The Avignon Quintet (124 page)

“Whose safety?”

“Mine! Everyone’s!”

“I suddenly felt I needed to get away from you, to stand off from you in order to see you more clearly; I am going to desert you after lunch and visit my old clinic to see how they are getting on with my old patients.”

“And tonight?”

“I must sleep in my flat, alone.”

He used a lot of bad language under his breath, swearing in French, Arabic, Greek and English, but what the target of these objurgations was he could not say – it had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with this strange love-predicament. Just when he most wanted to seem a man of the world, sincere but experienced. “What are you mumbling?” she asked suspiciously, but he only shook his head and said, “I was swearing at my own lack of subtlety. I should have got tickets for a concert. It would have been one way of being together without chewing each other with our eyes.”

It was hardly surprising that they lacked appetite as well, though she found an excuse in the fact that she had only just arrived from a starving country and was not used to all this abundance. But she drank a couple of stiff whiskies – a fact which he noted with disapproval. They were joined fairly soon by their two billiardaire companions who were indulging in their usual desultory wrangling. “Just because our old friend Blanford is about to manifest, Robin here has set up as a new Einstein, just to
épater
him. On the bathroom mirror he has in lipstick E = mc
²
with the legend
ERECTION EQUALS MEDITATION PLUS CONNIVANCE SQUARED.
As if that were not enough he had added on the mirror in the hall,
MEDITATION OVER FORNICATION LIKE MASS OVER FORCE YIELDS REINCARNATION.
I do not think either Blanford or Einstein would approve, but there it is.”

“It’s the fruit of my inmost supposings,” said Sutcliffe, a trifle coyly. “It’s such a bore just going on being a cricketer.” He was referring to his famous namesake, now in honourable retirement. “Can’t one change hearses in mainstream? Why not Jack the Stripper or someone more colourful? I shall ask Aubrey when he comes if it’s all the same to him.”

“Will you come to meet him?” she asked curiously, and he said, “Of course I will, if you will drive.” But she did not believe him. Somehow she thought he would avoid the meeting. On an impulse she decided to go home to bed, but once she walked into her flat a terrible desolation seized her by the hair. She telephoned Affad and he came to her, as swift as magic.

They looked at one another for a long moment; and then, no word said, they went outside and got into the car. He felt as if he was hardly breathing, he was pale. Once they reached the hotel they rang for the lift, and still silent went up to his room where he at once drew the curtain to shut out the daylight, while she was naked in a flash and in his arms. She was so excited that she wanted to live out a sort of expiation, and through clenched teeth she whispered,
“Fais-moi mal, chéri. Déchirez-moi.”
To hurt her, to drive his nails into that firm body – yes, but he wanted to bide his time as yet for their breathing was not in synchro. They would scatter the precious orgasm, mercury all over the place like a smashed thermometer. “Ah, you are holding back!” she cried in anguish, and scratched. “I’m not, Constance.” She began to laugh at their precipitation, and their disarray, and then the laughter turned to tears and she buried her face in his shoulders and planted a dejected blue bruise on the fine brown skin. Two arms, two legs, two eyes … an apparatus both for surfeit and for bliss.
Tristia!
What a tremendous novitiate loving was – no, she was taking it too seriously. It was just beauty and pleasure. He was saying to himself, “It is like drinking a whole honeycomb slowly. O Divine Entropy – even God dissolves and melts away. Ah, my poor dream of a committed love which is no longer possible because of the direction women have taken.”

Suddenly he gave her a tremendous slap across the face, and almost before she could react with surprise and pain he was on her, had taken her by the shoulders and penetrated her; and to still her cries of rage and injured pride he sealed his mouth upon hers. There was no doubt who led, for now he mastered her and inflicted orgasm upon orgasm upon her like welcome punishments. And suddenly, after a struggle, she accepted the fact, she played the role of slave, knowing that her perfect submission would tire him sooner and bring him down to her feet once more. The charm of that inner compliance excited him beyond endurance almost; later he told her it was like being covered in honey and tied down to an ant-hill, to be devoured slowly kiss by kiss, ant-mouthful by ant-mouthful. So the time ran on until the two exhausted creatures fell asleep.

“I knew this would happen,” she said much later, combing out her hair in the mirror. “I simply knew that I could be something to you.” Then added, “Bloody fool that I am!” Almost every day now they dined at her flat, which enabled her to show off a culinary aptitude which was fair to good for a bachelor girl, and which he appraised as well as praised with discrimination; then he helped her stack the washing up for the servant and played a little on the sweet, small upright piano which was her solace in times of melancholy, and on which the ponderous Sutcliffe amidst sighs swathed himself in the moods of Chopin. Affad did not play as well as she did – good!

He stood up and said, “Were you happy as a child? I think I must have been because I never asked myself the question. I stood between my father and mother, each held a hand, as if between a great king and queen, two gods. It would have been unthinkable to regret or doubt. I lived in a dream, and it is still going on in the depths of things, for me. Yes, still going on.” And he softly repeated the word which he did not like others to use: “Sebastiyanne.”

They lay down side by side on the couch, fully dressed and thoughtful. He said, “You know, this war is coming to an end, slowly but surely. Italy has been turned inside out like the sleeve of a coat. I have been checking the reports of all posts. We have a date now for a landing in Europe in full force. It is all coming together, becoming coherent, and the Germans know it. They will turn very nasty now before they are finally convinced. How right Tacitus was about their national character. How marvellous the British have been to hold on, how can we ever thank them?”

“What do you see beyond – what sort of world?”

“A smashed Europe like an old clock; it will take about six or seven years to get it working again, unless the Russians decide to prevent it ever working. They will emerge from this thing strong, while we shall be exhausted.”

“I shall stay here,” she said, “and operate from here if I can. We shall see. But meanwhile, for the present, we mustn’t forget that Aubrey arrives tomorrow at dawn. Sutcliffe has panicked and retired to bed with a heavy cold. He dare not look upon the face of his Maker, it would seem.”

He slept quietly where he lay, and she in her turn also did so, though she first made herself more comfortable in a silk dressing-gown, and combed out her unruly hair in the bathroom; the little radio was on but turned quite low. She heard Chevalier singing “Louise” and for some reason she felt moved, tears came into her eyes and threatened her make-up which she was too lazy to remove. She restored her looks and her composure with the help of a tissue and told her reflection, “All this will end in a fine neurasthenia, you see.”

She unlaced his suedes and drew them softly from his feet, while he hardly stirred; what had he been doing to get so tired? Then she arranged a rug over their feet and crawled under it, nestling beside him, trying to remain quite still, almost breathless like a bird, so as not to disturb him. In the middle of the night she woke to find him staring at her with his eyes wide open, so intently that for a moment she wondered if he were still asleep. But no. “How marvellous!” he whispered and in a flash was asleep once more. She felt proud and contented, as if she had suckled him. Her own sleep was troubled lightly by questions about the future – intellectual nest-building which she reproved. It seemed hardly an hour before the little alarm clock squealed and they woke reluctantly upon the darkness, to envisage the distant airfield in its remote valley under the snows. The car was sluggish, too, but at last they got it going and crawled across the sleeping town towards the lakeside where there was much more light, with a distinct promise of a clear dawn coming up apace.

“Can I smoke?”

“No. Or I shall too.”

“Very well.”

They drove on in sleepy silence, until he asked: “Have you precise plans for Aubrey Blanford’s treatment? You said you had seen a detailed dossier.”

“Yes I have; there may be one fairly big operation and two minor ones to do, but the picture is not without hope. I have invoked the aid of Kessley and his clinic – he is by far the cleverest surgeon for the job. Aubrey is young still and in quite good physical shape. There is no need for a gloomy prognosis in his case, as in some of the others. I have made all the arrangements – a pleasant lakeside room, and of course the hot water spa right at his elbow. Let’s see what he says.”

The airport was hardly awake, and the bar provided them with deplorably weak coffee and a croissant. But they were glad of the shelter and the warmth, for outside on the field a chill wind was blowing. In a while they heard the distant droning of the three Ensigns which were bringing the chosen fifty to safety and medical aid. They circled the field once or twice before making their run in one after the other. They came to rest and taxied up to within hailing distance of the terminal before releasing their occupants – a cluster of uniformed nurses and orderlies, followed by a mass of stretchers and wheelchairs. They waited patiently, trying to sort out the throng with their eyes. “There!” Affad said at last; as a matter of fact it was not Blanford he had recognised, for he was huddled in his wheelchair, covered in a rug, and deeply asleep. It was the snake-headed valet, Cade, who wheeled him out of the plane and towards them. He wore a kind of desert uniform with a bush-jacket, and his service cap sported a cock feather. “Good morning!” he cried cheerfully as he saw Affad. “Here he is all safe and sound. But sound asleep,” and as if to explain, Cade groped at the feet under the rug and produced an empty whisky bottle. He frowned and said, “Too much of this for my liking, but what can I do? I have to obey orders.” He gave a brief canine smile, full of yellowish teeth. The sick man stirred.

He seemed to Constance to be very much thinner than she remembered, and indeed more youthful in a strained sort of way, but surprisingly brown, which gave the tone of fitness to the general impression he made, lying there asleep.

Presently he woke, due perhaps to a slight jolt of his wheelchair or some unaccustomed change of silence or sound or temperature – a cold wind blew across the airfield and the air was full of cries and greetings. Yet he woke smiling a trifle shyly, to give each a hand, saying, “I’m sorry to be in this disarray; it was a long twelve-hour flight and my backache drove me to gag the pain with whisky, which annoyed Cade.” She told him with genuine delight that he had not changed – yes, he had allowed a small moustache to grow, that was all. Nor had she, he said, and blushed with a sort of delighted confusion, with emotion at meeting, so to speak, with a survivor of that last Provençal summer. Yet both made the same disclaimer: “Ah, but inside!” she said, and he agreed that the change was there, though invisible. They felt aged in the heart of their experience. He held on to her hand as they talked, as if to draw from it warmth and support; and Affad, feeling that a third party would increase the dilemma of constraint and shyness, said a brief fond word and took his leave, on the understanding that she would ride in the ambulance with Aubrey, and that he himself would send a duty car to the clinic for her.

Some provision had to be made for Cade and the wheelchair, and this she arranged with the driver of the ambulance, squeezing in beside him so that she could keep Aubrey’s hand in hers while they drove in companionable silence to their destination. “It’s quite unbelievable!” he said once, and that was all; but she noticed that he was feverish and a little hysterical, no doubt due to fatigue and the claustrophobia of the journey in an old-fashioned plane. At any rate he berated Cade for trivial lapses or oversights with an unusual violence and outspokenness. The hireling did not reply, but simply drew his lips back to expose his teeth with an expression of pain, or as if he were a dog about to snap. His resentment he showed by breathing hard through his nose. Aubrey saw that she remarked this departure with curiosity and coloured as he said, trying to laugh the matter off, “One becomes a bit of an old maid, as you see. We quarrel like an old married couple – Cade is the wife.” Disgusted, the valet pretended not to hear. He looked out of the window with his dogged expression, impatient of their arrival at Dr. Kessley’s clinic. It did not take very long before they turned into a well-tended property full of green grass and firs, and dotted about with elegant chalets. At one of these they disembarked and found their way to his quarters which delighted him by their seclusion and the beauty of the view. “I was hoping for snow,” he said. “I wanted to see snow again.” Dr. Kessley made his appearance and created a most favourable impression on the patient by his modesty and by the fact that he was fully abreast of the case. Constance he called by her first name, which increased the sense of intimacy, of being among friends. “We want you for a few days to do nothing but take hot water massage in the spa waterfall and sleep a great deal; we want you completely at ease and relaxed before we go any further. You have received excellent attention in Cairo for the first stage – there is no work to be undone. We can continue from the present state of affairs with some confidence. I suppose you know about your condition.” He said that he did; Dr. Drexel in Cairo had given him a thorough brief as to the general shape of things. “Good,” said the surgeon and took his leave.