Jigsaw (22 page)

‘The
cavaliere servente
business,’ Alessandro said. 

‘Do you mean the young man?’

‘He means the young man,’ my mother said.

Alessandro, speaking as a man, said, ‘But she’s got no sex appeal.’

My mother, speaking as a woman, said, ‘There’s not much of it in him either, I’m referring to her husband. I would qualify that to: not yet. There is something … suspended about him. One can’t tell why. As if for the present they were both playing a part. They
are
extremely attractive. He’d be a difficult man to know; I think he’s got principles, more hardened than you would expect from his age and manner. I’d say there was something unusually disciplined under all that urbanity and …’

‘Charm?’ said I.

‘No,’ she said, ‘
Grace
.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘
Topaze
of course. We agreed that beside the fun it’s a good play. I asked him if the goings-on at the Marseille city council were really as hair-raising.
Pire
, Madame, he said,
Worse
. Councils in France were run by scoundrels,
des escrocs
was his word, petty scoundrels
compared
to Marseille, there I must think of Chicago. He’s awfully down on politics, politicians,
des salauds
, the lot of them; he’s rather like the Kislings there though I very much doubt that he has any liking for
les gens de gauche
. What he seems to stand for are clean hands, disillusion, withdrawal. The war has left us all bankrupt, he said, and he did not mean it in the financial sense. One could see him as a monarchist – if restoration weren’t such a
cause perdue
in France – he’s far too intelligent for that kind of faith.’

‘He
is
intelligent?’ I asked.

‘Very much so,’ said my mother. ‘One wonders what he’ll do with it.’

Their name was Desmirail. Philippe and Oriane Desmirail. Despite their air of kinship – underlined then by their comportment – they were not blood relations. Nor were their origins Parisian; they had been educated, and spent a portion of their adult lives, in Paris. She had been through
lycée
, he through
lycée
and a
grande école
: 
Condorcet and Polytechnique. (The latter, the bastion among other disciplines of science, mathematics and high IQs, is not to be confused with any current British polytechnic.) Philippe was the descendant of a family of
grands magistrats
who had served the administration of their country since Louis XIV. Their ancestral home was a fortified Romanesque château in the Ardèche still lived in by his parents at the time I am writing of. His father had been a president of the highest constitutional court of France. He was an avowed agnostic and had been a Dreyfusard at the time when it was hardest to stand up and be counted. His mother was a devout Catholic and iron-clad
anti-Dreyfusard
. For some years their domestic life, dutifully adhered to, had been under strain. This, however, was some time before Philippe’s birth.

Oriane was the daughter of a
grand industriel
from the North. The family had been marginally ennobled under the Third Empire,
something
that had to be lived down or could be dropped into the
conversation
according to the company. Her mother was an amiable chatterbox, her father a member of that pinnacle of intellectual distinction, the Institut de France. He had a large and discriminate collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and contemporary painting, a collection begun at about the time when Philippe’s mother was a member of the public who had to be restrained from taking the sharp of their umbrellas to Impressionist canvases. Both parents doted on Oriane, who was an only child, and who beside her looks pleased by being bright.

Philippe Desmirail had three elder brothers, all reputed brilliant, virtuous and attached to one another. The long holidays of their childhood and early youth were spent at the château in the Ardèche and on the property of a cherished grandmother near Biarritz. The brothers, one after the other, were killed in the 1914 War. When the third was gone by 1917, Philippe was still one year too young to be called up. He was a delicate adolescent, shattered by his brothers’ deaths. He joined up all the same. It was said that his mother, who subsequently never went out of mourning for her sons, told Philippe that it was fit for him to offer himself to his country, it was now 
his turn. He was not killed, he was not even wounded, he caught pneumonia after some months in the trenches, was gravely ill for a long time and did not fully recover until some years later. Eventually he resumed his education but afterwards declined to embark on any official or orthodox career. Instead he joined the forward-looking Maison d’Editions of Bernard Grasset, a publishing house in which it can be said that interesting things were happening. (It was young Bernard Grasset who in 1913 had brought off the coup, that left so many red faces in the French publishers’ and critics’ world, of publishing the rejected
Du côté de chez Swann
; rejected through the good offices of André Gide by the NRF which later had to buy back the rights of
A la recherche du temps perdu
at the expense of a very great deal of face and money.) At the time Philippe joined Grasset, some of his own friends such as Jacques de Lacretelle were making their name as writers. He, though not a sedentary man and without any literary ambitions of his own, enjoyed his brief publishing career very much, and never quite severed his connections with Bernard Grasset. Brief, because it was soon found that his health would not stand up to confinement in a city; he was ordered out of Paris and recommended to live in the country, preferably in sea air. A prescription he has adhered to till today. This cannot have been his parents’ choice: this excessively gently mannered man had inherited his mother’s iron will. It seldom showed. In fact it was imperceptible to most.

At first they went to live alternately and impermanently on the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts.
They
, because by the time Philippe left Grasset, he and Oriane were married.

They had known each other for some years. They moved in a milieu of highly educated, upper-class, post-war young, who had lost ideals and aims but retained their manners. (And the scruples which these comprise.) They had turned – privately: they were no socialists or reformers – against patriotism, militarism (that above all), religion, bourgeois values; they still believed in individual good behaviour. They wanted a good time – what else was left? – and sought it in amusements they devised themselves:
fêtes costumées
, motor rallies, dawn sorties into the country to catch a view of a cathedral in a certain light, hoaxes 
of a sophisticated nature. Unlike Evelyn Waugh’s Bright and Young they wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving unpaid bills or burning cigarettes on other people’s carpets. They drank little. Alcohol – apéritifs, pastis, even wine – was felt as part of a gross national heritage. Abstemious was more elegant. (I am writing here of a small and ephemeral coterie of the Desmirails which they had already left behind by the time they moved from Paris. Some of its spirit lingered.)

Besides such an outlook, Philippe and Oriane shared many tastes. Their three major interests at that time were the new French literature, tennis and motor cars, on Philippe’s side to the point of taking them apart and putting them together again in his own way. His friends said that given a pram, a tea-kettle and a clock, he could make them run. Philippe’s mind was trained, precise; Oriane’s mercurial. To her father’s and her teachers’ disappointment, she had not wanted to go on to university, no career or employment had been envisaged, thus a quick, sharp, able, and soon restless, mind remained unharnessed to any defined or useful purpose for a good many years; decades in fact. Philippe had shown no great desire to get married to anyone, Oriane had shown a great desire to marry him. Somehow they got engaged. To the distinct approval of their friends and their respective families. Philippe insisted that there should be a year of reflection, Oriane agreed. Granting mutual freedom was part of their modern values. So they went on, he with his publishing, both as ringleaders of their
petite bande
. When the year was up he told her – quite casually and coolly it was believed – that they might as well call it a day. Perhaps he was not made for marriage, perhaps he was not ready for marriage, and so he supposed was she – there was not much point in marriage as an institution if one did not wish to produce, if one felt one ought not to produce, children: children in the world as it was were cannon fodder. Slightly to his surprise, Oriane now turned her back on modern values and became unhappy and upset, using the weapons that are at hand for a woman in her situation. Philippe was a man who would not willingly inflict a hurt; among his many principles was that of honouring one’s word (however conditional), he readily gave in. He liked her very very much and they got on extremely well.
Their friends – who were fascinated by that visual illusion of their alikeness – proclaimed that they were made for one another.

In an early period of their marriage they fell among a serious tennis set at Biarritz whose mainstays were three of his boyhood friends. Serious is an understatement. Philippe’s chums, the three young players in question, were Borotra, Brugnon and Lacoste. When as youngsters they had started learning tennis together, Philippe, who was a few months older and advanced in chess, began by beating them quite easily at the beginning of the holidays; after a few weeks they had drawn even, by the end of the summer it was hard for him to get a game, he was outclassed; for ever. This did not mean that when they were united again at Biarritz, Philippe did not make an acceptable partner; he might have reached top-class himself had it not been for his lack of physical stamina. At one time he was ranked in the lower half of the
Seconde Série de France
; Borotra & Co. were of course at the top of the
Première Série.

The real discovery, however, was Oriane Desmirail. They made much of her at Biarritz; the great Suzanne herself, Suzanne Lenglen, played singles with her. She showed big promise, they all thought, and began grooming her for world class. For some strenuous months Oriane’s abilities were harnessed to a purpose. Too much so. She had two things going for her, a chess-player’s mind and the will to win; it was her physique that was not up to it. Her coaches kept her training eight hours a day for weeks on end. One day she collapsed on court. It was diagnosed a heart attack. She was twenty-four. She recovered quickly, and it was not the end of tennis for her (her ranking eventually was near the top of the
Seconde Série
). But it was – definitely – the end of public tennis (and that settled purpose).

The allure of the Biarritz tennis club had been the main reason for their staying on the Atlantic coast; Philippe, congenitally
frileux
, needed a warmer winter climate; their respective parents were pressing them to settle down; they both loved the austerity of the Provençal landscape and had liked Sanary during previous stays. So now there they were, having acquired their piece of land, watching over their house going up. 

The house, architect-built – not by Le Corbusier, as my mother had flung out, nevertheless by one of his French disciples – was a present to Oriane from Oriane’s father.

Behind the young Desmirails there was a good deal of money. Solid old money on Philippe’s side: land, urban real estate, government stocks and bonds (not so solid); less, and less old, money but large present revenues on Oriane’s. As far as the young couple and their prospects were concerned there were snags. At the end of the war Philippe’s parents had decided that their surviving son must in no way be advantaged by his brothers’ deaths. Dispositions therefore had been made for one quarter only of the estate to come to Philippe, the other three quarters were left to charities. (With, it was said, Philippe’s entire concurrence.) His father also felt that it behoved Philippe – now that he was improved in health – to earn his living as best he might. Since he was not trained to be a country doctor or anything in that line, and that to attempt farming in the South of France where tiny parcels of land were held by rooted and tenacious peasants, would have been clear madness, the setting up of a business – some cottage industry? – was seen as a solution. It was a moral question for the Desmirails, not one of commercial success or gain. As soon as Philippe had devised some scheme, his father would provide him with the capital required. Meanwhile and since the beginning of the marriage, Oriane was receiving a large allowance from her father (supplemented by accounts at one or two maisons de haute-couture where most of her
simple-looking
clothes were made).

And now there was the future house, Oriane’s present purpose.

I had been wondering after that theatre night whether we – I – would be meeting the Desmirails again and, given the heterogeneity of the first occasion, on what footing. Some people are brought together by their dogs, with us it was fated to be cars. Alessandro and I were caught on a somnolent hot early afternoon on the quai at Bandol – deserted by the boules players now asleep – by Oriane Desmirail, also not keeping siesta, passing in a Citroën. Alessandro was trying –
trying
– to teach me to reverse on our Peugeot. Now that I was 
eighteen, he was teaching me to drive. Oriane stopped and watched my efforts which did not improve by observation.

Dear children, she addressed us with what I must call a mocking smile (she was a master of that as I was to find out).

‘My dear children, don’t you know the first rule about learning to drive a car?’

‘This one has a tricky gear …’

She ignored me. ‘The first rule is never to be taught by a member of one’s family. The second, not in one’s family’s car.’ Pause. ‘We must do something about this.’ She looked at Alessandro. Then, gaily, decisively, ‘I’m sure we’ve got a car for her to learn on – not this great big thing. Now listen to me: passing one’s driving test is quite a serious business in the Département du Var.’