Jigsaw (20 page)

I was tremendously pleased, flattered by the confidence this seemed 
to show, intensely curious – how not! – and delighted to be meeting an actual judge.

In the nineteen-sixties I was commissioned by the
Observer
to do a profile of judges and their comparative comportment on the Bench. I spent an interesting month cruising between the Law Courts, the Old Bailey and Assizes, an anonymous, silent watcher from the press box. I could make notes; I had access to
The Times
’s Morgue. Some weeks later I wrote the piece in the quiet of an isolated wing of some friends’ large country house in Tuscany. I did eight judges, or was it ten? It was tough work – there was a sharp deadline – and I was entirely absorbed in it. Trays of meals and refreshments were deposited on tiptoe outside my door. At intervals I would pace the landscaped garden and the olive groves with alternating elation and despair. I was a prisoner whose release could only be effected by my own boot-straps. (I did appear at dinner.) I could tell a good deal more about all phases of those days, the house, the atmosphere, the bath towels, what we talked about in the evenings, what we drank before dinner: Bloody Marys and on the last night Veuve Clicquot – the rest, the judges who filled my working hours and my dreams, I have almost entirely forgotten.

Well, some were very good, some were not so; one, quite young, was outstandingly, breathtakingly brilliant, and still regarded so now; one was a good
man
, and kind; another remarkably less so. That remains, and some mannerisms, their faces, their voices, their very names mostly, have receded into a muddled blur.

I could still refresh my memory – clippings of the piece exist. When I met Rosie’s Judge I was not able to attend as a mute nameless reporter –
no
notebook – indeed I was not supposed to observe at all: I was there as the guest of a friend of a friend: I was supposed to speak, to behave, to be natural, that is, show no awareness of the subtexts of the situation. If I felt awe that was only proper in someone so junior and unlearned. In the end it turned out that I had come to enjoy myself.

Enjoyment elates the moment but is apt to blunt the memory thereof, particularly if one is given a great deal of burgundy at lunchtime.

The Judge, Jack – she called him that, I called him nothing – was 
certainly a handsome man, substantial without heaviness, senatorial head, hair going grey, wearing an elegant though conventional light summer suit with a cream silk shirt and a foulard scarf for tie – if memory serves, but does it? Anyway, this is how I see him. He began by thanking me for having found, ‘found us’ he said, such an
agreeable
hotel. Was I familiar with English seaside resorts? There was a difference. He was entirely at his ease and he was also unmistakably our host, a good host, reminding me a little of my father looking after Lina and myself at table: we were his womenfolk, he was our protector seeing to it that we were cosseted, treated tenderly. The Judge was very nice to me, with a nuance of amusement and no condescension, though without any pretence that he was other than the man he was and I a young girl. I liked that, I liked him, but then I had come wanting to like. He said he knew a good deal about me, that I was interested in law and fond of wine. Rosie looked gratified at this
prise de contact
. He asked if I liked burgundy. I had the sense to tell the truth, that so far, very little of it had come my way. I had come down in the world in that respect at an early age, hardly a drop of a
cru classé
– and that had always been Bordeaux – after my father’s death. Since then I had been drinking
good
local wines, a couple of times I had the chance to taste a Côte de Beaune at the Panigons’ house though more often they drank
Châteauneuf-du-Pape
with their gigot … I do believe that I really trotted out all this to the Judge. He
had
put me at my ease. He did the obvious thing, saying we must remedy that, the wine list here wasn’t at all bad. He deliberated over two or three splendid names, then chose a Volnay, the year and vineyard of which I have forgotten. Can we manage a bottle, you and I? We can’t count much on Rosie. I said he could count on me.

What did we talk about? No legal anecdotes, no quizzing from me in that line. He wanted to hear about Sanary, he talked about the French, about fellow hotel guests, trying to make out where they came from, what they were up to. Though he didn’t share Rosie’s interest in the modern English novel, he was well read in French nineteenth-century literature. He spoke about their plan to spend a few days in Provence, 
he wanted to show Rosie Aix and the Pont-du-Gard and the
amphitheatres
at Nîmes and Arles …

How long should they take, could they hire a car? I had just been to Aix with Alessandro, and loved it already. It hardly mattered what we talked about, it was lively and, at least his part of it, good conversation. A cultivated man, not an intellectual, and whatever he might be like on the Bench, here he was private, charming, witty. A tape would have helped more than the notebook: the actual way he talked I am of course unable to reproduce. So there remains but little to report.

The important thing, what I longed to penetrate, was what went on between this man and this woman – the perennial mystery of what there is between two people – that eluded me. How often does one not wonder what thoughts accompany the talk, what is said – thrice quicker than speech – inside the head, and what goes on beneath those thoughts, at the back of the mind; who has not strained to listen to that composition of the said/thought/felt played inside another human being? All
I
seemed able to do was watch the surface while sounding my own feelings.

There were two people, ill-matched in looks (in circumstances too, but this did not show so much), who appeared to get on extremely well with each other, were attentive to each other, were enjoying a holiday, a good lunch, as though they had no care in the world. A couple, married? lovers? new or long so? the surface remained unbroken. I know what I knew and they knew that I knew but they gave nothing away.

Oh yes, we did polish off the burgundy, the Judge and I, in even shares (point of honour). I thought it tasted sublime; and though I told a few Sanary stories I held my wine quite well. This amused the Judge who said I had a good head.

After coffee he went off to have a siesta, this was meant to let Rosie and me have a few minutes by ourselves. She walked me down the drive. I wanted to tell her how much I had liked him and hoped to do so without being intrusive. I needn’t have worried. She was radiant. He loves it here, she said, he’s as happy as a sandboy. He’s admiring himself for having taken to the simple life. And you know, she said, 
they’d been given
adjoining
not
communicating
rooms. ‘But we have our balconies – he prefers them to the corridor; it reminds him of Switzerland and romantic novels. He tells me it makes him feel young.’

Wasn’t that rather
unwise
? I said, there were bound to be people out there in the moonlight at all hours. ‘That’s taking rather a risk.’

‘That’s what he likes,’ she said. ‘He’s a gambler.’ She didn’t look radiant any more. ‘With a gambler it
is
wise to provide a minor risk.’

I had lunch with them once again. It was towards the end of the fortnight, after they’d come back from their tour of Provence. They were full of it and Rosie delighted with what she had seen. The atmosphere was much the same, except that by now the Judge and I seemed to have become old friends. They had been bathing that morning on the strip of sand outside the hotel. The Judge had
complained
before of the lack of pretty girls, but today there’d been two fairly ravishing ones. He and Rosie described them. I surmised that they must be the Panigon girls and realised that they were in fact becoming fairly ravishing girls – Annette no longer a boyish child, Cécile losing her puppy-fat and her face getting quite beautiful in a soulful way. Would they be likely to come again tomorrow? Rosie wanted to know, that’s the one thing Jack expects on a beach, he doesn’t like just sun and staring at the sea. I said I could introduce them. No, no, Rosie said, that would be going too far; and the Judge laughed and concurred.

He repeated the burgundy dare. This time we had a
Nuits-St-Georges
, and again I thought it was pretty wonderful. The odds are that it was not quite that, and almost certainly served too warm. It is not a wine I would choose now to drink at noon in a Mediterranean August. Whether the Judge was a burgundy man, whether the wine list was poor in claret, or whether the heavier wine (
those
burgundies were heavy) would be more of a test for me, I never found out.

They left on the same day, travelling by different trains, he straight on to Scotland. My mother had suddenly remembered that perhaps she ought to meet Rosie because of me – doesn’t she stand
in loco parentis
or something? Rosie considered staying on for another
forty-eight
hours, then shrank from the anticlimax. I did not see the Judge 
again, but was able to take her to the station. In the taxi, she thanked me: it was perfect. He says we must do it again. We’ll come back.

‘I must tell you something.’ She became solemn, which was not her way. ‘This is the first time – since all those years ago in Switzerland when he was a young man – that we have ever
not
been alone together. I never see him with anyone, I never hear him talk to anyone, other than a waiter or a jury, I didn’t know what he was like in company. Do you know,’ she called me by my name, ‘that you are the only human being I’ve seen him sitting at a table with, this is the only time I heard him talk to someone
I
know. You cannot understand what this means to me.’

But I could. It came as a shock. I had not imagined their situation in that light before. I never forgot it afterwards.

My own Sanary summer had another two months to go. Much of them spent in the sea. My mother and Alessandro were in conclave doing up a house for a Dutch woman who wanted an all-year place on our side of the coast. What she’d bought turned out to be the mistral-buffeted villa we had lived in the year before, and
that
needed conversion from scratch. Alessandro had been commissioned, and it was riveting to watch the transformations that were taking place, at that point chiefly in their minds: my mother having ideas and Alessandro thinking up ways of making them practicable. He was extremely clever at that: suggestions turned into sketches and sketches into exact designs like conjuring tricks. He engaged a builder, an
entrepreneur-maçon
, and established a good understanding. The results for the present were all destruction: inside walls broken down, windows and doors knocked out, tarred canvas flapping. They were much on the building site, my mother joining him in the late mornings, or rattling about in the Peugeot hunting for furniture in the Haut-Var. Having working parents felt comfortable; when they were at home we played paper games in the evening, my mother and I with enthusiastic commitment, she quite annoyed when I won, which was rare. Alessandro didn’t mind losing. His game was patience 
which he played at all hours. I still see him, that slim young man with his long beautiful hands, bring out the two small packs of pretty cards and lay them out on the dining-table just cleared or on a small one by my mother’s bed while she was talking. He had a good repertory and taught me some of it; I have often found Miss Milligan or Nine-Up a soothing resource.

Alessandro was a thin-nerved fellow who kept himself under control. He abhorred stridency, noise, a quarrel. He was sweet-tempered, never quarrelled himself and knew how to smooth out my mother’s
flare-ups
. He did this affectionately with a mixture of good sense, laughter and teasing. It was in
her
nature to end an outburst by laughing at herself. I received a hint that his equableness did not always come easy when one day I went down with a bad throat, probably caught by staying out on a beach too late in the September evening vapours, and unused to feeling ill was expecting care and attention. Alessandro surprised me by being greatly taken aback. Not
you
, he told me, you’ve
got
to be all right – looking after one woman is enough. He said it not unkindly, but it came from the heart.

Was looking after my mother
such
a strain, I asked myself. Her unpunctuality, her refusal to face decisions or trouble could be exasperating. There must have been more to it: did Alessandro feel he had taken on a kind of servitude? For my mother without being really selfish or egocentric – she believed in putting ideas and ideals first – behaved as though she owned her entourage, and of course above friends and daughter, one owned one’s husband. Having seen something of Toni Nairn’s marriage put this in my mind; like my mother Toni was possessive and at the same time condescending to Jamie. Was nothing ever as it should be? I thought. And what should, or rather could it be?

Another remark of Alessandro’s puzzled me rather more. We were alone; he looked at me; he said reflectively, ‘Has it occurred to you that a man might find it difficult to have a stepdaughter?’ He said
a
stepdaughter
, not
you
for a stepdaughter, and it had not occurred to me.

Was it because of my having been ill the other day? He shrugged impatiently; then gave me a reassuring smile.

If at that time I had been pressed to define our relationship, I might have put it: two brothers, like each other, serving – in different ranks – in the same regiment.

I am saying so much about our family life because it must not be thought that, taken as
I
was by the Kislings and their circle, we were really intimate or spent so very much time with them. Twice a week was about it, fitting into the routine of summer life. We (my mother had known Kiki in Paris) were regarded as friends, tangential friends: outlook and habits were different. (My mother would not have dreamt of joining them when late in the night they proposed carrying it on in a
dancing
or
bal musette
; she had never drunk deep or made
la bombe
, and she’d decline for the three of us.) Both Renée and my mother can be called unconventional women; they were not unconventional in quite the same way. What is more, I believe that they did not really like each other. My mother was amused by Renée and liked to hear and tell stories about her outrages; she did not love her. As I did from the beginning. Renée, on her side, had not much use for my mother, for her she was too ‘intellectual’, a great fault in the eyes of someone who knew what she chose to know by instinct. Later on she told Maria Huxley – she was much too protective of a filial relationship to tell me – that she had always found my mother too cool, too cerebral, too literary. My mother would sooner talk about a plant than grow it. Incidentally Renée held the same view, in stronger measure, of Aldous, and used to commiserate with Maria, who saw her point. Those two women were growers of plants.

There
was
an intellectual astringency in my mother, she was serious not merely about books but about the world and the people who had to endure it; and this for all her laxities and omissions injected a certain mental discipline – quite absent in Renée’s living – into our life, however uprooted. And I felt an allegiance to that.

I had also come to feel that Sanary
was
the true South, and that Sanary and the French were for me. I had fallen for it and for all that it had offered already. Here was my home, here I was going to live (with a necessary foot in London, indefinably acquiring what it would take to become what I should be), and here, the gods willing, I was going to 
write my books. There was one more thing which set this summer apart from the ones that followed. It was my last as the young person at the low end of the table; I was growing older, I would become a participant.

In England also I was presented with a widening of the social scene. It came about in this way: almost parallel with my mother and
Alessandro
, the Nairns were relatively prospering. Jamie had been offered a partner- and directorship in a distinguished book-dealers’ firm bringing with him the goodwill and stock of his own shop. Debt paid off, a salary coming in, Jamie and Toni found themselves securely and nearly comfortably off in a matter of weeks. The first thing Jamie did was to take a cottage in the country to spend their holidays and weekends in, something he had longed to do. On my return from France, Toni and Rosie were already trudging round second-hand shops, warehouses and stores trying to acquire cheaply furniture, curtains, floor-covering and anything else needed. They’d been told to keep to bare essentials; essentials, however bare, tend to be numerous and varied, so for the sisters it was quite a task. Jamie went out on Sundays to do some plastering and painting, and I accompanied him to help. We made an adequate job of it, no more (compared to Alessandro). The cottage was in an Essex village, in decent repair, roomy, dry and rather pretty. It had a garden, well stocked with raspberry and gooseberry bushes, a lawn Jamie looked forward to mowing, and a strip of orchard. There was a scullery where he proposed to keep a small barrel of cider and a small barrel of beer. I had a long look at the cook-stove. It was years before bottled gas. Toni? I said. Jamie looked surprised, then thought she should manage, anyway
he
would be bringing in the coal.

Shortly after Christmas the cottage was more or less ready for habitation and we were able to spend a first weekend. It was
mid-winter
; indubitably. We did not spend days and nights in extreme discomfort – there were good fireplaces downstairs and small ones with pretty grates in the bedrooms, Jamie did keep us supplied with 
plenty of wood and coal. The lavatory was indoors, there was a boiler and an airing cupboard, cold water laid on and a supply of paraffin lamps, in a word all the comforts of the English country. It required
some
work, not
hard
work though, and took up much time. Jamie was happy; evidently, if silently; for the Falkenheims already come down from steam-heat to electric fires, it was another matter. If they suffered, they also remained silent. Not ineloquently so – Rosie kept on her fur coat (Berlin relic) during meals urging Toni to do the same. Toni withdrew behind her princess-on-the-pea look. Meals. I decided that we’d reached a point where I must induce Toni to come to terms with some of the basic elements of cookery: this was not the time and place for delicatessen food which anyway was running out. The stove was lit (by me) and going, which included a nicely heating oven, I was able to point out the simplicity and wonder of the baked potato. From where I led on to further steps: chops in the frying-pan, a vegetable – Look, just a little water on the boil. Toni, stiffly, bowed to fate and duty. She could not be gentled further into making soup. There
were
tins. My turn to bow. Jamie, who as I said was happy, did not or preferred not to notice; he was used to his mother doing everything and his wife a little.

Respite was at hand. A literary man, a friend of Jamie’s, had a house at Finchingfield the village next to ours. He was A. J. A. Symons, the bibliographer of Yeats, the future author of
The Quest for Corvo
, a founder member of the Wine and Food Society, and married. He asked Jamie over for drinks on the Sunday morning, to bring his wife and friends and stay for lunch to escape the horrors of the first days in the new home.

We went, we stayed, were given a very good lunch indeed, drank claret, played games into the afternoon. The house was Jacobean, filled with objets d’art, sybaritic. It was also filled with guests, well read, amusing, not particularly accommodating men, two or three fast women (or so they appeared to me). Our host was wildly erudite and undisguisably eccentric, his wife chic, slim and ostentatiously
made-up
. There was another new milieu, one I had wished for and imagined:
English
, the educated, the literate English whose horizons embraced 
France, Italy, Greece and beyond. At the end of a short bicycle ride in Essex I had arrived at a side-stream of the English literary world. I had found my first Garsington.

The analogy should not go too far. At Finchingfield the accents were, besides books and talk, on very good wine and games. Heavy bridge (and possibly, I think, house-party affairs) for some of the women, for the rest their version of the war game – a combination of strategic planning and strenuous hide-and-seek to which the
convoluted
house cross cut with unexpected staircases exactly lent itself – played with bravura, utter devotion and mostly in the dark. It was enormous fun.

It could also be eruptively noisy. One was apt to fall out of broom cupboards or down some backstairs, and there were the whoops of joy of the winning side.

Toni winced at the very idea of these rough and stupid games and would not participate. That at the outset of a social life was a mistake. Rosie must have seen it – she knew a thing or two about
accommodating
oneself – but was too loyal to her sister to do anything but side with her. So when the light went out, a safe retreat had to be found for the two timid women, a small sitting-room where presumably they sat munching chocolate biscuits, shuddering at the pastimes of the English goys, and reading. (Toni had come armed with Thomas Mann, in German, how else; Rosie snatched up a Siegfried Sassoon of A.J.’s, a sign perhaps of her not undivided allegiance.)

A.J. liked Jamie and Jamie liked A.J. Finchingfield became a fixture. We were asked over for luncheon or dinner or both at least once a weekend, and in the Easter and Whitsun holidays Jamie walked and I bicycled over almost every day. A.J. (always addressed so) was
impersonally
, informally hospitable, one joined in whatever was going on, food appeared. (One didn’t notice any servants or an absence of servants; there must have been some village people who came and went.)

I was tolerated probably because of my enthusiasm (still much the young person at the low end of the table), Toni was accepted as Jamie’s wife, and Rosie – when she did come down – as someone in 
her wake. Toni did not shine at Finchingfield. She rejected what was on offer covering her antagonism by a ruffled aloofness: polite refusals all the way, No Thank Yous ringing out when the Château Palmer went around. It irritated and enraged me because it diminished her –
and
Jamie; Finchingfield did not see what
she
had to offer, what they saw was a namby-pamby outsider who made no effort. In that situation – it had to be seen as one – Jamie’s weapon, or just nature, was unawareness.

Jamie was expanding. No money pressures, success in his work, he had his two and a half days a week in the country, pottering in the garden, long walks, a part – a not unlively part – in the pleasurable round of Finchingfield. What Toni had hoped for, but not uttered, was a month on her own staying with friends in Berlin, instead the money had gone into the cottage and a slightly newer Morris-Cowley. What
she
had was two and a half days a week in the country – the cook-stove, the fires, the washing-up, and the social round at
Finchingfield
. For the present she remained quiescent.

Rosie, for her part, was complaining about Jamie, he was letting Toni do far too much, Toni ought to speak to him about it – Jamie was the most selfish man on earth. (Was not that what Toni had said about the Judge?)

All seemed well in that quarter. France had done Jack so much good, Rosie was telling me, he got through the last Law Sittings without getting so restless and bored.

Bored?

It’s been terribly frustrating for him these last years, but I believe he’s feeling much better now.

I had to ask what she was talking about.

‘I thought Toni would have told you about it. She knew.’ And then it came out. It was a midweek winter afternoon and we were having tea in her room, she was not going to join him that evening so we had planned to have a bite together at an ABC later on. She was smoking – Turkish – I was not.

‘It was dreadful,’ she said. ‘The worst thing that ever happened. You 
see, I had his note, he had posted it to me. For three days I didn’t know he was alive. There was nothing in the papers – I could do nothing – I didn’t dare ask anyone.’ She spoke drily and quietly. I sat still. She got to the beginning.

‘He
is
a gambler – a real one. So that winter,’ she gave the year, ‘he was getting more and more depressed and anxious. I knew he had worries but he wouldn’t tell me what they were. Then one day he did: he was owing a large sum of money, more, far more, than he could pay.’

An old, old story – could it happen to a judge? For some months he had been losing, and losing again: horses and cards. (He gambled in private houses, never at a club, though abroad he played in casinos at whatever was going,
chemin de fer
, roulette.) He was owing his
bookmaker
, he was owing friends, people who trusted him. But now he thought he could see a way out, there was a race coming up, he had been told of a horse … He would scrape together such credit as he still had. Rosie pressed her savings on him, he took them – they weren’t much, every hundred counted, he told her, with
that
horse: if it won he’d recoup himself.

It didn’t. The week after he told Rosie he was going away for a few days to sort things out in his mind. He left her thinking that he was going to stay with some of his cronies in Gloucestershire. Instead he went to a country hotel and took an overdose. By a miracle he was discovered in time, rushed to a nursing home and eventually revived; another miracle, the whole thing, suicide attempt, gambling debts and all, was kept out of the press, hushed up with the help of
colleagues
, connections, friends. Other friends stumped up the money. The whole of it. He was alive, he was free; rumours there had been, yet his career was intact.

They made him give his word never to bet on a horse again, never to touch a card.

‘He hasn’t, of course. He
can’t
. At first he was
so relieved
… That awful threat gone. Everything again before him … That did not last. Now he misses it most of the time. It is very hard.’

I thought about my father’s make-believe roulette we had played at Feldkirch –
had
it been make-believe to him? I thought of his anecdotes 
about men shooting themselves at dawn in Monte Carlo. So such things really happen, I thought.

‘Poor Jack, poor poor Jack,’ she said, ‘and I … I thought I had lost him.’

‘Now put on your coat, I believe it’s got quite chilly.’ I did as told and out we walked into the dankish night and the ABC in Baker Street.

The next thing Jamie did was to buy a dog, to take on his walks. When it arrived it was an upstanding rough-haired terrier puppy called Tommy, a sturdy, steady fellow. Not for long. The Falkenheims, who had never had a live animal in the house, fell for him with injudicious rapture. I had not seen them so demonstrative, so willing to perform hand-maidenish tasks. Never was dog so petted, so walked at all hours, so brushed and combed and dried, so rushed off to the vet; the prettiest basket, the softest cushions, the finest mince, bowls of creamy milk, shares of their own biscuits. They trembled for him when he had to cross the road, meet a strange dog or God forbid attempt to chase a cat. If need arose they would have protected him – heroically in
their
case – from a mouse. Jamie shared their devotion to Tommy but tried to make them exercise constraint. In a matter of weeks the dog had become a timorous, nervous thing.