The Avignon Quintet (140 page)

The monastery gradually rose up out of the sand with its curiously barbaric atmosphere – as if it stood somewhere much more remote, perhaps on the steppes of Middle Asia? The cluster of beehive buildings were glued together in a vast complex of brownish stone: pumice and plaster and whatnot, and the colour of wattle smeared with clay. This light, friable type of material offered excellent insulation against both desert heat and also the cold of the darkness during the winter.

The palm groves stood there, silently welcoming, with their weird hieratic forms, benignly awkward. But the great doors had been shut and he was forced to lift the heavy knocker and dash it upon the booming wood once or twice and to swing upon the thick bellrope which set up a remote interior jangling in the distant recesses of the place. At last a monk opened and interrogated him, and having given the name of Yanna correctly he was allowed to send him a message and to take a chair in the waiting-room with its dense smell of candlewax and incense.

The principal Coptic father of the monastery had been once a banker, but for many years now had retired to this life of silence and contemplation, though he ruled the place with an iron hand and vaunted the efficiency of its activities. He was completely bald and had a heavy, Chinese-looking countenance which contained, deeply embedded, two eyes of penetration and pertness, always twinkling on the edge of laughter. Affad greeted him with affectionate familiarity and explained that he had come on the offchance of an interview with Lily as he was planning to go on a long journey and wished to see her before he went away: also to give her up-to-date news of the child … Yanna debated and sighed as he did so, shaking his brown dome of a head doubtfully. He said, “Nobody has seen her for ages now; food is left and the dish is emptied and put back outside her hut, so we know she is alive, that is all. But she was in a bad way, a significant way. She once wrote me a message saying, ‘I have begun to see colours with my mouth and hear sounds with my eyes, everything is confused. If I take a pencil in hand I make letters a foot high. I must retire and cure myself again.’” They gazed at one another, reflecting. “The best would be just to go and try. She can only refuse, you can only go away after all.” He crossed the room to the wall upon which there was a large framed picture of the oasis with the grouping of the buildings clearly marked, thinning away into the desert where there were the cells, mere wattle shelters which housed those who had chosen to live as solitary anchorites. There were also a few lean-to shelters for sheep against the desert winds. He placed his finger on one of the star-shaped huts and said, “There! I will give you the monk Hamid who takes food, he will show you the way; but my friend, if she is unwilling don’t insist, I implore you!” Affad looked reproachfully at his friend and said, “Of course not – why do you say that?”

“I’m sorry. It was out of place. I apologise.”

The old monk who was the night-janitor of the monastery now appeared bearing in his hand a dark-lantern and a wattle basket with some fruit and a bowl of rice. He bowed and grunted his assent when he had received the orders and, turning, led the way across the complex of silent buildings and thence through a large lemon grove which, like an outpost, opened directly on to desert dunes with here and there a fringe of palms.

It was quite a stumble across the sands and Affad could not help noticing with admiration the curious ease of movement of his companion: his walk was a sort of glide across the difficult terrain. The lantern with its single candle seemed on the point of going out all the time; but a frail horn of moon was rising through the dense fur of the night mists. So they came at last to one of the remotest cells beyond which lay nothing – just the uncompromising sea of sand curling and flowing away into the empty sky. In such a place the sight of a stone or of a distant bird of prey would stand out from the whole of nature like a sun-spot. He shivered with a pleasurable distaste as he thought of life here, how it must be; to be alone with one’s thoughts here, and
nothing else to distract you away from thinking them
. The old man grunted, put down the lantern some way from the wooden door and gave a strange hoarse cry, as if to some domestic animal: a sort of “Hah!” or “Hey!”

For a while there was no response and then they heard a shuffling noise, as of a broom sweeping up dead leaves, or of someone rustling old parchment, old newspapers. But no voice. The janitor advanced to the door, and after placing his ear to it, drew back and said hoarsely, “Someone is here to see you.” At the same moment he beckoned Affad to come and stand beside him, and by the same token, to make himself known. Affad did not know what to say, everything had flown out of his mind. He said at last, “Lily! Listen! It is I.”

There was a further rustling sort of commotion and then the door opened violently and a gaunt, ragged figure appeared, shielding its face from the dim light and chattering with excitement like a sort of huge monkey. He cried out her name again and the chattering subsided a little while her voice – such as it was, for the sound was as disembodied as if it came from some kind of instrument – called to the old janitor, “Go and leave me!” And the old man, taking up his lantern with a submissive reverence, glided away into the surrounding night. Now the light was indeed dim, yet he did not dare to reach for the little electric torch he always carried in his pocket. She was like some rare bird which might be disturbed by the light, might disappear in a panic. How did she look now, after all this time? He could not guess.

It was as if she had lip-read his mind for she said slowly, “I wonder how we look now, after all this time?” They stood listening to each other’s breathing, just their antennae touching, so to speak. Then he said, “I have a light, if you wish to see.” Actually he wished to see her, to evaluate how she was, from her eyes. Silence again. “Shall I show you?” She said nothing but just stood, so he slowly reached back into his pocket for the little torch which always aided him plant his latchkey correctly. He held it above his head like a douche and switched it on so that the light flowed down over his countenance; at the same time raising his head. She gasped. “It does not look like you at all,” she said. “Not at all.”

He was dismayed and a little astonished because it seemed that she was talking about someone else, to somebody else. He had the sudden impression that he was now impersonating somebody he did not know, had not met. “What is your name?” she asked, with a touch of peremptory sternness, increasing his discomfort, his sense of being there under false pretences. “Surely you know,” he said. “Surely, Lily!”

She burst into tears, but very briefly; after a single cry the current was switched off, so to speak, and she knuckled her eyes free and said humbly, “I have forgotten. Not speaking for long, my memory has gone.” Her wild look of sadness was replaced by one of savage expectation. She took his wrists and shook them softly. “Shall I guess?” she said slowly. He nodded. “Yes, Lily, guess.” She bowed her head on her breast in deep contemplation. Then she gave a small snort and said, “It is like a gigantic crossword puzzle, only instead of words just sounds to be filled in and colours!” She was speaking of reality, he quite understood. It made him feel helpless and morbidly sad. “O God, why can’t you remember? Can’t you remember when you dropped the basket and all the eggs were broken –
every last one?
” She gave a cry of amazement, youthful and lyrical, her face cast up to the sky as she pronounced the word, the elusive word: “
Sebastian.
¹
At last I have got it. O my darling! How could I?” And now she was really crying and in his arms, her fragility made all the more striking by the tension, the electric current flowing through her body like wind through the foliage of a tree. He held her humbly and with pity and a wild desire to make amends to her for the shortcomings of the world which had allotted her only half a human mind, but not (cruelly) withdrawn the capacity to love! He groaned in the inside of his own mind, groaned. It was stupid, he knew. One always feels that one should be able to cure the whole world. That one is to blame for everything, every iniquity. It was a form of false pride, he supposed.

He felt that what was needed at that moment was to give her confidence, and so with a kind of necessary innocence he sat down on the ground before the hut, pocketing his torch. And after a moment of indecision so did she. So they sat in the dust facing each other, like Arab children. Now her breathing had become less laboured, and her fingers had ceased to tremble, so he felt that he could embark upon a recital of his adventures since last they had met. Nor did he omit anything, speaking about his attachment to Constance with a kind of puzzled sincerity which seemed to her very moving, for she stifled a sob and put two fingers sympathetically upon his wrist. He told her that Constance was to try and evaluate the position of their son in medical terms and decide upon what treatment, if any, was best for the case. But even as he spoke she shook her head softly from side to side as if she had already made up her own mind about the matter, and that it did not offer much hope.

And then about himself. “I have received my own orders as well; you know that for some time I was quite expecting them – well, now the die is cast, though for the moment I haven’t got the actual details. But this will be our last meeting, of that I am sure. So I must thank you for everything, and for having put up with my shortcomings as you did. It was not your fault that things turned out the way they did.” O dear! It was the truth and yet it sounded terribly prosy when put into words; and why the devil did he have this sense of contrition? Had it been his fault? Lily was like a butterfly born with only one wing – otherwise perfect in every way. The fatal handicap stood in the way of fulfilment – or perhaps simply changed its prerogatives. She would sit there in darkness now, perhaps for life after life, gazing at a hole in space throughout the full length and breadth of time. He could see her whole future of darkness in his mind’s eye – as if she stood on the bridge of a liner; the night was a liner, slowly travelling through absolute darkness towards an undisclosed goal somewhere in the darkness ahead. “Well,” she said humbly at last, “So you must go at last. We must all go.” And she gave a sigh full of world weariness and passed into a kind of compassionate silence, still touching his wrist with her fingers. After a long time he stirred and rose, and they embraced and stood latched one to the other in a final decisive gesture. Kissed also. It was like kissing the face of a rag doll. Then he left her.

He drove himself back across the desert in a state of dejection and exhaustion, glad of the car’s tinny radio which accompanied his thoughts with the monotonous ululations of Arabic music unwinding its quartertone spools forever upon the moonlit night. His headlights put up startled desert creatures – were they hares? They fled so fast into the surrounding darkness that he could not say for sure. And then at last the dispiriting city of chromium lusts and avarice and boredom! How well the music illustrated its suffocating monotony, its limitations of growth, squeezed between two deserts! He would be glad to get away again. Abruptly he snapped off the radio and allowed the swishing desert silence to fill the hull of his car. It was late. He was exhausted by so much fervent thought. The house was dark except for the hall light. He felt suddenly sad and mateless. He lay down on his bed fully dressed and went to sleep at once, only to be woken by the discreet knock of Said as he came in bearing a cup of early morning tea. He drank it with relief and treated himself to a long hot shower before going downstairs to where his breakfast awaited him beside the small lilypond with its whispering water.

At ten the phone rang and a somewhat irascible Prince asked him where the devil he had been, “because I was trying to reach you last evening and there was no reply”. Affad explained; but he was intrigued by the note of concern, almost of alarm, in the Prince’s voice as he went on, “I spend almost the whole day on the phone to Geneva – you will imagine the difficulties, the bad lines and so on – in the hope of finding out about your famous letter. It was delivered to your office, and thence taken by Cade to the clinic, thinking you were with Aubrey, but you had gone. Now comes the funny part: Aubrey gave it to Constance, thinking that she would certainly be seeing you. But apparently she did not, or forgot it. At any rate she seems to have it, but after a series of calls to her consulting rooms I managed to get Schwarz who tells me that she has gone on leave of absence, to have a rest. Of the letter he knows nothing. It’s to be presumed that she still has it?” Affad was puzzled by the tone of the Prince for it conveyed a notion of alarm, which did not seem to match the rather commonplace facts of the case. After all, a letter had gone astray, but was not lost. He said, “You sound sort of strange.”

“I am a little put out,” admitted the Prince, “and I will tell you why. When I managed to get through to Aubrey and he said that he had handed it to her he said that she had been angry and depressed, and said that she had half a mind to put it into the fire or tear it up unread. You see, she disapproves very strongly in … well, in
us
, all we stand for. I wish to hell he had not been so indiscreet. But you see that if she were to do anything impulsive like that it would constitute a sort of technical miscarriage vis-à-vis the central committee. I could not foresee the reaction, but once more you would come under fire.” Affad groaned and agreed. “I would have liked to tell Constance direct that any attempt to interfere with the course of … well, justice, historical justice, in a sense, might put you in a gravely prejudicial position … But now she has gone away somewhere and we don’t know for how long. I have left a message with her colleague Schwarz, but he is a pretty vague fellow like all analysts. Anyway I can do no more.”