Jigsaw (33 page)

‘I hadn’t thought …’

‘No. There have been rather too many things to think about.’

One request Jamie had not complied with was a lawyer. Toni went and found one somewhere in North London, more or less by a plate on the door, and instructed him to start divorce proceedings. From this man – whom Rosie encountered and disliked – she learned that her alimony would most likely amount to one third of her husband’s income. Toni who knew Jamie’s assets to the shilling – they consisted, besides a small savings account and his car, quite simply of his salary – realised without batting an eyelid that she would not be able to afford to live in the vicinity of Regent’s Park. The flat hunt moved from NW1 to NW3. (She must find a place, she said, near somewhere she could walk the dog.)

I had drunk some wine, I had persuaded Toni to drink a thimbleful of the Bristol Cream. She had begun to tell me it reminded her of her uncle’s Château Yquem. I was telling myself that I had nothing to lose but a friend. I did not want to lose this friend. What she was doing went against all I believed in, and I hated it; I longed to help. Not only for Jamie’s and for Rosie’s sake, I could not bear her desperate unhappiness, I too was attached to her. Nor could
she
afford to cast me out as well. Smash through something, Rosie had said. Well …

I don’t remember how it began; soon we were in the middle.

‘What
is
so frightful about what Jamie’s done? Do you really believe that two people must or can stay faithful to each other for ever?’

‘No,’ she said.

Thank goodness, I thought.

‘We are not talking about two people, we are talking about Jamie and me.’

‘The principle is the same.’

‘I have nothing to do with other people’s principles.’

‘Only with your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where do they come from, your principles? Religion?’

‘I am not religious,’ Toni said, ‘I wasn’t brought up to believe in a God.’

‘Not in a God of vengeance?’

‘We were not orthodox,’ she said crisply. 

‘Ethics then? Right and wrong?’ I rushed on before she could cut in. ‘I have no religion either but I do believe it is
wrong
, profoundly wrong, to own one’s loves … to be possessive … jealous …’

She did cut in: ‘
I
am not jealous.
Jealous
of that woman, Cynthia, or whatever? I hardly remember her, they’re much the same at
Finchingfield
… She is nothing to me.’

My momentum was stopped.

‘
Jamie
has done wrong,’ she said with finality. ‘He must bear the consequences.’

‘For heaven’s sake! You turn it into
lèse-majesté
. He loves you, you love him …’

‘I do. I never forgive – he ought to have thought of that.’

‘You said that to me once – your never forgiving – I was shocked then.’

She remembered at once. ‘But I did. You were very young.’

‘And it was a minor offence.’

‘Don’t be frivolous. You’re getting it from Rosie.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I am most serious – I think it is abominable to throw away your marriage … for what? Because a man had made love with a friend?’

She winced.

I went on: ‘It’s natural. It happens. It need not mean very much. Even my ex-Church regards it as an absolvable sin if you repent.’

‘
You
were brought up without morals.’

‘I was not,’ I said fiercely, ‘my mother taught me morals. Not in your narrow sense – I know it’s wicked to begrudge pleasure to those we love. Toni,
be generous
.’

‘
He
did not think of me. He broke his faith. What you regard so lightly is a betrayal. Perhaps you are too young to know.’

I saw that it could be. A betrayal. Not in their case though. I should have liked to take her hand, put my arms round her in an up-rush of pity. ‘Does it hurt
so
much?’ I asked.

She was silent.

‘It does help if one tries to see the other side,’ I said, ‘if one can push out resentment. It really does.’ 

She stayed silent.

I mustered courage. ‘May I ask you something? Are you so offended because you yourself feel that going to bed with someone is … is not a good thing? that it is something … coarse?’

‘It is coarse,’ she said. ‘One should avoid coarse things.’

My turn for silence. When we spoke again, we were arguing in circles, separate circles.

‘Think of
yourself
then,’ I said, ‘will you like living without Jamie … a single woman … leaving this flat … Do you want to undo your life? Can’t you see how it will be?’

Toni lifted her small fragile face, ‘Of course I know,’ she said with unflinching calm. ‘It’s unfortunate, he is spoiling my life – he should have thought about it before.’

The flat was found. A few steps from Parliament Hill, just the thing for the dog. Jamie was flabbergasted then sentimental about losing Tommy as well. I won’t have him cooped up at Surbiton or at Finchingfield, Toni had conveyed. Jamie eventually responded with: Tommy loves us both and Toni would be more alone without him. (At that point I felt that I would like to get married to Jamie.) Toni was not going to be alone. The flat she chose had two bedrooms and a rent she could not quite afford. Rosie had been right. Toni proposed that they should share it.

‘
You can’t
,’ I said. I knew what her independence meant to her.

‘I must,’ she said. ‘I’ve looked after Toni since we were children.’ Now she too was unhappy.

Toni was about to sign the NW3 lease when she thought it might be a good idea if Jamie had a look at it first, and at the flat – plumbing and wiring – he was good at that: a man’s job. In her absence. Jamie did.

While discussing this with Rosie, something struck me. Why doesn’t she want to go and live in Berlin? One would have thought that’s what she’d do – return to her Berlin.

Ah, no. It
had
occurred to Rosie. In fact she’d talked it over with Jack. He agreed that there were two reasons against it: Toni had left 
Berlin on the arm of her handsome young Englishman; she would be coming back alone, divorced, years older with her early prettiness nearly gone – she would not be able to bear returning on these terms. The other reason, Rosie was afraid, was herself. Toni would not live anywhere for long without her sister being near her. That curious bond. Whatever its origins, it was an inescapable fact. Jack
acknowledged
it too.

‘And you comply?’

‘Within limits.’

‘You will live in Parliament Hill,’ I said, ‘but not in Berlin?’

‘My life is here. My life is in England, nothing could make me leave. Quite beside the fact that I never liked Germany.’

I asked her what the Judge was making of it all.

‘He didn’t think she
would
go to such lengths … But then, he says, one never can tell what a woman won’t do.’

‘He does think she’s wicked?’

‘
I
think she’s wicked and not quite sane. Jack says she’s stupid – Jamie will feel he’s well out of it, some day – he says it
is
jealousy, of the narcissistic kind. Toni can’t bear anyone being preferred to her in whatever capacity. History is repeating itself.’

‘She didn’t forgive the Judge for you. Now it’s Jamie. Though it’s different.’

‘
Very
different,’ said Rosie. ‘For one thing, Jamie still prefers Toni. It all started because Toni was being unkind to him.’

‘What will become of Jamie?’

‘Women will want to console him, eventually he’ll allow himself to be consoled. He feels baffled and hurt and terribly sad and he’ll miss Toni badly, but his heart isn’t broken. Perhaps Cynthia herself will make an honest man of him by and by.’

‘“What a woman won’t do”?’ I asked, ‘What would
you
do?’

‘In Toni’s situation? I’d choose not to know. And if I had to, I’d do anything to keep the man or get him back. No reproaches, no ultimatum, best behaviour, not showing one’s feelings.’

‘And the feelings?’

‘I should mind dreadfully. Do you know I was even scared when 
Jack admired those pretty girls on the beach at Sanary. If he really fell for somebody, I should suffer very much.’

‘You would? There are still so many things I cannot imagine – or get wrong – perhaps I’ll never be a real novelist … But you haven’t told me if you would forgive him, the man who was unfaithful to you?’

‘If I loved the man, of course,’ Rosie said.

In no time at all the removal men were at Regent’s Park. (Most of the furniture – Berlin relics – was Toni’s, including the piano.) Then it was Rosie’s possessions’ turn: her Bavarian peasant baroque arrived and was distributed at Parliament Hill. The flat there was
high-ceilinged
and a good deal larger than the mews. Rosie’s new bedroom was not, and it lacked the pleasing proportions of Upper Gloucester Place. Now there the two were, the two sisters (with the dog and his basket). How swiftly lives are uprooted, the trappings of life
dismantled
. I found it terrifying.

They said it was pointless my staying on by myself miles away in Upper Gloucester Place. Their neighbourhood was not a bed and breakfast area; they proposed I’d stay with them – it was March, it would only be for some weeks. I said yes. They bought a couch, and so there I was too, sleeping in their sitting-room. It was not very convenient, and it took longer to get to my pupils in whose houses or flats I taught. But small matter, it was worse for Rosie who could no longer get to St James’s in the evenings by a direct tube train, she had to change from the Northern Line; it took nearly twice as long. What did the Judge say about that? I asked her.

‘Nothing. He’s not familiar with the London Underground system.’

Again many evenings were spent by Toni and myself alone in the new flat. There had been a crisis when Toni told her sister that she could not possibly come home in bright daylight in evening dress – what would the neighbours say? ‘What they wish.’ Rosie had treated the request with such contempt that Toni knew defeat. She was mortified but the subject was ignored from then on. The sisters still lunched together regularly at Schmidt’s (reached by Underground 
without change); the dog was walked by Toni whatever the weather morning and afternoon; I was out most of the day.

A new trouble arose when Rosie’s school teacher friend from Watford was due for her fortnightly tea. Toni said that woman mustn’t be told about any divorce.

‘And why have I moved up here then?’ Rosie too could sound very chilly. ‘And where is Jamie supposed to be?’

‘You can invent something. Say Jamie is out at work.’

Rosie was able to put a stop to this nonsense as well. It did not diminish our anxieties about Toni and the future.

‘One thing I shall have to be firm about,’ Rosie told me, ‘that’s our holidays. Jack says we can go to Sanary again this summer.’

‘Splendid.’

‘Let’s hope I can arrange something for Toni.’

It was not just the atmosphere of the flat that got me down, it was the unreasonableness of people and their capacity to hurt each other – if relatively civilised and well-meaning individuals could do so much violence to their loved ones, what about the vast ignorant mass of humanity labouring under so much greater injustices, grievances, hardships, triggered by ideologies, nationalism, class hatred? Once you can say, and
believe
, We are right – They are wrong, is that not when wars break out? I thought of writing about this – the links between private and mass catastrophe, but lacked the knowledge and skill. Not for the first time I lamented the fact of my not being able to go to university (my fault? whose fault? circumstances?); I would have read history, not literature.

One fine afternoon I was walking with Toni and Tommy on
Hampstead
Heath, the dog tumbling happily on the grass.

‘Jamie must miss him,’ I said.

‘And he misses Jamie – I wish this divorce wouldn’t take so long.’ She had learned that it wasn’t even on the lists yet.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Once it’s absolute, he can come and see Tommy. And me. I hope he will. I’m looking forward to it,
I
am missing him so much.’ 

‘
Toni
,’ I said.

‘He can’t remain my
husband
, there’s no reason we can’t stay friends.’

April. I’d done my time; done my duty to the pupils as I saw it, equipped them with some subjunctives and a useful amount of slang. Sweet escape.

I told Rosie I should be booking rooms for her and the Judge before long: Hôtel de la Plage. Something to look forward to.

This did not mitigate my feelings about leaving them. All the same, sweet escape.

I went by the Newhaven–Dieppe route again, by choice this time. I liked pacing an open deck on a long crossing, breathing the salt air, thinking quick thoughts. I was pleased with the presents in my bag. There had been no new novel by Aldous Huxley since
Point Counter
Point
nearly two years ago, so I got an Ivy Compton-Burnett, her second novel
Brothers and Sisters
which had come out last autumn, for my mother, wondering what she would make of it. I was also bringing Earl Grey tea from Jackson’s, ginger biscuits, a cardigan for Emilia, Dunhill cigarettes for Alessandro and Dunhill tobacco for Philippe (which it turned out he abhorred, he only smoked
caporal
in his small white clay pipes); I couldn’t think of any suitable offering for Oriane, so let it be. On the train I woke as usual at Marseille: soon after, one saw the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean light, later the line ran above the bay of Bandol, close to the sea, not far behind the Kislings’ new house.

At Toulon I was met by the donkey-man in the Quatre-Chevaux.
Votre papa
asked me to fetch you, he is occupied (with the two
conversions
they had now on their hands, no doubt). And how are Monsieur and Madame? I asked, meaning the Desmirails. ‘
Bién, tout le mondé va bién
.’ Oh, this blessed Midi accent, I realised how
homesick
I had been. And how was the CTL, how were the buses running? Full tilt, everybody using them, no standing room on any run, trouble 
was that everybody wasn’t paying, too many blokes thinking
themselves
entitled to a free ride. There Monsieur had made a mistake from the beginning – we all knew Monsieur.