The Avignon Quintet (129 page)

Because he was a decent chap

He wore the fairies gave him clap

But Mrs. Gilchrist took the rap

Because he was a decent chap.”

There were other trifles which amused them for a while but then she had to leave to keep an appointment and he took his sleeping draughts and composed his mind to sleep, sipping the while a green tea which she had left him and which Cade prepared. He fell once more to dreaming in slogans and pictograms, trying to visualise the words as he thought them. ‘‘Secret Practices – lovers sharpened by slavery. A committee of dolls ruling everything.
Terrain giboyeux à vendre pour roman à clef
. He who once vaccinates the novel with heraldic doubt, must poke to let the sawdust out!”

On this note he fell asleep at last and was only woken by the silver chiming of his little travelling clock. He was surprised to find Constance sitting at his bedside, watching him sleep, deeply thinking. It was reassuring in a way to renew his hold on life again through her – for the effect of pain and drugs and fatigue had begun to make him live in a sort of twilight state, between realities, as it were. Constance was real, she rang out like a note in music. But profoundly sad. “He’s gone!” she said in a half-whisper. “O Aubrey, what a dilemma!”

There was a tap at the door and Cade entered the room with a silver salver upon which there lay a letter. He smiled in his sly conniving way as he said, “There’s a letter for Mr. Affad, sir.” They looked at each other in total indecision. “But he’s gone,” she said at last, and Blanford put out his hand to take up the envelope and examine it. The postmark of origin, the Egyptian stamp … He said sharply, “Very well, Cade. I’ll take charge of it. You may leave.” As the door closed behind the manservant he said to her, “I am going to confide it to your care and discretion. Wait until you can give it to him personally. Let the present issue resolve itself first. Don’t hurry, don’t tempt providence. Wait!”

“Alternatively to open it myself, to see what it contains, to be sure … what a temptation!”

“That is for you to decide of course. The temptation of Eve in a new form. Darling, do what you feel you must.”

The girl rose and took the letter. “Or else just to tear it up and throw it on the fire! Why not?”

“Why not?” he echoed. She stood for a while looking down at the letter in her hand. Then she said, “I must think about the matter. I must really think, Aubrey.”

He watched her slow and perplexed retreat across the green lawns of the clinic towards the car park where her car awaited her. What would she do? It was a pregnant decision to take. He could not for the life of him predict.

FIFTEEN

The City’s Fall

F
OR THE HISTORIAN EVERYTHING BECOMES HISTORY
, there are no surprises, for it repeats itself eternally, of that he is sure. In the history books it will always be a Friday the thirteenth. It is not surprising, for human folly is persistently repetitive and the issues always similar. The moralist can say what he pleases. History triumphantly describes the victory of divine entropy over the aspirations of the majority – the hope for a quiet life this side of the grave. For Avignon, as for Rome, it would not be the first time; before the city of the Popes existed its inhabitants had seen the swarthy troops of Hannibal swimming over their thirty elephants, animals whose odour and fearful trumpeting struck terror into the Roman legionaries as well as their cavalry. Today it was a depleted 11th Panzer division, that was the only difference; much armour had been drawn off for the impending collisions of the war in the north. But the preoccupations were the same: the transverse lines of the swift precarious rivers and their vulnerable bridges.

The pressure had increased, just as the tension in the news bulletins had sharpened; all of a sudden the sky filled up with giant bombers which flowed steadily down the railway lines at dawn and dusk dropping high explosive upon the culverts and rails, or spending a whole night at work on the marshalling yards of Nîmes from which in spouting red plumes of flame one might see whole wagons thrown into the air like toys, and human figures like ants shaken from them. Of course some went astray. In some market garden or down some country road full of flowering Judas one might come upon houses which had become very tired, been forced to kneel down, even to fall: some old medieval
bergerie
turned inside out with livestock and the farmer’s clothes blown into nearby trees. The weight of the silence when the bombardment ended – that was insupportable, for the shattered fragments of reality reassembled themselves and then one could estimate the result. Say that one had fallen in the middle of a Sunday School picnic among olive groves. You only heard the screaming then. The children blown down among the crockery, some without heads, and one leaning sideways against a tree with a straw boater dangling from her neck. The old black priest held on to his stomach as if it were a runaway horse. He was of an exceptional pallor, he was leaning on a wall, which itself was leaning on an empty space upheld by pure gravity. It was no use calling for stretchers and doctors, for yet another roar was approaching them, more bombers moving against the sunset and picking at the bridge this time; but they passed so low that one could see the expressionless eye of the rear gunners as they sprayed their surroundings with lead. The guns on the fortress responded, but the small calibre made them sound as if they were yapping like bandogs while the bombers bayed and gave tongue like hounds in cry.

Away over the green meadows at Montfavet the noise was simply a distant blur, but the flight-path of the aircraft brought them over the village at roof level so that the trees were pollarded by the rippling machine guns and showers of green plane leaves fell everywhere like a benediction from on high. The lunatics in the central courtyard gathered up all the branches they could and waved their thanks to the planes. They did not notice if here or there one of their number sat on a park bench completely immobile, or lay in a flowerbed dozing. They were used to variations in behaviour. In the case of Quatrefages it was neither one thing nor the other, for he had managed to achieve a kind of heightened consciousness which allowed him to see everything as a purely historical manifestation.

He slept in a monkish cell in the most ancient part of the building, and the light of passing cars flared briefly upon the whitewashed wall, bringing him pictures from his past, the projections of troubled memory, once full of armoured knights riding down infidels in a gorgeous array of plumes and helms – like great fowls on horseback; now the same space peopled with the dark-robed exemplars of the new Inquisition, thirsty for booty, not for knowledge. He laughed aloud, for with all the cars and tanks passing the wall went on and off in cinematic fashion, and each time it was a new picture. A feeling of continuity resided only in the fact that the one that repeated was the old Crucifixion of Clément – the land of Cockayne. It was amazing that – it had not been carried off like so much else in the town, for it was quite a celebrated work of art; so much so that Smirgel had managed to get a half-size colour print of it which he pinned to the wall of the nearby cell in the Danger Ward where he composed his despatches. Quatrefages could hear the tapping of his little cipher machine, insistent as a woodpecker. Smirgel had changed into civilian clothes of dull, pewter-coloured stuff which suggested an out-of-work clergyman; he walked now, no longer strutted. He seemed, unlike the rest of the German garrison, to have become weighed down with the gravity of things, whereas for the others a new anxiety was mirrored in their sharp squeaky commands and the restless running to and fro at speeds which suggested the movements of an undercranked ciné film. The armour had moved off, and they felt bereft, uncovered; reports now spoke of landings on the Côte d’Azur in the area of Nice. The three squadrons of spotter aircraft upon whom they relied for firm intelligence had been bombed into immobility and silence. Nor was it possible to interest the high command in their plight, for all eyes were turned on Normandy where the battles were absolutely critical not only for their own future but also for armies further south – not to mention the Italians!

From the personal point of view, however, what Quatrefages most deplored was that the noise had silenced the amours of the frogs in the lily ponds, for he loved their deep thrilling bassoons, loved watching them in the love act, their throats swollen out with lyrics, like human tenors at the music festivals of Marseilles. He had been taught that their love clamour could be scripted, after Aristophanes, with the phrase “
Brek ek kek kek Koax-Koax
” a pretty enough transcription of the sound. But after a few days of this he thought that the sound became “
Bouc Bouc Bouc-Emissaire
”. Yes, that was it! And how much more appropriate it was. He used to lie for hours by the pond, flat on his face, with his chin on the side, to watch them as they struggled amorously, sometimes in chains, tacked on to each other by simple imitation – three frogs, let us say, with a dead female at the end of the line, still penetrated by her mate who could neither disengage himself nor rid himself of the younger ones which had clambered on his back. Quatrefages was at heart a kindly youth and he spent some time with a long metal spatula which he had stolen from the kitchens trying to disengage the dead from the living. The little animals were so much on heat that they made no further distinction. The younger and less experienced, driven mad with the delicious copula of their lust, clambered anything that presented itself, alive or dead, male or female. This complete abandonment to ruthless passion was wholly admirable. Sometimes to send himself to sleep he drowsily imitated their plaint, laughing and hugging himself with waggish delight. With the disappearance of his reason, in the formal sense, he had been filled with a wonderful notion of freedom. And now great changes were in the air. The hated Milice had suddenly disbanded and thrown away their uniforms, though some had kept their small arms before heading for the hills where ambushes organised by the Resistance awaited them.

He heard Dr. Jourdain call out this choice information to Smirgel as he locked or unlocked one of the doors in the ward; the information had come from a casual visitor on a bicycle. How empty the town must feel! He began to wonder if he might not return there for a while and make a mental inventory of everything which had changed. He had never seen a siege but he had read of many and could predict much of the present reality, like the bands of famished dogs which roamed about, driven mad by the noise and the lack of food; they set upon the heaps of uncollected garbage and the piled dustbins with a will. Meanwhile odd bands of leaderless men, not very numerous but distraught – Poles? Russians? It was not quite clear – roamed about armed with sticks. They manned the ferries which buzzed back and forth but lacked passengers.

But it was far from the end, you would have thought, to see Ritter and his staff, pale but determined as they went about their tasks in the fortress and ensured their control of the roads and bridges by frequent patrols, lightly emphasised by the appearance of an occasional heavy tank which fired a few rounds across the river, or into the surrounding hills from which came from time to time sporadic ripples of gunfire, one presumed from partisans or infiltrators, or even runagates from among the forced labour groups hidden in the forests. Only the pile of cigarettes beside him – the butts there of – suggested that Smirgel himself was under strain, for the rate of his bird-like pecking remained slow and calm. He worked from shorthand notes on the back of service messages or grey envelopes, building these into the messages that Affad received by the lake of Geneva and, as like as not, transmitted to Toby in his cellar. He gave a succinct and sharply focussed picture of the new command at work, recounting their high morale under this determined party general whose perpetual toothache made him seem to be grinning always. A rictus of pain served as a permanent facial expression. Small, slightly round-shouldered, he had the long ape-like arms most suitable for declamatory gestures before a map; he took over from Von Esslin’s old-fashioned rhetoric and produced a new version, with up-to-date oaths and outlandish jokes which made him strike his thigh with imaginary amusement, though the grin of pain did not change. To him they owed a new idea of some consequence. The plum target for the bombers had always been, would always be, the railway bridge over the Rhône. Since he had been told that when the time came he would have to retreat upon Toulouse it came to him that an ammunition train halted on the bridge might, if hit by the Allies, blow up and inflict a marvellous, undreamt-of wound to the town which he had come to hate so profoundly. Alternatively, if the Allies knew about the train they might spare the bridge. With this in view he had commanded an empty train to be backed into a siding at Remoulins and quietly loaded with the more powerful and effective explosives from the great underground ammunition dump in the hills near Vers. This would be his parting gesture to Avignon! The train arrived in the darkness of a moonless night and was shunted up on to the bridge before being deprived of its engine and abandoned. Meanwhile the town was also abandoned in all but seeming, for it was most effectively covered from the new base in Villeneuve across the river, and within a protective shoulder of medieval wall which, in the event of the train being blown up, would protect the Germans adequately from blast. They were within days of leaving now and they knew it, but it was necessary to keep up a show of force to make a withdrawal across country more safe. They had “leaked” the train as well so that after some days, bombing switched to other targets and other bridges, thus avoiding catastrophe for the town. It was only when withdrawal became a fact that Ritter elaborated his ideas, and decided that it would be pleasant to make sure of the explosion after all; why should the train not blow up within moments of their retreat?