The reaction hit me the day after I arrived in Paris: waves of black depression, sudden fits of weeping, rages in which I wanted to throw things and smash them, long white nights of lying awake and staring at the ceiling.
How Gianni endured me I will never know. How he navigated between his medical practice and a half crazed woman in his bachelor apartment is a mystery, too. He coaxed; he scolded; he made demands, which he rescinded only when he saw I couldn’t meet them. He was doctor one minute, big brother the next, fussy and womanish, too, when it served his purpose. There were times when I wanted to run away, hide myself for ever; but Gianni seemed to have thrown a net over me, gossamer thin but strong as steel, so that I could not escape either the house or his solicitude.
He brought me books which I skimmed and laid aside. He played me Chopin in the evenings. He walked me like a lover in the parks. He encouraged me to cook for us, forced me to confer with the Brothers Ysambard about my affairs, and, one quite memorable evening, to give a dinner party with Basil Zaharoff as guest of honour. I asked Gianni what was the idea of having Zaharoff to table. The man was a horror, a cruel manipulator, a dealer in death.
“So are you, my love,” Gianni reminded me tersely. “This will be an exercise in mutual tolerance, in gratitude, too, because he pays my bills on time, and in diplomacy – which touches you quite closely.”
“Diplomacy?”
“Sexual and social. The man offered you employment, which you turned down. You gave him one night in bed, for which he rewarded you quite handsomely. That’s his bracelet you’re wearing now, isn’t it? After that one night, he went away, pleasantly inflamed at the prospect of an affair with you. What happened? You fled to Zurich without so much as kiss-my-hand! The man is offended. He isn’t used to that sort of treatment. He has told me so himself. I have pleaded for you – ill health, menopausal problems, the whole list! He’s only half mollified. He can be a bad enemy. So you’re going to put him at your right hand for dinner and you’re going to eat a little humble pie, while he enjoys the saddle of lamb. Capito?”
Capito! It was hard not to understand Gianni and his Latin logic. The dinner party went off well. I don’t remember the other guests. They were rich nobodies, but good patients of Gianni’s. I do remember, most vividly, how Basil Zaharoff questioned me about my experience in analysis with Jung:
“So you sit and talk, just that?”
“Well. You sit, you move about, you stand. That’s Jung’s method. I understand Freud and others like the patient to lie down on a couch. I could see that one might avoid certain aggressive reactions that way.”
“And you talk intimately?”
“The more intimately the better.”
“Does the doctor – the analyst – take notes?”
“Jung did. He took copious notes.”
“And presumably those go into his files?”
“In Magda’s case,” Gianni cuts into the dialogue without so much as a by-your-leave, “in Magda’s case, Jung gave me all his hand-written notes. I burned them. But in general, yes, the analyst records the conversations for later study.”
“Any such record could be highly damaging.” Zaharoff is determined to pursue the argument. “Damaging not only to the patient, but to any other person mentioned in the discussions.”
“It’s a perennial problem in medicine,” says Gianni, agreeably. “The law prevents disclosure in court. It protects the Hippocratic confidence between doctor and patient. But I agree: there is no protection – no adequate protection – against malicious or irresponsible disclosure. That’s why I insisted on having Magda’s notes handed to me, why I burned them in her suite at the Baur au Lac.”
“Were they so damaging then?” Zaharoff asks it like a joke question: when did you stop beating your wife?
Gianni is quick to answer.
“I don’t know. I didn’t read them.”
“Why not?”
“I have my own opinions of Magda. I did not want to pollute them with those of another man. Come, my friend! Would Basil Zaharoff accept another man’s judgment of a woman? Of course not.”
“But why,” asks Zaharoff innocently, “why didn’t you, Magda, continue with Jung?”
“For quite a serious reason. We were temperamentally incompatible. Patient and analyst alike have to repose enormous trust in each other. Jung and I were at odds the whole day.”
“As the recommending physician,” Gianni continues to assert himself in the talk, “I felt it wiser for her not to continue.”
“But surely Jung’s notes would be valuable for further treatment?”
“They might also be very confusing,” says Gianni. “It’s not the same as physical medicine: I could describe your symptoms to any reputable doctor and he would make the same diagnosis as I. In psychiatry it’s different, much more clouded.”
“Weren’t you curious about Jung’s notes, Magda? I can’t imagine any woman not wanting to know what the man was writing about her.”
Zaharoff is jocular, benign. I, on the contrary, was concerned to be serious.
“You miss the point. When you’re there, as I was, anchored in the chair, you don’t care what he’s putting down. He’s doing surgery on your psyche and it hurts like hell. For all you know, he could be writing bad verse or drawing dirty pictures. Anyway, I’m glad Gianni burned the stuff!”
“Fascinating,” says Basil Zaharoff. “I can see a future for the art! It has lots of problems and some interesting uses. Just at this moment I would very much like to have a transcript of the love life of Mr. Lloyd George!”
When the evening was over, Gianni paid me a big compliment. I had done very well. I had charmed the vultures out of the trees and turned them into singing birds. I asked him:
“What was Zaharoff going on about? Why should he be interested in analytic procedures?”
“He’s not,” said Gianni with a grin. “He’s interested in you – and how much you might have told about his business offer or his prowess in bed.”
“And if I’d spilled it all?”
“Then, this week or next, next month perhaps, you’d be dead! Don’t laugh! It’s true. He’s made a huge fortune. He’s achieved enormous power. Now he has to be respectable. That was the whole point of the dinner party. I want you in Paris. I can’t keep you here if Basil Zaharoff is unhappy about you.”
“I don’t believe this!”
“Believe it, my dear!” says Gianni curtly. “We live in a jungle, and Basil Zaharoff is king of the beasts.”
Two mornings later Gianni knocked on my bedroom door and commanded me to get dressed:
“Old clothes, stout shoes. The dowdier you can look, the better. We leave in thirty minutes.”
“Where are we going?”
“La Ruelle des Anges – Angel Lane.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
“That’s the only pretty thing about it. It’s a couple of blocks behind the Boul ‘Mich’, a rough quarter – hence the sober clothes.”
“Why are we going there?”
“Business.”
“What sort of business?”
“Possess your soul in patience.”
“I don’t have a soul.”
“Then possess your body in patience.”
“What the hell do you think I’ve been doing? It seems years since I’ve had any sex.”
“Good! Then you’ll have a clear head and a pure mind.”
“I don’t have a mind either, at this hour of the morning.”
“Then we’ll have to make do with whatever’s left, won’t we? Hurry please! It’s five past eight; we leave at eight-thirty.”
La Ruelle des Anges belied its name. It was a grimy cobbled alley with an open gutter down the centre and rows of bedraggled old dwellings on either side. At the far end was a big wooden coach gate with a smaller door cut into it. Gianni explained that the name Angel Lane was an irony. The angels in question were the prostitutes who used to live there but who had left long since for better accommodation. When we approached the coach gate, Gianni pointed to a newly lettered sign: “Hospice des Anges”. He pushed open the wicket gate and ushered me into what had once been the stable yard of an imposing mansion. The stables were now in an advanced stage of reconstruction. The yard was busy with workmen. Gianni threw out his arms in an expansive gesture.
“Well, this is it!”
“This is what?”
“The business, the investment we talked about. We should be able to open in about six weeks.”
“Doing what? Bringing the angels back?”
“In a way, yes. That’s what the name on the gate signifies. It’s a hospice for women or girls who’ve been on the game and fallen victims to it, one way or another. It’s a place where they can come when they get out of gaol, or when they’ve been beaten up or fallen pregnant. There’ll be lodgings, a kitchen and dining room, an infirmary. The commune of Paris has promised a small subsidy on the basis that we’ll help to keep down the V.D. rate.”
“And who’s going to run all this?”
“There’s a small group of women in Paris – widows mostly – who are experimenting with an old Christian concept of common life and service. They call themselves ‘Les Filles du San Graal’. They don’t wear religious dress. They don’t make vows, just pledge themselves to service for as long as they can offer it. They’ve taken up this idea and they’re going to staff the place for us. I’ve undertaken to supply medical service and try to raise the funds we’ll need to keep going. It’s a simple idea. A place for women to go when things get too much, a place to be when they’re sick and friendless. We’ve got a motto. We’re printing it on the cards which will be passed out around the quarter: ‘Hospice des Anges. Here we make no judgments. We offer only friendship and service.’ Well, what do you think?”
“What am I supposed to think?”
He tells me – tic-tac! – in a swift rattle of words.
“That it’s a good idea! That you’ll give us a lot of money and that you’ll come and work here as a doctor!”
I simply do not believe what I am hearing. It is all too cliché for words. I round on him.
“If this is your idea of a joke, Gianni.”
“No joke.”
“You’re out of your mind! I’m known on the circuit the girls come from! You’ll make yourself and this place a laughing stock.”
“Change your name then! Call yourself Sister Mary of the Angels. I don’t give a damn! But I want you here.”
“The money you can have, but. . .”
“To hell with your money! I want you. And you, by God, need this!”
“Like the plague I need it.”
“You are the plague!” He is cold and utterly contemptuous. “You’re the Black Death! You kill everything you touch – because you’ve never in all your life thought of anyone but yourself. This place is a refuge for the casualties you and your kind have created and will go on creating. I read Jung’s notes on you very carefully. I understand you better than he does. I’m an odd one, like you. I’m also an old fashioned absolutist; and so – God damn it! – are you! You want to kill yourself. And you will one day; because you’re a defaulting debtor and you don’t want to face the accounting. I’m giving you a chance to do just that: pay life for life, child for child, love for hate. Jung wrote something about you that hit me like a hammer. ‘She expects too much. She demands a god I can’t reveal to her, an absolution she hasn’t earned and probably never will!’ How right he was! The only time you were close to God was at your husband’s bedside and you ran away from Him. You couldn’t face what He meant. The moment our first girl walks through our gate, with a broken nose and a dose of clap, He’s going to be here again, and you’re going to miss Him again – and again and again until you can’t bear the solitude any more and you blow what’s left of your brains out! Oh hell! What’s the use! Come on, I’ll get you a cab.”
“Gianni!” He is halfway to the gate before I find my voice, a small unsteady voice that I hardly recognise as my own. “Gianni, wait a minute, please!”
“What is it?”
“Suppose. Just suppose I said yes.”
“I’m supposing. Go on.”
“How could it possibly work? You know everything about me now. I can’t trust myself too far. You’ve said yourself I’m the Black Death. I know I am. In a place like this I’m very close to old memories and not-so-old associations. I don’t know what that’s going to do to me.”
“Frankly, I don’t either. I’m gambling.”
“Not on me, please! I’m a bad risk.”
“There was something else in Jung’s notes: ‘She is much taken with the inscription over my door.’”
“I was impressed by it, yes. But I really did feel something should have happened: a puff of blue flame, divine fireworks. I don’t know.”
“I believe something did happen.”
“What, for God’s sake?”
“That day in Jung’s house, you died a little.”
“A little! Oh, Gianni, Gianni, so much of me died that the rest hardly matters!”
“That’s what I’m gambling on: ‘Si le grain ne meurt.’”
“Say that again.”
“‘Si le grain ne meurt. Unless the seed dies it remains for ever solitary and sterile.’ It’s a quotation from the gospels.”
“I’ve never read them.”
“No matter. In this place you’ll be living them, with the blind, the halt, the maimed – and the spirochete as well. Come on! Let me show you round. I need some suggestions.”
“Gianni.”
“Yes?”
“What are you doing to me?”
“Just what you asked Jung to do – except he didn’t know how. This is a breech presentation, maximum risk, high-forceps delivery. You’re being born again – into Angel Lane!”
“You’re a bastard!”
“No, my darling you have it wrong. You’re the one born on the wrong side of the blanket. I’m a high born, totally legitimate Florentine snob!”