Pleasures and Landscapes by Sybille Bedford

Author:Sybille Bedford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907970412
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2014-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

DOWN IN BRIGUE the air was mild. Petrol station and lavatory were clean enough but not sparkling.

‘Not up to standard,’ said Martha. ‘Cisalpine.’ And then we walked under the arcades of a most civilised palazzo.

At Sion we pulled up as they were saying compline in the darkening church, and sat for a while under the vaulting, the vestments gleaming in the fading light, the voices rising from the choir stalls. Orate pro nobis … This Romanesque church of Sion is beautiful, and so is the setting of the town in the vineyards and austere hills of the Valais, ‘the rainless apricot country between Sion and Sierre’; and the town too has beauty, perhaps magic, but it is also – what? – a shade desolate? transitional? run thin? Crummy, Martha said, but no – strayed rather, of two climates, astride like the Rhône towns above Orange, disturbing with intimations. We drank Fendant de Sion, the live pale-green wine of the country, and that night I walked alone in the vineyards above the town and the ruined tower under a cloud-chased moon, stumbling and transported, grazed by twig and leaves, holding the grapes, crushing the berries sulphurous sweet into my mouth. And in the morning we slid off, glad to be gone, glad to be moving, into the scrub and polish and simplicity of Swiss Switzerland.

At Bex crouched a castle large and innocent with turrets and chromatic tiles. A small, long-faced, spectacled little boy informed us gravely in singsong Swiss how to get to the Château.

‘Safe again,’ said Martha.

At noon Lake Léman and the Dents du Midi blazed before us.

‘Can this be Chillon?’ said Martha. ‘It’s become so small.’

At Lausanne we remembered nothing. A town, packed and ungelled: brick dust, gaps, new buildings. I asked for the Hôtel Gibbon. But the Hôtel Gibbon is no more.

‘Vous avez toujours le Lord Byron près de la gare.’

‘French Swiss isn’t the answer either,’ said Martha.

But at Yverdon the sun lay on the square like butter; at Morat we saw another manor with striped armorial blinds; and Neuchâtel was all clean provincial handsomeness, long-warmed walls, purring in afternoon calm. We picked up some fruit and washed it in a fountain and sat by another, and ate and talked and strolled and looked into people’s windows and wrote postcards.

‘What a genius they have,’ said Martha, ‘for the small change of freedom.’

At Payerne something dropped out of the engine of the car; the man said it would be mended by a quarter to five, and it was.

‘Why does it all feel like a balloon outing, when it’s really so solid?’ said Martha.

‘The happy ground crew.’

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