Family and Friends Page 4

  Now Betty is demanding that Sofka allow her to have her hair cut. That beautiful hair! Sofka regards the girls’ hair as being in the nature of her own possession, something that she will hand over like a sacred torch to whomever shall claim the girls in marriage. After that they can do what they like with it, although Sofka will always hark back with a reminiscent smile to its earlier glory. Sofka would like the girls to remain as children while they are in her care. This is, after all, only good form. Their thoughts and attitudes, if they have any – and Sofka does not see this as necessary – they must keep to themselves. It is the least they can do. Mimi shows every sign of conforming to this unwritten and indeed unspoken rule. Mimi is the girl that Sofka has always decided she should be, staid, enchanting, and naïve. Mimi’s presence in a room is registered, but not entirely noticed. Betty is a different matter altogether.

  This business of the hair has been discussed, with slightly raised voices, many times. The boys have been called in to back up Sofka’s refusal. Frederick has not been entirely helpful. He tugged at Betty’s plait, and said, ‘If you only knew how much naughtier you look like this,’ at which both Betty and Sofka gave him a sharp glance, only to meet his ruefully innocent gaze. But Alfred is furious. Alfred, like Mimi, is pure, with a scornful purity that resists all advances. ‘Of course you can’t have it cut,’ he shouts. ‘Why can’t you wait until you’re grown up?’ Alfred has surrendered his own childhood so unwillingly that he cannot understand how anyone could want to get rid of such a beautiful commodity. ‘I am grown up,’ screams Betty, reverting to an earlier pattern. At which Sofka intervenes in genuine distaste. A scene in her own drawing-room is something she will never permit. She sends Betty and Alfred to their rooms and the whole question is shelved. So effectively is it shelved that Sofka can hardly complain, or so Betty maintains, when Betty returns one afternoon from Marylebone Lane with her hair shorn into a bushy triangular bob, looking more like Colette than ever.

  Sofka is genuinely heartbroken. She sits down in her chair and weeps, so brokenly that even Betty is uncomfortable. Betty, in one of those brief changes of mood that are to make her irresistible, kneels down by her mother’s chair, covers her hand with kisses, and weeps just as brokenly as Sofka; more so, perhaps, for her sobs are intermingled with cries of ‘Mama! Mama! Talk to me!’ Sofka raises haggard eyes from her handkerchief and, seeing her daughter a little girl again, bends forward to comfort her. The boys are uneasy, Frederick mildly sorry that this had to happen, and Alfred struggling over a decision never to speak to Betty again. With a desolate light dawning in her eyes, Sofka turns to Mimi. ‘You were with her. She is your little sister. You are supposed to take care of her. Why did you let her do this?’ She speaks as though Betty has sustained some terrible injury. So genuine is her grief that Mimi hardly likes to explain that Betty had slipped out of the studio while she was performing her Chopin étude and, guided by Frank, had commanded the nearest Italian barber to cut off her hair. Mimi would feel disloyal if she said any of this. And so the matter is laid to rest, with Sofka and Betty reconciled, and a slight animus against Mimi. The next day, Sofka telephones M. Emile, her own hairdresser, to come to the house and even up Betty’s hair. Within a few days Betty is all smiles, having got her own way. ‘Not bad,’ concedes Frederick. ‘Not bad at all.’

  But of course this will not satisfy her for long, and Sofka wonders what will happen when she comes into her own money. It was decreed by their father that the girls should receive one thousand pounds each on the day that the younger reaches her eighteenth birthday. In that way there will be no envy, no rivalry. It is one of his few sensible decisions, the last he made before his relatively early demise which is usually accredited to his lavish private life and seigneurial business practices. Sofka does not have too long to wait before she finds out. On the fateful day, which happens to coincide with one of their weekly visits to Mr Cariani’s, the girls arrive home at tea-time. Mimi has celebrated by buying her mother a large bunch of flowers. ‘Silly girl,’ says Sofka, smiling. ‘My silly girl. We have so many in the garden.’ But she takes the lovely roses and for a moment, as she looks down at them, she has to bite her lip to quell a dangerous pang of emotion. It is not the gesture that moves her so much as the spectacle of Mimi’s simplicity. Mimi is now twenty years old, her second child, and yet she behaves as if she were fifteen. So sweet, so docile: how can such goodness survive, and who will claim it? How will Mimi know who is worthy of her? How will she fare when her mother is no longer there to guide her?

  She need have no such fears for Betty. Betty is celebrating by paying renewed attention to her appearance. During her attendance at Marylebone Lane Betty has taken advantage of the piano lessons and has made a tour of the nearby stores. She has returned with numerous pairs of flesh-coloured stockings, a new dress patterned with spiders’ webs of white on a navy ground, some red beads and matching bracelets, and some extremely high-heeled shoes. With this outfit, in which she looks years older than Mimi, she wears a great deal of kohl shadow on her eyelids, while her upper lip, rouged in a sharply pointed bow of Indian red, lifts slightly over her small white teeth. The weight of the shadow on her lids makes her narrow her eyes. She has also started smoking, with so little difficulty that it is impossible to believe that she has not been doing so for some time. With the ivory cigarette-holder between her teeth and her fingernails painted bright red, with her legs crossed high, her brooding eyes and her sharp teeth, Betty looks like a painting by Foujita, a native Parisian, a Bohemian, a fallen angel.

  There is something about Betty’s new appearance that is so complete, so utterly thought out that, unlike her hair, it leaves no room for modification. This gives Sofka pause. Here is the intimation of a work of art and she is quick to appreciate it. But she is also quick to see that it has been created not for her approval but to court opposition. This she withholds, merely laughing gently and touching Betty’s necklace in passing as if amused by so much artificiality. Sofka is extremely practised in these arts, which she expects from every other woman. Sofka hardly believes in the solidarity of her sex unless it is united by bonds of mutual standing: sisterhood, matrimonial status, mother love. She is well aware that Betty is one of those women, rather like herself, in fact, who is the instinctive ally of men. Gentle amusement, the lightest of touches, the merest flutter of surprise, are all that Sofka will permit herself in the course of this particularly feminine commerce. But she has it in her to fear for Mimi, who will not profit from close companionship with her sister, and will not learn from it either, and for whose sake it might be politic to separate the two girls. Sofka thinks of that little cousin, Nettie, of whom Alfred used to be so fond. So temperamental did Nettie prove to be that her mother, Carrie, had to send her to a finishing school in Switzerland to have her bad manners shamed out of her by other, more scornful girls. It might not be a bad idea, thinks Sofka, to send Betty to join her cousin in Switzerland for a while. This is under active discussion.

  It is quite clear that Betty will have to go somewhere. Even Mimi is vaguely troubled by those high spirits which Betty chooses to manifest in public. The girls have taken to having afternoon tea at a pâtisserie in town after their lesson and on these occasions Betty reveals herself as being very high-spirited indeed. ‘Don’t look round,’ she hisses to Mimi. ‘Move your chair closer to mine. There’s a man over there who can’t take his eyes off me.’ ‘Where?’ whispers Mimi, instinctively raising her head and meeting the eyes of a middle-aged man who is smiling in genuine admiration of Mimi’s coiled red hair. Politely, Mimi smiles back. ‘For God’s sake,’ hisses Betty. ‘Don’t encourage him. I shan’t be able to get rid of him.’ But she moves her chair slightly and, in the course of doing so, her skirt rides up a little. She appears not to notice this. The middle-aged man, however, recognizes the difference between the two sisters and adjusts his manner accordingly, turning his attention to Betty, albeit with some slight feeling of regret. Most people are aware that Betty is infe
rior to her sister but Betty provokes and absorbs so much attention that she is usually thought of as more interesting, more controversial, more entertaining. Betty has a trace of Frederick’s command of alluring bad behaviour. In any contest with her sister, one, to be sure, which Betty might care to avoid, there is no doubt as to which one will carry the day.

  That is why there is something of a question mark over the sisters’ relations with Frank Cariani. Handsome Frank, although all too willing to make an exhibition of himself when he dances with Betty, really prefers the docile and serious Mimi, whose grave demeanour appeals to his rigorous Italian upbringing. It is Mimi whom he slips round the door of the music room to see although his visits are cut short by Betty whirling him off for a bout of passionate Latin dancing. Betty is one of those women who believe in acting out a passion before they really feel it. Maybe they are cold. Maybe Betty, for all her exacerbated appetites, suspects this of herself. Maybe she knows that Mimi, so dreamy, so passive, so correct, might, would, with the right partner, come to a deep amorous understanding, an expansive love without need of gestures, a radiant acceptance of what a man has to offer, and a joyous capacity for motherhood that Betty knows can never be hers. Perhaps that is why she starts to try harder to attract Frank Cariani’s attention, pressing up against his body in long silent attitudes not wholly warranted by the dance, or, dropping all pretence, touching him knowingly, her sharp little tongue just visible between her sharp little teeth. Betty is not entirely bad. She wants to capture Frank Cariani before her sister comes to realize how much she cares about him. In that way, thinks Betty, Mimi will be spared what she might have felt had she, Betty, taken her time, as she would have preferred to do. It is imperative for a woman of Betty’s temperament (and high spirits) not to cede the pass to any other woman even if that other woman should happen to be her sister. Knowing so much more about men, she has found herself obliged, by a single long and entirely serious glance between Mimi and Frank, to force the issue. Regrettable, but necessary.

  That is why Betty has been obliged to make certain contingency plans when her removal to a finishing school in Switzerland is under active discussion. Betty knows that without her supervision Mimi might permit herself to become seriously enamoured of Frank Cariani and he of her. Mimi is one of those women who marry early or not at all, and she is, at this moment, very beautiful. Frank Cariani, although not of an eminence to please Sofka, would make an excellent son-in-law, attentive, deferential, respectful. The Cariani academy is doing so well that Mr Cariani senior has been able to buy the freehold of the house next door, extending himself quite patriarchally along Marylebone Lane. Mr Cariani senior is more than good to his wife, his unmarried sister, and his mother, and has housed a widowed sister-in-law in another property he happens to own somewhat to the north of Regent’s Park. This is entirely the kind of benevolent and structured family into which Mimi might transfer from her mother’s house without any feeling of disloyalty whatever, and Sofka, seeing her safe at last, could not but approve. In addition to all this, Frank Cariani is a very handsome man. For Betty, the idea that Mimi might see him naked before she herself does is simply not to be borne.

  Betty’s plan is to acquiesce to the finishing school idea, to suggest that Frederick accompany her as far as Paris, and that he then put her on the train to Lausanne. Knowing Frederick and his habits, she will be able to dissuade him from seeing her to the Gare de Lyon, since she has behaved so beautifully during their brief stay at the Hôtel Bedford et West End, not screaming, not demanding to drink champagne, not wearing outrageous clothes. Having said goodbye to Frederick, Betty will lie low for a couple of days until she knows him to have left Paris. She will then – and this is the difficult part – wait for Frank Cariani to join her. She has the better part of nine hundred pounds, she is quite fearless, she believes in their future as the highest-paid character dancers in Paris, and Frank is a simple fellow who is very tired of living under his father’s thumb. He tells himself that once he has established himself as a reputable name in the entertainment world he can always go home and find Mimi again. Mimi is not the type of girl who will, or indeed, can, do anything independently. But Betty knows that her mission in life is to be a woman who prevents men from staying with their virgin loves, and she is eager to embark on this career.

  On the day of Betty’s departure for her school in Clarins, Sofka weeps as if she is saying goodbye to her for ever. Betty weeps too. There is a kind of random sorrow in Betty that guides her roughly to the inner meaning of these occasions. While the chauffeur loads the suitcases into the car, Betty embraces her mother and her sister. Only Alfred refuses to relax in her arms and turns his cheek stiffly for her kiss. Then the car moves off, very slowly, with a handkerchief fluttering at the window. On the street, Sofka, her own handkerchief quite soaked, suddenly grips Mimi by the hand, draws her to her side, and drops her head for a moment on to Mimi’s shoulder. Mimi, surprised, smooths her mother’s cheek. Sofka alone knows that she has sacrificed one daughter in order to keep the other.

  4

  ‘DEAR NETTIE,’ writes Alfred, aged sixteen. ‘I hope you are well and happy. Thank you for your postcard showing the lake at sunset. It looks very pretty.’

  Alfred sucks his pen and stares out of the window. He is not good at writing letters, perhaps because he is already very good at hiding his feelings. This he needs to do because he imagines his emotions to be so violent that they constitute a danger to others. His feelings are basically a love for Sofka and Mimi, a growing dislike of Frederick whom he sees as idle and flippant, decamping from his office in order, so he says, to give Alfred a taste of being in charge (at sixteen!), and sheer unbridled hatred of Betty, a response that surprises him, and which is in itself rather interesting. Alfred’s purity reacts instinctively to another’s impurity; what he feels for Betty is not in fact hatred but disgust. Alfred senses about Betty, when she passes him, a sharpish odour, the acid sweat of a true redhead, which makes him grit his teeth. In this way, and for this reason, he will always be resistant to the odours of women, shocking them sometimes by a very slight movement of recoil when they bend to kiss him. For this reason too he will only be accessible to a woman whom he recognizes as akin to himself, or to a woman so artificially fragrant that he does not sense her real presence.

  Alfred’s heavy burden of feeling, his purity, and his scorn have added a lowering quality to his handsome face which makes him doubly attractive to certain types of women, usually older women. He is perhaps Hippolytus to their Phaedra, and they look at his tall slim body, his long eyelashes, and the compressed line of his red lips and wonder how it would be to initiate him into the mysteries of love … Alfred, stern and unbendingly dutiful, inspires these feelings in a whole range of women, from Frederick’s motherly secretary to one or two of Sofka’s friends. All are careful to censor their reactions, allowing themselves only an anxious smiling concern for his condition. Alfred is preoccupied by his condition and therefore does not notice the range of female sensibilities to which he has access. When he is a little older, this imperviousness will drive women to unwise acts and statements, which they will later regret.

  It is in any event the peach-like face and the silky hair of Nettie which form Alfred’s unique wish for the company of a woman other than his mother or his elder sister. But he thinks of Nettie not as a woman, although at nearly sixteen she is all the woman she will ever be, but as a child, that beautiful over-excited over-tired child with eyes black as black glass, her head thrown back, her arms extended, as he tried to dance with her at that long-ago wedding and at two weddings since then. She always seemed to be straining after life in a way that troubled him, for he could imagine nothing better than to stay as he had been, as they had been. With his mother there to care for him and with Nettie to love, Alfred’s dream is crystallized, and in a curious way this dream will survive unmodified throughout his adult life. It seems to Alfred that there are two kinds of love: the one that cares for your welfar
e, your food, your comfort, and the one that engages your wildest dreams and impulses. At this blessed point in his life, still in childhood, Alfred possesses both types of love, sacred and profane. He will grieve for such plenitude for ever after.

  To Alfred Sofka is quite simply a deity, one who bends her cool lips to his hot cheek or smooths the hair from his forehead when she thinks he has been reading too much. She is the one whose disapproval he would do anything to avoid and whose pain he would burn to avenge. He knows no one as beautiful as Sofka, with a beauty that does not disturb, a beauty always smiling, never challenging, implying caresses of the kind that lull a child to sleep. Even his beloved sister Mimi would do better, thinks Alfred, to follow Sofka in this respect, for Mimi, although good as gold, is also young and he senses in her an innocent stirring which to him spells corruption. It is the love that knows no questing and no conclusion that appeals to Alfred, and he does not yet know that he will not find it on this earth, for he thinks that he has found it in Sofka. And Sofka treats him like the man he has been forced to become. As he departs for the factory every morning, Sofka, in her Japanese silk peignoir, stands at the door to embrace him; she smooths his forehead once more, and hands him his newspaper, sending him off to the Westminster Bridge Road with his head held high, able to forget for a moment the grim day that lies ahead, in his pride at joining the community of the world’s workers, in the knowledge that a loving and admiring woman will be waiting for him when he returns. In this way he experiences that good conscience that others never find, perhaps never look for. And when the door closes behind him, he knows that his mother will devote her morning to the grave and seemly pursuits of good housekeeping, and when he returns in the evening, tired with the unnatural tiredness of a young man grappling with an antipathy which he cannot overcome, he knows that Sofka will have prepared for him the minced veal cutlet and the soft fruit pudding called Kissel that he prefers. He does not yet know that his antipathy is the price of his good conscience, and that in later life, bewildered by his inability to find further happiness, he will be reaping the reward of that antipathy and that good conscience, for having overcome that early hurdle he finds himself suspicious of those who take life more easily, and having wrestled the enemy of his boyhood to the ground and worsted it he does not know how to transact with those who have had a more fortunate passage. Some men are children all their lives because they have had admiring mothers who chronicle their every game of football and their every lovable misdemeanour. Alfred too has a mother who watches him, jealous lest a fact of his life escape her. But she has seen to it that his life never will escape her, for he is now locked into a family enterprise from which there is no honourable issue, no issue of choice, that is, but only violent disappearances, as Betty will find out. Sofka, instinctively, through love, but also through fear, has transferred her vigilance from Frederick to Alfred, like a prudent investor transferring funds from one bank to another. Frederick’s light-heartedness, though so enjoyable, really does not measure up to Alfred’s severity. Frederick is for leisure, for diversion, for entertainment; Alfred is for work, for investment, for security.