Jigsaw (41 page)

When might I see her?

Possibly soon. Though so far she had not asked for any member of her family. There was now one nurse she had got fond of, and who was able to do something for her.

I got into a state well before those calls. It began by Wednesday evening. The Desmirails were very good to me on these days.

The best of the week for me was Sunday, because on Saturday night Philippe brought the office typewriter, a great clumsy thing used by Josée, the ‘overpaid’ secretary, on working days. Philippe unfailingly carted it up to La Pacifique every Saturday and took it back on Monday morning. On Sunday I typed out what Oriane and I, keeping an ironic tone, called
mes oeuvres
. I transferred six days’ harvest of block letters on to stiff white paper. Was it all right? Was it wonderful? Was it drivel? I hoped, I feared, I exulted: seeing it in type was almost as good as print.

One of the rituals established by Oriane for her young writer was her impressing on the maid Suzanne never to intrude on me with such 
things as cleaning. (Any writer, old or young, genuine or aspiring, would jump at such protection.) Kind Suzanne only took broom and duster to my room in my absence, a quick dip after luncheon. For a time all looked well. I love order, excessively so according to some of my Anglo-Saxon friends, but well below Desmirail standards. One day Oriane decided that my room needed a proper tidying up, which was done by Suzanne during one of our walks. Fretting that ‘my papers’ might have been disturbed or, God forbid, discarded, I did a thorough check afterwards. Everything was in place except for an aspirin tube that was missing from the dressing-table. That tube had been given me by my mother during those last days of vacillating before the clinic. Would I keep it for her
without
opening it and trying to look what was inside? Would I give my word? She did not hold with this much herself but trusted that I would. Naturally I promised. It was a very minor Bluebeard’s chamber, an almost weightless aluminium tube that made no sound when you handled it. I gave it small importance – so many bizarre things were going on at the time. When I left Les Cyprès I packed it with my brushes and things, and left it on the dressing-table. Now it was missing; Suzanne must have thrown it away; I didn’t like to ask about it – it had probably contained some nefarious substance we were better off without. I did not regard it as a sacred trust (safe for not opening and looking) and dismissed it from my thought.

It was a good, a healing, a peaceful life that I was leading at La Pacifique – even without the bonus of being made to write – and I am for ever grateful to the Desmirails, for their generosity and affection – they were angelic.

Perhaps not consistently angelic as Oriane went, that was not in her nature, something drove her – it got worse in later life – to show claws from time to time. One evening at dinner – we were alone, some crisis with a theatre bus was holding Philippe at the garage – as I was helping myself again from the carafe of wine (a third glass? a fourth? I drank a good deal for my age), Oriane said in a velvet voice, ‘You know,
ma chérie
, I should be
careful
in your place – after all,
ta mère est une morphiniste
.’

Instantly she was appalled (far more than I was) and cried
forgiveness
. ‘How could I?
Je suis méchante
.’ I understood or thought I did; we calmed each other, being certain that not a word of this would be breathed from either to Philippe.

Oriane talked a good deal on our walks. Some of them led to or passed by hide-outs – an abandoned hut, a sheltered clearing – she had discovered (used?). I thought of Louis. She was talking of other men. Future men. A banker in Paris, very clever, an
ambitieux
who would go far, who was waiting only for a sign from her … but he was
middle-aged
. The driver of bus number one was giving her smiles, but would need encouragement, a very well-set-up young fellow, one’s husband’s chauffeur – would it be amusing to be the French Lady Chatterley? (I’d like to have heard my mother’s comment on
that
.) Her younger cousin’s husband was mad about her too – I’d seen him: wasn’t he handsome? – it would serve Adrienne right, she’s been cuckolding him enough
and
she tried throwing herself at Philippe, on the other hand an affair en famille wasn’t what one really wanted, was it?

What, I thought, shocked and puzzled, did Oriane want? Excitement? Amusement? Vanity appeased? There were elements of these in many love affairs … To
that
degree?
And what of Philippe?
Yes – one knew about Philippe’s version of the post-war code of marital laisser-faire, his was based on tolerance (with a pinch of lassitude, indifference?), this was not unmatched by Oriane: her springboard was triviality and one-upmanship; her permissiveness, in thought if not in deed, lacked dignity (let alone the spontaneity of the Kisling milieu). Oriane talked a good deal about Philippe, how she loved and admired him. And in fact she did. They were inseparable, she believed (and would do her best, her worst, to keep them so), and they were alike: two of the same mould. Their tragedy was that he, too, believed this, at least for a long time. They were
not
alike, not in their characters (his had strength, hers self-will), not in their values. The twin-act of their youth was
trompel’oeil
; their affinity – so marked in their looks – a product of education, milieu, manners, a few shared tastes and distastes, and the great illusion of their marriage. They were just alike enough not to strike fire in each 
other as lovers; they were too unlike for her to go on subscribing to the fundamental tenets of his nature, his exceptional gentleness, probity, moderation; too unlike for him – once he awoke to it – to go on forbearing the lack of them in her.

There was a hunger in Oriane to be effective, to make a great splash, a longing for fulfilment, love, vocation; she had courage, dare-devilry and a taste for outrage, and if fate, as was likely, would fail to deal her the great hand, she would go hunting for it like a thwarted feline beast.

(Did all women carry the seeds of their own destruction? Toni … my mother … Doris … Cécile … Yet there was also Renée; and Rosie, dear sweet ugly Rosie; they were sound.)

While I was living under the Desmirails’ roof, these misgivings about their mutual future were intimations, thoughts crystallising below the surface of my mind; what occupied it then, and is forgotten now, was the character of the young man in my novel, of whom I remember nothing except that he was likely to have spouted Mallarmé and Catullus, and that he had a mistress, a teasing, ravishing woman in her thirties whose name was Marie-Laure de Sainte-Trinide.

In the meantime, when I did not think of the clinic at Nice – which I did not as often as I could manage – I was happy.

When my mother was at last allowed to come home, we prepared for her, and ourselves, as well or as badly as we knew how. A young nurse, who had travelled with her, helped her out of the hired car. My mother held on to her arm – slowly they walked up the drive. The woman Alessandro and I saw approaching was gaunt and moved awkwardly. She returned our greetings with a vague compliance. We saw her face: it was lined, there were grey streaks in the chestnut hair; the eyes were dull.

When I had seen her at the clinic (lately I had been allowed to do so a few times), she was someone ill in a hospital bed, made ready for a visit, pronounced too tired to talk much – she was afflicted with acute 
pain and stiffness in her joints – I had not expected her to be herself. Here, upright, dressed and ‘cured’, the change struck home.

We went indoors. It was around three o’clock in the afternoon, seldom the best of times for an arrival. She sat down. I sat down. The nurse said it was time for her to be going. She kissed my mother who as if panic-stricken held on to her hand, then wordlessly let it go. Alessandro conducted the young woman to the car.

I had moved back into Les Cyprès two days before. Alessandro was already there. He had re-painted our hole of a bathroom to make it look brighter, and constructed a special table for the books and papers my mother liked to have about her bed. Maria (the Huxleys were back in Sanary) had filled the house with flowers, the room was scented with them and the late autumn fruit I had brought and arranged in a leaf-lined basket; La Grosse Hélène had put her energies into a cleaning; the dogs were there. My mother was as indifferent to their greeting as she had been to ours and all the rest.

Alessandro returned. (He had had a word with the nurse who told him that ‘adjustment’ was a difficult thing. The first days could be the worst; someone discharged had to be looked after with great care. Alessandro had looked after my mother always, no one better than he,
as a man looks after a woman
. Not a son, not a sick-nurse. Moreover – like myself, like many people who have known little of it – he feared and distrusted illness.)

‘Would you like to go to bed now?’ he asked. ‘I suppose so.’ She looked about her despondently. ‘There isn’t anything much else to do.’

I took her into their bedroom. ‘How primitive the plumbing
arrangements
are in this house – is this all the running water you can manage here?’ It was said with resigned surprise rather than reproachfully. ‘You were comfortable at the clinic then?’ I said, recalling my glimpses of it – a cross between a luxurious hotel and a discreet madhouse; I was also thinking of the bills.

‘Comfortable?’ she said, ‘
comfortable
? Oh, I suppose in a sense it was, one never lifted a finger.’

She looked at the large bed. The expression on her face was half 
fearful, half sullen. ‘I think,’ she said very slowly, ‘that I shall require nocturnal solitude. Will you tell him that?’ It would not be the last time that she was conveying a message to Alessandro indirectly.

That evening he moved his things into the spare room. I did not intrude on, nor wish to know about, his relief.

My mother’s physical condition improved. She was able to move quite easily again, but her spirits were very low, and they infected us and everything we did. All her responses were grey. Nothing pleased her; few things markedly displeased her: she had become acquiescent. She talked little. Her zest for analysis had gone and so, except for a touch of hauteur shown now and again to Alessandro, apparently had her temper. In place of the alternating personalities of last summer, we were finding a new third.

I tried to break through by asking, ‘Mummy, you are still very unhappy?’ ‘Happy … Unhappy …’ she said in the new slow way, ‘I can’t imagine happiness, I can’t imagine anything.
Is
there anything?’ She was afflicted by what they talk of in the carefree Midi, where it is said to strike in the afternoons, as
le cafard
, that heavy unmovable black thing that sits upon man’s spirit and turns the finest day, the brightest prospect, into dust and ashes.

The man at Nice had given my mother a letter to a GP at Bandol. We were afraid now of all doctors. That one, a well-disposed,
common-sensible
,
homme-moyen-sensuel
sort of chap, was reassuring. Yes, he told us, she was going through a phase of depression.
Pauvre femme
. Not much to be done about it medically (not at that time, not at Bandol). He advised some mild sedative, Sedobrol or her ineffectual old friend, Paciflorine, and warned us to keep her from heavy sleeping pills. Distractions? rest? – they would not signify. Just patience … Time …

We tried to make her eat – she was far too thin – and get up and dress at least once a day. Alessandro and I cooked the things she liked, Madame Panigon (always kind to our faces) sent round some exquisite soup she had made herself. My mother would sit up wearily,
drumming her fingers on the table, listlessly eating just enough to forestall comment and cajoling, waiting for Alessandro to re-fill her glass, then greedily gulp her wine. We used to tease her about how little she would drink, often no more than half a glass of claret with her dinner. Now, we did not resist her demand, ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘amuse me,
if
you can.’ I tried to talk about life at the Desmirails’. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘not exactly amusing, I’d call it a eulogy: first it was Oriane, now it is Philippe – my poor child, all your geese are swans.’ She reached across Alessandro for the bottle. ‘Are you asleep?’ she said to him. The wine was bringing back something of herself. It was a relief.

The Huxleys gave my mother a kitten, an offspring of Matelot and Pussy, their Siamese couple. It was a beautiful small animal with creamy pale fur and all the right black tips. My mother took it into her arms and on to her bed where it made its home. Siamese are eclectic devils, this one allowed himself to be taken to by her. She called him Uley, which was the way the Huxleys’ name was
pronounced
by the locals, Hs and Xs not trundling readily off their tongues. She played with Uley, with the papers on her bed for toys; she fed him on the best bits off her plate; when she got up she carried him in her arms. The dogs, whom she was still indifferent to, got up to trouble, she quelling them. It was the first breaking out of her deadly negativity.

As my mother was picking up, she became chummy with La Grosse Hélène, sending her off in mid-housework to do errands. (Could it be cashing cheques for her at the bank?) La Grosse Hélène, knowing and bonhomous, treated all of us with a mixture of the maternal and the insolent.

My mother became brighter, spurts of optimism with intervals of sullenness; she took to talking again. Some of our dinners were animated once more. At last she began speaking about the clinic, not about horrors – about people, staff, fellow patients. Now we learned that she had struck up a friendship with a Russian, a White Russian émigré, not in his first youth, who was undergoing his sixteenth
detoxification cure. ‘
Sixteenth
. I’m not going through a
second
. Ever. That I promise you.’