Jigsaw (42 page)

Alessandro and I sat with folded hands and prayers in our hearts.

The Russian, his name was Ivan, ‘Not very original of him, or rather of his father; but then that wretched man was stuck with Ivan as well: my Russian is Ivan Ivanovich.’ Well, he had gone through the gamut, cocaine, hashish, opium, heroin. Opium was the best, he told her, if one learned one’s way about it, one could make it last the longest. The Russian, a man of infinite finesse and cultivation, said that she would never get the full perfection of Turgenev unless she learned to read him in the original; she needn’t trouble to learn Russian for Tolstoy whose style at times was clumsy,
he
read better in translations. She missed Ivan Ivanovich … She implied he had admired her. They had promised they would meet some day, when he came out, whenever that was; he did not trust himself for long in the outside world.

‘I think I shall learn Russian. He’s already taught me the Cyrillic alphabet.’ She fished for paper and pencil and fluently produced 4 Cyrillics. Then cried out, ‘Oh don’t look at me as though I’d performed a circus trick – you are treating me as if I were a dangerous animal. I still am … Oh do I know what I am?’

Alessandro got up and uncertainly patted her arm. ‘You see?’ she said with a sneer.

On other evenings she would lament for the young nurse. ‘
There
was someone who knew what one needs when one’s not well. She read one’s thought.’

‘That’s because she is a nurse,’ Alessandro said, unwisely perhaps.

For these evenings would end either in sudden flatness or in the now renewed tirades against Alessandro. To his face, behind his back.

‘
He
brought me to this,’ she would cry in sudden fury.

I tried to imply that
this
was over, must be put behind, she burst out, ‘After what has happened to
me
! My ruined … health.’ (She was unable yet to speak of the ruin of her looks.)

She slept heavily and long, sometimes into the afternoon. One day I 
came across the gin bottle in her bed. It fell out, it was empty, a bottle of Gordon’s gin. She first pretended that I was dreaming, then that the bottle got there by accident.

The second time this happened – I had not waited for the bottle to fall and it was not empty – she was furious.

‘And if you dare tell anyone, least of all the medical Cerberus at Bandol …’

So it was not just to cash cheques that La Grosse Hélène had been sent into Sanary.

‘I believe that woman steals,’ my mother said to me, ‘are you missing anything?’ No, of course not. ‘Are you
quite
sure?’

‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘With all her faults, that’s the last thing Hélène would do. She’s honest. I dare say she steals our good name.’

‘We haven’t got a good name. With the loose life my husband leads.’

It had been predictable, the common-sensical Bandol GP said. And you can’t stop her. They always find ways of getting at it. Try to make her take less, try to make it look natural, convivial, drink
with
her.

So we got in vermouth, orange juice, angostura, ice, and suggested wouldn’t it be jolly if we had gin slings, Tom Collinses together or whatever. Goodness how false it rang. My mother wasn’t taken in, that didn’t suit her at all. She wanted her secret – to retire from time to time, return to bed with Uley and a bottle.

For a time she managed this rather well. It enabled her to be almost normal and up and about at most times. She went out by herself, shopping, to the hairdresser. The grey streaks in her hair disappeared, a good sign. Her taste for social life revived. She called on people, sometimes at odd hours, was invited on her own and went – almost on time – to lunch with the Panigons, the Kislings, the Huxleys. She even called on Oriane. (Philippe she avoided; she had an instinct about the granite below the graceful comportment.) And the best of it was that she was no longer immersed in depression, no longer desperate. What was bad, very bad, was her continuing hostility to
Alessandro. She treated him with mockery and scorn, making him feel a criminal, a worm. He bore the assaults with great courage.

‘Don’t you
want
to go and see your concubine?’ she asked him in my presence.

He controlled himself with difficulty; in a sudden flash I realised that his anguish was about my mother’s behaviour and not about poor Doris. Admiration as well as love for my mother had filled almost all of his adult life; for on to a year now she had been destroying her beloved self before his eyes. He could not bear it.

When I sought him out later, a possible time had come to ask, ‘
Do
you want to see Doris?’ Oh no, he said. That could not be renewed. It had been paid for too dearly.

Soiled and spoilt, I thought. ‘What is happening to her?’

He groaned. Poor little Doris. She would not go back to Paul. She no longer accepted his money. She was working for some political association, immersing herself in active German politics, ultra
left-wing
. Paul was heart-broken. ‘I wish I were dead,’ Alessandro said.

My mother received letters from her Russian, Ivan Ivanovich. She would snatch them, take them to her bed, hide them under a pillow. Perhaps they were love letters; perhaps she liked us to believe they were.

She had acquired a Russian grammar. Time she did something to improve her mind, and Uley liked to be called by Russian
endearments
. She might also take up soon her essay on Stendhal and Flaubert. She was talking to me as she used to, often very sweetly. So I told her about the novel I had started at the Desmirails’ and not touched since.

She was serious about that. Did I realise how difficult it was to write a
good
novel? Perhaps the most difficult, and rewarding, of literary forms. She herself would have given everything – no, not everything, as her life would appear to have proved, but a great deal – to have written something: to have achieved that translation from experience into art. Might she have had the necessary talent? One could never tell unless one tried – and trying was work. ‘I’ve never learned to work.’ Writing was something one had to give oneself to like a vocation. If it
hadn’t been for all those love stories … Lived, alas not written.

As for me, her daughter, I might bring it off or I might not.
If
I had the talent, if I accepted that writing had to be served. ‘Never look over your shoulder, don’t think of a public, or reputation, or money – follow your inspiration, if you have it, then do your damnedest to pin it down, prune it, lick it into shape.’ And it would be best for me not to marry, not to burden myself with a house and child. She grinned. ‘Oh I know they all think I haven’t burdened myself enough with you. But then I have
not
become a writer, here’s a nice non sequitur. And now you must leave me. I need a little rest.’ She smiled engagingly again, ‘I will have a little nip and Uley may have a drop of it in his milk. I don’t particularly want him to grow into a huge cat.’

On Christmas Eve my mother and I – Alessandro had some work that entailed his spending a few days at Aix – had dinner at the Huxleys in Maria’s basement kitchen dining-room (Maria’s entertaining was unconventional long before it became willy-nilly so for most of us). My mother brought Uley who was entirely ignored by his parents; Aldous was fascinated by this parental detachment and compared it favourably with human family patterns. He was himself much attached to the cool father, Matelot, who liked being in his, Aldous’s,
work-room
, perching on his shoulder as he typed. So we sat at Maria’s large oilcloth-covered table, talking Siamese cats, eating rose-leaf jam and salted almonds shunted to and fro on a miniature railway young Matthew had constructed for the occasion; my mother was in a good mood. It seemed possible again that life was tolerable.

We jogged along. For weeks on end my mother was quiet and aloof, Alessandro came and went, a peace was kept. I was writing again. A little and not easily. One winter afternoon I came back from a walk with Oriane, I had found her edgy, seething with discontent. She couldn’t stand the silly buses, the dull life at Sanary any more, nor Philippe’s stance that it did not matter what kind of work one was doing as long as one did one’s best. (One’s best! When money was going down the drain, drivers’ wives were being treated in private 
clinics for ridiculous complaints at the Company’s expense, and a rival line had started a service from Bandol!)
She
was going to Paris to see theatres and some civilised people, or she might well go to
Switzerland
and take a rest-cure in a sanatorium, where they were able to do wonders for one’s nerves. ‘
Comment, idiote, tu ne savais pas que je souffre des nerfs?
’ I managed to soothe her, said that I would find Paris better for
my
nerves than Lausanne, and went home. In the hall I was met by a faint smell of ether. Quicker than thought, my limbs began to shake, arms and legs doing an independent little dance. It was an odd experience; only after seconds, did my mind make the connection – this is what she cleans the needles of her syringe with. It had begun again.

When I first attacked her, she denied it. Ridiculous suspicions; we were degrading her with our surveillance. When it became more obvious – there were other signs besides the smell of ether, once we were alerted – she made the admission with a kind of triumph: what fools we had been.

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘None of your business any more.’

And so it turned out to be. One thing, both Alessandro and I made clear, we would have no hand in it this time. No assistance with the spirit-lamp, the whole witch’s set-up, no touting in pharmacies. My mother said she did not need or want our help.

‘You can do nothing to prevent me,’ she said lucidly, ‘short of extremes you would not envisage such as reporting me to the French authorities who might deport me or get me locked up – or very likely wash their hands of the whole thing. Equally it would be impracticable for you to deprive me entirely of money. You could keep me short of course, but we have credit …’

She was right. We had no weapons we could use.

Aldous and Maria had gone to London in January and would not be back for some time.

We did not ask when and how she got the stuff. The probable, simple 
answer was Joyeu. She had resumed resorting to the impenetrable Joyeu.

Once she saw that our sense of impotence had sunk in, she spoke more softly. ‘Don’t be so upset, don’t be so afraid … It will not be like the other time. I can assure you of that. I shall be the master – my Russian friend taught me a good deal – I shall not let myself become a slave again. I shall control this two-edged offering of the devil and the gods, treat it as my escape, my treasure; I must ration the hours in my artificial paradise. Yes – it is that; and now I am cast out of any other. Though believe me – as you can’t, poor mortals, because you have not tried it – the artificial one may well be the best, and one
can
return to it at will. I shall return as an acolyte, a visitor,
not
an addict.’ She believed herself and there was pride in her voice.

I could have cried, ‘You already are an addict or you would not have dared return.’

Indeed for a time – months – things were not terrible. My mother did ration herself: three or four times a week perhaps (we did not enquire too closely). In the interims, gin, wine, veronal at night. She kept herself quiet, hoarding states of mind; to me she could talk intimately at times, this always melted me; with Alessandro she kept a wary reserve. Once or twice she called him the poor boy. He applied himself to such work as was at hand.

Drugged or not, my mother did not like to be alone in the house of an evening; if one of us went out, the other had to stay in. We had been trying to keep up the ritual of family dinner, too often it fell apart. I was doing no work, and got away from home as much as I could. The Kislings and their friends were welcoming, I was seeing them regularly again; I also took to spending evenings at Bandol, meeting new people. It was spring, and hotels and bars were filling up. Those I met there knew nothing about me and our history, and this gave me the freedom to appear as what I chose to be. I was attracted by some of them and found that they were attracted to me. I began having affairs. They were not very serious or lasting, but they were with people I liked, often 
admired, and liked being with. It was friendly and sensual and open, the Kisling doctrine, as interpreted by me, in action; I was joyfully carried away. Not so much by any single lover – although these affairs were beside much else affectionate – as by the climate of love-making, the adventurousness of it, and the direct new way of entering into the lives of adults at ease with themselves. I was fortunate, or I chose well, for most of these were charming people, good people, some even remarkable ones. With many of them I remained friends a long time after, often for life. Only one or two were mistakes I don’t like to think about. (Some of this began in that spring; it did
not
happen all at once.)

My mother called me to her room one morning, she was up and dressed and putting franc-notes into a bag. The two young dogs – who had been taken on again and were making reasonably good ménage with Uley – were watching her from the bed. ‘I’m going to take the bus into Toulon,’ she said in an off-hand way, ‘I need that thing I gave you to keep for me.’ What thing? ‘The little aspirin tube, in September before … I went away.’

Oh that. ‘I do remember now. I’m afraid it’s gone.’

‘
Gone
? Impossible!’

I explained how it had disappeared, got thrown away while I was at the Desmirails’. ‘But didn’t you know what was in it?’