Jigsaw (38 page)

They brought the
casse-croûte
– it took a little while – anchovies, olives, oven-grilled bread. Sure, there was a short cut: if we didn’t mind it not being a real road, we could take a left turn some five kilometres out of the village that would take us down eventually to the N8. I found a thread like a snail’s trail on the map – the light was going fast – a thread classified
chemin d’exploitation
, a track for peasants’ carts? It cut right down towards the coast, it would save miles and miles – if I could find it, if it led where it appeared to lead to.

My mother still dawdled. She lacked a sense of self-preservation.
At last
… I found the left turn, or what looked the likely left turn. We took it. 

It was narrow, it was bumpy, it began to wind; I could see no guiding sign or stone. Quite soon I would gladly have turned tail – there was no place a car could turn. I pressed on, praying we were in the right direction, praying we would meet no other vehicle to pass. There was not; the track was getting to feel very lonely and at times uncomfortably steep. From time to time it seemed to me that we were climbing – on a descent towards the coast? I prayed some more, casting sideway glances at my mother trying to assess her state of mind, feeling that she was beginning to scent danger. I drove as fast as allowable in the conditions and tried to calm myself by counting blessings: we had plenty of petrol, I’d seen to oil, water and the tyres. All roads must ultimately lead somewhere – or must they? If they were tracks –
chemins d’exploitation
– might they not end at some uninhabited agricultural plantation? And how far was ultimately? It had been getting dark, now it was dark. The Ford’s headlamps were good but I had not had much experience of serious night driving; after all I had only passed my driving test a little over a year ago and, notwithstanding Philippe Desmirail’s training in double de-clutching, I was not an experienced driver. Still, all would be well
if
this track led somewhere. Somewhere
near
home.

Now my mother’s questions were beginning. Are you sure this is the right road? We’ve been going an awfully long time, it seems to me? Oughtn’t we to be down at the main road by now?

How much longer is this going to take
?

From her tone, she was strained, impatient; she had not yet come to the excruciating stage of nervous craving and physical pain I had lived through with her once or twice before when a hypodermic had been too long delayed.

Damp was rising after the heat of the day and for stretches visibility was blurred by swirling mists. It was difficult driving.

Could we go a little faster? my mother said.

On and on we went. We seemed to be descending now. Still no signposts. Night noises had begun, tree-frog and cicada, nothing else; once I hoped I heard a dog bark. Two of the worst moments were when we came to crossroads. Don’t you dare stop, my mother 
shouted. Her acute time had begun. I just drove: nothing could save us now but luck.

I knew what she was suffering. (One of La Rochefoucauld’s most repeated maxims is to the effect that nothing is easier to bear than the suffering of others,
les souffrances d’autrui
. In some situations this is not so.) Another mist patch, another sharp downhill bend, my mother beating her own legs with her fists. Faster, she cried, faster.
Please
.

Nothing for it but keeping steady, keeping on. Quite suddenly the track debouched into a back street of a hill village, dead asleep, which I recognised as Evenos. Within minutes we were on the N8: we were less than fifteen kilometres from home.

The last stretch was the worst for my mother. Once on the main road she urged me to drive as if I were driving in a race. I felt as a horse might in a finish with nothing left to give, she was beating the steering wheel, she was beating my hands and arms; feebly, that made it all the more pitiful. Faster,
faster
, FASTER …

When we reached Sanary, I dared look at my watch for the first time: it was two o’clock in the morning. We drove straight to Docteur Joyeu’s house under the dank trees – an unspoken decision, I was in no state to handle a syringe. Joyeu received us wordlessly – he appeared not to have been to bed – my mother, equally speechless, looked ghastly, she might well just have had some appalling attack. He put her on a
chaise-longue
and administered what was necessary. I believe she fell asleep for a while. I was gasping for breath: Joyeu handed me a glass half filled with a cloudy liquid with a vaguely pharmaceutical smell. I did not really want to, but I drank it. Eventually he aroused her quite gently. She opened her eyes. ‘I will go home with my daughter,’ she said, ‘if she will kindly take me.’ It was then that I had to try not to burst into tears.

I forgot;
she
asked, ‘What do I owe you, Docteur?’ He named twice the usual sum, speaking his first words that night, ‘
puisque c’était une visite nocturne, Madame
.’

We were both so unnerved that for some time after we could neither of us speak of that night-ride. Nor was there any question of
undertaking
further outings together. By the end of the week she told me she could go on no longer:
He must come back
. I would have to telegraph. Today. I begged her to leave him be – she had been so good to let him go: don’t spoil it now. Let him come back of his own accord. It’s not even the middle of August yet, leave it to him, it’ll feel better for
you
if it is his decision.

She would not hear and ordered me to send the telegram. Say I am ill. ‘It’s nothing like appendicitis,’ I said stupidly. ‘Then
say
it’s appendicitis.’

I held out. She demanded to be given his address.

When I held out again, she said, ‘Let me remind you that you are under age, I can denounce you to your German guardians for not obeying your mother. You are out of control, they will take you over.’

I felt rigid with shock. Not that it worked any longer; it triggered off residual apprehensions, not real fears. In less than six months I would be twenty years old, a number of disagreeable things might still ensue, legally I was not out of such clutches, but I no longer led the life of, I no longer
felt
, a ward in chancery. I was shocked by my mother, and very angry. In this matter she and I had always been on the same side; she knew it had been my bugbear; I could not take the malice of her betrayal.

Coldly I told her that I had promised Alessandro not to recall him except in a real emergency.

‘A real emergency! He made you promise
that
? The cad.’

‘Of course he did not. We didn’t speak about it. It was understood, some things are.’

‘Stupid girl. Where did you get those gentlemanly scruples from? Not from me, nor from your father as I knew him.’

Next Sunday morning they were to launch a ship from the small naval yard at La Ciotat where it had been built, something pleasant to watch. The Huxleys were going with some of their friends, Maria proposed that we join them and eat a picnic afterwards in a rock bay on the far side of the harbour. I tried to tell my mother that it would be all right to go – I wanted to make amends for something I had felt guilty about 
in my mind: my squeamish refusal to give her an injection outside our own walls, putting her into the position of the other night. I would find a way of transporting a sterilised syringe, we would find a discreet place en route … ‘If it will make you feel more free, I will give you the treatment wherever you like.’

She gave me a curious look. ‘Too late, my dear. I’ve learned that lesson too. I’ve been giving it to myself – quite easy really – as you say, it makes me feel more free.’

I realised then that when I had been puzzled about the number of ampoules in the box, it was not I who had miscalculated. From that day on I never gave her, nor did she ask me to, another hypodermic. I continued seeing Joyeu and touring pharmacies for her supplies.

In the event we did go to La Ciotat. The launch of the ship, a small coaster, the slow glide under a noon sky into natural harbour was beautiful; and memorable.

A couple of days later when I came home to Les Cyprès after an errand, I found the sitting-room floor covered with splintered wood and glass. My mother, standing among the débris, said smugly, ‘Isn’t this what they call “breaking up the place”?’ Indeed it looked like something seen in the movies.

‘For God’s sake, where’s Emilia?’ I said.

‘I gave her the afternoon off.’

The weapons, I saw, had been a flat-iron and a stick. What sent a shiver down my spine was the crack across the looking-glass over the chimney-piece. That brought bad luck. She was ingrainedly
superstitious
about a broken looking-glass, so was I. She couldn’t have done this too on purpose?

She said, ‘I’ve only just begun. Unless you think that this
is
an emergency?’

Linked into an inescapable chain of wickedness and betrayals, I walked down to Sanary, to the post office, asked for a form, wrote out the brief message in dictionary Spanish and addressed it Correo Restante Granada.

For the best part of a week we heard nothing, then one mid-morning Alessandro burst into the house. He looked unslept, red-eyed, streaked with dust and sweat. ‘How is she? Is she ill?’ He brushed past me, ‘I must see her!’ I wanted to prevent him, he went straight to her room.

When he came out again only minutes later, he still looked dreadful though in another way – stricken, bewildered, dazed. He fell into a chair. ‘What has been happening? What have they done to her?’

I knew what she was like in the morning, the colour of her skin, the state of her hair, of her nightdress, the state of the room: I had seen the changes, I had seen them gradually. To him they were new shocks.

‘What is that awful smell?’
Ether
. For some reason she had been using ether rather than neutral spirits as a disinfectant for her needles. I had ceased to notice it. Alessandro stayed slumped in that chair for some time. Emilia, unasked, brought him coffee and a jug of fresh lemonade. My mother came in, dressed now, said haughtily, ‘You ought to have a bath.’ Wandered out again. We seem to have spent the rest of the morning and the day and the time that followed sorting ourselves out at a slow pace with no aim.

At one point I said, ‘Where is
Doris
?’ He had left her in the car, had driven straight to the house, driven straight from the border, straight through the night. They had not been at Granada when the telegram must have arrived, they were touring the south of Andalucia, they were at Ronda in fact when it caught up with them, the telegram. They started off at once, driving north through central Spain, two thirds up to Madrid, eastward to Zaragoza, Barcelona and on, straight on. It was hot – August in Spain, a hot August, the height of the holiday season, crowded roads. How many days? They had practically no sleep: twice only they stopped at a roadside inn for a few siesta hours.

We found Doris sitting upright and awake in the Chrysler, she looked frightened, sad, and utterly exhausted. Her face and dress were covered with dust; the car and windscreen were filthy and sticky with dead insects.

My mother, nine-tenths in control of herself, made her come in, You must be dead, my poor child. While they slept – Doris in the spare room, Alessandro on my bed – I drove about Sanary trying to find an hotel room. Not a hole to be had; finally the Plage, where we were in good standing, relented and promised a maid’s room after the weekend. So Doris stayed at Les Cyprès, urged to by my mother who went on treating her in a friendly detached way. Alessandro she mostly ignored, making conversation over his head. Suddenly Doris said,

‘Where’s Waldemar?’

‘Good God,’ said Alessandro, ‘where’s Waldemar? Gone, I suppose.’

‘No, no,’ Doris said, ‘he wouldn’t, not without saying goodbye to us.’

‘Who is Waldemar?’ I asked.

Oh well, a young German, a student, a Communist – he was keen on letting one know that – they had picked him up, rather he had picked them up, at the Spanish side of the border. The guards were refusing to let him in, something to do with his travelling on foot or not liking the look of his papers (it was the year before Spain became a Republic, six years before the outbreak of the Civil War), he was afraid the French might not let him back in again – so perhaps if he could cross with them in their car? Alessandro had other things on his mind but Doris was firm that people in trouble must always help other people in trouble. Once in France with Waldemar crammed in the back with the luggage, they had gone on giving him a lift. He was a Berliner – with nice manners – who wanted to see a bit of the world during the holidays.

Presently Waldemar drifted in, he’d been asleep under a cypress tree, now he wanted to say thank you and goodbye. As well as
travel-stained
, he looked under-nourished: a skinny hare. His French was atrocious in accent but grammatically correct; when he broke into German, he talked in Doris’s educated Berlin voice. You must tell us all about the state of the Weimar Republic, my mother said and asked him to stay. We had no second spare-room; Waldemar said he would be happy sleeping on our terrace, he carried all he needed in his rucksack. In due course some water was doled out for
his
bath.

This domestic situation persisted for some days, my mother
alternately
withdrawing for long periods and reappearing with renewed animation; Doris heroically concealing what went on inside her while we were all too aware of how much there was to conceal; Alessandro taking gradual cognisance of the damage wrought during his absence, lounging about the house adrift in indecision. There was too much to speak about. Mostly we said nothing.

When he learned about it, Alessandro wanted to stop me from scrounging round the pharmacies. That really appalled him. I told him, If you or I won’t do it, she will on her own; in a taxi, I suppose, with God knows what results.