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
* * *
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
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