Quicksands by Sybille Bedford

Readers of Sybille Bedford's semi-fictional autobiography, Jigsaw, may expect this latest memoir to chronicle her life after the Provence of the 1920s, which provided such rich material for her novels

Readers of Sybille Bedford's semi-fictional autobiography, Jigsaw, may expect this latest memoir to chronicle her life after the Provence of the 1920s, which provided such rich material for her novels. Indeed, Quicksands begins in the postwar years, with Bedford - who was born in 1909 - struggling with the writing of her first published book, A Visit to Don Otavio. Hers was a life of distractions: travel, falling in love, swimming in warm seas and drinking wine on trellised terraces in Mediterranean places, nostalgically before the days of mass tourism.

It was also financially precarious. A network of literary friends prevented her from going under. One sent a small regular allowance. Constantine FitzGibbons passed on the cheap tenancy of "a sort of hut" atop of an office building in Rome. Martha Gellhorn lashed Bedford's conscience into writing against the forces of self-doubt and sloth.

All seems set for a sequel to Jigsaw. But a chance encounter with a German baronessa, while visiting Ischia with Gellhorn, plunges us back to the past that exerted a magnetic pull on Bedford in her novels. Her memory returns to her parents' broken marriage - the childhood years, first with her German father in his run-down schloss, then with her exotic mother, who swooped around Italy chasing lovers, with daughter in tow. She married an Italian, who was half her age, settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, finally succumbing to morphine addiction.

The earlier book concentrated on personal relationships. In Quicksands, the threat of Nazi Germany casts a shadow over the sun-baked days of Sanary. Thomas Mann arrived as an exile and Bedford contributed an article expressing anti-Nazi sentiments to a magazine founded by his son. This resulted in the confiscation by the Nazis of her deceased father's estate, which would have provided an income, and the prospect of being a stateless person when her German passport ran out. As she had a Jewish mother, a return to Germany would have been fatal.

In a memoir where much is obscured, Bedford is remarkably forthcoming about how she solved the problem of the passport and came by her surname (she was born Von Schoenbeck). There was a Mr Bedford, the homosexual friend of a designer friend's butler, in need of some cash. The registration of their intent to marry attracted a hostile visit from a Home Office official, who served her with a deportation order. Once more, Sybille was saved by Aldous and Maria Huxley, for years central to her life. Maria sought an audience with the Home Secretary. The marriage went ahead, and Sybille got her British passport.

Maria insisted on a wedding party, to which Terry Bedford agreed only if he could bring "his own background". Showgirls and some tough male bruisers mingled with literati and politicians. It was, remarked Virginia Woolf, "a very queer party". The husband melted back into his existence, but Bedford writes about the daily pang of apprehension when she awakes "for a few intense seconds I hold my breath - if the telephone does not ring, and no doorbell sounds, it will be all right: nothing bad is going to happen on this day."

Clare Colvin's novel 'The Mirror Makers' is published by Arrow

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