The Avignon Quintet (101 page)

The flock of official cars followed the dark Red Cross limousine bearing the Prince and the banker to the former’s hotel, and then as they approached the town, dispersed in their various directions. Felix dropped Constance off at her flat and kissed her cheek as he said goodnight. The Prince had given her a large envelope from Aubrey Blanford containing messages and manuscripts for her to read and she was anxious to examine them before going to bed.

On the morrow they met in the Consulate ballroom which was so often used as a boardroom of a temporary kind, and here the Prince, freshly laundered, so to speak, presided with aplomb. He had recovered his twinkle and the suavity and crispness of his professional manner. He began by giving them a brief account of the state of the war from the point of view of Egypt. “I am irritating the British very much,” he admitted, “because my Intelligence is so much better than theirs; you see, being neutral we still have diplomatic representation behind the German lines and normal confidential bag facilities. So it’s not to be wondered at that I know a good deal. Naturally we pass on all we can as Allies, but often we are not believed, they think we are double agents and passing planted information to them.… Goodness, how suspicious and mistrustful they are as a race!” The central heating was on full blast and, finding it a trifle too much for him, he pulled out a small Japanese fan from an inner pocket and fanned himself as he continued his exposé. He was lucidity itself, and beginning with the rape of Poland he went through all the succeeding events in order; it aged them to hear him. Each great battle or disaster sank into their consciousness like a nail driven home. Dunkirk, Sudan where France fell, the Battle of Britain, the fall of Paris. “What is to be expected now?” he went on. “I can tell you, though I don’t know the date. And don’t tell the British, they won’t believe it. But all my contacts agree and all my sources insist that an attack on Russia is imminent. This will relieve pressure a good deal, but not in the desert where Axis forces are building up again.”

He now turned aside to purely Red Cross matters concerned with budgets and balance sheets and appointments. “My journey has somewhat intrigued everyone but in fact there is nothing specially confidential about it. I am bearing messages to various people, and I must briefly visit Sweden and if possible Paris. I hope to get the necessary exequatur this week for both; but while I am busy talking to the Germans, I want to propose that we have some representation in the unoccupied zone of France. Aix? Marseille? Avignon? I don’t know. You may think it not very urgent but in fact my own guess is that the zone will not remain unoccupied very long; it is too easy for the British to filter agents into it, and whatever there is of dissidence and resistance to the Germans can form down there more easily than in the industrial north. And you know what the French are like. They won’t obey orders and they are completely selfish; sooner or later there will be a gaffe and the Germans will come in with a heavy hand and take over the zone. We need someone there to make sure that Red Cross supplies get through and are properly distributed to the medical people. I cannot see that the Germans will refuse such a request since they are still signatories and we have not been repudiated.” The Committee heard him out with quiet respect; nobody had specially clear-cut views about their field of operation, nor were there any very thorny budget problems. In Egypt all appeared to be going well and even the new Axis build-up was being faced with confident determination. “What would you?” said the Prince. “The war will last another four or five years, then peace will come; though what
sort
of peace and on what
sort
of terms I cannot tell you! Even though I appear to be a know-all … there are limits. You will have to consult Nostradamus!”

That evening there was a reception given for the Prince at the Consulate to which only Felix was invited. Constance had work of her own to do, while Toby’s department never figured on the social secretary’s invitation list because of its confidential nature. The Prince was in great form. “Felix!” he cried, “if I may call you so, for we are old Provençaux, no? Felix, I want to speak to you frankly about your uncle, Lord Galen. I fear he has been misplaced by the British and will commit incoherences.” Felix Chatto groaned and threw up his hands. “I share your views alas,” he said. “The appointment is disastrous. The P.M. must be out of his mind!” Lord Galen was the new Minister of Culture and Information, and had taken up his new post with great style and an elaborate incoherence special to himself.

From every point of view the appointment had been regarded as extraordinary. It was not that Lord Galen lacked all culture – except such as might be acquired by someone who had spent a lifetime on the stock exchange: there were other objections as well. The fact that he was an eminent and widely known member of the Jewish community would give Nazi propaganda an easy topic of comment about the culture of the Allies; moreover the appointment had irritated all the intelligent Jews already involved in the struggle. “And then, your uncle made an inaugural speech at his first press conference which was of fantastic inappositeness.” Here the Prince got up on tiptoe, spread his arms in an imitation of Lord Galen’s public manner and said, in broken tones, overcome by emotion, “Culture … our heritage … we must … do everything to preserve it … it’s so precious … we can’t ever do without it … precious heritage … I mean to say, what?” The Prince shed his imitation like a cloak and pursed his lips, shaking his head reproachfully the while. “It is not possible. He is drawing ironic applause everywhere, like Ramsay MacDonald in his heyday. And you know he gave Aubrey the fright of his life; poor Aubrey woke from a siesta to find Lord Galen standing at the end of his bed with outspread arms like an eagle, intoning: ‘O my dear Aubrey, the first victim of our culture … the first young writer to be wounded by enemy fire … I will get you an O.B.E.’” They both laughed at the thought, imagining the face of Blanford waking to find this dark cultural apparition at the foot of his bed. The Prince went on: “I pointed out that Aubrey had been shot by his own side, and he was extremely irritated. No, I don’t think the appointment can last long. There is not enough culture to go round with him in charge.

And you know, Felix, I am an old friend and love him dearly, so I am not just being malicious about the matter. He is a
disaster!”

Felix was delighted by the sincerity and familiarity of the old Prince’s conversation; it somehow set the seal upon his own new maturity, for he himself had changed very much since the outbreak of war. First of all he had secured a vastly superior posting to Geneva – ironically enough he had moved heaven and earth to get himself called up for the Air Force, but with no result. The Foreign Office had “frozen” him in his new duties which were not too arduous and only mildly confidential. Best of all, Lord Galen had been so impressed by the eminence of his new rank that he had offered him a rather handsome allowance upon which he could not only live in good style but also run a small car, which greatly aided the image carried by his rank. The change in him was rapid and very much for the better; he became quite at home in the more famous
auberges
of the town, and indeed in the more respectable night clubs. He even managed to conquer his innate timidity enough to invite the occasional dance-hostess back to his flat for the night. He had grown taller and very much more handsome and assured the Prince that he would be happy one day to accept a Cairo posting if it could be arranged. “Of course it could. The Minister is my friend,” cried the little man with vehemence. “He would do anything for me. It’s thanks to the Mount of Olives, as we call him, that I am here really, in the teeth of those old Arab Bureau slyboots. I will start work on it as soon as I wind up here and in Paris and go back to Egypt. We will speak more of this matter – this is not the place.”

Everything, for the Prince, had a place and an appropriate time; it was amazing how he kept things so sorted out in the filing cabinet of his memory. Most people in his position would by now have succumbed to the role of “delegating” to an assistant. It was this quality which made Constance sure that he would devote some of his private time entirely to herself – there was a whole sea of conversational matter between them which had not yet been taken into account. She quietly stood back and waited for him to complete the first social evolutions on his agenda. Sure enough after a week during which he had sent a bunch of red roses to her flat every morning, he proposed lunch and a drive round the lake in the afternoon.

It was a brilliantly sunny day despite a fresh wind off the distant snows – for already the traditional autumn decor of Switzerland was beginning to assert itself; the Prince, compensating for his short legs by a prop in the form of a cushion, was at the wheel of the office limousine. They set off in a sort of bemused silence due to a sudden attack of shyness which took them both by surprise. “How strange,” he said at last in a puzzled voice, “I feel that I don’t know where to begin.… Isn’t it strange? Help me, Constance, will you?” She smiled, and shaking her hair out of her eyes said, “I know. What a strange sense of inhibition! Dear Prince Hassad, forgive me. Let us begin with him, with Sam.” He recognised at once that she was correct in her assessment of their mutual reluctance to talk of the death which nagged them. He began to talk now, quietly but with emphasis, about the fatal picnic party and the Bridge of Sighs, and he could feel her physical tension, the timbre of her anxiety, as yet hardly even translated into physical form, though her fingers trembled slightly as she lit a cigarette, and she turned away from him rather abruptly to gaze out of the car window at the fleeting lake scenes they were passing. Once launched, however, he spared no detail, for all the world as if he were anxious himself to unload the full burden of his guilt, to expurgate the whole incident for which he knew himself to be responsible. Indeed he was paradoxically a little hurt when she said sharply, “There is no real question of guilt. I think we should drop that notion, it leads nowhere. The same thing could have happened in Piccadilly with a runaway taxi, you know that as well as I do. Only …”

“Only?” he echoed, gazing at her.

“The thing has filled me with impatience and anger and the sensation of uselessness. I have been seriously thinking of going back to the U.K., shelving all my commitments here and finding something useful to do there. After all, there something real is happening, they are being starved and bombed. They are in the thick of it, while here we are skulking on the outskirts of reality. The Swiss get on my nerves, they are so dull and gluttonous.”

“I know what you feel,” he said thoughtfully, “but I think you should not act in too great haste. You are doing valuable work here; and if you did move I can think of more useful places for you to occupy. No, I don’t agree.” He shook his head somewhat sternly. It made her smile affectionately and putting her hand fleetingly on his arm she said, “You sound reproachful.”

“No, but for someone so clever not to recognise that you are only acting out of a sense of guilt. You want to be punished, that is what, so you seek action, fear, discomfort.”

He was right, of course, and she knew it. “I am just run down,” she said. “I’m tired of the insane, I need a change. But a radical one.” They drove on in silence for a while. Then she went on: “I’ve got so jumpy, and that is a bad sign in my line of business. Yesterday a dying patient threw his slops at the nursing sisters – they are nuns in my ward – and screamed, ‘You don’t love me at all. You love Jesus, you hypocrites! I want to be loved for myself! Take your hands off me, you bloody masks!’ To my surprise I burst into tears – a poor advertisement for a doctor.”

“Well, you will need a change; how would you feel about a visit to Tu Duc? I have to visit Avignon quite soon; I saw the German Mission yesterday and they have agreed to get Berlin’s authority to have Red Cross representation in the unoccupied zone – though I don’t think it is going to remain unoccupied long. What do you say – a trip into enemy country, so to speak? It’s a rather
unSwiss
remark, I am afraid.”

“Back to Avignon?” she mused, for the idea seemed quite chimerical, unrealisable; the rail system was dislocated and the frontier closed, this much she knew from the steady flow of visitors which passed through Geneva, as often as not to call upon friends and relations taking treatment in various clinics. The city has been from time immemorial a vast sanatorium as well as a political cross-roads. Its present neutrality was nothing new; a spycraft and international banking were still flourishing, and the buzz of loans and mergers was always in the air. The Prince found all this delightful, suggestive, invigorating.

“In fact,” he said, “when the post is approved I will offer you first refusal of it. It might suit you for a year to work there for us, and come back to Geneva every other week. To keep on your flat and continue your present job in a less exacting sense. What would you say?”

What could she say? The prospect was such an unexpected one that she could hardly visualise it to herself, much less take a decision involving it. When they had left Provence they had envisaged saying goodbye to it for years, perhaps forever. In the case of Sam it had become indeed a case of forever; she closed her eyes and conjured up the battered old balcony upon which they had spent so much of their summer, the woods dripping now with the first winter mists and heavy dawn-frosts. The melancholy road winding down past Tubain towards the silent town with its assemblage of belfries and towers, its cruising walls still hairy with stork’s nests, its gypsy-infiltrated bastions.

“I don’t know. I must think.”

“Of course you must,” he said, “and the post has not yet begun to exist, so you have time ahead of you to consider it.”