A Void (22 page)

Vowl had said Haig was studying, inquiring at
its
administration

if it had a Clifford in any class. On this occasion his luck was in:

Augustus was told that his son
was
on its list; but was also told

that, coming top of his class in unison singing, Haig had just

flown off to Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music, to study

composition.

Six months go by. Things finally start to calm down. From a

criticism in his
Figaro
Augustus saw that Douglas had won round

Carignano's intimidating public. Longchamp, a famous musi-

cologist, had him "bound for instant stardom", whilst Gavoty,

his rival, thought of him as "tomorrow's Tito Gobbi". And that

was just in Paris: Hugh Canning, an important British critic, was

to call him a "Gigli with Kim Berg's vocal gifts, Ruffo's passion

and Souzay's intuition".

* * *

Now - it was on a Friday, if I'm not wrong - having bought

that day's provisions and arriving from town with, in tow, an

urchin whom I paid a franc or two, to carry a particularly volum-

inous shopping bag - I saw, strolling nonchalandy around our

pond, a man with an air about him that I found just a bit dis-

turbing as, for an instant, I actually took him for Haig. In fact,

as you probably now know, it was Anton Vowl.

Vowl, tall, as straight as a capital I, as slim as a strand of hair,

clad in a panama hat and a drab plastic mac with a tartan collar,

carrying a stick and looking about 20 at most, was, at first sight,

nothing but a normal, charming youth, but a faint hint of - oh,

how shall I put it? - a slightly indistinct, out-of-focus quality

about him instandy put you on your guard. His curious skin

colouring, giving his bulging brow a sickly cast, his languid gait,

half-lurching, half-undulating, his shifty look, his rabbity lash-

bound iris so limpidly bluish I thought I was looking at an albino

- all in all, I saw a kind of twitchy agitation in him which I

found highly anxious-making, as if this poor man was carrying

a cumbrous physical or psychological cargo within him.

I stood in his way, haranguing him according to a traditional

old tribal custom.

"How! Ugh! Man of whitish skin! May your wigwam know

only harmony, may you bury your martial tomahawk, as I shall

bury my own, and may you not talk in fork'd words, for nor

shall I! Now you and I must powwow."

"Ahiyohu," said Vowl, touching his brow with his right thumb

and flicking it against my brow just as a Mohican would, thus

showing his familiarity with our customs. "May a fat and juicy

caribou sit roasting in your cauldron!"

I brought him in, inviting him to sit down and ringing a gong.

In an instant Augustus stood in front of us, saying, "What is it?"

"Anton Vowl," said our visitor with a curt bow. "Last

autumn. . ."

Augustus gruffly cut him short. "I know. Last autumn you

told us all about my son's dissipation, his crazy 'political' activism

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and, thank God, his finally choosing a vocation and sticking to

it. Haig, or so I'm told, is at last making his way in this harsh

world of ours, and in Turin, just four days ago, got a standing

ovation in
Tristan.
It was my wish, you know, to thank you for

your aid, but I had no notion at all as to how I might contact

you. I found no information of that kind on your communication

to us."

A sigh from Anton. "Alas, Mr Clifford, I simply forgot to add

it - a thousand pardons. But, fortuitously passing through this

district, not far from Azincourt, I thought I'd drop by and say

hullo."

"By gad, I'm mightily glad you did!" said Augustus. "If you

don't mind, though, I'll call you Anton from now on - and you,

I trust, will drop that formal 'Mr Clifford'. Just Augustus, all

right? That should simplify things, don't you think?"

"As you wish . . . Augustus."

"Good. Now can I talk you into joining us in a light but

satisfying collation tonight?"

"Hmm, I won't say no."

First putting down his stick, Vowl took off his panama hat

and his mackintosh.

"Now," said Augustus, "why don't you and I pop into my

smoking room for a drink, a cigar and a chat. What do you say,

Anton?"

Coming out into a dark hallway, walking down a narrow corri-

dor and climbing up six stairs, Augustus brought Vowl into

a room with a pair of cosy armchairs in black Morocco and

shiny mahogany, giving him a thick Havana, and not a phony

but a first-class product, as I can vouch, of Cuba's tobacco

plants.

Vowl took a long puff on it, luxuriously savouring its odour.

Proudly showing off all his barman's apparatus, Augustus put

it to him: "A whisky? Scotch? Irish? Bourbon?"

"Hmm . . ." Vowl said doubtfully.

"A gin and tonic? A cocktail? A Bloody Mary? Or possibly just

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a Virgin Mary? That's without any vodka, you know. No? A Bull

Shot? A Tom Collins? A dry martini?"

"Actually, you know what I fancy? A blackcurrant drink."

"A kir? Naturally."

Clink-clink.

"Bottoms up."

"Skoal."

"Chin-chin."

At which point, having drunk his kir, Vowl said:

"Now, what you want to find out most of all is how I got to

know your son. Voila. It was a day on which I was idly strolling

around an aquarium - you know, in Paris's Jardin d'Acclimat-

ation. A youth clad in a black cloak, low in spirits, visibly down-

cast, a youth whom you might think of as my own kith and kin,

stood with a curiously languid air, not far off, gazing down into

a pool in which a shoal of carp was swimming about. Out of a

plastic shopping bag this lad brought a funny-looking foodstuff,

part-halva, part-loukoum, that sat crumbling in his hand until it

was thrown to any fish daring to snatch it, notwithstanding con-

stant complaints from a guardian who, on four occasions, would

approach him, yapping at him and snapping at him and pointing

with a shaky, nicotiny hand to a signboard prohibiting visitors

from giving any food to animals, birds or fish.

"It was almost as if this poor boy was waiting in actual anticipa-

tion of a carp rising up and hopping out of its liquid habitat,

just as would a dolphin, to grab a crumb in mid-air. But no carp

did hop out, a fact that cast a pall on his spirits.

"I finally thought to accost him, talking to him of his poignant

but, from what I could work out, totally solitary passion for fish,

carps in particular, which brought from him a frank admission

that in his past, among many casual companions, his only bosom

buddy, so to say, was Jonah his carp, which would swim up on his

murmuring 'Jonah . . . Jonah . . .' or his whistling a complicitous

fishy signal. Not a day would pass, so I was told, without his

carp catching a crumb or two out of his hand, without Douglas,

148

if at all downcast, taking Jonah as his confidant - Jonah, who

wouldn't fail to wink back at him amicably.

'Today, said Douglas, lost in his thoughts, too candid for his

own good and, frankly, just a tiny bit crazy (but his almost sui-

cidal mood was an obvious product of his affliction), it was his

waif conviction that a carp from this Jardin d'Acclimatation would

swim up and (why not?) flick its tail at him in a cordial salutation.

And so, with his last franc, your son had bought a pound of

halva, a sticky concoction for which Jonah had always had a

gluttonous passion, particularly so if it was, as now, royal halva,

Shah's halva, as Iranians call it - of a quality found only in first-

class shops, Fauchon in Paris and Fortnum & Mason in London.

"Brought low in my turn by his sorrowful mood, I stood him

a drink and a ham sandwich in a local snack bar. Douglas was

hungry all right: watching him gulp his food and wash it down

with a Coca-Cola, I thought of a Muslim coming out of

Ramadan, a Ramadan just a tad too long and drawn-out for

comfort.

"Whilst sipping my cappuccino, I was told by your son all I

was avid to know about his work, about his vocation, about you,

Mr Clifford - oh pardon, I should say Augustus - and about

Squaw..."

Augustus, his brow moist with anticipation, cut him off. "What

did Haig say? Was my poor boy conscious of that curious taboo

surrounding his birth?"

"I'm afraid so, old man. Unknown to you, as a child of six,

Douglas - or Haig, as you call him - had caught you on a

fatal morning in his childhood in that soothing, drowsy-making

caldarium in which you lay flat out, cut off from all human con-

tact, in your lustral bath, sinking into Nirvana, murmuring, only

half-consciously, a rambling glossolalia so intriguing to a child's

imagination that, approaching you, Douglas stuck his auditory

organ against that harnass, or its clasp, that you'd put on to hold

you in position, a clasp that, according to him, had a strong

amplifying capacity . . ."

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A groan from Augustus:
"Ah capiscol capiscol"

"That's right, Augustus, now you know. You unwittingly told

your son all about it. You told him about Zahir, about that

mystical scab in his umbilical cord. And, his wrath against you

brought to its boiling point, a wrath making him as strong and

vicious and unforgiving as a lion - what am I saying? a wrath

driving him almost out of his mind - it was Douglas who would

pull his Zahir off your pinky!"

"So provoking that damnation that's pursuing us to this day!"

"Right again," said Anton Vowl. "Douglas, as I say, was six

at most, but it had all sunk in. Cursing you with all his childish

brio, from now on your son would rancorously hound you, rap-

turous to find you falling, to find things going badly for you,

and in agony, by contrast, if your luck was starting to turn. His

loathing of you was constant - nay, undying!"

"My God! Oh my God!" Augustus was now loudly sobbing,

as if in convulsions, and twitchily crumpling a hanky in his hand.

"Your son's fulmination against you, bastard as Douglas is,

British as Douglas was, is intact to this day. What your son did,

all of it, including his vocation, was part of a monstrous plot

thought up by him to bring about your doom!"

"His vocation?" said Augustus in an anxious murmur. "I'm

afraid I don't follow . . ."

"Which is why," said Vowl chillingly, "I was in such a hurry

to catch up with you."

From his black chamois-bound bag Vowl took a charcoal draw-

ing, not unskilful in its way, of that
Uomo di Sasso,
clad in an oval

plastron of pallid stucco, who would punish Don Juan not so

much for having slain him as for going so far, committing an act

so sick, as to ask him to lunch. Think, if you will, of a gigantic

Humpty Dumpty.

On its back, in Douglas's handwriting, was a disturbing prog-

nosis: "Augustus, too, is in for it at
my
apparition, for my blood

is a blot on his honour!"

"This," said Anton Vowl, "is what Douglas would hand in at

1 5 0

my club four days ago. With it was a card announcing that your

son was living in Urbino, singing you-know-who
in Don Giovanni

and planning to marry Olga Mavrokhordatos . . . "

I saw Augustus jump up, as if stung by a wasp.

"No! No!" was his cry. "Haig is hurtling to his own dam-

nation!"

151

IV

OLGA

M A V R O K H O R D A T O S

15

In which, untying a long string of fabrications and

falsifications, you will find out at last what sank

that imposing Titanic

"No! No!" was Augustus's cry, as I say. "Haig is hurtling to his

own damnation!"

"Abyssus abyssum invocat\
" was Anton Vowl's gloomy con-

clusion.

But as Olga, in a turmoil, is sobbing, almost fainting, Arthur

Wilburg Savorgnan cuts short (as abruptly, in truth, as with a

pair of scissors) Squaw's rich, insinuating narration.

"Ah, such trials and tribulations," says Savorgnan, "and no

solution in sight. Douglas Haig 20 springs ago, Anton Vowl a

month ago, and now Augustus - kaput, struck down by a

cunning form of malignancy that's still prowling around us, a

malignancy which also struck at (for why not? who knows?)

Hassan Ibn Abbou, Othon Lippmann and that poor, unknown

woman who brought Douglas into this world . . ."

"All our sons, saving only Yvon," sighs Amaury Conson.

"But," adds Savorgnan, "isn't it so that all of us now approach

our goal? Can't all of us now grasp its principal factors? What

Squaw has just told us, omitting nothing, not a word, not a fact

- didn't it contain a prodigious opportunity for us to find a way

out of this abomination that's pursuing us?"

"But Douglas didn't know my family background!" Olga

abruptly affirms.

155

"Douglas didn't know it, that's right," says Squaw, continuing,

"nor did you. But Augustus did know it and instantly saw how

important it was: