The Avignon Quintet (150 page)

He halted the recital of his woes in order once more to avail himself of the whisky which, Blanford remarked, he now drank in heroic doses, hardly diluted. It was obvious that this intellectual adventure had shaken him, had even pushed him into having recourse to the bottle more frequently than was his wont. “And then what?” said Aubrey, torn between amusement and sympathy for his friend. Galen groaned. “Schwarz,” he said, “has got an amazing idea that the Jews
created
racial discrimination by their Chosen Race policy and their refusal to dilute the superior blood of Israel by mixing it with inferior brands. Isn’t that very strange?” Aubrey said, “Well, it’s one way of looking at it. It could be true like in India; the top dog complex creates instant Untouchables – which is what the gentiles are for strict Jews. Am I wrong?” Galen knew nothing of India. “Jews are not all Untouchables, on the contrary they are very generous, though of course they bargain and like to know where their money goes. But the Jew is generous, quite an easy touch in fact!”

There seemed no point in pursuing this line of thought, based as it was on a typical misunderstanding. “You win,” said Aubrey, abandoning the train of thought, and with a smile Lord Galen stretched out along the end of the bed and, metaphorically, put his head under his wing and went to sleep, looking rather like an old rook snoozing on its nest.

But he went on talking with his eyes shut – burbling, rather, for there were patches of free association as well as gaps in the slow sequence of his rambling. It was as if he were talking not to Aubrey but to his Maker. For example, at one point he raised his head and still with closed eyes exclaimed passionately, “No Gentile could have invented double-entry bookkeeping!” accompanying the thought with a gesture of fearful vehemence. Now, however, he subsided into sleep with a somewhat fatuous smile on his face and whispered, “It was all this that led me to the
pouf
of Mrs Gilchrist. A young diplomat in search of profound sensations agreed to accompany me. I did not know of her international celebrity at the time – apparently like so many things in our time she is a chain store, and has branches all over India, Turkey, Greece, France and Eastbourne. She literally breeds girls for the diplomatic and military markets. I seemed to impress her very favourably; she said I had majesty. She was of uncertain age and with heavily tinted hair combined joviality and hysterectomy in equal parts. For a moment I almost thought I might love such a woman – Aubrey, they were right, I was in need of wantonness. She was, said my young diplomat friend, thoroughly representative of the age and the culture, so I could go ahead and explore on an empirical basis. There was a lot of talk about Lective (hic) Finities – another cornerstone by Goitre. I didn’t follow but pretended I did until she hopped back on the nest. Then I was lost in the night of her hair – afternoon, rather, it was bright red. But lost, lost to reason. I had heard of whirlwind romances before but never realised fully. I tell you this, Aubrey, because I don’t want to hide anything from you, I want your views on culture. And besides, you know all, for in the midst of this adventure who should I meet but your man Cade who said to me, ‘Lor’ bless you, Milord, what are you doing in a place like this? With Mrs Gilchrist! It’s like fucking a dead mouse.’ He is a coarse and narrow-minded man and doesn’t know what it is to empty some dull opiate, as my young diplomatic friend puts it. But things went from bad to worse for when we returned to what Mrs Gilchrist called the winter garden there were a lot of half-dressed people dancing in a marked way, some with few if any clothes. One young man in an apron and a boater, who had a flower behind each ear, stubbed out a cigar on my forearm without asking permission. The pain was terrible. I still have the scar. Another dressed in next to nothing forced me to waltz and gave me a bite on the cheek which kept me from the office for a week. Mrs Gilchrist said it was nothing, just a love-at-first-sight-bite. I was by now in an advanced condition of intemperance and not much able to look after myself. But I was making mental notes all the time. She had covered my neck in what in such circles are known as
suçons d’amour
, blue marks. But she seemed proud of me for I heard her proclaim, ‘Celui-là a des couilles superposées.’ I wondered what my committee would say if they could see me. Well, whose fault was it? There was a kind of fight, and an influx of policemen and it was then I saw your man, who kindly helped me to the door. I found myself in the street sitting on the pavement with my opera hat beside me – someone had jumped on it – and being bandaged by some of the nicer girls: but of course they were going through my pockets and wallet. However, I had taken the precaution of carrying very little money and no personal jewellery of value; my signet I left in the office safe. So that all in all, while I was shorn, it was not completely. My diplomatic friend put me in a cab and – against my will – took me to another dingier place where I got stuck in the lavatory and was kicked by a curate. I protested, whereupon my friend said, ‘Are you a man of the world or no?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Well then!’ I didn’t see his point.”

There was a long pause, some snoring and the dazed voice once more took up the tenuous thread of what now seemed to be a jag lasting over weeks; perhaps it was just the confusion in the telling. “O my God! how she talked and talked about culture. And I kept telling myself that I must remember everything in order to report to the committee. O my God!” He groaned again and wagged his head on his shoulders.

“Thelème!” he said once more. “I don’t suppose the name means anything to you. An abbey somewhere in Provence, the abode of perfected felicity! It is now called Cuculotte in the Gard, centre of the hot chestnuts trade. Mrs Gilchrist sometimes goes down at Easter with her mother. Her belly is cloven with the devil’s hoofmark, but her sex is as smooth or smoother than a surgeon’s glove. Sometimes she turns down the lights and does horoscopes. She can see auras, she can overhear states of mind. When I told Sutcliffe this he said, ‘Let everyone make his personal noise for the braying of donkeys is sweet to the ears of the Creator!’ Cuculotte, she saw it so clearly in a dream. There is a woman waiting for me there who looks like the Virgin Mary but is really called Cunégonde – another cornerstone. A hole-and-cornerstone. Ha! Ha! My diplomatic youth again, the poor cynic. I last saw him standing naked, on Mrs Gilchrist’s upper balcony, arms wide as he declaimed, ‘Hear me, ye sperm-coaxing divinities, for I am afflicted by scrotum fever and I bring ye my purse of Fortunatus!’ The Swiss fire brigade had to get him down with a ladder and I expect he has been rusticated already. O God, Aubrey, all this because they said I had not lived enough.

“But
Ulysses
, that odious book, what is one to do? Toby says that all energetic wanderers descend from Dionysus, they are really gods of wine which gives warmth and motion and curiosity. The wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, Gil Blas, Panurge – O my head spins with everything I have been hearing!”

Aubrey thought with a pang of the long nightmare of Joyce’s struggle to get his work published – eighteen years – and said, “You must not blacklist him, whatever you find to say against it, you must not index Joyce. The Catholics already did, and he was a secret Catholic as much marked as old Huysmans ever was. Hence the heavy liturgical type of prose exposition with its gruesome echoes and parodies of what he could not forget. No, it’s rich in church furnishings, and the function of Bloom is to desecrate the Church, to shit on the High Altar. You are lucky if he doesn’t recite the Creed as he shits. No, it’s a real cornerstone.”

But this time Galen slept and did not hear; faint snores escaped his lips though he still smiled at some cherished memory; and it was during this period that the shadow of Sutcliffe tiptoed into the room, finger on lip, and took up an amused position in a nearby chair, whispering, “Is it okay for me to be here – or is he confessing all?”

“Nearly all. He speaks of a Mrs Gilchrist whom I seem to have heard of.”

“Of course. Those songs. The first scowling clap brought back from Gallipoli by the Anzacs was claimed by one of her girls. The song was plaintive – Will she give you the cherry off the cake, Mrs Gilchrist?”

“I never heard it.”

“I could bring her to have tea with you; she probably does massage as well.”

“Thank you, my friend, but no.”

“With me too she waxes mystical and speaks movingly of the Third Eye, Troisième Oeil as she says with a classy twitch. But what really concerns her is the Troisième Jambe of men – those who had it were marvellous. ‘Quel homme fascinant, il est géomètre’, she would coo. Or else, ‘un homme spécial; il est chef de gare mais il a des qualités de coeur!’ She is what our ancestors would call an adept of splosh-fucking. As Cade would say, ‘She’d fuck the tiles off the roof if you let her.’”

“I did not know you had shared this tremendous binge of Galen’s.” Sutcliffe nodded and said, “The real life of Geneva, capital of Calvin, goes on there. Toby found it, and it proved so restful that he often takes his knitting down for an hour and just sits, listening to the banter of Mrs Gilchrist’s girls. It is the hub of this Spenglerian capital where one sees that our civilisation is the weary little monkey which sits atop the barrel organ and proffers a tin cup for alms while the organ-grinder is a large Jewish gentleman of urbanity. Toby says that Freud is the only honest Jew, just as Socrates was the only honest Greek. Yes, I have been sharing in the quest for the Golden Fleece – if I may call it that. And a fine job he has made of it. He has discovered that when the love of lamb cutlets is universal the reign of benevolence will begin. A thermonuclear Jehovah is watching over us!”

“There’s a hellish lack of continuity in what you say.”

“It’s good sense but somewhat diluted with whisky. It will all get clearer and clearer – now that you have admitted to yourself that I exist – or rather that you only exist in function to me! Socrates only existed in Plato’s mind, Freud only in Jung’s, that’s how the whole thing goes. It’s a chain gang. Sam once had a limerick about the matter which went:

Who sends out his cock to the Cleaner’s

Must risk quite a shrinking of penis

Which perhaps is restored

By recourse to a bawd

And a subsequent transit of Venus.”

“Be more precise, please; you rave!”

“It is very simple, Aubrey: if the Superego is really God the Father, then man is the only animal who has one ball higher than the other – no other carries his ingots in this position. The women have found out and here they are jousting, tossing the caber, climbing the greasy pole, wrestling in mud, writing, painting, pissing standing up, clearing their throats just like – better than – men. I am fordolked,
morfondu
, chilled to the heart by the spectacle. This is what comes of letting them share the war.”

“But at least they are free and you can get at them.”

“In a manner of speaking.” He recited darkly the verse:

Marsupial Sutcliffe with distinguished balls

Sits by the telephone and waits for calls.

For a moment, like a whale surfacing, the recumbent figure of Lord Galen condensed itself and shot upright as if on a spring. “My God, where am I?” he asked in total bewilderment, and then just as suddenly closed his eyes and sank back into profound sleep once more. Aubrey said, “If he can sleep through your disquisitions he can sleep through anything.”

“I haven’t told you all as yet,” went on Sutcliffe in a hushed voice after having allowed Galen a moment or two to engulf himself thoroughly in slumber. “I haven’t told you about the Crucifixion on the most memorable evening, the last and worst. At midnight or after there came an influx of theatre people, or perhaps a carnival party, with extravagant hats and plumes and weird noses and masks. They were all more or less drunk and the naked sirens of the house had great fun in plucking their clothes from them like fruit from trees, appropriating their hats and noses and whatnot, while the whole place resounded with music and everyone fell to the knife and fork act with celerity, except for those like little Cravache-Biche who must be corrected with nettles. Don’t tell me where they found them at this time of night, perhaps by moonlight near the lake. In all this the wistful Galen wandered vaguely half-undressed and on the incoherent side of his last huge whisky. There was a sudden fight, too, which was not allowed to deteriorate into fisticuffs, thank goodness, though I heard a female voice cry raucously, ‘Lâche-moi, espèce de morve,’ which I translated back to myself as meaning: ‘Unhand me, species of snot!’ The contestants were separated by two clowns and the party rolled on over our heads like the sea. More players, more music – a kind of predynastic jazz with sweet unction of clarinets calling from forgotten minarets to the faithful who crowded the tiny dance floor yapping like Pekinese. Someone was crying ‘Redemption!’ and I thought he was a religious maniac, but no, he was waving a banker’s draft: yes, there were bankers among us, and I even saw one undressed. He looked just like other men but he was crying, ‘I am absolutely frozen, my ingots, my heirlooms, my assets are frozen, I tell you.’ It was not clear whom he was trying to convince. Toby was talking moodily of bringing down a secret transmitter to the
pouf
in order to sift all the available information. ‘Why not install it – I sometimes have brilliant ideas – in Mrs Gilchrist’s pussy? From there you command the whole wide world.’

“But I had no chance to develop my idea for a fascinating dark girl intervened and coaxed me into indulging in some conventional knife and fork in an alcove – the facsimile of a joy I would gladly have shared with her. She was of a dark, grave, Semitic beauty, and in distress, thrilling like a wounded nerve. And I felt my age heavy upon me as I gazed into those sweet wounded eyes. Aïe! Jewish girls have fur-lined pussies and simmer with sinful single-mindedness, salacious and solitary and sexual as swallows in spring: they swerve out of the dark syllabaries of sensuality with superb submission like silken scimitars swung by a sultan …”