VIVA AND I were inside the beach house now. It had been dark for some time Jack Ives had made us both some dinner which we’d eaten on our laps. Then he’d gone off to sketch out what he would do the next day. She was reclining on Harry’s white couch, the Fortuny model in decline. On her head was a thick white headache band. Her face strained for dignity, a withered bird’s face, the skin very dark around the eyes.
‘There were several cars parked around the station at Bagnoles,’ she said. ‘They all had their hoods back and their windows were wound down and rattling. There was a lad in a cap beside one of them, with a sign clasped to his chest saying “Cordier”. We’d heard about runners from the woman with the legs, who said there was a class of person at these resorts who lived on nothing but tips.
‘Your father didn’t approve of this sort of thing at all, and I felt very self-conscious what with our two sacks of paper and a couple of sugar bags for our clothes. Henri said he abhorred servitude of the sort expected from the boy, who was lumping bundles into the trunk of this throbbing black Renault sent up to fetch us. When Henri tipped him a good many more francs than was customary, he got a chagrined look in return, probably for his lack of savoir faire.
‘There were three of us for the Cordier. The third was an old man in a homburg, with a bandaged foot. He had to be lifted into the car by the runner and the chauffeur. His tip got a respectful raising of the cap from the boy.
‘I felt cross with Henri for being grumpy. Here we were lifted out of the slums and plonked in the lap of luxury. There was the casino on an artificial lake, all flag-poled and cupola’d and obviously very much in use. Henri called it an abomination. He had a look on his face which I hated – his eyes used to disappear into dark caves under his forehead so I couldn’t see anything except the sun shining on the fringe of his lashes. I used to think he did it on purpose. He could be very unreliable when he was young, full of self-righteousness. His mother used to say it was just “his way”, but I thought he was over-concerned with being in the right.
‘The Cordier was just as sumptuous as the car. It was built into a hillside; you drove down to it off the road. In keeping with many of the other establishments in Bagnoles it was of grey-white brick, picked out in terracotta round the windows and cornices. A flight of white stairs led from a sun terrace to the driveway, where two porters were ready to lift the crippled man from the car and carry him up to the lobby.
‘I felt very shabby and disappointed. After all, I had worked out and practised my seduction technique night and day for a week. I’d primed Henri up properly before the trip and I was saturated with love. Sodden with it – and here was he in a bad mood because Bagnoles hadn’t been designed by Emile Zola. It wasn’t my fault.
‘I slapped my ringed hand down on the desk to spite him, and he gave the name we were supposed to give. He didn’t say everything we were supposed to say, though. We were supposed to be meeting someone there called Genet. Since he didn’t say it, I did. Your father was holding his mouth in that disapproving way he used to have …’
‘Disapproving?’ I asked. ‘Dadda disapproving?’
‘Well, of course, you never saw it, I suppose. He used to hold his mouth in a certain way, with its little side kinks crimped upwards and his lips pursed forward. And, of course, he was grinding his thumbs, making that annoying noise with them. It made me think he was feeling for the fabric of the place. The clerk picked up the phone, began dialling and asked, quite unexpectedly, “Which Monsieur Genet?”
‘Well, we didn’t know there was more than one, but apparently the original Monsieur Genet’s brother had arrived at the weekend. The first Monsieur Genet was convalescing from an illness and the second had come to visit him.
‘I said we wanted to see the first Monsieur Genet, and although that was probably the right thing to do, it made Henri scowl all the more. The concierge dialled and gave us a room number, saying the porter would take our luggage to our room while we visited Monsieur Genet. Well, we’d been told not to let the journals out of our sight, so I said we had a special reason for wanting to meet Monsieur Genet in the lobby.
‘The concierge dialled up again and said we wanted to meet the first Monsieur Genet in the lobby, but apparently he was taking the rest cure, so his brother was on the way instead.
‘We were quite nervous, because we’d been told always to follow instructions to a T, and to be very wary of changed instructions. Contrary to expectation, however, the second Monsieur Genet was a roly-poly, beaming sort of man who bounced off the stairs like a cat on springs. He was disarmingly pleasant, and the light kept flashing off his little round spectacles, making him look a bit like a clown.
‘He tossed our hessian bags up over his shoulder as if they’d been full of loose-packed straw rather than bundled papers, and he bounded on up the stairs, motioning us to follow.
‘I remember the room we went into was quite sumptuous and had open French windows facing out over the gardens at the back of the hotel. There was a trellis smothered in white roses, leading the way to what I supposed was a race. We could see water slipping behind a wall. And there was a huge sequoia on the lawn. I remember thinking it was wearing its shadow like a skirt that had slid from its hips and lay around its feet. As I said, I was soggy with love.
‘I didn’t know who it was lying on the bed with his leg up on pillows. Henri told me later it was Carlo Rosselli himself, and the other man was his brother, Nello. Apparently Carlo had developed phlebitis soon after going to Spain. He had fought on in the trenches for six or seven months, but at the end of May he’d come back to France to undergo a cure. But we didn’t know this till afterwards and all Henri could do was sound off about decadent luxury.
‘The meeting didn’t last long. They told us to go and have fun in Bagnoles. Well, we wandered off, me trailing after Henri, who wasn’t even looking at the surroundings, so I had to imagine my idyll rather than have it.
‘The situation had snaked out of my control, and it became a lost cause altogether when we saw an eagle pause in the sky, drop and come up out of a cedar with a squirrel in its beak. Henri was disgusted. He turned away and said he wanted to follow the race and see where it went.
‘I thought I’d brought a curse on myself, but I couldn’t think what I was doing wrong. Claude was far away but she seemed to be exerting long-distance control.
‘And then I realised it wasn’t only Claude who was influencing my mood, because when the race became a stream and was surrounded by weeping willows that were halfway to showing their full leaf, I was reminded of my horrible childhood. Weeping willows beside creeks were a sign of the invader in our town. They symbolised rural pacification. They were where city people had their picnics, spreading their rugs on skerricks of soft green grass in the hope that the place was used enough to consign the stinging ants to its margins. They’d bring wads of newspaper to stun the horseflies and mosquitoes. The idea was you ate your soggy tomato sandwich, drank your thermos of tea, had a bit of a ramble and then went home, supposedly renewed.’
But Viva knew better than this. She knew that at a similar time of year to June in France, the Australian forests would be alive with rosellas and green parrots, there would be cockatoos, magpies and a banquet of textures, aromas and sounds in which you could lose yourself completely. It could enter you and make you disappear, along with all your fear and anguish.
She would have liked to tell Henri, but felt her way of telling would be inadequate and would not induce the intended mood. Gates would shut in her mind when she reached for the tender part of herself, and her thoughts could only be conveyed in banalities. Though this was the occasion, if any, to conquer Henri, she was being forbidden to do it. She felt herself to be like the eagle, but trapped too high in air currents to discern her prey, the creature Claude, whose beauty was the perfect camouflage.
As she was thinking these thoughts, they came on a camp. A rough-looking man was sitting by a tent, skinning a rabbit. He had his back to them but Viva recognised the coat. ‘It’s one of those men from the train,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe they’re poachers and they come here to catch hares and rabbits to sell.’ There were such people in Paris; Viva had seen them at Les Halles, displaying the rabbits hung up inside their open coats.
The man’s back seemed to mark the boundary of their walk and they turned back without disturbing him.
‘We had to sleep in the same bed that night. I tried very hard to be vulnerable and seductive, but we were treated to a champagne and pheasant dinner and your father let himself be disgusted. Oh, the arrogant assumptions of twenty-year-olds! When we went to bed he lined up the pillows in between us.’
Viva held her devastation at arm’s length so that it seemed like someone else’s. She imagined weeping herself to shreds, but didn’t do it. For years now, the only legitimate reaction she could rouse in herself had been jealousy.
The next day they took the train back to Paris. Henri had a hangover that lasted the whole trip. When he apologised for his bad mood, she made of it what little she could.
‘We went back to Bagnoles years later,’ she continued. ‘I wanted to undo the pain of Henri’s rejection. We spent a few days there but it was winter, and the feeling of the place was quite different. It was all boarded up. The Cordier wasn’t a hotel anymore and we had to stay in a place that was nothing like it. We’d make love in the evenings, but I’d wake up later and find Henri crying. No doubt it was for his lost Claude. But I was not lost, I was there. And then I thought perhaps it wasn’t just for Claude he wept, but for the Rossellis. They were assassinated the day we left Bagnoles all those years ago. The bodies weren’t found until a couple of days after we got back to Paris.
‘For a while, Henri and I thought we might have led their killers to them, maybe they were the rabbiters. But that wasn’t it at all. They’d been under the surveillance of a group of right-wing French, a splinter group that formed when the Action française was disbanded. They called themselves the Cagoulards, the Hooded Ones. Apparently a few of them were staying at a hotel opposite the Cordier called the Bel Air. Henri and I looked for it when we went back, but it had been knocked down. Anyway, it was up the hill from the Cordier and had a good view of it.
‘Apparently, while we were on our way back to Paris, Nello and Carlo went for a drive to Alençon, a town down the road going to Couterne. They visited a patisserie there and had some coffee and cakes. The killers overtook them on their way back to Bagnoles.
‘They got some distance ahead and faked a breakdown, with the car blocking the road. They had their bonnet up, and when the Rossellis stopped and got out of their car, they shot them. Nello must have survived the shooting, because when the bodies were found, he also had stab wounds.
‘At first the police suspected Italian fascists, but bit by bit it became clear they were French. A hairdresser from Bagnoles had been riding her bike past the place where it happened and she saw a Peugeot take off at high speed, and blood on the road. The bodies weren’t far away, but they weren’t found until some man was caught short on the road and nipped in behind the Rossellis’ parked car to relieve himself.
‘The hairdresser knew the killer’s car, of course, and she started to receive threatening mail. That led the police to the Cagoulards. Apparently they’d done it in return for the delivery of a hundred semiautomatic Berettas from Italy on Mussolini’s say-so. They were going to stage a fascist-style coup d’état in France. It was fixed to take place in early November, but they couldn’t raise enough support from inside the army and someone dobbed them in. The leaders were arrested. Their trial dragged on until well after Henri and I had left France. By the time the war broke out they were in jail, but they were let out because they said they wanted to fight. More than one of them ended up in Vichy fighting for Hitler. There’s a certain brand of make-up I never buy because one of the Rossellis’ assassins escaped to Spain and was instrumental in setting up the firm. Some of the others found work through him after the liberation.
‘The first inkling Henri and I had that anything was wrong was when we arrived back at rue de la Glacière from Bagnoles and found it milling with gendarmes. The Icebox had been ripped apart and Allegra and the concierge had been badly hurt. We never knew if the two attacks were linked. Perhaps they weren’t at all, but someone else from Giustizia e libertà was roughed up at the same time and it was obvious someone wanted to silence us. It didn’t stop the next edition of Giustizia e libertà carrying a front-page denunciation of Mussolini, all the same.
‘Later that night – it was terribly hot, I remember, and the nurses in the hospital waiting room were ill-tempered and unsympathetic, they said we were terrorists and deserved what we got – the concierge died. Allegra had been beaten around the head and had contusions. She was drifting in and out of consciousness, but it seemed she would pull through. She managed to tell us to get out and go to Nicola in Australia as soon as we could.
‘Even though your grandmother was very ill,’ she said, her voice under strain, ‘all I could think of was I’d won. It sounds horrible, but the thought of Henri coming to Australia with me put every feeling I had for anyone else out of my mind. I was almost gay. Your grandmother was dangerously ill, and I was gay!
‘We went to live in a cheap hotel near the Katzes. I went through the motions of disgust and outrage. I even felt generous letting Henri say goodbye to Claude.
‘He wanted to marry her and bring her to Australia, but Lev Katz said no. When Henri got his Australian citizenship she could go out, but not before. It was so far away. Henri was twenty, but Claude was still only seventeen.
‘Only seventeen! I thought, only seventeen! – I’ve been only seventeen, I was only fifteen once. I was so jealous of Claude, so jealous! She had everything: beauty, protection, love. Then, when I went to see Allegra before leaving for Australia, she said, “Don’t lose your heart to Henri, Viva.” It put me in an agony, knowing I must keep to myself till he felt he’d said goodbye to Claude. If I really had won, the prize would be a while coming.
‘Well, we went to England, took ship and sailed. Your father was downcast for the whole journey. I had to pretend sympathy. However, after we’d arrived in Melbourne to a very warm welcome, I felt the tide had turned and I’d mastered something. Henri was smiling again. My only problem seemed to be Julius, but I told him I was in love with Henri and he could see I was: or perhaps Orpah had extracted a promise from him. Whatever, he let me go with no fuss.
‘We lived at Rose’s. It was really good for a time, and of course Henri became a great favourite with the Lonsdales and other people we knew in Australia, but still I hadn’t seduced him. Sometimes he would hold my hand or put his arm around me affectionately, but only because he thought I was showing sisterly concern.
‘He wrote to Claude for a long time, but he had to wait five years before he could become a citizen and by then, of course, we were in the middle of a war, and France had fallen.
‘One letter got through for Rose from Lev, when the invasion of France was imminent. He said the Germans would never bring the French to heel. The national climate in France was something they wouldn’t understand. The will to fight had evaporated since the First World War and the loss of two million Frenchmen, which, when you think of it, was a third of the male population between the ages of twenty and fifty.
‘Allegra had made quite a good recovery, despite having had her skull fractured, and was living back with them at their insistence. She was still working for what was left of the Concentration, but the Rossellis were an appalling loss and everything was in dreadful disarray.
‘It was after France had fallen that Henri found it all too much to take and began sleeping with me, but it was like a palliative to him, and if he could have turned me into Claude he would have.
‘The only person who loved me for myself was Leslie. He was called up during 1941, though he hated the whole idea of it, as did we all. Leslie didn’t show much interest in women. I kept thinking it was because he was young, but Rose, whose morality was much freer than mine, said she thought he might be homosexual. I dismissed this at first but then Harry Laurington, whom I did not then know, virtually abducted him, coerced him to desert and set him up as a painter, here in this house.
‘Rose sat by and allowed it to happen. Homosexuality was, of course, illegal then. It carried terrific social opprobium and severe penalties for those who were caught.
‘I was outraged. I suppose as much because of the danger involved as because I saw Leslie’s actions in the light of my own. I’d been a rich man’s moll, after all, and quite a lot of that was driven by the thought of saving Leslie for a better life. Now he was a rich man’s moll, and the situation was ever so much more dangerous than Julius Lichtblau’s fling with me.
‘Your father tried to persuade me that Leslie’s sexuality didn’t matter, but to me, and to most people at that time, the thought of an older man keeping a younger one to have sex with him was criminal. And then, what would happen when the affair ended? Did your father or any of those people care? Leslie was a poor boy, there was no rich family for him to fall back on. When Harry grew tired of him, there would only be me. I can tell you, I tormented them. And the more I did, the more they closed ranks on me, determined to make me capitulate.
‘In the meantime, Harry joined forces with Rose and Laurent and went ahead with his cafe-restaurant. The first Siècle was in the basement of the boarding house. They opened three or four nights a week. It wasn’t ever going to be legal because it didn’t conform with fire regulations, so they ran it as a kind of open-house bistro for their friends. Laurent and Rose did all the cooking, but the war made the menu rather unpredictable, with rationing and what have you. And, of course, they didn’t have a wine licence though they served wine. A certain group of people came, and Siècle was known among the painters. I worked there infrequently. They would give me a share of the take but basically I earned my living doing a war job.
‘People liked Siècle, I suppose because it was exciting, being illegal, and it took their minds off fear. Sometimes they couldn’t run to a main course and once Rose did wonderful things with tripe, but none of the Australians could eat it.
‘On Sundays Henri and I would come down here to see Leslie. I could see everyone else “making do” and “making the best of it”, and sometimes I’d feel part of the whole thing, but at other times I’d think, “at whose expense?” Because it seemed in a way to be at my expense. Henri was using me as a substitute for Claude and Leslie was letting Harry have sex with him in return for being fed and hidden from the Military Police.
‘We spent Christmas Day 1941 down here; there was me, your father, Leslie and Harry. They say Christmas is the time when family members murder each other. Well, I felt hostile towards everyone. Harry and Leslie tried to placate me, but I wasn’t going to condone their affair. And then Henri told me I was being impossible, and I had a huge fight with him, following which he hitchhiked back to Melbourne, went to Rose’s and told her he was leaving. He said he wanted to clear his head and he was going to go where his feet took him for a while. He told Rose of his love for Claude and of his affair with me, and that he didn’t think it would be very helpful to stay around me because he didn’t feel for me what he felt for Claude.
‘Well, I remembered his protracted farewells to Claude in Paris and was mortified by the memories. To me, my lovemaking with Henri was the consummation of my feelings for him. For him, it was substitute love. I felt I had nothing. No thing. Except, my period didn’t come. I didn’t know where the hell Henri had gone, he’d just vanished, but my period didn’t come. Second month, my period didn’t come. Third month.
‘We thought we were about to be invaded any day by the Japanese and here was I, going to have a baby.
‘I had things out with Harry. I told him all my fears. At first, I hated him and said so. But Harry was a kind man. He is a kind man. If I could not patch things up with Henri, he said, he would marry me and adopt the child. It seemed he and Leslie had decided something, perhaps they had decided things would work out better if Harry married me. I asked what would happen about sex between them. Harry said he didn’t know, the attraction between them was very powerful. I said he would ruin Leslie if the sex continued, he ought to give him a chance, Leslie hadn’t even experienced sex with a woman yet. And Harry agreed. Leslie ought to be given the chance to live an orthodox life.
‘I gave Henri six more months, by the end of which I had only days to go before my confinement.
‘We were married here, in this place, Harry and I, on the 4th of September 1942. Checkie was born in Geelong, on the 11th. She was christened Cecilia Viva Laurington, Cecilia being your grandmother’s confirmation name. Henri didn’t even know she existed.
‘There are worse fates than being born into the Laurington family, Isobel, and Harry’s relatives were absolutely delighted to think he had a wife and child, so I left it at that.
‘Henri was still in Australia. Nicola would get cards from here and there and everywhere, but there was never a forwarding address. He said he’d be back, but wasn’t sure when. Nicola didn’t know that Checkie was Henri’s child. I don’t suppose he ever thought about things like that, taken up as he was with his politics. I didn’t think it was in anyone’s interests to tell him, so he always assumed Checkie was Harry’s.
‘Rose knew, of course, and told Henri when he got back to Melbourne early in ’43. He gave Rose the paintings he’d done while he was away and she gave them to me for Checkie, but he wasn’t going to interfere with our lives.
‘The next I heard of him, he was going to marry some bank teller!’
This obviously hurt Viva a great deal, as she had to clutch herself and reel around and make as if to clap her hands to her ears.
But I also felt something. I was suddenly overcome with a deep surge of love for my mother. ‘She’s not some teller,’ I said to Viva. ‘You have a life, Stella has a life. You’ve shown courage when you’ve been called upon to show it, but you haven’t much compassion. Stella has. No doubt it’s cleverer to be courageous than it is to be kind, but Stella’s whole life is kindness, even when she bungles it.’
‘Is that enough?’ she asked bitterly.
‘No more than courage is. I guess it takes courage to overcome the taboo on killing, yet people kill in the name of ideals. At least the motive for kindness is kindness itself; courage may have the vilest of motives.’
‘And kindness, the worst of outcomes!’ she cried. There were tears in her eyes now. ‘No, I’m not kind. I never was kind, but I did love Henri, and I had to bear your grandmother saying to me, “Don’t lose your heart to Henri, Viva. Henri will always be in love with girlishness, and you are a woman.” She said it as if I were capable of sharing the sort of dignity she had. All through my life, I’ll remember our visit to Fortuny’s. When I said I wouldn’t model for them in spite of the huge temptation, they gave me a blue silk slip and a scarf. A magic scarf, made with secret dyes. I used to dance with that scarf in your father’s loft, and they’d draw me while that slip clung to me as if it were a lover. Or a child. I stole a bit of Henri to make Checkie, Isobel. She was a sweet baby. I compensated myself with that; she had your grandmother’s gorgeous blonde hair, but the eyes were mine, the face was mine. I could read history in Checkie, the coming together of separate strands, the expunging of the pain of my past.
‘We met once on the street, by accident, Henri and I, just before his wedding. I cursed that I didn’t have Checkie with me, it might have won him away from your mother. He said he was going to marry someone who had experienced much the same sort of loss as he had. We knew Claude was dead by this time. The same sort of loss.’ Viva shook her head and wept.
‘And then to have him call his first child Allegra! I hated him! Oh, God, how I hated him! But he’d left some paintings with us and I was determined to keep them. I was going to show the world who his true wife was. I understood him. I knew him. What did your mother know? And then, when I met her by accident, you two sitting there with his eyes copied into your faces, and she so heedless, so damned blithe! The day she married the man I loved, my brother walked into the sea and drowned himself because his own situation seemed to him to be morally impossible.’