A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error by Sybille Bedford

Author:Sybille Bedford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681370576
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

2

THE NAME of the French fishing port where they found themselves that night was St-Jean. St-Jean-le-Sauveur. For the first few days circumstances propped her; afterwards, unaided, Constanza pursued her instinctive course. She refused to move.

They took the villa that had been so fortuitously offered. It was a preposterous choice, as they learnt later on, at the time it did not occur to them to look for any other. It stood on the end of a narrow hill edging the sea, and it was exposed to every wind. The hill which was called the Hill, la Colline, was covered chiefly with stunted, shrubby pines, and there were a few modest villas, all new, and all of them already locked and shuttered against the winter. Half a mile inland lay Mediterranean country—cypresses, olives, vines, but the hill with the sea, the pines, the villas, offered only a mélange of the grandly bleak with the suburban. The only graceful thing on it was a Roman watch-tower at the tip, white-washed and soberly converted into a place to live. The tower, too, was shut up.

Lewis’s telegrams subsided. He accepted Constanza’s plea to postpone, to wait. We have been rushing ourselves into things, she wrote to him. Very well, if you wish, take your time, he answered by telegraph. She had never had a letter from him yet.

“Do you think all his books are ghost-written?” she said to Flavia. He did not offer to come to the South of France, but suggested various meeting places. Her answer always was: Later; not yet. At last he acquiesced.

“I rather think he has commitments at Stockholm at the end of the month,” Constanza said.

She asked Flavia when she would be off. “Michaelmas term must have started.”

Flavia had thought it over. “I think I’ll stay on with you for a bit, if I may,” she said lightly.

“Darling, your career!”

“I’m very young actually, I’ll be able to catch up. We might write them to send me some books: I might try to do some work for them by correspondence.”

Flavia did not know why she, too, now felt compelled to stay. There were several pointers: a chivalrous sense that she must not desert Constanza; a sense of something going to happen; curiosity.

Constanza had rather felt that to be alone—a rare state for her—was a prerequisite of the reculement, the retreat, she was seeking for herself; but she was touched and pleased, and she said yes.

“As long as you remember that you are not stuck here because I choose to be. There is still a Calais Express for you every day.”

Their villa was new and clean and ugly, down to the coloured tiles. Except for the dining-room there was mercifully little furniture besides the wide brass bedsteads and the armoires à glace. The coal-stove in the kitchen was hard to light and smoked whenever the mistral blew, the windows were badly fitted and rattled in the wind, and the mistral that winter blew a very great deal. It is a hard wind, bringing swept blue, bitter days.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.