The Avignon Quintet (168 page)

Their own objective was one of the seaside cafés where they had reserved a shady corner of terrace with a vast green awning, which would serve as a headquarters from which they could sally forth into the fair at will. Here their hampers were unpacked, their plates and cutlery being disposed upon long trestle tables – all the allure of a scouts’ picnic. And it was while they were taking their aperitifs that a gipsy woman approached them with a slow and curious air, as if she were looking for someone who might be found in their midst. She was awakening into an uncertain familiarity with the face of Blanford – though it was Sutcliffe who was the first to recognise her, and let out a cry of recognition. “Sabine, darling!” he cried. “There you are at last! We’ve been hunting for you in each other’s books for ages! Where have you been?” The woman thus addressed was indeed hardly recognisable when compared to the memories they had kept of the old Sabine.

She was stout and dirty and wrinkled, and her clothes and trinkets were of the cheapest sort. Her hair was greying now, and the once magnificent eyes were a prey to myopia, which added to her difficulty in recognising those who had once been acquaintances and friends. As they peered it seemed as if they were seeing her afresh through several veils of reality, several washes of colour. Of course she had always been rather self-consciously a tramp, as so many university children of her era had been. You showed your intellectual independence by not washing in that far-off epoch. But Sabine had gone further and actually disappeared with the gipsies, which had more or less destroyed the happiness and peace of mind of her father Lord Banquo. He for his part had been an old associate of Lord Galen and had even known the Prince. So that when Sabine discovered herself to them several recognitions took place and several simultaneous conversations broke out around her past and around her father, whose chateau in Provence was now boarded up and deserted and seemed to have stayed like that throughout the war. “He’s dead, yes,” she said in her harsh but calm tones – it was so strange to hear that Cambridge accent coming out of her swarthy face. “They say of course I killed him by taking to the road – well, perhaps I did. But there was no other choice for me to make. I wished to please him, and there was nothing I could offer as an excuse for my choice. I even submitted to a Freudian analysis of several months in order to get myself fully explained: but it explained nothing and I was literally driven to this solution in spite of myself. It wasn’t love either, or passion, as in the novels. It was like one decides to go to America or into a monastery. It was a sort of magnetic solution. I was sleep-walking, and I still am. I would not change this for worlds.” And surprisingly she put her hands on her fat hips and let off a laugh like a police siren. How much she had changed, thought Blanford, and he had a sudden memory of Banquo’s face watching her with such admiration, such pain, such anxiety.

She sat down and put her head on one side, as if she were listening to herself; indeed she was. “God!” she said. “I’m so thirsty to speak some English after so long; and yet it sounds so strange coming out of my head. I thought I had forgotten it after so many years of dog-Esperanto. Aubrey, speak to me!” and she smiled this new hideous smile full of flashing gold teeth. She tugged his sleeve affectionately, pleadingly almost. He said, “Immediately I want to know
why
! Why did you do it?”

She lit a hemp cigarillo and began to smoke in short sharp inspirations, holding it not between her fingers but in the palm of her hand, as if it were a pipe. “I’ve told you,” she said, “just as I told dear old Freud who was hunting my Oedipus complex. Mario, the man I went to was so much older, you see, that they thought he was a father-replacement. I ask you!” She laughed again in her new ferociously lustful way, and clapped her hand on his thigh. “When I came down from Cambridge I was an economics star and I wanted to do a study of society which would pinpoint whatever it was that was preventing us from constructing the perfect Utopian state – a state so just and equitable that we were all using the same toothbrush. You know how it is when one is young? Idealism. I finally narrowed it all down to the idea of the Untouchable in his various forms. My book was going to analyse Untouchability. We were after all Jews, so it was a good starting point; then I went to India and experienced all the horrors of Brahminism; finally among other little ethnic puzzles I came upon the gipsy, first in the caves at Altamira and then one day in Avignon when I bought a basket from a rough-looking gipsy in the main square of Avignon. The next day when I was passing through the same square he was still there and he recognised me. He said, ‘Come with me, it is important. Our mother wants to speak to you. She says she
recognises
you.’ This is our tribal mother
-puri dai
, as they call her! Our tribe is a matriarchy. This old woman took my hands and predicted that by the end of the summer I would join them and that Mario would make me pregnant – which he did. She forgot to add that he would also give me syphilis! But compared to so many other trials it was nothing and I was after all sufficiently educated to get it treated. I was spellbound by the self-evident fact that I
was
a gipsy – the whole of European culture slid from my shoulders like a cloak. Mario was much older but like an oak tree. After the first night in his tent I went home and told my father I was going to leave him.” Yes, but her voice held pain at this stage in the story. Blanford remembered that troubled summer when the old man locked himself up and refused all invitations. How tough women were, finally!

Indeed she looked quite indestructible in the quiet certainty of her direction. “We’ve done India several times. All the horrors. And Spain and Central Europe. My children died of cholera. We burned them and moved on. We speak about economic survival and I am a trained economist. But where does it come from, the ethnic puzzle? Even Freud did not know, I found. But the gipsy has resources, he has to; because often one is moving through a land which, if not hostile, does not need our pots and pans, our woven rugs or rush baskets, or our farrier work or the knife grinding. What do you do then to eat? Mario taught me the economic answer.” Here she was so overcome with laughter that the tears filled her eyes. “It has been our mainstay in so many places. It is called the ‘dog and duck act’ in the annals of the American circus, and we even have a faded poster which we hang on the tent where it takes place.” “I must see this,” said Sutcliffe, and she said, “So you shall this evening. Our stars, our principals, are called Hamlet and Leda, and I sometimes think when I watch them coupling that they represent European culture – the ill-assorted couple, the basic brick of any culture; what sort of child could they make? Why, something like us!” The Prince was filled with an ardour and a compassion which showed that he recognised how remarkable a woman she was. “It is deeply affecting what you say!” he cried, brushing away a tear; and taking her hands he covered them with kisses. “It reminds me so much of Egypt!” he said. “I feel quite all-overish!” And he shuddered with intellectual admiration for this weird gipsy who was now quite at her ease – quietened by the hemp and full of joy to rediscover old friends who might well have been dead after such a long war … And she submitted to the Prince’s admiration with great dignity of bearing, showing that she was touched and pleased to be understood. Yet how strange the English language sounded to her as it flowed out of her head.

“Hamlet is a small and apparently ageless and immortal fox-terrier, and Leda is a fat old goose, lazy and thoroughly lascivious as all geese are. But she loves being mounted by the dog, she ruffles her feathers with appreciation and honks while he, like a dog or a banker, gives of his best. I realised after the death of my own that they were really our children, our own small contribution to the way things are. How extraordinary the world is. Even God is dying of boredom – it’s called entropy!”

“Don’t say that!” exclaimed Lord Galen – a surprising interjection, coming from him – “Don’t say that, please. There will be nothing left to invest in!” And now the church bells in the belfry of the fortress-church burst out in an anguish of clamour, almost as if they were answering Lord Galen’s prayer! And Sabine laughed once more and said, “You must go and pay your respects to Sara now because soon the procession will begin and with such crowds you won’t be able to move. Then come back here and I will try and arrange for you to be skried, or read or divined – however you like to put it – by someone reliable, perhaps even our Mother, because so many of us are cheats and rogues and bluffers. India too is thick with imposters and thieving swamis, as you well know!”

Sutcliffe murmured under his breath the folk verses they could never remember correctly.

A slimy swami pinched his cap

But Mrs Gilchrist gave him clap.

“No, no,” said Blanford, “I swear my version is the correct one. I wish we could prove it!” And he recited the lines in another text.

He swore the fairies gave him clap

Though Mrs Gilchrist took the rap.

He added: “In this way the British Army made its small contribution to Indian thought. I wanted to write the biography of Mrs Gilchrist who set up the first classy tearoom-bordel in Benares and imported suburban butterflies from Peckham to staff it. But there was never enough material available.”

As he was speaking they were all turning their heads towards the main street where there was a sudden eruption of music and a gush, literally a gush, of white steeds with flowing manes and the Camargue
gardiens
mounted on them, sombrero on head and trident in hand. They were to form the escort for the Saints in their descent to the sea, and they were clad rather formally in the dress uniform of their profession – beautiful whipcord trousers with black piping, and flower-patterned shirts topped with black velvet coats, and short jackboots. It was a uniform which melted down two different influences into a harmonious and aristocratic unity – Spain and the Far West of America. At their appearance the guitars, rather hesitant at first, burst into a fury of passion and the air throbbed with the warmth of castanets and the swing of Andalusian dances, the whirl of skirts, the snapping of coloured paper streamers. There was just time to salute Sara, though after they had done so they wondered at their own courage in facing this dense press of swarthy bodies and literally carving a passage through it.

Sutcliffe was happy to renounce the adventure when he caught a glimpse of the throng hemmed in by the aisles of the little church, whose walls were decorated with every kind of
ex voto
imaginable, depicting shipwreck, accident, fires, earthquakes, acts of violence as well as acts of God; broken heads and limbs, dying children and their parents, overturned boats and horses destroyed by accident … a whole hospital of woes which had been either cured or averted by the Saint who was now waiting for them below stairs, clad in her new vestal gown. But how could they get to her? She stood on a trestle table at the far end of a low crypt or cellar where the lack of oxygen made one instantly begin to suffocate, while the brilliant wave of light from hundreds of candles throbbed and pulsed – for they too were eating your oxygen. Yet light one you must, and place it in the iron chandelier as well as deposit a coin in the offertory box hard by the statue. The dull plonking of coins in the wooden box provided an accompaniment to the low haunting chanting and moaning of the crowd, forever retreating and advancing towards the gorgeous black statue of the Saint. She is black, yes, but the cast of her features is completely European, occidental. Beauty and youth and incorruptibility seem united in her lucent and happy gaze. She looks through everything into a beyond of such perfect felicity that one longs to make the journey with her. The gipsies whimpered and sweated and crossed themselves and muttered in an ecstasy of apprehension and requited love. The other two saints were rather a washout – they were just Biblical walk-on parts, but Saint Sara was bursting with superb unction at what she knew. She looked a darling who was simply burning to whisper the secret to someone – if only there were less noise and singing and general rumpus – for a thousand children added to the complications with their chirping and shoving. And the whole of this sweating humanity was pushed down into a little dark sinus of a crypt where breathing was a torment. How did she not melt, one wondered, for Sara was fashioned in black wax.

“Not for me,” said Sutcliffe. “I can’t face this sort of thing. One hand on your pocket book and the other on your balls … it’s too much.” So he elected to go for a walk among the tents while the saints were being carried down to sea on their wooden trestle – part of the traditional service.

The. beaches were swarming with families who had settled in for the usual three-day festival, around flourishing camp fires where food was roasting on the spit. Sabine walked with him, pausing from time to time to greet an acquaintance or relation, and say a word to the children at their heels.

“Coming down through the chestnut forests of High Provence we had a wonderful stroke of luck,” she said, “for we ran into an absolute colony of hedgehogs: you know that for the gipsy it’s the greatest delicacy of all. That’s what you are smelling now. Mario is doing three or four for lunch. We dug out an old abandoned clay pit for the event. We gut them and then cover them thickly in wet clay before putting them to roast in a fire built just below ground. Have you ever eaten them?” He had not. “Slightly richer than Chinese puppy but very good in flavour. When the clay is baked and cooling it is knocked off with a hammer or a stone and all the quills and the skin go away with it, leaving the flesh exposed. I know – it must sound horrid!” For he shuddered at the description. “So I won’t invite you for lunch today!”