Jigsaw (18 page)

From the back, my mother was giving me their news, revealing the reasons for the acquisition of the car. All good. (On each of my arrivals 
I sought to read the omens.) She and Alessandro were trying their hand as decorators and antique dealers, a spin-off from his really quite successful incursion into the art dealers’ domain. Wives and
connections
were beginning to toy with converting houses in the South of France, and the same kind of people were getting enthusiastic over Provençal furniture, peasant furniture most of it, though some of the better pieces were quite fine, if one liked that kind of thing and wasn’t put off by the fakes in auberge dining-rooms. For the moment genuine stuff was still to be found if one knew where to look, and so she and Alessandro were making trips into the hills of Haute-Provence – beautiful country – knocking at people’s doors. Paying decent prices too – these rustics weren’t born yesterday – meeting some rum characters and getting on with them. Alessandro did.

So does your mother, Alessandro intervened.

We take turns, she said. So you see, we have to have a car. To get up into those wildernesses and bring back the loot. The Peugeot had a sturdy frame, chests and dressers could be carried, cushioned by a mattress, on its roof over the rutted roads. (I was grateful that they had not bought a van; estate cars did not exist in those days, not in France.) Monsieur Panigon had proved a treasure of knowledge and cunning, guiding Alessandro through the jungle of second-hand car dealers in Marseille.

Then we got to the house and all was pleasure. It lay above Sanary, a mile or less inland, off the Route de Bandol. We drove through a gate, left the car in a small yard – plunged at once into the acerbic scent of the Midi: resin, thyme, hot stone – walked round to the front and there it was: the new house was an old house, ochre-washed, one-storeyed, a simple façade of long windows with the faded-blue wooden shutters of the region, standing on the highest of three terraced levels flanked on each side by a row of cypresses. The front door was reached by a short flight of steps leading on to a platform with a brief balustrade. Inside it was cool, the floors plain polished deep-red tiles, the rooms – not many of them – well-proportioned, the walls whitewashed, the woodwork in light colours – I could see at a glance the hand of Alessandro – doors and uncurtained windows 
gracefully shaped. The original owners? Rich peasant or bourgeois? Building a century, a century and a half ago? One could only guess.

The furniture was unremarkable, not awfully solid, odd bits and pieces, nothing new or newly bought or really ugly, a long way from Galeries Lafayette dining-room suites. Here too I could see that Alessandro and my mother had done a bit of shifting and refurbishing: they’d made it look both sketchy and liveable. (Another good omen.) There was a decent-sized kitchen with a coal-stove, some charcoal burners and a marble sink with a cold tap. The lavatory was modern and clean and had its own window; the bathroom, presumably carved recently out of some cupboard, was a damp black hole the width of a trench.

The terrace fronting the house was roughly paved with stones held together by thistles and spiky weeds, just level enough to play boules and balance table and chairs for eating out on. The two lower terraces were covered with scrub. There was no pretence of a garden in northern terms. (The realities of water did not allow one so much as to think of grass.) What one saw looking out of the front windows was the austere perspective of a cypress alley with a glimpse at its furthest point of the tiled roofs of Sanary.

I felt happy. For the first time since we left Italy, I was going to live in a house one could love. I said as much.

It
was
good, said my mother, and for a rented furnished house it was a miracle. ‘You know, the agents told us it was hard to let. The summer people didn’t like it. For a time they stopped showing it. The rent is less than what we paid for that silly villa.’

I looked a question.

‘Annual rent,’ my mother said. Alessandro added firmly, ‘We’ve taken a year’s lease.’

‘Renewable?’ I said.

‘Renewable.’

‘You might be interested to hear who our predecessors were,’ my mother said. ‘Guess who had the house last winter? – by the way, it’s called Les Cyprès, inevitably – the “snobs” from Paris! You remember the mysterious couple we used to see at the cinema two years ago?’

I remembered. 

‘The one our friends at La Marine were so nasty about.’

‘So they came back?’ I said. There’d been no sign of them last summer.

‘And vanished again. Rumour had it that she’s a training partner of Suzanne Lenglen’s and that he’s been brought up with Lacoste and Borotra; they go to Biarritz and do nothing but play tennis all day long. Other rumours say they’re in Paris settling their affairs and are coming to live here for ever. Someone’s actually seen their building site.’

‘Where?’ I said.

‘I’ve not the slightest idea.’

The omens held. It was a good summer, my third in the South of France. There were many to come, each definable still: different, individual in atmosphere, focus, events; men and women in
foreground
. The great constant was the climate, the inflexible summer climate of the Mediterranean coast. It embraced, contained, our existence; the ever-present sun and sea, the scented air, the strident sounds of tree-frog and cicada were the element we moved in. From May to October there was no rain, only night-dew, thus nothing changed: the earth was monochrome, the sea reverberated the sky. Morning after morning we woke to clear light, coolness modulating through the hours into the still, unwavering heat of noon, the small evening breezes, the warm night luminous from sky and
phosphorescent
sea. How permanent they felt, these even summers, how reassuring – this will go on: we shall go on.

Oh the Mediterranean addiction, how we fall for it! Natives most of all; anywhere north of Avignon, of Pisa, as the case may be, they pine in deprivation, exile; while the rest of us go seldom free again of that call of the South after our first weeks on the Ligurian or Aegean. So did I respond when as a child I had looked out of a train window crossing the Alps; later the Sorrentine peninsula gave substance to the instinctive longing. From then the South meant Italy, and my first summer at Sanary had confused and disappointed me. The Mezzogiorno, Midi (by any other name) was the authentic South, no 
doubt about that, but it also was most certainly not Italy. I missed what I was used to, I missed what I loved, and though rash and ignorant, I was affected by the absence of the architecture that I had become expectant to see springing from the ground at wayside and obscurest village. Poor Sanary offered two fountains, at the ends of the port, each mounted by a statue (female) of circa 1900, one representing
L’Agriculture
, the other
Le Commerce
. It
was
a come-down.

In short I did not take to Sanary at once; hard to explain by any future light. There had been the unsettling effect of my mother and Alessandro’s sudden move to France; the vague unease that year, the sense that all was not well with them – between them? – contributed.

How very different were the months that followed so soon after. But they were a winter – sunny in every sense – a winter all the same. And although we were steeping ourselves as it were in Frenchness – those forays into books during the day, those sorties in the evenings – we might have been
anywhere
, it feels looking back, pursuing an existence of our own – a mother and her daughter, a pair of sisters, a woman and a girl – ensconced happily, very happily, in our wind-blown villa like two explorers in their base camp. Such a time never came again.

The succeeding summer, my second French one (a good part of it spent in London on my last lap with the Robbinses) I see as a
forerunner
of the third, the present one, the aestival routine of the South of France: active mornings in market and sea, siesta hours enclosed in shuttered houses, nights of eating, dancing in the open air. At home, indications of stability, the trustees and their warnings quiescent, Alessandro finding acceptance as a go-between by a small coterie of artists and their patrons. Locally, new connections had been formed, earlier ones sloughed off. The days were over when my mother had been subject to the courteous, protective gallantry accorded to a woman on her own (a beautiful woman, slightly enigmatic?), she and Alessandro were now facing Sanary life as a couple; we were seen – with me added – as a family, a household.

All this I found consolidated, in undertones and fact, this year: now, 1928. We lived in a handsome house (if without much
confort moderne
); we had a car; my elders were as near as ever to being 
gainfully employed, enjoyed their teamwork, which indeed seemed to help keeping us in modest prosperity. It had all become quite bourgeois. I no longer went out with a bowl to fetch our dinner from the
traiteur
, we had a maid from Italy now, living in, who cooked for us and did everything else as well. She would have baked our bread, had we not persuaded her that French bread was eatable (which it was indeed in those days before steam-baking). Emilia (procured by Alessandro’s mother), lean, wispy, unmarried, came from a Tuscan village, a hard worker, serious though not unsmiling. She saw being in service as a softer life than working on the land. Like Flaubert’s Félicité, she was saving part of her wages for a nephew. (To whom, we believed, she was not individually attached, it was more a matter here of family feeling and honour.) She reminded me of our Lina from the German village who had done so much so selflessly for my father and me. Emilia was less elderly, of less pessimistic outlook, less desiccated and a good deal less devoted to her religion. In some weeks she missed mass altogether. Perhaps she believed herself dispensed while toiling in foreign parts; perhaps she was unable to take the Sanary church – very sparsely attended, we heard (I never set foot in it) – quite seriously; perhaps she prayed at home in the darkish, silent kitchen of Les Cyprès while hand making our pasta. She was contemptuous of the indigenous population – of mixed and largely Italian origin – who considered themselves French, and were so by Emilia who understood but did not approve their patois. Like Lina she had an obstinate adherence to some stiff principles the nature of which was often quite unclear to us. As in Lina, as in Félicité – though not to the
heartbreaking
degree – there was much goodness there. We became fond of her, and she of us. She was not demonstrative.

To us she brought the blessing of an almost entire liberation from housework. We could ask whom we pleased, when we pleased at the spur of the hour as was much the habit of the circle we now moved in, to come and eat with us without suffering the aftermath of hospitality. When one had been at table long enough, one just got up and moved to another part of the terrace and went on talking.

Among these new companions – too soon to say friends,
acquaintance 
too cold – one did not ‘entertain’, one happened to eat together, in groups of six or maybe ten, in someone’s garden, in the bistros of Toulon or Bandol attracted by some spécialité or view.

I can still still hear it: someone driving up to our house, calling out of a car window, ‘
On va faire une bouillabaisse ce soir chez Justin
…
Vous venez
…
?’ and be off.

And chances were that we would join them, meeting at sundown outside Chez Schwob or La Marine, deciding who to go in whose car, then on to eat the bouillabaisse or the loup, the handsome big fish they’d caught that morning, at Justin’s restaurant on the port of Toulon. And there or wherever else our evening was spent would be a sense of elation, of being en fête, of sharing the pleasure of that moment. Spirited talk bubbled. The company were neither residents nor tourists, they were members of that new wave of artists and writers who had fallen in love with the South of France and were making it their summer habitat. The dozen or so who chose Sanary were painters and their wives, one or two of them also painters, an art critic, some literary journalists. Give or take a few years either way, they were in their thirties – young enough to be casually in fine health, old enough to have achieved a part of what they had set out to do. Some had come up a hard way. (Including, for most of the men, fighting in the war now ten years past.) They had reached a good stage in their lives, enjoying a measure of recognition, lack of material want. They had earned their dinners at Chez Justin and under the jasmine-scented arbours of their houses. Rented: no one had bought or built yet; many later did. They believed that the good times, now they had come, would last. Meanwhile their lives and work were based in Paris, though few of them were born Parisians.

The centre of their circle was a couple: he a Polish Jew, a tailor’s son, who had got himself to Paris as a boy; she born, like Colette with whom she shared many attributes and tastes, in a rural corner of Burgundy (or so I always fondly believed). They were the Kislings, the painter and his wife Renée. Kisling, Kiki, was on the threshold then of his international reputation. (Later he became fashionable, some thought over-fashionable – too many portraits of rich women – 
followed by relative eclipse. At the time of writing, 1988, France is preparing to celebrate the centenary of his birth in 1991.) Kiki was a charming looking creature, with something of a slender bear about him, short, with his round head, round amiable flat face and Slavic slanted eyes – very clean and trim in his blue cotton trousers and check shirts with the short sleeves; but I oughtn’t really to attempt describing him: there is at least one full-length self-portrait of the artist as a young man. There he stands brush in hand in his
pale-washed
blues and red-white shirt before his easel. I never saw him wearing anything else, not in winter in his Paris studio, not in New York, in exile from Vichy France during the war we did not yet think of then.

Renée, his wife, was a phenomenon, a force of nature which was capable of tender – as well as ruthless – emotions and of many civilised human skills. Her looks were startling: a blaze of vitality and colour, not readily defined in conventional feminine terms –
belle laide
leaves out the notion of scale and sculpture,
bel monstre
gets nearer to the mark. A head of rock-hewn features supported on a strong neck and powerful bronzed shoulders, large prominent blue eyes, heavy-lidded, thickly lined with kohl and a fat blue, honey-fair hair, straight cut, savagely bleached and streaked by sea water and sun, a fringe covering one side of the wide forehead, a nose like a parrot’s beak. Her clothes dazzled with strong plain colours; she dressed simply, a pair of sailor’s trousers, barebacked singlets, turquoise or scarlet, sea-shells about her neck, shell and ivory bracelets on her arms. It was superb. And when the monster smiled – proffering, it might be, a slice of melon – it was a smile of serene sweetness and sensuality.