Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, by Marina Warner
Ysenda Maxtone Graham
YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir By Marina Warner William Collins £16.99
Esmond Warner was a young British staff officer stationed in Bari in 1944.
One day, he was helping the local Terzulli family with translations. With his customary bluff ebullience, he introduced the prettiest daughter of the family to a fellow officer of his, saying to her, ‘Here’s just the thing for you.’
The girl turned to Esmond and said to him, simply, ‘But why not you?’
‘And the possibility struck him to the heart, the words flying true from the bow of her lips,’ writes Marina Warner, in this charming and compelling memoir of her parents’ marriage.
She focuses mainly on her own earliest years in Egypt, where her father Esmond ran the Cairo branch of W H Smith from 1947 until it was burnt down in the riots of 1952.
Esmond fell madly in love and was terribly excited at the prospect of marrying the stunningly pretty Ilia Terzulli. Warner captures her balding father’s rather unsexy British ardour: he was forever loudly sniffing a Vicks inhaler while holding the other nostril, and forever roaring with laughter.
Writing to his parents in London (his father was the retired England cricketer Plum Warner), he gushed, ‘She’s like a two-year-old filly … a lovely, open character … although very possessive and jealous!’ He added, ‘Her life will be mine, not her circle’s’.
The two of them had spent only two minutes alone together. Esmond was 37, 15 years older than Ilia.
And Ilia … well, Warner’s prose takes flight while describing the darting southern-italian beauty that was her mother. There was ‘nothing to her but light and air, and the rainbow dazzle in her black hair and bright face’.
They were married in Bari. Esmond was posted to Sri Lanka. And there Ilia suddenly was, ‘the young daughter of a widow of no means from a stricken region of a defeated nation’, on a London bus to South Kensington going to lodge with her parents-in-law in their mansion flat.
You can imagine the clash of the two worlds. Warner takes us there, sublimely. The flat smelled of the peelings from the kitchen’s rubbish chute, ‘the building’s ample digestive tract’ with its ‘dark gullet’. In the stuffy drawing-room, Plum Warner handed Ilia a wooden sporting implement and said, ‘There are only two rules in life. Keep a straight bat. And your eye on the ball.’
Almost the first thing Esmond did on his return to London in 1945 was to take Ilia to Peal’s in Oxford Street to fit her out with a pair of brogues, his way of signalling that she was now an Englishwoman.
Here I need to remind you what it’s like to read a Marina Warner book. She comes to a halt on certain items or words and writes a short academic paper on them. It’s no good flicking forward. That would be disrespectful, and you might miss the crux of the book. You must just sit back and imagine you’re in quite a good Monday-morning lecture.
So now, in this chapter called Brogues (all the chapters are named after items in her parents’ belongings), we have an essay on the etymology and mythology of brogues. ‘Brogue also means a way of speaking your own tongue … Oddly, shoes have a tongue … A brogue is a mark of identity, a sign of tribal belonging and origin.’ Later on, we have a seven-page essay on the word rastaquouère (‘dashing with a tendency towards sexual unscrupulousness’).
I was far more interested in the dynamic of Esmond and Ilia’s marriage after they moved to Cairo. Were they happy? Ilia kept a notebook of favourite quotes, one of which was Proust’s ‘One’s ideal is always unattainable and one’s happiness mediocre.’
All too soon, Esmond had stopped calling her mia piccina and gone over to ‘How was your day, old thing?’ before heading to the drinks tray. And he had a terrible temper.
The ‘difficulty at the core of his whole being’, Warner writes, was that, because of his father’s fame, he had hung out with the Bullingdon crowd, where he didn’t belong and hadn’t the money.
He and Ilia lived in style in Cairo, but money worries gnawed away. Ilia made all her own clothes – and her children’s – happily and capably. One day, though, she dared to stop off at Cicurel (the Cairo Harrods) to buy her husband a silver photograph frame. He was furious and hurled it out of the window, narrowly missing her face and a passer-by. He wept with remorse, his glasses steaming up, and begged for forgiveness. But from now on, Ilia was terrified of him. Having witnessed the scene, Marina Warner writes, ‘I resolved never ever to depend on a husband.’
The world of early-1950s Cairo that she evokes is dazzling and seductive. The
portrayal of a W H Smith office picnic outing to the tree under which Mary and Joseph rested on the flight to Egypt is one of the book’s many delicious and pivotal sections. Warner uses her novelist’s skills to imagine conversations convincingly. It’s dreadful when the bookshop is burned down. That night of riots signalled ‘the end of a world and an era’. It had a brutal effect on Esmond’s mind, embittering him.
Also, it leads to a seven-page essay on the history, geography and mythology of book-burning.