the car for a short drive through the vineyards on the hill. But when the second winter came, she kept entirely to her room.
I saw her for the last time in November, 1942, having obtained a week’s leave from the Red Cross—since it was plain that, when the advancing Allied armies moved on to the north of La Foce, we would be cut off entirely from Switzerland and I should not be able to get to her again until the war was over. I had brought with me some photographs of her grandchild, Benedetta (who had been born after her departure from Italy), but her interest in them was as perfunctory as in the news from England which her sister wrote to her. Everything had shrunk to the small space enclosed within the four walls of her sick-room.
The news of her increasing weakness continued to reach me, through Percy, for a few weeks longer—then all communication with Switzerland came to an end, and even messages of inquiry through the International Red Cross produced no reply. Finally, in January, I opened a letter in an unfamiliar uneducated hand, postmarked in Turin, ‘La nostra amata Contessa è spirata il 26 dicembre, senza soffrire.’ That—a message smuggled by a partisan across the Alps—was all.