: Sybille Bedford
: A Favourite of the Gods
: Daunt Books
: 9781907970184
: 1
: CHF 8.60
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 288
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'One of Britain's most stylish and accomplished writers.' -- Telegraph One autumn in the late nineteen-twenties for no particular reason at all, as it would seem, we began to live in France. Constanza and her young daughter step off a train in the French Riviera in the late 1920s without the slightest notion of where they are. But their story begins with Constanza's parents: a beautiful New England heiress, a Roman prince and the confused catastrophe of their marriage. An idyllic childhood spent in crumbling Roman palaces, sun-baked olive groves, at sumptuous parties and being taught by the most interesting men in Rome, is changed forever by a fatal clash of culture and an impulsive decision. In this elegant novel, Sybille Bedford tells the story of three generations of women, of Europe and America, and the turbulence of the early twentieth century. This is a dramatic companion novel to A Compass Error, also published by Daunt Books. 'Dazzling' -- Bruce Chatwin 'Sybille Bedford is the most sensual of writers. No one writes as she does about the smells and colours of the Mediterranean, about the pleasure of food and wine.' --Victoria Glendinning 'A writer of commensurate artistry.' -- Auberon Waugh 'An excellent stylist and a splendid narrator . . . and this is a very clever work.' -- The New Yorker 'A study of the rich . . . an examination of love . . . and a statement of what Henry James either did not or would not know about the darker side of the portrait of the lady. Bedford's mind is radiant. Her alarming economy of style burns.' -- V. S. Pritchett

Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Charlottenburg, Germany, the daughter of a German father and an English mother. She grew up in Italy, France and England. The account of her travels in Mexico A Visit to Don Otavio was her first published book in 1953, and she followed it with three novels, A Legacy (1956), A Favourite of the Gods (1963) and A Compass Error (1968). Her semi-autobiographical novel, Jigsaw, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989. Her memoir, Quicksands, was published in 2005. Sybille Bedford died in 2006.

Prologue

One autumn in the late nineteen-twenties for no particular reason at all, as it would seem, we began to live in France.

 

 

The train had stopped. My mother put a glove to the window: VENTIMIGLIA.

We each took up our book. For some time nothing happened. Then the customs were in the corridor, in pairs, in their uncouth uniforms, strung with side-arms. My mother kept them in check with a light hand. Poor louts, she said; and it could not be true that black didn’t show the dirt. They went. Still we did not move. Again we tried to read. Suddenly I saw my mother’s brother step into the carriage, he came swiftly forward: ‘Constanza!’ ‘You?’ she said. He put a kiss on her right cheek, on her left. She sat passive. ‘What do you want?’ she said in her cold voice. He saw me. ‘Ciao, Flavia,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I motored down from Sestriere to catch you,’ he answered her in English. I disliked him and I left the compartment; and so I heard no more.

From the platform I could see them in the carriage window – my mother sitting still with a soft and absent look on her face; my mother then was a very beautiful woman, and on that afternoon, in that empty dust-blown station, she was, as so often, like an apparition from another world. He was talking urgently, with animation, using his hands. I passed on; and a little later I saw him jump off the train, rapidly cross the lines and walk towards the exit. I went back to the compartment. ‘Giorgio’s mad,’ my mother said; ‘how tiresome of mama to tell him where to find us.’ ‘What did he come for?’ ‘God knows,’ she said, ‘some hare-brained scheme.’ The cast of my mother’s mind was analytical and interpretative – people, behaviour, motive – but Giorgio had long been discounted. Nor did I insist. And soon we began to move, the train clanked across a bridge and we were in France – all right? I said; all right, said my mother, it wasn’t anything very much this time – and presently we began to think about getting our things together, for we were changing trains at Nice, we were catching the Calais Express.

We drew in and I was about to wave a porter when my mother touched one of her hands to the other and said, ‘My ring.’ ‘Which ring?’ I said. ‘Papa’s ring,’ she said sharply, ‘the ruby!’ ‘Oh,’ I said, my heart sinking. ‘Did you have it on?’ ‘You know I am never without the ring,’ she said. This was true; I could not remember her not wearing it. It was a large ring, heavy, and it had been a present from her father, the prince in Rome. I called him that in my mind, although he was my grandfather, because I had never met him. We looked on the floor, looked under the seats, we probed the upholstery, gingerly. We looked the way people look in such circumstances. ‘Think,’ I said. We went over the day. ‘You washed your hands.’ I went to look in the lavabo, but the corridor now was full of people getting on and the lavabo was locked. We went through bags, pockets. ‘Mummy,’ I said, ‘we’vegotto get off.’ Our berths on the Express were booked. Nonsense, she said, the Express could wait, we could take it somewhere further up the coast, it must stop at Cannes and all those places. ‘I am not getting off this train without the ring.’

When we got a ticket collector, he called thechef du train. They looked as we had looked, only more competently. Under their hands, seats and cushions snapped apart like chunks of zigzag puzzle. Chiefly hair-clips and spent matches came to light. The men seemed as disappointed as my mother was. They seemed to be on her side.

‘Une bague de valeur, Madame?’

‘Valeur sentimentale.’ Her French had that slight harshness with which Italians use that language. ‘But since you ask – yes. It’s a ruby, but a rather unusual one. Oh yes, a valuable ring.’

We were pullin