Hilary Mantel

The last of the vintage wine

When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or entrained (taking their own monogrammed linen) for the major European spas. Her own family’s values looked back to the 18th century; her father was interested in mesmerism, and knew a man in Grasse who could raise the dead.

In this long-awaited memoir, his daughter has performed the same feat. Her autobiographical novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989; it unfolded some of her story, its cast trimmed, the rough edges of life smoothed into fictional form. Now, in a book which takes, she says, ‘a zigzag course’, she unfolds more, in a less tidy but still compelling version of her extraordinary life and times. Her style is calm, graceful and distanced, and the whole text is lit by glowing pointillist descriptions of places and people.

Her mother was a wealthy and reckless Englishwoman, a glamorous bolter. She was a dreadful mother to have, except perhaps for a future writer. She ignored the young Sybille for long stretches of her childhood, leaving her behind with her father and pursuing a series of love affairs. Her mother’s second husband was a handsome Italian, 15 years her junior. When he began to be unfaithful to her, she took to morphine as relief from mental pain, becoming swiftly and savagely addicted. In Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford wrote that she was never able to love her mother, though here she pays tribute to her intelligence and her far-sighted understanding of the way the world was moving, between the wars.

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