Jigsaw (14 page)

Neither the Nairns nor Rosie were on the telephone. Turn up at the shop? A back-door approach: Jamie very likely hadn’t taken much notice of my dereliction. In the end I wrote to Rosie. A postcard. I am back – may I come and see you?

We are often, and correctly, told now that anything posted in those days dropped on to the receiver’s doormat in a matter of hours. I had Rosie’s answer the same day: come to tea tomorrow.

It was better and worse than expected. She was friendly, seemed pleased to see me, she let me explain about the letters in the mind. She became serious – We didn’t even know you’d arrived – bringing home what she saw as the enormity of my conduct. She didn’t mind for herself, she said. But you have hurt my sister. Toni is easily hurt.

I took it in; much ashamed.

You are not a heartless girl, Rosie said.

No, I said.

Don’t do it again. Don’t ever do it again to her. (But I did. To her, to others. Is it part of the writer’s flaw, wanting to get across so much and shrinking, so painfully, from the execution?)

Hurdle two, meeting Toni surprised me. Toni was lively – no reproaches, no mention – a table laid. Then at one point she looked straight in the air and said in a level tone, I’ve forgiven you. I never do.

I stared at her. Ashamed though I was, this was giving the whole thing too much weight. There she sat with that flower-petal Nefertiti face. ‘I never forgive.’ And when I managed to say, Why? ‘I don’t forgive people who do wrong by
me
.’

I felt chilled. Also a twinge flattered – did she like me so well then? or rather was
I
so likeable as to be made the exception?

In no time it all settled down. I settled down. Things resumed much as they had been in the autumn, in a groove now, taken for granted. I slept at Belsize Park, had breakfast with Susan and Jack, did my books; set off, walking a stretch, catching a bus, eating my lunch perhaps on the steps of the National Gallery having attended – what I thought of as – an excellent lecture on the Quattrocento or the Flemish. Round the corner were the attractions of the Charing Cross Road, Soho offering another kind of browsing among the 3/6
d
., 2/6
d
., even 1/6
d
., French and Italian menus; in the Strand barristers crossed the road in their wigs – the streets of London in busy midday, were pleasant places to be in for the young and curious. Then it was time to meet Rosie, tea at her bed-sitter in Marylebone: talking time. There would be books on her table, just come out, highbrow books as one spoke of them then unselfconsciously. She took
The Times
, for the reviews, the theatre critics, the law reports. Politics, except in most general terms, were seldom referred to. (Though, like my mother, she often spoke of the beastliness of the 1914 War.) Toni would come in … after reluctant household shopping or her singing lesson … Rosie was still rarely available in the evening (except at weekends) so I often walked across Regent’s Park for supper with the Nairns.

Their mews sitting-room was, as I said before, small. It contained essentials, a piano, a bookcase, the folding table at which we ate, some chairs – it was
very
small: not unfittingly so for Toni but Jamie filled it like Alice the White Rabbit’s house. That incongruity of scale was paralleled when he tried out his bits of German on Toni, who had taught him a working vocabulary. (He used to go to Germany for 
auctions.) What she had actually made him learn were the diminutive forms of concrete nouns,
das Büchlein, das Tischlein
instead of
das Buch, der Tisch
and so forth. So when that big and markedly unloquacious man called the gas fire in good faith
das Öfchen
(so much harder to pronounce than
Ofen
) the effect was weird. It must have puzzled many a serious Teutonic book collector. Rosie, I noticed, ignored it altogether, responding to him always in good English.

Mostly however – not in baby German – Jamie quietly, sparingly, talked shop. Rare editions, how discovered, whom to offer to … prices … Toni giving clear-minded attention. He could come out with an anecdote, something Shelley had done or De Quincey had said, he told it as if it had happened the other day and he’d heard of it that morning. Toni talked music, which meant opera. She had a collection of early records of famous sopranos and tenors but did not like to play them in front of us. When Jamie fetched the gramophone, hand-cranked of course, kept in their bedroom under one of the single beds, he would put on a symphony or an oratorio. I sat on the floor, trying to listen, mind wandering.

When it was time to leave, they’d say, ‘See you tomorrow, it’s Saturday, if the weather holds (were we in June by then?) we might drive to Kew in the afternoon.’ I went back on foot; it was a walk, though not
such
a walk, up Albany Street, Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill, Belsize Park – bushes were scented, streets well lit, one met policemen on their beat; the odd drunk too. Did no one try to pick me up? In London, an hour or less from midnight? If so, he must have been easily brushed off – I don’t remember. The Nairns were under the impression that I was going home by tube or bus.

I hoped that I
deserved
it all. In the mornings I wrote essays (on Macaulay who fascinated, on Thackeray who distinctly bored), tortured pieces, overflowing with quotations, leaden with words, were dragged out of myself by the sweat of my brow. Then: thunderbolt. The Robbinses. They said they had something to tell, or rather to talk over with me. Susan and Jack and I gathered in the high-ceilinged dining-room that served as studio. It made me think of the last time, 
of the ‘conference’ we had had in their parents’ house when I was a child – how many years ago? – and decided to throw in my lot with theirs rather than be sent away to a school … Now, it was they who were required to make up their minds.

The facts were: well, Jack was getting on … Painting … The galleries … Perhaps he’d been seen around a bit too long … It didn’t get any easier to live hand to mouth, hang on to promise … Oh, it
had
been fun. Belsize Park: they’d managed to stay put a good deal longer already than they could afford … Something cheaper in the country …? losing contacts … there didn’t seem to be many cottages any more to be lent to one … And now there was this offer. A
JOB
.

Art master at a school. In New Zealand. (Or was it Australia? both were remote to me.) A decent salary. Very decent, Jack said. A
three-year
contract; extendable. Passage paid. A house of their own in the school compound.

Can you
see
us live in a school? What a laugh. Can you see
Susan
? I thought they already could see themselves – respectability at a certain point may look adventurous.

Their people were pleased, even though it was the other side of the world. And it wasn’t that Jack would have to give up being a painter – holidays were long. It would be
warm
, Susan said, sun the year round, like living in the South again, and I guessed that she was harking back to a Mediterranean beach of some past summer, perhaps the very beach on which she had encountered my mother. ‘And what will
you
do?’ they asked (as if reading my mind).

I thought of the moment in Italy, at Cortina when the telegram had come for Doris offering a screen test and I had said You must go, and had stayed on by myself at the hotel. (That hadn’t been so bad. Or had it?) Now my reaction was dread – What will happen to
me
? I had the (elementary) grace not to show this and threw myself into discussing their pros and cons. The pros had to have it. Their families were already seeing them with new eyes – to the length of proposing to pay off their debts. (No more pawning of my cigarette case.) Whatever rigours and stuffinesses they might meet with in antipodean scholastic life, they would be sure to draw some amusement from; they’d be 
much forgiven and liked. (This turned out to be so: reports trickled through that Susan if she had sometimes scandalised, had charmed.) At the worst, we summed up, they’d be back in three years – Jack wasn’t getting on all that much – solvent and, who knows, with a show’s worth of canvases ablaze with an exotic vegetation.

They were not to sail until the autumn and I was going to spend the best part of the summer months at Sanary, so I did not assist in the dismantling of Belsize Park, and the question of my future could be treated by all concerned with marked unurgency. In the end, with a minimum of misrepresentations, it all slid into a new, or not so new, arrangement.

When I say all concerned I do not only mean the Robbinses,
Alessandro
(a benevolent word in edgeways), my mother (who could by no means always be relied upon to act passively), I have to include the powers – seen as dark, and largely
in
the dark, but powers all the same – who technically controlled my destiny until I came of age. I was still a ward of that court in Germany. It had a hydra-headed identity because the communications we were so slow in opening and responding to emanated, above gothically convoluted signatures, from a team of
Oberlandesgerichtsrats
and
Amtsreferendars
. We
forebore
to speculate how far they were in ignorance or at least in doubt about facts that must have appeared both nebulous and irregular to those good men (I did not refer to them with such equanimity at the time), so irregular indeed that whenever they took a collegiate look at what in some far-away cabinet must have been my file, they may have felt it best to let it lie. Sleeping dogs in another country … They may have prayed as hard as I did to have done with me. Unfortunately there were still quite some years to go.

I don’t remember or never really knew how the new arrangement was put over, or who instigated it and why; what seems odder is that it was made at all. A line of least resistance … It suited me. What emerged by late September – towards the end of a pleasant stay en famille in France – was that I was to go on spending the rough equivalent of the school-year in England pursuing – pursuing what? – well, my pursuits, and that I was to live in London under the 
protection, as Victorian novels put it, of Mr and Mrs Nairn (not met, unlike Jack and Susan, by my mother) which in practice meant a bed-sitter in Upper Gloucester Place found for me by Rosie
Falkenheim
ten steps from her own door.

Independence was to go the length of my managing the monthly money. (So far it had been sent to the Robbinses who had given me a share: well below a dress allowance but good pocket money.) And there I ran into an embarrassment at the outset. The room Rosie had chosen was a first-floor front for something like 25/6
d
. or 27/6
d
. a week with breakfast. I had only just realised how little the total amount of my allowance was (and how little the generous Robbinses had been taking for my keep!). There was a smaller room free to let, the landlady revealed, a top-floor back at 21/6
d
. When I said I would have that one, Rosie did not understand my choice. I ought to have talked facts but lacked the savoir-faire. She and Toni did not think talking money nice and moreover were convinced somehow that I belonged to a well-off family. I said I preferred to be high up; she said, it was I who’d have to live in it, and I knew that she thought me stingy. There’d be more occasions such as this. At sixteen, independence and friendship with one’s elders have their strings attached.

So there I was for a good part of the next three years in my room in Upper Gloucester Place trotting about London, latchkey and all. A not inconsiderable slice of life. They say that if you spend thirty years in one place they go in a flash. If this is so, the speed must be terrifying. In my own life, I found that the fragments it got carved into went fast, much too fast – the year in Portugal, the year in Mexico, five in New York, seven in Rome, three years in Essex, the decades, more than one, in Mediterranean France … Time split by places, by events – rushing towards the war, blowing away the post-war years – everything that happened as one got hold of it was over.

Is there remission in childhood? Time can feel long – or slow: not the same. I remember such stretches, yet on the whole even then things seemed to – did – pass, change, as one was settling in. So now 
in adolescence I felt no impatience for anything to happen to me. (Curiosity about people and the world, readiness for adventure, escapades on a minor scale were side-lines, not committal.) I had an instinct that already things had gone too far for me, I should like to have moved backward if one could (backward to where? unanswerable question). Perhaps like my mother I just preferred to remain in the day.

Her
tendency not to take care of the Future overmuch may have come from a sense of the Future being already flawed: she had lived as an adult through a war that had irretrievably damaged civilisation; on the private level she had entered one marriage she could not absolve herself from and another bound to give hostages to fortune. My case was different. If I saw the Future as indefinite and not yet here, I also saw it – world and peace permitting – rosy. One would be happy. I might attain the one thing I ought to be, a writer. This by now seemed to have been accepted, by my mother explicitly, ‘
If
you have the talent’. (The bugbears at the
Oberlandesgericht
had not heard of it.) A most exalted calling –
A Writer
. (I never referred to it as author in my mind; still don’t.) I knew that I could never be a musician or a painter, were I ever to make my catch it could only be in words.

In more frivolous moments I thought of being a barrister as immensely interesting and exciting – and it might have been good training for that ultimate vocation – but my sex at the time was against it, not to mention my educational deficiencies. (At that stage I was convinced that I could learn almost anything including a new language in six months flat.) Meanwhile I occasionally faced the question: How does one become a writer? By writing. But the writing – the little that got done – wasn’t going well: not the stuff that becomes transfigured into
A Book
. So I stuck to the only apprenticeship I thought there was (today I might have thought of journalism?): I went on reading. Please God, make me a writer, but not yet.