Jigsaw (47 page)

Enough. Right or wrong, the book got done. Expeditiously. One fine bright cold January day, my (later) friend, then future English publisher, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, gave me luncheon –
something
he does with supreme elegance and lightness of touch. We were at his window table at Chez Hilaire. Well then, your novel? (Elaine Greene, my agent, had paved the way some time ago.)

‘I think I got beyond page 84 …’

‘I see …’

He didn’t; but he couldn’t know. With Christopher one begins, at lunch time, with a Bloody Mary or with Krug. One drinks (and eats) well and wisely. One is at ease, elated, and one is still so when one leaves: ready to take on the day. Never a ruined afternoon. We parted on the pavement of the Old Brompton Road, we shook hands, then we embraced, an accolade
à la française
. I had just said, ‘You’ll have your novel by the beginning of June.’ He did.

Aftermaths. Within weeks of eventual publication, a very unexpected light was cast on a prominent player in the sub-plot, the Sisters’ Story. He was a judge, a real live High Court Judge, well-known in his time as brilliant, eloquent, somewhat controversial: great fodder for the Press. 
What was heard off the bench on a morning could often be read in the evening papers. In fact, the Press knew nothing, but nothing, about his private life. Today it would have bloated the headlines. A few people must have known something; each would have come across one or another fragment of the truth. I, by the oddness of his circumstances, got to know a part of what seemed the core of it, the ‘Judge’s Story’, such as I told it in the present novel. There, I strictly stuck to what I knew at first hand; which was little enough, if enormous in terms of the Judge’s position and career. These I saw as safe – he had died in the early 1930s, and indeed for the next fifty years nothing of my end of the story appeared to have surfaced. Not so after Jigsaw. A friend, a very sharp-minded QC, confronted me with a straight inquiry. I was summoned – dinner at the Reform – cross-examined: the judge in the novel must have been, could not have been other than, unadulterated Judge X. He, my QC friend, put a few data together; I conceded. He was right. (And not going to proclaim it from the roof tops. One may feel smug enough knowing something others don’t.) We sat on, speculating on the wonders of the cover-up. However, this was far from being that was that. Within days I was approached by a young woman who baldly declared herself, name and all, to be our judge’s great-niece, professing affectionate memories of her uncle and no knowledge whatsoever of my facts about his life. She proposed to come and see me. We settled for a day and time. She would bring a surprise, she said, a big surprise. I would be unprepared – she would not prepare me.

When the bell rang, there were two strangers on the doorstep, a young woman and a man, a pleasant, quiet man, he turned out to be, a retired civil servant, of nearer seventy, one guessed, than sixty. She introduced him as the Judge’s natural son. And here we had the pivot of another hidden story – one judge, two stories, parallel much of the time, two halves each ignorant of the other. No whiff of the son’s existence ever reached the sisters, none of theirs ever reached the son. Now
he
had read
Jigsaw
and
I
, the sisters’ surviving witness, soon read the typescript of the son’s autobiography which tells, and tells it well, his half of the tale of what must have been quite a feat of double deception by an attractive and well-liked public man.

I got to like the son – he shares his father’s first name (which will not be found in the book) – I talked to his wife. Sadly, he died early. I still hope that his autobiography, which contains a good deal more than his parents’ story, will be published. All of this has left me with a puzzled sense about the relativity of given truth.

Books are apt to engender correspondence. I do not mean mere letters and their polite acknowledgement, but a good continuing exchange about some minor matter (and the more absurd the subject the better). The prize that time went to an elderly English gentleman established in France who wrote to me accusingly that the tramway line serving Sanary–Ollioules–La Seyne which I had mentioned (
very briefly
) had
never
existed. I wrote back to say that although the line had been defunct at the period described, I had seen, admittedly, no tram, but the actual tracks. He wrote back citing his authority; a vast tome entitled
L’Annuaire des Tramways de France depuis 1898
. I replied that I had actually stumbled, nearly turned an ankle, on one of those tracks, unmistakably
trams
’. He wrote back; I replied; it went on: never acrimonious, just obstinate and sure of our facts –
Les Tramways de France
v. my own feet … Who says that writing even an unaccommodating novel does not yield its pleasures.

S
YBILLE
B
EDFORD
, 1999

About the Author

Sybille Bedford was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, in 1911, and was privately educated in Italy, England and France. She published her first book,
The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey
, in 1953. By the time it was reissued, seven years later, as
A Visit to Don Otavio
, it had won a reputation as a classic of travel writing.
A Legacy
appeared in 1956, and three other novels have followed:
A Favourite of the Gods
(1963),
A Compass Error
(1968) and
Jigsaw
(1989), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The Best We Can Do
(1958), an account of the murder trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams, was the first of Sybille’s writings on the law at work. She reported on some of the most important criminal trials of her times, including those of Jack Ruby and the former staff at Auschwitz.
The Faces of Justice
(1961) collected her observations on the courts in England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France.
As It Was
(1990) brought together further essays on justice as well as her celebrated writings on food, wine and European travel. In 1973 Sybille published a two-volume, authorised life of her friend and mentor Aldous Huxley. Stephen Spender called the book ‘one of the masterpieces of biography’.

For the last twenty-five years of her life, until her death in 2006, Sybille lived in London, where she was a vice president of English PEN. In 1981 she was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1994 was elected a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. Dogged by difficulties with her sight, she nevertheless continued to write and in June 2005, less than a year before she died, Sybille published a memoir,
Quicksands
. Bruce Chatwin saw her as ‘one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose’. 

61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL
Email: [email protected]

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