The Avignon Quintet (165 page)

But to do justice to Blanford it must be allowed that underneath the tugging of the alcohol with its spurious consolation there echoed on the profound sense of desolation and emptiness which followed upon the defection (if that is the word) of Constance, and her absorption in Sylvie. As for the programme for a future life à
trois
… it was problematical in the extreme. “It was anguish to revisit Tu Duc,” he told Sutcliffe. “The great dewy orchard, its apples tight and sweet as nuns’ bums. And ironically I arrived with the first cuckoo – it seemed as if the whole spring had come to Avignon to announce my cuckoldry!”

It was with difficulty that she managed to shepherd them back to the car. Sutcliffe swore that his armpits were smoking from the
riquiqui
. But they were docile enough to obey her.

TWO

The Moving Finger

D
URING THESE DAYS OF SOMEWHAT FORCED
conviviality Constance realised that Blanford was inwardly quite terrified of the move and all that it might portend. He had begun to drink rather heavily, and of course his bondsman and double followed suit – which made them excellent company for Toby and a trial to Lord Galen whose sense of humour was somewhat limited.

Paradoxically enough, however, the alcohol had an enlivening effect on his talent and the commonplace book began to fill up once more with what Sutcliffe called “thimbles” or stray thoughts, and Blanford “threads”. He wrote: “Pearls can exist without a thread but the novel is an artefact and needs a thread upon which to thread not so much the pearls as the reader! It is not true that all the great themes have been used up. Each age produces new ones. For us considerations like this: what did they think, the women who watched the crucifixion? They say that Buddha’s wife became his first initiate as did the daughter of Pythagoras. Those were the days! Or, to change topics: what of the one Spartan to outlive Thermopylae? He was left for dead on the field and came to himself when the enemy had gone. But he could not stand the odium of having escaped the slaughter, the suspicion of having run away. He killed himself in despair. A Don Juan who was terrified of women? Crusoe through the eyes of Friday? A Life of Jesus out of Freud and vice versa?” Sutcliffe broke in with: “And love? What about love?” In his new mood of sorrow and guilty intransigence Blanford said, “The greatest of human illusions. It’s not worth the kisses it is printed on! Pearls before swine, what!”

“I am meditating a love story about the ideal couple. She would be called Rosealba, a girl to detonate insight if ever there was one. He – I haven’t chosen a name yet, but he is the original death-yield of a love-bundle bang-plus-whimper man. Moreover it is a perfect marriage. Every morning he tells her something she does not know. Every evening he puts something so big and warm into her hand that she becomes thoughtful. They are almost dead from pure yes-ness. She has filled his heart with a glorious blindness.” Blanford protested, “It is out of date. The new discrete image of fiction is different. All the people are parts of larger people or composed of parts of smaller people, enlarged or diminished according to need. All events are the same event from a different angle. The work becomes a palimpsest with a laying out of superposed profiles. (My God! What supreme, prize-winning boredom! Nevertheless
avec cela j’ ai fait mon miel
!)”

“The fourth-century Thebans were renowned for the practice of male sexual cohabitation – plus a crucial military innovation. The Sacred Legion comprising 150 homosexual couples was commanded by Pelopidas. It was the
corps d’élite
of the line regiments, and the only full-time unit. Perhaps your escaped legionary from Thermopylae committed suicide for other reasons: like the loss of his love?”

“Perhaps. I am reminded of some lines by Shakespeare: ‘The fulcrum of my lover’s bum / Will guarantee a nightmare come.’”

“Pelopidas.”

“The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to count my uniforms and run through my decorations, always starting with the Grand Bandage of Outer Mongolia where I was consul for a week. The artist decorated is an awesome sight. Should the poet make reassuring noises? Yum yum, yes please!”

“The sea-shell is the mystic’s telephone. Only in the sea-shell can one hear the mystical
toc sonore
and realise fully that in art a methodical licence rules, and that greatness does not stint but neither is it profligate. Finally that with every breath, every pulse-beat, every thought the whole universe invests its strength anew in reality. My friend, these bold words were dictated to me while I slept.”

“In a new age of plastic caryatids we shall be permitted to change women in mid-scream. Thus to honour a secret goddess in her kilt of dead rats! Ah, you had better tear this letter up before reading it. Constance, the vatic second state you so distrust is reached without strain. I drifted into my life like an air-bubble into an old aorta. Went off bang one day and died for her. Exploded like an aneurism.”

“Thank God for petrol. Arabs who are sensitive people buy women like others buy paintings. If paintings could open their legs they would buy paintings!”

But this persiflage could not disguise the deep unhappiness of the inward monitor. “I feel that I am giving off a steady glow of sex – like an abandoned dungheap!” said the incorrigible Sutcliffe. “And I have discovered a way of making Galen cry when he irritates me too profusely. Any reference to his late cat ‘the wombat’ puts him into a tearful state. When I twist the knife and speak of the ‘old days’ he whips out his hanky and says, ‘Don’t go on: we were so happy. I feel so lost now. Boo hoo!’ He is highly susceptible, our great Coordinator.”

“Other problems. How to defend yourself against your own self-esteem, eh? How not to look complacent when you are? There must be a gadget. The objective of the Christian is to be good, that of the Buddhist to be free. A different frequency. As death closes in more and more, illustrates itself with the loss of friends, the difference becomes more marked, one tends to take out more fire insurance. The mysterious root-force which gives enduring life to art can be felt and described in terms of architectonics, but its nature and essence remain mysterious – a dark river flowing from nowhere to nowhere. The pen touching paper marks the point of intersection merely. But when the artists of an age begin to use architectonics without humility we are in danger of losing the thread they weave. Wagner, Picasso – they are like mechanised muezzins whose prayers are recorded and broadcast on an almost political level. The intimacy has gone, the sensual exchange is not there. A microphone has intervened. As for the artist … poor fellow, after birth the terror of ego-consciousness strikes, the awe invades, the fear, and immediately the self laps itself in layer after layer of protective feelings to avoid foundering: like an onion, layer upon layer of defensive schemes. This is what poor old Buddha tried to counter by his policy of unwrapping the poor ego from its mummy-like swaddling clothes – the nervous aggressive reactions. He had made a capital discovery, but it is hard to convince people that the threat of nature is illusory. Yet once they twig the fact peace spreads round them in rings. But it’s a whole art, to make yourself thoroughly vulnerable, even open towards death. Yes, once you are in the know nothing much matters any more, the penny has dropped. You realise that harmlessness is the highest good.”

“Good art is never explicit enough.”

“How should it be? It does not contain an ethic. You cannot break the code of the beauty exemplified by the rose. Ah! blessed principle of Indeterminacy which renders every eventual second of time miraculous: because all creation is arbitrary, capricious, spontaneous. Without forethought or afterthought.”

“Every two seconds a mental defective is born. Nevertheless I pat the whole universe on the back and cry, ‘Well done, old cock, well done!’“

“A monkey telling its nits, the priest his beads. Yet somewhere I am sure the Great Plan exists. It is pinned out on a vast wall-map containing every imaginable reference as to our entries, exits, names, styles, natures, destiny. I’m sure!”

“You remind me of poor Quatrefages!”

“Yes. And his great map of the Templars. He has retired into the fastnesses of Montfavet –
la vie en rose!
He has not quite succeeded in convincing Galen that there is no Templar treasure to be exploited, but very nearly. The real secret treasure was the Grail, the lotus of insight. They had become infected first by the old Gnosticism so rampant in the Middle Orient (
outremer
); and then secondly and definitively by the practices of yoga – as the thread woven from millet round their waists so clearly showed. The Catholics were quite right – they
were
heretics, and their practices
did
create a danger for the Catholic world.”

“Galen must be beside himself with anguish, after having invested so much money in futile research on the subject. So indeed must be the Prince who allowed himself to be talked into the scheme. We shall see next week when he arrives.”

“They will find something else – a new line in widows and orphans. The war has created so many.”

“A world without man – how was it before we emerged, I often wonder? Perhaps trees were the original people, anterior to humankind. Man sprang from the humus when it was mixed with water. Thus the mystics desire to regress into the unassailability of plant life – the insouciant lotus – in order to recapture the down-drive into dissolution, echoing the force we call gravity upon body and mind. What would you say to that? Excellence – the very notion of excellence comes from rarity, scarcity, paucity. Nature’s robust mutations encourage species to evolve and lead the many towards the unique one. Ah! The brain’s old begging-bowl! Perhaps the first fish were soluble and could not resist the rubbing water: but gradually by will-power and curiosity they learned survival. And elephants like humble space-ships floated without touching the ground …”

“Then came man. Woman blows man like spun glass from her womb. He is the weaker of the two, she writes his books though he executes them. Yet his sperm is her supreme document. If the quality falls off she becomes sick with malnutrition, soul-hunger, a sort of vampirism possesses her. The couple, the basic brick of understanding, is at risk. What is compromised is the sexual bonding which comes with insight.”

“St Augustine was right in a way, writing letters to his punch-bag and cheeking the Holy Ghost. He was right – those who say don’t know, those who know can’t say … The corollary is that those who don’t bloody know can’t bloody say, yet today they make the most noise.”

At this point Lord Galen erupted, clapping his hands, and said: “That is enough higher thought for today, Aubrey. Lunch is on the table, and it’s mushrooms we picked ourselves.”

THREE

The Prince Arrives

G
ALEN PLEADED WITH SUCH HEARTRENDING EMOTION
for them to defer their departure that Constance took pity on him and decided to stay until the Prince arrived on the scene, which he duly did, accompanied by the newest version of Felix Chatto, now a man of the world, indeed a young ambassador in bud waiting for his Latin American republic to mature, so to speak. But the Prince was in an evil mood due to this latest contretemps with the British who had arrested twenty-five members of the secret brotherhood on the vague presumption that their activities were political and, by the same token, subversive. But for his part he was delighted to see Constance again and embraced her tenderly with tears in his eyes. He had left the princess behind in Cairo – she risked nothing from the British, he explained, as she had always been neutral; besides, she had become a bosom friend of the present ambassador, and as usual the embassy was at loggerheads with the army, as personified by the odious security brigadier who had initiated all these persecutions. “Him and an odious little man, Telford, who was a billiard marker in peace time and now enjoys currying favour with the army by supplying false information. He doesn’t even speak a word of Arabic or Greek. And he’s from Barnsley. I ask you,
Barnsley
!” He positively sizzled with contempt. “The real problem is,
how
can I go on loving my dear British when they let wretched people like this persecute us, eh?” He kissed her hands repeatedly, and she knew he was thinking of Affad, though he did not mention him. Instead he said: “And the boy?”