Free Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford

her looks alone, yet what drew most men and women into her orbit at first meeting was her talk. She was an extraordinary talker, a storyteller who could make the truth with all its ambiguities come whole: the moment, the connections, the perspectives . It was also never relentless, quite interruptible, full of self-mockery , and it was often very very funny. I saw that Alessandro loved to listen to it as much as I did – that was our education. We saw that acts had predictable ends and yet not, that there were always more than two sides to anything, and that what you did yesterday would be relevant to things to come. We were avid to learn, both he and I. The talk often began at breakfast, she in her bed, we sitting on it, and the hours went and little would get done. She paid no regard to my age or his feelings. With nonchalant openness she told about that great ‘previous attachment’, the man she had loved so much and had to leave, and how she had chosen my father – affected too by the magnetic field of his pursuit of her – as a retreat into a different world, and how wonderfully unconventional my father’s (he guessed about it all) attitude had been. (New light for me.) Unconventional too, one might say, was Alessandro’s attitude: he accepted these resurrections of her past; to him they were ingredients of her legend.
    * * *
    Something went wrong. Alessandro had to go North to see his family. Look after her, he said to me, try to cheer her up; I’ll be back soon. How soon? I would have liked to ask. He added on his own: As soon as I can .
    I was grateful to him for his trust, but I was unable to divert her. She hardly spoke; our meals had become silent. One winter afternoon we went for a walk along the beach. Her steps, she was walking ahead, were uncertain, she had slender ankles and was wearing the wrong shoes, she was not looking where she put her feet. Watching that walk I was gripped by an unaccustomed feeling: pity. My mother was not the kind of person one felt sorry for; she always seemed to be holding an advantage point. She sat down on a rock. I stood in front of her. How can he come back, she said, they want him at home, they need him at home – I can see how they see it: a foreigner, a divorcée and of course the proverbial woman old enough to be his mother; a dubious Catholic as well. They won’t let him come back and he’ s not strong enough.
    He will come back, I said. He told me so.
    And how can it last? He’s too young. He’ll always be too young. We met at the wrong time. Come to think of it, there could never have been a right time, given the dates of our births. That is the inevitable factor. I’m a fool but not such a fool as not to know that we are headed for great unhappiness …
    ‘Billi – can you understand that one can miss one human being, one presence … in the whole of the universe … to the point of … well, extinction of all else? One day you will know too.’ 
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    I was able then to love my mother. I wished her well. I saw that there might be things in store for which there was no help and no answer. For the first time I felt the sting of compassion; I never forgot that afternoon by a grey Mediterranean.
    * * *
    He did not come back. He sent for her instead. She had to leave me by myself again: it could not have been a trickier moment. As my father was dead, a German court was appointing a legal guardian; they would not accept my mother nor anyone she proposed, they required somebody resident in Germany. I said I would have my sister’s husband, the deputy mayor. Are you sure, my mother said, your sister is such a bad picker? I like him, I said. He’s on our side. I don’t think anyone is going to be on our side, she said. But all right, let’s have him, and meanwhile we’d better lie doggo for a bit – don’t open any buff envelopes with great German seals while I’m away.
     
    She stayed away for what seemed a long time. I was beset with the