A Question of Loyalties Read online

  I have just remembered. It was Lord Alfred Douglas. How could he, of all men, have forgotten his father?

  So, back to my hotel, through the old town, where, despite the immigrant workers, it is still safe to walk the streets. People tell me this is the great recommendation of Geneva and other Swiss cities, that you can still walk at night without fear of attack. In fact, when I have lived in cities, I have always enjoyed walking when the traffic is still and ghosts murmur at street corners, and have never been assaulted, or even experienced fear. Of course I am very solid, and that may act as a deterrent. On the other hand, I don’t trouble to disguise my prosperity. I look what I am and am not, a fat burgher with an easy conscience and the fixed belief that the world is ordered for my convenience.

  We went to South Africa in 1945 when I was fourteen. Polly, my mother, was only too happy to leave Europe at the earliest opportunity: she craved the sun and had no taste for the austerity promised post-war Britain. Besides, my stepfather, Roddy, was eager to be home. He was only a dozen years older than me, and so some ten years younger than his wife, and I think perhaps a little anxious as to how she would be received by his family. Being brave, in short bursts anyway, he wanted to get the meeting over. I don’t mean to disparage Roddy, he had plenty of physical courage, as he had shown as a fighter pilot, but he hated rows; which was unfortunate for him, married to my mother.

  I was pleased enough to go. England meant the thin cocoa and cold corridors of the preparatory school to which I had been consigned, and where I had been mocked for my French accent. Everyone knew that ‘France has let us down.’ ‘My Daddy says the Frogs were windy as anything.’ ‘They jolly nearly lost us the war.’ ‘I bet they’re as windy as the Italians.’ ‘De Balafré’s a windy Frog.’ Etienne de Balafré; what would I have given to be Stephen Scarface?

  There was one master who tried to befriend me. He was a weedy young man, only nineteen or twenty, but debarred from military service because he was asthmatic or consumptive, something to do with his lungs; I can’t remember. Despite his condition his fingers were stained yellow by the Goldflake cigarettes he smoked to the very tip. He was due to go to Oxford, but was ‘doing his bit’ by teaching us seventy young savages English language and literature. How cruel we were to him! There was one boy, Tomkins, who could reduce Mr Fielding almost to tears by the contemptuous response he offered to the poems the poor man read us. Well, Mr Fielding was a Francophile, who used to carry copies of novels by Gide and de Montherlant around with him. I didn’t know then that my father had been acquainted with both men. Mr Fielding had developed a cult for General de Gaulle, which, out of kindness, I suppose, he was ready to extend to me. Poor man; I wonder what became of him.

  I hated England, and hungered for the sharp outlines of Provence. Its smell came back to me … when? In dreams? surely not … till it was stifled by the wet laurels and lush grass of the Home Counties. My father once said that the South of England was ‘like a salad, without oil, vinegar or garlic, of course’, and I repeated that line which was one of the few things I could positively recall that he had ever said, and held it to my heart as a talisman.

  Then it was discovered that my Aunt Aurora had been in prison. I don’t know how that came out. I can’t imagine any of the boys had ever heard of Mosley. One of the parents, a mother most likely, must have said something. ‘De Balafré’s aunt used to dance with Hitler’ … ‘Did you call him Uncle Adolf?’ they cried.

  They never found out about my father. I wonder what Mr Fielding would have said. I feel sure he would have found something sympathetic. That certainly is a measure of my misery in those years. Of course you will say, rightly, that my sufferings were as nothing in comparison with what was happening to children in Germany, Russia and indeed France. They were trivial. Boys however have no objective standards, no means of measuring their pain against anyone else’s. The life of youth is a sort of solipsism, and I was wretched. We are too fond perhaps of objective standards now, it is part of our obsession with statistics: Hamlet was a prince in Denmark, which didn’t prevent him from self-torture.

  I have often wondered, though not then, why they left me my name. Was it because, thanks to Aurora, my mother’s name, Lamancha, was itself notorious? It had a foreign ring too, though in fact it is the name of a Border Parish whence my great-grandfather came south, to make a fortune in the China trade and then establish himself as a landowner in Northamptonshire.

  When I was recently in England, after my Lamancha grandmother’s funeral, I was approached by a young man who was writing a book about Aurora.

  ‘A thin subject,’ I said, ‘surely.’

  He waved pale fingers at me, and smoothed the waistcoat he affected.

  ‘Fascinating,’ he said, ‘a period piece. And a woman of rare quality.’

  ‘You’re too young to have met her,’ I said.

  ‘Oh indeed yes, though she would only be seventy-two now, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve just buried her mother.’

  ‘All that period,’ he said, ‘and that set mean a lot to me. I would have chosen Unity, but she’s been done, and Lady Mosley’ – is it my imagination, or did his slim fingers inscribe the sign of the cross over his dove-coloured waistcoat? – ‘is still out of court, as it were. Though I’ve had such a charming letter from her.’

  Perhaps I do him wrong; perhaps he was only brushing the crumbs from the cloth – he had constrained me to offer him tea in the hotel where he had run me to earth.

  Roddy was, I am sure, eager to be back in South Africa, eager but anxious too: anxiety was at the heart of his character. Perhaps that was caused by the head wound which had ended his career as a pilot, I don’t know, but I fancy it had always been there. There was something vulnerable about his beauty: so slim, so blond, so tawny-skinned, with deep blue eyes; had he married Polly, I came to wonder, to protect him from himself? Even approaching forty Polly retained that androgynous appearance so characteristic of her decade. Roddy was quick to be wounded, and Polly, I soon saw, now that I was released from my boarding school, and from holidays passed at my grandmother’s, was discontented. With her this has always taken the form of an increased, a desperate sociability: and Roddy, who was in full retreat, even then, was anxious to cut himself and the wife and child he had acquired off from the surrounding life of those who would have to be regarded as equals. Then there was his mother, brisk, dominating, out of key: how she brooded on Polly, how she suspected her. So when Roddy, with that silent obstinacy which had in the first place taken him across the sea to fight for an England to which he had surely little reason to feel attached, now removed us after only a few months from Cape Town, where Polly was already, with her nose for society, acquiring as interesting a ‘set’ – her own word, always – as might be found there, and settled us on the farm he had inherited from his grandfather, which lay some three hundred miles out of town, you might have guessed that the marriage was heading for the rocks: to the satisfaction of course of Roddy’s mother.

  Yet it never quite arrived at that destination. Perhaps my own happiness on the farm helped to reconcile Polly. I used to believe that, but the illusion has faded. How could that have been the case? The truth, as I now see it, was that Polly herself, beneath the brisk carapace, was alarmed. Heaven knows, she had cause enough; she had looked into deep whirlpools; she had seen how even the most confident and the strongest could be broken, she had lived, after all, among those who never questioned their own immense superiority, who gloried in it indeed; and where were they now? Polly herself had never of course quite tempted fate in the same way. She had an English scepticism which served as a substitute for the Greek sense of hubris, something which had been denied to Aurora; she accepted that she was one of the fortunate ones in so many ways, and she knew that when you spin a coin it may fall either side. So now, instead of making scenes, she sat on the terrace, smoking her imported American cigarettes, those long Pall Malls from the pre-filter age, with the bo
ttle of Cape gin to hand, gazed across the golden and green expanse of Roddy’s farming enterprise, and watched the lines creep down from the corners of his mouth and eyes, and watched his hand stray ever earlier in the day to the bottle of Cape brandy, which was set out on the wickerwork table beside her gin an hour after breakfast every day, and said little that was pleasant to him, but nothing that crossed the verge of disaster. Once bitten, twice shy.

  We never talked of my father; that was forbidden territory for years. And we never, Polly and I, in those days discussed Roddy either. It wasn’t until my last visit that, holding a photograph of him in his Air Force uniform, so young-looking, so afraid and so nerving himself to overcome his fear, she said, with a flicker of contempt, ‘Strange the taste for men who are not quite strong enough.’ She took a sip of gin. ‘And, when you can see so clearly just what they are, why do you prefer to pretend they are different?’ She has never thought, it has not perhaps even occurred to her, that she might have let them both down.

  How extraordinary, in my fifty-fifth year, to be mulling over this dead stuff in this wayward journal. It is like a compulsion to turn out an attic room. Polly hated lumber. She would have thrown everything out. Yet now she finds herself turning back, with cool resentment. Life has not been as it was sold to her. I had a letter the other day: ‘ … it’s so murky, darling. Of course everything is going to pot here, and that’s maybe why I find myself remembering what it was like then. Not happily, I assure you. Oh it was great fun when we were all young, but let’s face it, your poor father was no good. And yet, except in the hunting-season when I was a girl, or on hunting mornings anyway, I don’t suppose I have ever been really happy except in our years together when we lived in that little apartment off the Palais-Royal, and we still made love, and he still laughed at my jokes. That’s the really important thing in a marriage or an affair, and of course poor Roddy has no sense of humour at all. Perhaps if he had, I could have stood the fact that he doesn’t really like women. But what on earth are you doing in Geneva? Dismal town I should have thought. Switzerland’s all right for operations and for keeping money in, I suppose, if you have any, but then you do, don’t you? Sarah came to see me the other day, and I was so sad, such a waste, silly girl. I’d like to see you again, darling, before I pop off.’

  Which she is not going to do for years. There’s tenacity there, which Sarah, my only child, inherited.

  She is wrong about Geneva and it is interesting that she is so mistaken. But then almost everybody misunderstands the Swiss – when they can be bothered to take an interest in them; which isn’t often. I find this curious. Here after all we have possibly the only case of a successful political and economic system in the world, and we’re told it’s a bore. I daresay there are dark corners of Swiss life that I have not penetrated, reasons for shame – they are human, so there must be reason for shame; nevertheless, Switzerland, which used to be regarded as a bastion of liberty, and quite right too, is now viewed with a mixture of envy and contempt; very rum. Can it be that humankind cannot bear too much peace and prosperity? Do we dislike the Swiss because of the complacency with which they refuse the temptation of the abyss?

  Certainly I think Sarah would say so. How I long for her, and how certainly I know that she would quickly make me miserable with her disapproval of me. For Sarah is everything that I have never been and could not be; she is a rebel with a cause. She believes in human rights, and I … well, inasmuch as I suppose that I am writing this for her, I am still trawling the past in search of any reason to believe in anything.

  That is not quite true. Last week I went fishing. I took a little train which climbed up into the mountains and debouched me in a village which has somehow contrived to escape any tourist development. Then, in what was still the cool of a crisp mountain morning, I bought rolls at the bakery, cheese and wine at a grocer’s and tramped up a narrow hill path to cross the neck of the valley, and descended to a brisk stream. I put my bottle of wine in a pool under the shadow of a rock, and fished half a mile upstream and down the other bank. Larks cried overhead, and in the distance cowbells tinkled, and the air was rich with the scent of meadow flowers. The trout were eager and nimble, but I returned the first three I caught. I kept the fourth, which weighed three-quarters of a pound, and made a little fire, sprinkled the fish with rosemary, and when the fire died down cooked it in the ash: as I did so, I saw Joshua squatting by just such a fire beside the stream that rose in the hills behind Roddy’s farm, and I heard the muttered humming with which he accompanied all tasks that demanded care and precision. The two scenes came together; it was as if Joshua were there, a numinous and innocent presence. Tears pricked my eyes; but it may have been the smoke. Yet of course it wasn’t. I knew that very well. It was an assurance of some sort of immortality, of our ability at the same moment to live in a delightful present, and to slip time’s halter; and what is such an experience but a confirmation of the goodness and reality of God?

  Today it is raining. Mist obscures the lake, and I have been reading. Gide’s Journal. One keeps coming back to Gide; there is such a splendid mendacity, such an ignoble truth to his writing. I have been reading that section which deals with his time in Tunisia in 1942–3, when he was persecuted by the son of his hosts, a boy whom he calls Victor. I don’t think many of the writer’s admirers can have read about this appalling young man without having had a strong impulse to kick his behind. His persecution of the distinguished and elderly writer seems merely malicious. At table he would grab the choicest cuts simply so that Gide wouldn’t get them. He claimed to be a Communist, and Gide was convinced that this was only to emphasise his bullying, boastful and anarchic character. Of course some may have wondered why the boy – he was no more than fourteen or fifteen – should have behaved in this way, and concluded, naturally enough in view of what is known of Gide’s tastes, that the writer had probably made advances to him which the boy resented. (And indeed, years later, when the boy had grown up, he wrote and published his own memoir in which he confirmed such a suspicion, while nevertheless presenting himself as being at least as disagreeable a young man as the one Gide had portrayed.) Yet, without having any such suspicion myself when I first read Gide’s Journal, I recall how all my sympathy went to the wretched and in many ways despicable Victor. Why shouldn’t he, I thought then, put this pretentious and sanctimonious old thing, this canting proser, so firmly and painfully in his place; if there was something malicious about it, well then, I thought, the old booby asked for it. What right had he to assume the airs of superiority he had; to insist that his standards were so much more admirable than poor Victor’s, who had after all his own life to live, his own way to make, in his own manner? My youthful sympathies went out to Victor, and the more evidence Gide accumulated of the boy’s vileness, the closer I felt to him. Wasn’t he, even, in his assertion of a ridiculous and insincere Communism, making a very apt criticism of all ideologies, of all high-minded self-justification? So I thought then, and I wonder now if the strength of my partisanship wasn’t occasioned by a memory, buried then, of that poor Mr Fielding who had tried to befriend me, and who had carried copies of Les Faux-Monnayeurs and other novels by Gide so ostentatiously about with him?

  And reading it all again now, I find that my sympathies are absolutely and ridiculously divided. Victor’s vileness is very apparent, and yet I still find myself attracted by his farouche refusal to be anything less than himself. The cause of the estrangement, the occasion of the boy’s compulsion – for it was certainly that – to persecute the distinguished writer is unimportant. There is something fine as well as malicious in Victor’s behaviour. Why should he have accepted Gide at his own valuation?

  We cannot be really damaged while our personal myth remains unimpaired. Who said that?

  The last time I saw Sarah was in London six months ago, when she told me she was returning to South Africa ‘to continue the struggle’.

  ‘By the word or the gun?’ I asked.

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��I’m not much good with guns,’ she said. ‘All the same it will come to that in the end, there’s no real question of that, I’m afraid.’

  As she spoke she looked at me with candid eyes in which I could see no fear at all. We were sitting in the lounge of my hotel, and at one time she would have looked out of place there, in her dirty jeans, blouson jacket and sloganned T-shirt. But things have changed, and now it seemed to me that it was I myself in my herringbone tweed suit who did not belong.

  ‘Well,’ I tried to make a joke of it, ‘at least you disdain revolutionary chic.’

  She paid no attention.

  ‘By all the rules,’ she said biting into a cheese sandwich, ‘I ought to have no time for you. Fathers, some of my friends say, are always the enemy.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather old-fashioned?’

  ‘Well, you are too, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘In certain respects I seem to myself to be terribly, deplorably, modern. I don’t believe in anything, and isn’t that a characteristic of the coming age? It may be you who is old-fashioned. When I look around me, I can sometimes feel quite in tune with 99 per cent of humanity. Even those for whom you are ready to fight. Doesn’t it ever occur to you that the age of ideology is dead, and very properly dead, and that we all ought to be grateful for that? What cause has ideology ever served but its own?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I’m not interested in ideology, only in people’s natural rights. Which they are denied.’ She stopped speaking and looked at me with exasperation. I would have liked to have been able to read love in that glance … and yet she had come to see me, making a point of doing so. There must be something there, I told myself. After all, innumerable girls do cut off their fathers.