A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error Page 2

  This girl yearns to be a writer and tries to apply herself daily to her “vocation,” even as she fantasizes about what she will do:

  She had even less desire to write autobiography than straight fiction; she did not see herself as a future novelist; ideas were what she believed that she was after. Aldous Huxley. . . professed that ideas were more interesting . . . than men and women, and Flavia was sure that she agreed.

  What she hoped to write (talent and acquired knowledge permitting) were essays, books of essays, proposing changes in government, economics, law and general conduct; rational changes, effected by good will, technological advances and the lessons learnt from history . . .

  As we know, this was only half true: The girl grew up to be a writer, but her novels are every bit as good as her other writing; their subject, certainly, was “the lessons learnt from history.” (Or not learnt.) If this particular work of fiction turns out to be more autobiographical than Bedford said it would (“I am not Flavia”), who can blame her? Hers was a remarkable life, and it makes for a remarkable tale.

  —DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  To Eda Lord

  A FAVOURITE OF THE GODS

  INTRODUCTION

  A FAVOURITE is my second novel and I began it, rashly perhaps, without the usual trepidations. Well before I had put hands on typewriter I had one or two ideas of what I wanted to do. Trying to do—this is my one attempt at fiction with almost no autobiographical sources or associations: I wanted to be on my inventive own. Such as it might be.

  In my first novel, a main initial concept was the reactions of contrasting sets of people, basically three families of one country, according to their diverse creeds—religious, political, behavioural. This time I saw, still vaguely, one family of multiple nationalities divided (often without realizing this) by the customs of their origins. What they were, I was as yet not clear about. Nor did I know how they were related to one another. What I had was a thread which might or might not be perceived as running through the eventual book; I meant to build up a protagonist (of generous and enlightened nature) born and brought up with all the advantages one would wish for and more: perfect health, looks, affectionate parents, enriching yet unconfining education, surroundings of great natural and architectural beauty, money flowing lightly (do I make it sound like highbrow Mills & Boon?); a protagonist, moreover, for whom misfortunes and the restraints of a conventional social environment are turned to her advantage (the protagonist is a woman); a being, then, apparently smiled on by the gods, who does not get spoilt, whose youth is enjoyment—happiness. In the years of maturity she becomes conscious of . . . well what? Diminishing returns . . . a flatness . . . changing worlds? Conscious that it was not enough, that glowing start, that something more is needed. A purpose, a target, a belief? A part. Where? And this, I, the prospective author, wanted to make clear, this was not a poor little rich girl’s plaint but the quest that lurks within every human creature fortunate enough to lift its head above the daily grind.

  So much for that thread. As for the players—the favourite would have to have a mother in a major role and, in due course, a daughter. Fathers and husbands, sons and lovers, had not as yet materialized. Nor had the story, or plot. Locations, in some order, were perceivable.

  •

  I was not anxious, not in a hurry. It was the beginning of the 1960s. A year or two before, I had entered without much active volition one of the most placid, not to say bucolically contented, periods of my existence. By a few turns of chance, I, we, had come to live in Essex. We had not meant to do this, we had not meant to stay. It derived from my wanting to write another of what I call my law books. To the chagrin of my publishers who were paying me a—quite comfort-able—annuity to produce a novel, I was setting out to write an account of justice in a number of countries, linguistically accessible to me, that was. (Denmark, alas and in spite of much helpful kindness, was a wash-out; I was able to take in little beyond gazing at the pretty porcelain stoves they have in their court-rooms.) My aim was a book lightly written—there is much entertainment as well as wrong-headedness and heartbreak to be found in most courts, criminal and civil—if mainly prompted by an intense desire for a humane, intelligent and stable rule of law. After starting research in England I had a few winter months of London courts behind me, when I found that some experience of Assizes, County Sessions, Magistrates in small towns, was also needed, and began thinking about a country base from which to attend—a lay reporter with press-card. London had been a temporary if charming mews. (We had no roof, or prospect of such, anywhere in the world at that point.) The Constantine FitzGibbons, already friends and neighbours on Capri, in Rome, had just taken a house in the country, Constantine wanting some quiet writing months. (Constantine: a brilliant writer—died early—civilized, versatile, remember? When the Kissing Had to Stop, The Shirt of Nessus, the Life of Dylan Thomas, the piece about Norman Douglas, the Blitz documentary—remember? One hopes so.) In a thrice Theodora, ever helpful, ever efficient, had found us a furnished house practically next door. It stood in about an acre of lawn with some good trees and a calm green view on these, and was easily affordable. We took it for the summer. Within a week the FitzGibbon marriage broke up. Theo was off to Ireland, for good as it turned out (starting her own writing career: autobiography, excellent cookery books). That sudden end was surprising as one was used to their frequent, often savage, fights quickly followed by reconciliation; the FitzGibbons were believed indissoluble. Within another week Constantine came down with serious jaundice and had to be transferred to a London nursing home. We had made that move counting on their company—evenings—and on that of their certain-to-turn-up entourage of amusing and agreeable hangers-on and friends. (They gave parties, we did not. I need a sixteen-hour day of solitude to work and get into work, and am not sure what is more abhorrent: an overnight guest or Sunday lunch.) So now, there we were, in the country, without country connections or country pursuits; we didn’t get to know anyone, nor did anything we probably were expected to originally. It turned out rather well.

  At the end of our first Essex summer—one of the very few reliably fine hot English summers (tomatoes ripening in the open)—we had decided to stay on. Provisionally.

  The house, if of recent construction, had many comforts (for the period) and above all was impeccably clean which matters a great deal to me. A good place for work and innocent pleasures after work: taming the Aga; collecting logs; tending a kitchen garden; English vegetables from English seeds, picked small and early; feeding, in the long twilights, squadrons of hedgehogs rattling their quills like miniature Uccello warriors. They took milk from our hands.

  Eda Lord, my dear companion, American, a writer, who had been through a rough time in Occupied France during the War, had recuperated (as much as she ever would) and was just then settling down to write her first commissioned novel.

  The house on the lawn (it had an absurd twee name) was right for us because we both worked, separately, intensely, not eating together in daytime, hardly exchanging a word before sundown.

  It has to be said that we were away a great deal. The first year, weeks in European law courts—German, French, Swiss, Austrian, a try in the Principality of Lichtenstein (turned out of the press gallery: female journalists not allowed). Then there was travelling for pleasure—paid largely by American magazines, meaning they paid with money, I with work—to Denmark: first, enchantment by the beauty of the country houses and the niceness of the people; later, a solitary and freezing August in a rented bungalow on an empty pristine beach by an agitated sea. (We fled. Not back to Anglia: to France, the South, a long drive through half a dozen climatic zones, begun in wool, ending in shorts.) Another autumn to Calabria, still devoid of tourists and amenities. To Paris, often.

  And occasionally, bending to the custom, idle, distracting weekends with friends in handsome houses in Wiltshire and Dorset (I loved those countrysides). Once we drove to Scotland, the furthest north I had ever been in the Brit
ish Isles. Once more it was supposed to be summer; once more we retreated.

  Back with the Aga and the hedgehogs and the writing disciplines, we never stopped making plans, growing more detailed as dinner went on, plans about the place—rural or small town, the quiet village by the sea, by a lake, with an amplitude of friends we were still young enough to believe we would find and make—where we would settle as soon as these books . . . as soon as the next books . . . were done. Lago Maggiore? Aix-en-Provence? Lucca? Spain and Portugal, still dictator-ridden, were out, alas; the South of France then once more? As it was now at the opening of the 1960s? The dream of that small French fishing port where I had spent my early youth, the dream of Sanary retrouvé, was hard to kill.

  •

  When eventually Eda Lord’s novel (Childsplay) and my law book were finished, another summer had gone. Not a time to seek new house and country, time to get down to the novel I owed and wanted to write. One late autumn afternoon, walking in an Essex lane, rather chilly, getting dark, picking up a stick for our fire here and there, the beginning of that novel came to me in one swoop. The beginning, no more. In fact a prelude: a dialogue began ticking in my head.

  And so to work. The prelude, it started in a train, achieved some sorting out, if gradually. (Who said that writing was like mining?) It tied down a period: Mussolini—time, say the mid or late 1920s, and this required that the story would have to move backwards because the central character, let’s call her by her name now, Constanza, who is talking away (she’ll be doing a good deal of that), Constanza is already a woman with an adolescent daughter. How far backwards I did not grasp, though surely to well before the 1914 War. What the first dialogue, in its brisk elliptic way, firmly put in place were the nationalities of the characters: Italian; American; American-Italian; English; English-American-Italian. Up to me now to give them plausibility and life to weave themselves a story. A serious story written as a comedy of manners. . .

  Slightly tongue in cheek, I began to turn upside down the view of aristocratic Italian homelife as conveyed by high Anglo-Saxon literature—those great tales of American heiresses corrupted, exploited and deprived in cold unions and palazzi. No disrespect for those immortal books . . . My penchant for ironies created by the interplay of character and chance. Much of this novel’s brickwork is built on mutual misconceptions, laughable perhaps, but leading to the harsher reality of those destructive forces: jealousy, a-sexuality when treasured as a virtue, self-deception—three enemies of life, spoilers of what might be luminous and sane.

  There are other themes, or hints of them. But enough. This introduction is supposed to be about my circumstances while I was writing it, without pre-empting overmuch about the book itself. There was a contrast between that rather flat part of England and the view from my small study on a nice piece of grass and my attempted evocations of the august and teeming grandeur of Roma Papale: the quarter of the favourite’s home and the glitter of Edwardian London.

  The writing had been relatively smooth, a clear run, with none of the perennial bouts of sloth, perhaps because of so many legitimate, or at least deliberate, absences for travel. The clear run was paid for the morning after the euphoria of the last page. (I revise, rewrite, polish, paragraph by paragraph, every day as I go along, so the last page is that.) I collapsed with exhaustion. Unable to write a letter (those postponed ones), unsteady using a cook pot, unsafe to drive a car. Unexpected—I had been staking runner beans the day before. Reflation was slow. A few nights in Brighton—talked into by kind friends—did not help: crossing the road, I walked into an oncoming car, falling against the front wheels, an inch away but safe; the poor driver, after this miracle with the brakes, was shaking (and not angry, generous man), I, dazed, picked myself up, apologizing vaguely; later I fell asleep at the cinema. London parties—kind friends again—made me ill; for the first time in my adult life I did not hold my drink. All this considerably delayed our departure for that permanent southern abode. For one thing, we had made no actual plan; for another, we found ourselves cluttered with a surprising amount of possessions after this stay of . . . three years, was it? Not quite, or a little more? Books of course, a staggering amount for a house virtually without book-shelves; papers, oh—the letters we had kept, the clippings, the publishers’ correspondence—how these files had swollen! Objects as well: the batterie de cuisine, the wine glasses, decanters, even clothes . . . Would this be going to Lago Maggiore? Be given away? Or both? Decisions, schedules, collecting cardboard boxes . . . There was also our landlord to be considered. Gradually it was decided that we would be able to leave by the end of the year. After Christmas. A flat in London—Fulham—was organized for us, a winter’s respite before the move abroad. Nobody had mentioned that the flat had no means of heating whatsoever (were we supposed to acquire stoves and fires with their plugs and fittings at our leisure in mid-January?). Nobody had noticed that there was a, serious, gas leak in the kitchen. Nobody could have foreseen the nature and severity of the coming winter, 1962/63, the worst since 1947.

  By Boxing Day we were snowed in. No way of getting the car out of the garage, no way of using any wheeled vehicle on our lane. Well it looked pretty, there was the Aga going, we spit-roasted a good-sized leg of lamb over the fire in the living-room on a hand-constructed, hand-worked spit (one of the best ways of doing a gigot). A morning in early January, the cold and snow had got worse, we put on ski-clothes with overcoats and wellingtons and, leaving our belongings stacked in boxes along the floor, left on foot the house with the whimsical name that had been good to us. We each carried a typewriter, a briefcase and a bundle holding overnight things and a black dress to change into for the dinner party we were going to that evening. We made it to the main road, we made it to a station, to a train. We were looking forward rather to the flat in Fulham.

  •

  Two more points, relevant to this novel. It was a mistake to call one of the contributary characters Mr. James. Though a New-Englander with a Harvard link, he was in no ways related, connected, or alike his illustrious namesake, nor to be thought so. That would have been impertinent and inappropriate, as well as just silly. I realized this at the time but simply could not detach the character from his name. Writers will know that names in fiction once given are, like a witch’s curse, immoveable, have a life of their own and will not let themselves be changed. I can only apologize.

  •

  Have I ever committed an unlawful act such as the one executed by the young daughter who far from being myself has approximated some of my attitudes, tastes and reactions in the course of the narrative? The simple answer is No. But also I have never been presented by remotely similar circumstances and opportunity. And if I had? There would have been conflict. The English belief in the fundamental necessity of sticking to the law—do not take the law into your own hands—and against that the impulse nurtured by my life in Italy and France that in some issues humanity should prevail, the end not the rule. To me young Flavia’s end is desirable—a deed of despair and spite made void by an act of protective love (and presence of mind); without the—technically criminal—means, the end would have been irrevocably bad. This is my view. But would I have had the courage, the cool quick-mindedness of that girl, ma semblable ma sœur? I think not.

  —SYBILLE BEDFORD

  2000

  PROLOGUE

  ONE AUTUMN in the late nineteen-twenties for no particular reason at all, as it would seem, we began to live in France.

  •

  The train had stopped. My mother put a glove to the window: VENTIMIGLIA.

  We each took up our book. For some time nothing happened. Then the customs were in the corridor, in pairs, in their uncouth uniforms, strung with side-arms. My mother kept them in check with a light hand. Poor louts, she said; and it could not be true that black didn’t show the dirt. They went. Still we did not move. Again we tried to read. Suddenly I saw my mother’s brother step into the carriage, he came swiftly forward: “Constanza!” “Y
ou?” she said. He put a kiss on her right cheek, on her left. She sat passive. “What do you want?” she said in her cold voice. He saw me. “Ciao, Flavia,” he said over his shoulder. “I motored down from Sestriere to catch you,” he answered her in English. I disliked him and I left the compartment; and so I heard no more.

  From the platform I could see them in the carriage window—my mother sitting still with a soft and absent look on her face; my mother then was a very beautiful woman, and on that afternoon, in that empty dust-blown station, she was, as so often, like an apparition from another world. He was talking urgently, with animation, using his hands. I passed on; and a little later I saw him jump off the train, rapidly cross the lines and walk towards the exit. I went back to the compartment. “Giorgio’s mad,” my mother said; “how tiresome of mama to tell him where to find us.” “What did he come for?” “God knows,” she said, “some harebrained scheme.” The cast of my mother’s mind was analytical and interpretative—people, behaviour, motive—but Giorgio had long been discounted. Nor did I insist. And soon we began to move, the train clanked across a bridge and we were in France—all right? I said; all right, said my mother, it wasn’t anything very much this time—and presently we began to think about getting our things together, for we were changing trains at Nice, we were catching the Calais Express.