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Sybille Bedford

he Naples boat was on time. The crossing — it was May — had not been too gruelling. Lightly one stepped ashore and into the funicular, and after a brief, slow ascent emerged into Piazza, still warm under a late afternoon sun.

I was elated. To be back, to be anywhere in those days — the year was 1948 — felt a miracle. One responded with a delirious sense of freedom, rediscovery, renewal: the Europe for so long known to be held down in agony and chaos, so long believed lost to us, possibly for ever, was beginning to be regained. I had spent — immense privilege — the winter in Italy, Venice first, then Florence, and was now living, somewhat precariously, in a back-street hotel in Rome. I had stayed up late the night before — all hours were precious — then left at dawn, driving south chanting poetry to myself in the car I had been entrusted to deliver. By full morning, when the near empty road (not much legitimate petrol around then) glared before me, I had to fight drowsiness till at one point there was a great jolt and I came to with the front wheel already off the road and I was just able to wrench the car back on course. Jolted hard myself, I stopped — I had missed the ditch, a milestone, a tree. Out of nowhere women arose from a field crying 'Mamma mia'. I braced myself to inspect the damage; but no — no dent, no buckled mudguard, no burst tyre, the poor old Morris looked unscathed. I was not quite so sure about the steering as I drove on, slowly now, with circumspection, and contrite, appalled by my irresponsibility. This was not my car. Another 140 kilometres to go out of some 250, the prospect seemed long . . . The dawn jaunt had turned into a slow, hot, anxious drive.

In the end I got there. I left the car as arranged in a garage, considered, as far as this is possible in Naples, one of the less blatantly dishonest ones, and instructed them to check and, if necessary, repair the steering (the bill to go to me). After that, lunching with a friend, the young British vice-consul, I got my second wind. Constantine FitzGibbon was with us, and Theodora — we were all high with the same joy of being where we were, and I only just caught the boat to Capri.

On boarding, Constantine left me with a pill he said he had got off a German officer he'd taken prisoner during the Italian cam paign. It was a largish capsule, a bit tacky by now. issued reputedly to keep a man efficient and alert for 48 hours or more

without sleep. Constantine seemed to think I might need it before the day was out ( I

had told him whom I had to face). Recklessness had returned: I accepted the pill, wrapped it in a scrap of tissue and put it in my pocket.

And now there was Capri. The Island looked itself. One point about the war was that where it had not destroyed, it had conserved, Craters and ruins yes, no new excrescences (yet); for five and a half years the developers had been kept at bay. And in Piazza there was the usual crowd, native and tourist, assembled to wait and watch the boat arrive and passengers appear. To my surprise and pleasure I saw Martha Gellhorn. I had not expected her to meet me, but she had.

'I say,' she said, this is a glorious place.' She had taken a room for me at the pensione she was staying at, 100 feet up from Piazza. Clean and cheap. 'That', I said, 'would be delightful.' But before we took one step further I had to tell her something (straight candour with Martha — anything else would have been unthinkable.) I had done something very bad, I confessed. Then I told her what had happened.

She and I had met only just over a week before at the studio flat of a man who to her was a fellow journalist and an excombatant (he had been parachuted into German-held Italy after Anzio and spent some intensely perilious months underground before the liberation of Rome) and to me a connection, a cousin in fact, of my step-father and a childhood chum. Meeting Martha Gellhorn, being addressed, being taken notice of by her, was like being exposed to a 1,500-watt chandelier: she radiated vitality, certainty, total courage. Add to this the voltage of her talk — galloping, relentlessly slangy, wry, dry, selfdeprecatory, often funny. Add to this her looks: the honey-coloured hair, shoulderlength, the intense, large blue eyes, the fine-cut features, the bronzed skin, the graceful, stalwart stance. I saw her as the (very feminine) image of the Piero della Francesca Archangel in the National Gallery, the presented sword, the heroic yet angelic look, the slender foot poised on the dragon's head: a shining defender of the just, the oppressed, the poor.

Add her reputation: the intrepid American frontline reporter for whom war had been the daily element when most of us had still tried to carry on with our private lives. Now she was back in Europe. in Rome at that moment, doing research for a piece, I forget about what, and she seemed to think I might be of some use. I made no bones about the pleasure I took in her company and a brand-new friendship began quickly. Before the week was out, Martha said that Rome had had it. (I was yet to learn about those barbarous spurts of restlessness.) I tried to point out the things she hadn't seen, not begun to see — it was her first time in Rome (to which I was passionately attached). To no avail. She decided to look at Capri. Off tomorrow. There was a snag, though — that stinker hadn't yet come with her car.

Hiring a car in Italy was difficult or impossible, exorbitant at any rate (the Topolino had just appeared; blissfully, city streets were still crowded mainly with Vespas and pedestrians). Martha bethought herself of the Morris she had kept in storage in England during the war years, and arranged for a young man, a colleague of sorts, who wanted to get out to Italy, to drive it over for her. She was sure that the stinker would profiteer by giving lifts to girl-friends and cheating her over the petrol she was paying for. His name was already mud because he hadn't arrived. The situation was resolved by my offering to drive the car down to Naples for her as soon as it turned up. (I jumped at the idea of revisiting Capri where I had friends, such as Kenneth Macpherson who was settling there in order to look after Norman Douglas in his old age.) Martha concurred, trusted me implicitly, and went ahead by train.

Now what had impressed me most about Martha was the absolutism of her moral standards. Looking down on much I thought permissible in days before, I resolved to become 100 per cent brave and truthful and reliable myself. This is a phenomenon well known to those who recall their first exposure to Martha Gellhorn. And now what had I done? Put myself in charge of her car after inadequate sleep (in sober fact, I had not slept at all).

'I did worse than your stinker,' I said, as we stood rooted to the spot in mid-Piazza. 'I may have wrecked your car.' Then I told her what had happened.

Martha looked at me with almost benign amazement. 'My,' she said, 'you might have killed yourself.'

That too had occurred to me — those seconds it took to regain control of the car had been drastically lucid.

'I wouldn't have to face you now,' I said. Martha laughed, brushing the incident aside with casual, sunny forgiveness. (Since, I have been much censured, disapproved of, about many things; the Morris on the brink was never held against me.) 'Let's go into the bar and have some martinis,' Martha said. Presently she and I went to have dinner (a boy porter in Piazza had taken my bag straight to the pensione). We went to the Savoia. the small trattoria a few steps from Piazza where Norman Douglas, walking down from the Villa Truto, ate at night. One went there — the food was seldom very good and the wine for anyone less hardened than Norman just not undrinkable — in the hope of his company; his privacy, though, was inviolate. The convention was to wave to him when one came in; he would call out a greeting or warning — 'Don't touch their squid tonight, my dear', or The veal's tolerable.' You might approach his table and say a few words in return. Sometimes he ate alone, usually he assembled two or three or more companions; yet, great friend or distant, one would never sit down with him unless expressly asked to do so.

That evening he had a look at Martha and liked what he saw. He called me to bring her over. The dinner (I got a kind of tertiary wind after what felt to have been a

great many hours) went well, it seemed to me, because of Martha and Norman's misapprehensions about each other's natures. He called her 'my poppet', declined to be aware that she was a formidable — and formidably committed — woman; what he chose to take in were her looks and charm. She might have been inclined to remain censorious and unamused (she had not read Sirenland, she had not read South Wind: she had heard of the paederasty, of which she disapproved with all the strength of her fundamentalist American puritanism). What she took in was an exquisitely mannered old gentleman and his charm. The talk, as I remember, was chiefly about fish. Anything about the late war, Nazis, collaborators and their tortuous allegiances would have glanced off Norman's Rabelaisian urbanity. It would not have been appropriate and was not attempted.

The Trattoria Savoia closed down (not early). After cheerful goodnights in Piazza — 'Bless you, my poppets' — Norman stomped off for his steep walk home with pocket torch and stick. Martha and I went to our pensione where a key had been left for us to find. The rooms, even under the weak bulb light, showed up clean and white, but they were stuffy, the shutters being closed. Owing to the peculiar topography of Capri back-streets, the windows were near-ceiling high: to get to them and undo those shutters one had to climb on to a pair of wooden stools. This we did and reached the small squares of open window — and there were Mauresque roof-tops, stars, night, air.

'Isn't this delectable?', Martha said. It was. Jasmine, citrus, oleander, warm stone, a hint of sea. We drew it in, leaning into the night, our elbows on the window-sill, our toes on the wobbly stools.

'We must stay up here,' Martha said. 'We don't have to go to bed yet in those stuffy rooms. Let's stay up here by the window. Let's watch the dawn come up. I want to talk.' We did talk. Martha talked. I can still feel us as we balanced on those stools, heads out in the air, like two characters in a surrealist stage production. Martha talked about Ernest, about Spain, about the angle of the Nationalists' fire on the Hotel Astoria in Madrid, the safer exposure of some rooms at the Dorchester in the London Blitz. Ernest, she said, had taught her about ballistics. She talked of her own ride (unauthorised) on the naked floor of an air force bomber, of the ascent towards Cassino, living with Ernest, being married to Ernest. He did not come out well. There are always two sides to anything going on between two people, but this did not get home to me during the night's talk. It was riveting, as Martha would say; I felt privileged, I was captivated. We were still standing, straining towards the air; there was no sign of dawn yet in the sky.

At one point I felt in my pocket for the capsule in the crumpled bit of tissue, the German officer's pill. And I took it.