The Avignon Quintet (127 page)

They were silent for a long moment; then he took up the manuscript once more, saying, “It’s only a novel, the bare bones of a draft of a story based on true findings. I was led to it by a lot of sporadic and scattered reading first of all: by the mystery of the Templars’ abject surrender and their obvious guilt. It was Affad who told me they were simply gnostics dedicated to cross swords with Monsieur instead of putting up with his rule. Then I took up the threads right there in Alexandria. They are not joking you know! The cult of the human head is with us even today. In the novel the death-map of Piers was an attempt to assess his chances – he had put the names of his friends on it, under the names of the Templar knights. He suddenly realised that his number was up – but who was going to strike the blow? I haven’t finished the book yet but in the final version it could be Sabine.” He paused before going on in a slower tone: “Suicide was forbidden to them, so it
had
to be some sort of death-preempting ritual murder. But of course it is only the inner circle of the confraternity who take this vow; as their ranks thin others are elected. Affad had to wait years he tells me. And of course there is no way of knowing when he will get the message – the short straws gummed to a piece of rice paper with his name on it. The letter with the Egyptian stamp.”

There was a pause. “Schoolboys!” she cried in accents of distress.

“Affad is leaving the day after tomorrow. He rang me and asked where you were. He thinks you are going to be bitter and reproach him for what you once called his ‘pre-lapsarian twaddle’.” She smiled a trifle wistfully. “Perhaps I shall, when next we meet.”

She had sent the car away, and now set off to walk back around the lake shore; at their old meeting-place opposite the promontory near the town approaches she saw the car of Affad standing, its engine uncovered, apparently in difficulties. Its owner was trying to execute some inexpert repairs, or remedy some defect in a fashion that seemed almost laughably inept and despairing. He was no good with machines, as he always said, and the machines knew it. He saw her coming and for a moment did not know quite what line of action to take – it seemed so ignominious to be stranded there with an expensive car. So he did nothing, simply stood still and smiled sadly at her in all his humiliating dishevelment. When she was still a little way off he said, “Have you heard? I’ve been recalled at last.” She said nothing but went on walking towards him, looking at him with such hungry intensity that one would imagine her to be storing up memories of this moment against his fatal departure. “You have come to reproach me,” he said, and she shook her head. She had suddenly seen him as he really was, she had seen his
eidolon
in all its gentle passivity and feminine warmth. There he stood, covered in oil and with his hair standing on end, pained beyond measure and quite humiliated by his defaulting motor car. She felt a tremendous shock of sympathy, a warmth about the heart, and with her eyes full of happy tears, put her arms round him, as if to comfort him in his defeat. A new pang had shaken her, and with it a new and quite unexpected magnanimity. “Yes, I came to reproach you, damn you.” But the malediction was not really meant as such – it was an endearment. He looked at her with his sad, protesting, sea-grey eyes. She said, “I really came to thank you for giving me the key to myself – teaching me to live and create without a man. I owe you that.” They kissed exultantly. She added, “I know you are ready to take me back with you, but I am staying here where I belong; perhaps you will come back, perhaps not. We shall see.” His look was a whole discourse of rapture and deep gratitude. “With so much death in the world surely we have a right to a little love?” she said. “Let’s not spoil this, diminish it by pettiness or playacting.”

She got into the car and pressed the self-starter. By some miracle it worked. They drove off along the lake. Never had friendship and love joined forces in this way for her. It was as if henceforward she understood everything, no more turning back. It was the right way to part even if it was not forever.

“What will you do with yourself?” he said, putting his arm round her shoulders, for she had elected to drive. “We may have years ahead of us.”

“I shall pursue my obstinate theology course – building the Taj Mahal on an icefloe, as you call it.”

“Deciding how many psychoanalysts can dance on the point of a pin!”

“Of Jews an infinite number, I feel sure.”

There was a long silence as they watched the blue lake unrolling beside them, and then he said, “What made me so suddenly and acutely aware that perhaps I wasn’t being fair to you was a conversation I had with the Prince; for the first time on a somewhat acrimonious note. He said that in the present state of my engagements – about which you now know I don’t doubt – I was not free to love you. In the most literal sense. I could not prejudice my commitments towards the committee – it would be like breaking the chain of belief which binds us. Like breaking a letter chain. In fact, that I was loving you under false pretences and he, the Prince, was jolly well not going to have it!” He could not help grinning affectionately as he mimicked the tone of the Prince’s voice. Constance smiled also, “Good for him,” she said, “at least somebody loves me.”

Affad said, “I am duty bound to go back and consult the brotherhood as to my chances of freeing myself from them. If I could achieve that I would be free to return to you – it would change everything. One could envisage another sort of life based on this experience. Would you encourage such an idea?”

“You would never do it,” she said after a long pause. “It’s your whole life. You would be wrong to try. I’m sure when you reflect – when it comes to the point – you will feel bound to them, to the organisation, and not to me. Outwardly I will still be there, of course, and nothing forbids us to continue to meet. But the inward landscape has changed, and that may well be for good, forever.”

“For love it’s the acid test,” he admitted. “But I refuse to pre-empt the future. In my present mood I feel sure that I am going to free myself and join you while there is still time. Constance, look at me.” She turned her bright eyes on him for a second and then bent them back upon the road. He said, “Can I leave you a hostage of a kind – a hostage of a strange sort? I have been meaning to ask you if you would study and pronounce upon the illness of my little son. I hesitated; but now I feel it is right to ask you if you will see him while I am away. Will you?”

She said nothing, but her eyes filled slowly with tears, though she did not shed them. An appalling thought had come into her mind, shocking in its baseness, namely: “He wants me to cure his child in order to recover the love of his wife.” How could she think anything so foul and so untrue? In order to expurgate the fearful supposition she leaned towards him and kissed him quickly on the mouth. “Of course I will, my darling,” she said, “of course.” And he thanked her, saying, “Lily suggested it long ago. She will be glad. And the thought will link us while I’m away.”

They drew up at the office of the Red Cross and left the car in the courtyard. It was an appropriate place to say goodbye – even a provisional goodbye. She kissed him and walked away towards the billiard bar, leaving him to look after her with his gentle and hesitant regard which somehow held finality in it. She seemed as she walked to overhear the voice of Sutcliffe say, “There are no more great loves, my lad, just Snakes and Ladders instead.”

Soon there would only be reminiscence left, going backwards into time as one unwinds, undoes an old sweater, on and on towards the dropped stitch, the original sin. Most love just lapses from satiety and indifference, but he had given her a version of the old text which one could continue to follow out, like a salient dialogue which went on even in absence. The rendering conscious of the orgasm as a gradually shared experience, it was like something new to science! Later the thought of him would perhaps ache on like a poisoned arrow, but for the moment she felt only her exultation, her solidarity with him.

This love was a separate culture. The world like some great express switches points without asking anyone’s permission, passing from tobacco smoke to wine, from steam to sail, satyr to faun, from one calculus to another: we live under the thrall of its symbolism. One simple default, a switch thrown too late, and the giant can be sent howling and hurtling from the rails out into the night, into the sky, among the stars. It was hard to try and see things clearly. Twixt
vérismo
and
trompe l’oeil
they were doomed to try to live and love. That night, watching dusk fall over the impassive lake which reflected a heartless city, she seemed to see death and love like a single centaur joined at the waist walking through the ice-blue waters to reach her.

THIRTEEN

Counterpoint

S
UTCLIFFE
,
DESPITE HIS DISPOSITION TO WAGGISHNESS
and frivolity, was nevertheless a most obedient slave. Obsessions usually are. He materialised on the chair beside the bed just as Blanford woke from a somewhat unrefreshing sleep, opiate-imposed. “Well,” he said robustly, “at last we meet. Dr. Dyingstone, I presume.” Sutcliffe nodded gravely, and said, “At your service!”

They both burst out laughing as they eyed each other. “I imagined you as much fatter,” said one, and the other replied, “And I much thinner.” Well, they would have to make do with reality – it was all they had to work on; it’s boring, this question of there being several different versions of a self, so to speak, no? Sutcliffe had actually combed his hair and donned a respectable suit – it might have been described as
tenue de ville
, his get-up. With him he carried the battered scarlet minute-box with the monogram of the Royal Arms on the lid; it contained his novel – the “other” one. “What are you calling it?” asked Aubrey curiously, and nodded when he heard the title, to show that he found it suitable:
Monsieur
. His own version was not quite finished, and he hoped during this convalescence to complete it, taking his cue from Sutcliffe. His visitor held up the red box and said, “It’s all here!”

“The whole quinx of the matter. Your quinx?”

“No. Your quinx, rather. My cunx.”

Aubrey gazed admiringly at his friend and chuckled as he said, “By the five wives of Gampopa, you keep up a pretty recondite style. Quinx to Cunx, eh?”

“A dialogue twixt Gog and Magog.”

“Between Mr. Quiquenparle and Mr. Quiquengrogne.”

“Ban! Ban! Ban! Caliban!”

“That’s the spirit!”

It was marvellous to see eye-to-eye like this. Sutcliffe had already spotted the whisky decanter in the corner with the tray full of glasses and soda syphons. “May I?” he asked politely, inclining his throat and trembling wattles in its direction. Without waiting for an answer he crossed the room and primed a glass. Then he stood and admired the lake view while Aubrey watched him with an affectionate if somewhat disembodied air. “My vision, like yours, is not absolutely panoramic yet. it’s selective: so there is always the blind spot.” Sutcliffe nodded, frowning, and said, “It’s the point where Monsieur intrudes on the cosmic scheme. The Counterfeit Demon in the pages of Zosimos. Or in more modern terms the demon figuring among the electrical properties of Faraday.”

“I was delighted to find that he was reborn to the R.A.F. Command as ‘the gremlin’ and is still with us. His uncles – the joker in the pack of cards and the Hanged Man of the old Tarot – are proud of him.”

“And no wonder. He lives a very full life.”

“And now that the war is ending, Robin, what is going to become of us? With our sad bifocal vision and the awful sense of
déjà vu
?”

“We will go slowly out of date like real life.”

“I doubt that; much remains to be done.”

“Where?”

“In the city! We return there!”

“All of us? To the dead city?”

“As many as remain. The survivors of love.”

They reflected on the probability with doubt, almost with distaste. Aubrey said, “In the Templar legends there is one crediting the Last Supper with having taken place in Avignon.
If five sat down to dine which was Judas?
So runs a riddle without an answer.”

“Will Constance come?”

“Of course! Constance is a key,”

That seemed a slightly less bleak vision of the future. At any rate to Aubrey it seemed still a way ahead – the other side of his convalescence. Here he must lie for months as yet, woozy from drugs, with reality dissolving like a tablet in spittle.