Jigsaw Page 5

  Father Huber began the communicants’ instruction by telling us – in such an off-hand way – that we were about to enter an important stage of our lives and ought to practise mortification of the flesh. (That always had an embarrassing ring to me.) How many lumps do you take in your morning coffee? he asked each little girl in turn with a view of getting her to cut down sugar. Each whispered that she was allowed half a lump on weekdays. As we drank tea at home (gift parcels from my sister) sugarless by choice, I felt a twinge of awkwardness and obliged by admitting to a thinly sugared coffee bowl. My father would have approved of this, seeing it as a prudent subterfuge – ‘Don’t show the difference in your tastes and habits.’ (Poor man, I have never known anyone more transparent.) I had offered the falsehood because of not wanting to belittle somebody else’s treats, and because of my desperate play-acting to belong. (I went as far in that line as telling schoolmates that the man who came to plough up our lawn was my godfather.) I have long since given up the desire to conform but still prefer untruths to ruffled feelings; those miserable half-lumps of sugar prompted my first social lie.

  Unfortunately they started Father Huber’s ‘spiritual preparation’ on a false and trivial note. He took us through the catechism and communion service line by line and that was that. I left the presbytery disillusioned. What had I hoped for? Inspired words, questions answered, fears allayed? A great change in myself? I began to answer my own questions. Surely the Church could not be true because it was unfair. Unfair. (Not a Feldkirch term.) Unfair that babies had to stay in limbo forever just because no one had managed to sprinkle water on them in time? Unfair that there should be only one safe church when it was chance whether you were born into a wrong one and could never go to paradise? Unfair that if you fell off a horse and died without having had a second’s time to repent your sins you were damned for ever? And why should one person be sent to hell for the same sins when another might get off with an indulgence for going to Rome or saying a set of prayers (I did not realise that this was not exactly an original protest). Well: God being omnipotent and just would never allow anything like that. By the same token He was omnipresent which means everywhere, so why were we told that we must worship Him inside a church? Yes, they were all wrong. I convinced myself quite easily and derived a sense of superiority and freedom from my reasoning. Only once during instruction was my imagination fired, that was when we read about the quality of repentance. There was repentance through fear, and repentance through love, love of God that was, abhorrence of our wickedness. But this too was imparted by rote. All might have been different had there still been Father Kaplan instead of Father Huber. When the time came, I made my first communion in a state of smug rebellion.

  My second social disaster was triggered off by Lina. ‘Give me that comb.’ ‘I can manage all right.’ ‘Give me that comb!’ I let go, it was past concealment, the teeth of the comb were teeming with live lice. What shall we do? Wash my hair in petrol. He will smell it. Papa must not know. But Lina was horrified – what if he should catch them? I saw: that was unthinkable; I gave in. So my father was told the facts of life (I had suspected them): some of my schoolfellows had lice, not all, not many … My hair was tooth-combed by the hour, washed in petrol, day after day, before we got rid of them, nits and all. This I submitted to, but now my father put his foot down. It was the end of my schooldays.

  *

  Hoping to remain unbadgered by the German equivalent of the Education Act, my father decided to tutor me himself. He went to Freiburg and bought a set of schoolbooks; they were secondary schoolbooks and so quite a jump. There were four of these, a geography book, a history book, a German grammar and a French grammar. My father’s method was simple, every weekday I was to learn, on my own, one paragraph from each book. By learning he understood by heart; he expected me to be word-perfect. So I memorised French irregular verbs, German declensions, lengths of rivers, the date of Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps. It bored me and I got into the habit of putting off the daily stint until the last hour, having some pretty narrow shaves. Once I had to fall back on reciting yesterday’s lesson and to my horror got away with it. This left me feeling mean and guilty but also rather cynical about the whole process. It had to be kept up though as the alternative was the threat of a resident governess who, my father said, would ruin our lives. What he failed to take in was the unequal distribution of my daily task: the paragraph I was to learn might run from anything like six lines to a page and a half.

  It must have been during that period that my father initiated our nightly sessions of roulette. He produced an authentic wheel from some locked recess and set it up. He acted bank and croupier, Lina and I were the punters, and we soon caught on. Candles, wine glasses, stacks of counters on the table, my father strict in the observance of the disciplines of Monte Carlo. Faites vos jeux … Rien ne va plus! The wheel spinning and the hush while the tiny ball jumped – le Seize, Rouge, Impair et Passe. We played for real money, Lina’s wages, my pocket money, and learnt to be careful. (Once I thought I was clever and backed a single chance with the minimum, doubling my stake when I lost; when I tried to do so for the fifth coup running I had a sharp and sufficient shock.) When losses became serious my father would make them up for us, but next morning, in daylight, not acknowledging what his left hand was doing. At night again we were a gambling club, dicing with thoughts of ruin while my father kept up a commentary of anecdotes about young men he’d seen cry Banco, lose all and shoot themselves at dawn. For the rest of that time at Feldkirch I played much solitary tennis.

  * * *

  It was autumn again, some disturbance was in the air. There were letters: something was on my father’s mind. I was not told until practically the last hour. One evening as we were sitting in his room side by side, he struggling for breath – as he so often did and I so used to it – he brought it out. Your mother … The lawyers … You see … Here were the facts: my father had custody while my mother had access, she was supposed to have me for a couple of months a year. Nearly three years were up now; so far she had not claimed me, or my father had managed to keep her off (something of both I believe). Now the lawyers said that she wanted me, there was little he could do, she wanted me to spend the next half year with her in Italy – I was to start for Florence the day after tomorrow, somebody was going to meet me at Freiburg and take me there. Before I knew what I felt I burst into loud tears. No, I cried and for the first time clung to him. My father said – I am not certain whether he said it or whether I only heard it with some inner ear, he raised his hands in some defeated gesture – too late. I cried more bitterly and had the grace to say – to this man who had watched over me, who had done so much for me, to whom I had never shown a loving heart – I want to stay with you. Again he made that gesture: ‘But Billi – you ran away from me.’

  Two days later I was put on a train. A few months after my father went down with appendicitis. He was operated on in Freiburg, his asthma became bad, he could not breathe lying on a hospital bed; within a few days he died. I knew that he had been much afraid of death.

  PART TWO

  Fugitives: Italy

  THE FUTURE as outlined to me at such short notice had been a home near Florence and a stepfather. It became clear though at the end of the journey that neither of these was to be just yet. My mother’s arrangements (as I had to learn) were often impulsive and reversible. The train crossed the Alps over the Brenner Pass and on its slow descent I had the first sight on a September morning of a southern sky and light, and took to it with the alert joy of a creature born in and emerging from the north. We got off, alas, alas, short some three hundred miles of Florence at Cortina d’Ampezzo, the resort. The name might be impeccably Italian, the place was not. The Austrian Trentino was turned Italian only by the Treaty of Versailles, we therefore found ourselves in political, not ethnographic, Italy. Here we were to wait for my mamma at an hotel. ‘We’ means the last in a chain of travel minders (lawyer’s clerks? all forgotten),
a girl from Berlin less than twice my age whom my mother had met at another hotel and roped in to meet me at a border. Her name, she said, was Doris. My mother turned up the next day and seemed a little puzzled as to why she had sent for me. Perhaps, she said, it was a little premature. Yes, yes, I’m going to marry O – you were told about that? – and live in Florence happily ever after. Though perhaps not quite next week. What she would like to have, she said, was second thoughts.

  O was a painter of some reputation, and they were to be married at a consulate. Doris described him as an interesting man: mature, travelled – all desirable qualities in our eyes. A word here about Doris because we were to meet her again, in other years, at other stages. She turned out in fact to have been the epitome of a lost generation, the young who came of age in the Weimar Republic. Doris had only lately chosen that anglicised version of her name (Dorle), it occurs to me that there must have been even before Christopher Isherwood and his kind became enraptured by Berlin, a corresponding Anglo (and even more so Americo) mania among bright young Germans, a two-way traffic of sexo-romantic fascination.

  Doris then. Of ‘good family’, North German, though not Prussian; a minor title, civil service tradition; with two or three men of letters, also minor (an uncle, great-uncles), urbane, cultivated, and she intelligentsia by descent and association rather than in her own right. Her mother had died early of TB, and Doris was brought up by a loving and unworldly grandmother, her father too being dead, killed in the 1914 War, and there was very little money (that little to be obliterated quite soon by the monster wave of inflation up into billions crashing over Germany). At our first meeting point the grandmother had already turned her Berlin flat into a pension de famille, the kind where the inmates are friends and most of the friends are artists and actors out of work. Doris despite her extreme youth had been trying to hold down a job or two, typing for a literary agency, some modelling; she hoped to get into films. That summer she had come out to Italy as secretary to an American script writer; that had gone wrong but as she still had a bit of money left she stayed on, my mother erratically befriending her. Doris’s face was sallow, large-eyed, her figure thin, flat-chested, spidery beyond the modish requirement of the time. Her talk was of parties, of avant-garde films and young men who were going to be poets and painters. To me she was a new species and a buffer between me and my new-found parent.

  Telegrams from O intruded. My mother made no move; she did not tell us much, there was nothing, she said, to explain; she laughed at herself, making a game of it, perhaps a waiting game. (We thought.) Doris fell in easily with the suspended future, I fretted; I could not bear the waiting – never did, never will – and there was the disappointment of not being taken into real Italy. Then one evening Artur Schnabel was playing at a soirée in some villa and my mother, who was as unmusical as one can be, was asked to go. She always seemed to know people everywhere. Doris and I amused ourselves with a night walk among the vineyards gorging ourselves with stolen grapes (while we were both older in many ways than our respective ages, we were probably also considerably younger in others). Next afternoon a young man called at our hotel. Goodness, my mother said, Doctor Caligari, I presume! That’s what comes from sitting out a Beethoven sonata. You had better see him, he’s a much more suitable age for you. So we were left to receive the man my mother insisted on calling Doctor Caligari in the hotel salon. In came a young man of great good looks who did not show the slightest interest in Doris let alone me; my mother eventually appeared, we slipped away and he must have succeeded in taking her out to dinner.

  Although so very young and handsome there was nothing sleek or facile about that caller; had one encountered him at another period one might have seen him in a cinquecento piazza standing by the scaffold, never at the thé-dansant. Style, an inbred sadness, a light façade of badinage and pliancy – in a few years and for long after, my mother told us, he would have come into a resemblance with Titian’s Man with the Glove.

  A week later my mother said that she was going away for a few days. To Florence? Not to Florence. And I would be all right, wouldn’t I, here with Doris? Of course. No more questions; my mother left. Next day Doris had a telegram about a film test. No, we said, she could not miss that. You will be all right here, won’t you? Of course. In a way I was. I had a room of my own, my mother had left books, living in an hotel was a fascinating experience. The food, to my thinking, was delicious (mayonnaise on something or other every day), the staff were exceedingly kind. Adult fellow guests tried to ask questions; these I evaded, just as I declined offers of joining them for meals. I ate at a table for one, attended by sweet waiters who brought the dishes for me to look at and gave me second and third helpings of anything I liked. I went for walks, looked into shop windows. I was all right; and yet … Time did not exactly fly and there was an undercurrent of anxiety, not admitted into articulate thought – Will she come back? Will anyone ever come back for me? At one point I bought myself an Italian grammar; learning by heart and reciting it back, I discovered, was a nice resource.

  A telegram came (it was always that: the telephone had not really entered people’s lives), it said, staying till Sunday do you mind. It was marked Venice. She did come back, alone, looking beautiful (but then she always did that). You have been to Venice? I said, was it heaven? It was. She showed me snapshots of herself lying in a gondola. Who held the camera? I asked and she looked at me and she laughed. Doctor Caligari? I said (it came to me out of nowhere at that moment to my own surprise). My mother laughed again and seemed quite pleased with me. ‘Do stop calling him by that silly name.’ And I laughed too and said that I knew it was only the name of a film, and after that and for ever it was as if some ice had been broken between us.

  * * *

  That was the beginning of a time of confusion, sudden journeys, new places, waiting – where did we go and in what order? and who went and who came? How long did he or we stay? Memories overlap, go blank. Alessandro, as we now called Titian’s Man with the Glove, had fallen in love with my mother. Intensely so. She, at that first stage, took it lightly. She was amused, flattered, elated. She had never before been interested in a man who was not a contemporary and preferably an elder, and who (with the exception of my father whose cover of eccentricity had misled her) was not at least an equal in what for want of a better term one might call a certain sophistication of speech and mind. Alessandro’s mind, she told me, was no more formed than mine. Anyway it was folly: he was far too young. A gap of over, well over, fifteen years in cold fact; up to her to stop it here and now. Well, perhaps not just now.

  Alessandro turned up again at Cortina. My mother sent him packing. Already at some cost to herself? Then relented; then sent him off again. Meanwhile there was the still open question of her marriage to O. That would be one way out, she said, but she would not take it, she owed that much to O. He would not take no by post for an answer and pressed for a meeting. She said that she owed him that as well. She asked him to Cortina, he refused; she would not go to Florence. So we moved on to Merano, another resort, a sheltered resort basking in late autumn sunshine. I rather think that Alessandro followed and had to be sent off again. At last O came. For the first time I met an authentic artist. (Snob, my mother called me.) He took trouble to talk to me, I found this handsome; he talked well and seemed to know a good deal about many things; he reminded me of my sister’s husband who had let me listen to Stravinsky. (How I longed for us to settle down!) To my mother he also made himself pleasant company. All he asked of her was not to make a final decision now: he would give the other thing six months, he would give it a year, he would wait for her verdict then. She told him that six weeks would be too long, if it was to be stopped it had to be stopped now. He must have said, Well then, do. To me she said (in front of me, rather than to me; most of the things she told about herself came out that way), Never marry to run away from something. Once was enough, never again. If I give up Alessandro now I might as well give up the world!


  How old was she then? thirty-eight? thirty-nine? (I knew that she’d had me late.) O left, still his unruffled self, making it clear that he did not regard himself as out of her life. Alessandro arrived with such despair over O’s visit that my mother went off with him for a week. I was on my own again. The hotel wasn’t nearly as nice but there happened to be a Swedish brother and sister staying there, older than I and very wild: they seemed to be able to do anything. They egged each other on, climbing, racing, trespassing, staying up shiveringly late. I became intoxicated by their company, and was hard put to keep up, pretending that I, too, had always lived dangerously. To hold my own I initiated rigging up a begging bowl plastered with a symbol much like a Red Cross bearing the legend ‘Soccorso d’Inverno’, Winter Relief. We put on our most neat and despised clothes and actually went about the public gardens of Merano collecting for this bogus charity. We made nice money and were levitating with the sense of our wickedness and peril.