The Avignon Quintet (174 page)

He jumped to his feet now in some agitation for he had also discovered that it was somewhat inappropriate to smoke cigarettes in the chapel and he walked to the portal in order to throw the stub of his cigarette outside. “Hilary!” she echoed in some confusion, standing up herself in order to let him pass her. “What has Hilary got to do with all this?” He looked at her keenly under depressed eyebrows as if her surprise astonished him – as if she should have been quite
au courant
with what he was about to reveal. Having despatched his cigarette stub he turned and returned to her side, motioning her to sit down once more. It was as if he said, “Pray sit down, because I have a lot more to reveal to you.” And obediently she sat down again under the oil-painting, but feeling now a sort of anxiety take possession of her. And Hilary, so long absent from her thoughts, now suddenly became a figure of significance and colour. He had been killed on active service with the Intelligence Corps; she had heard vaguely that he had been parachuted into France to help the Resistance, and captured by the Germans. That was all.

“Hilary, my brother,” she said quietly, “was in the process of taking Holy Orders when the war broke out. He felt sufficiently strongly about it to adopt a pacifist stance, and retire to his Scottish monastery, breaking off all contact with the rest of us – the order he joined was a silent order, so this was understandable. He kept this up for some years until gradually his intellectual posture changed, became modified. He joined the Intelligence Corps and offered to serve abroad with the Resistance; he was actually sent to France, but captured by the enemy and executed.
Voilà!
That is all I know. As a matter of fact I didn’t ask for more details – once he was dead, what did further details matter?”

“I hope what I am about to tell you won’t be unwelcome or shocking, but I wish to explain why I hated Hilary so profoundly. It was because of Liv. I don’t suppose that it was the first time in history that a brother seduced his sister sexually – but unhappily it affected me. I realised from what she revealed to me that in fact Hilary was responsible for shaking her affective stability with this unlucky passion which neither could renounce. To do him justice he often lamented their fate, often tried to unshackle himself from his sister, make a desultory move or two in the direction of freedom, or of other women. But in vain. I realised now that he was really the author of my misfortune, that Liv would never come right, be cured, so long as the magnet of Hilary’s presence existed somewhere in the world. All other relations were worthless to her while her brother lived and breathed. It was terrible, but the realisation of this fact poisoned my waking life. I was filled with vengeful thoughts, and indeed at long last, and quite by chance, fate made it possible to execute them.”

She must have looked astonished or perhaps even dismayed, for he broke off suddenly and gazed anxiously at her as he said, “May I go on, please? I do not wish to shock or hurt you but I feel the need to explain many of my actions in the light of this overriding passion of Liv’s; if possible, to excuse my own actions.”

“Of course,” she said, a prey now to old memories which welled up in her mind. They took on another light in view of these facts – new shafts of light struck them and forced her to re-evaluate them! “Of course,” she said, “by all means let us have the truth, since we have all suffered so much from it.”

He cleared his throat and resumed his painful narrative – it obviously cost him something after all to reveal these things.

“As for me, I followed much the same sort of trajectory in my own thinking – it took a few years but at long last I too grew disillusioned with the Nazis and ashamed of my own passivity in the face of Nazi doctrines and Nazi acts. I began to search for ways and means to escape the collapse I could see coming to meet us. I thought I might perhaps offer my services to the British. But how to make contact with them? One had to take a risk. I wrote a frank letter to the BBC which I entrusted – it was extremely foolhardy – to someone with a neutral passport who was going to Africa. Then I waited in a state of great anxiety in case the letter had been found, had been confiscated … But then one day I received a communication from a post office box in Avignon which gradually materialised, so to speak, into the person of a young French woman who ran a group of patriot agents and through whom I managed to inherit a transmitter and a code with a wavelength call-number which put me in direct touch with London, which is what I wanted. Of course it took me a little while to establish my
bona fides
but at last I did – it will seem ironic to you, but while neither side fully believed in my honesty both were exultant at having penetrated the enemy intelligence service. This was due to the selection of information titbits which I revealed, first to one side and then to the other Paradoxically both were soon content to accept my double agency, knowing that I could also pass false information to mislead the enemy! Indeed I was already operating a successful double option when I came to see you with that rather puzzling text which you may or may not remember. It was quite genuine, I discovered later. Secretly I was hoping that we might strike a chord of sympathy and make a sincere contact which would enable us to talk, but you proved too suspicious to offer me any encouragement and I felt unable to confide anything in you for the time, though of course the whole situation as well as the tragic denouement weighed very heavily on me – as you may well imagine.”

For a while now he fell silent and looked full of self-reproach, fingering his chin as if debating within himself whether to go on or not. He had turned quite pale as well. He shook his head doggedly and suddenly blurted out, “It isn’t easy to say, but I mustn’t disguise from you that fact that I am responsible for your brother Hilary’s death – and in a secondary way for Livia’s also.” He hung his narrow head – it was as if the full weight of what he had said were now suddenly made manifest to him: as if he had difficulty in assimilating its significance. He stared at her with the face of a sick vulture and lapsed into silence, weighed down it would seem by an immense depression and sadness.

Surprise bereft her of speech, deprived her of any capacity to react appropriately to this surprising and shocking piece of information; and with the surprise came a twinge of doubt as to its veracity. With Smirgel one was always being overshadowed by the angel of doubt. One was condemned to wonder what hidden motives might lie hidden behind the words he uttered. If all this were a tissue of falsehood, for example, why tell her, Constance, about it: why reopen the subject which was obviously as painful to him as to her? Nevertheless, “Go on!” she said, as if admonishing him for his lack of courage to continue. This soon resulted in him rising to his feet and starting to pace up and down the narrow causeway between the pews of the little chapel with his hands behind his back, gathering together the threads of his slow narrative.

“As you will imagine, much of my work was concerned with the Resistance which had slowly started to become a reality, a possibility, owing to the insane slave-labour policy of the Reich which drove the young people to take refuge in the hills to escape conscription in the slave battalions. Soon almost every hideout in the Cénennes was full of shirkers. They had nothing to eat, of course, and arms drops alternated with food drops as they were slowly transformed into military formations. A few I actually betrayed to my own people in order to keep my reputation for truth, but the most not. The heavily wooded country round LaSalle and Durfort were the obvious places for such activities – the real mountains begin around there – and despite frequent military sweeps by our troops and the Vichy police it was seldom that the guerillas were surprised. But of course the whole question was eagerly debated by both London and Marseilles, and all the time people were coming through to evaluate the importance of such movements. Agents were parachuted into the Cévennes in gradually increasingly doses. Of course I kept a sharp eye on all this activity, and by now London trusted me implicitly with a good deal of secret information which sometimes I revealed to my own people for obvious reasons. Then one day I got some queries from London which made me prick up my ears. They had got wind of the fact that Livia was serving in the Army unit which was doing garrison duty in Avignon. Don’t ask me how. But someone was trying to make contact. London said that it was ‘someone close to her’. I did not at first think that it might be her brother, for he had disappeared so definitively from the scene that I wasn’t prepared for his reappearance as a commando who might be dropped from the air in the LaSalle region, in order to organise Resistance groups which might later make an allied landing from the air a feasibility. As for me, only my hate for him surged up when I found that it was indeed he. Hate! Pure hate!

“It is not the most desirable or elegant of sentiments. I was surprised myself at its force, for I operated in a sort of blind dream-like automatism which seemed to absolve me of any direct moral responsibility. None of what actually came about was circumstantially planned in detail – or at least not by me. Circumstances fell out as they did, as if willed by destiny or fate or whatever. For example, even after I knew that it was Hilary and that he was going to be dropped in the hope of contacting his sister I did not say anything to Liv, though it would have been wise to see what her reaction might be. Would she, for example, have been capable of refusing these overtures on behalf of her brother – indeed, her lover? And then, what did Hilary really hope to gain in making contact? It was hard to see what London was really expecting of the operation. But for my part I was quite filled with exultation to think that I might lay my hands so easily upon the author of all my misfortunes, and that it was in my power to have him done away with the utmost ease, simply by betraying him to the Milice or having the Army arrest him and sentence him. But first we must secure his person. I selected a landing ground with the greatest care, high up in the forests of the Cévennes, and again there was something dreamlike about the ease with which the whole operation took place. He himself was not suspecting anything untoward, and he had received a message through me that his sister would make herself available for a talk. Of course we did not recognise each other after such a long lapse of time – indeed, there really was no reason why we should. We had perhaps seen each other once or twice but we had never actually met in the conventional sense. Indeed I would not now have been quite certain of his identity had I not known from London who it was. It was pitifully simple, his capture and transfer to a jeep to take him to Avignon, and of course by now he knew that he was a prisoner of war, that the plot had failed. I had involved both the Army and the French Milice in the operation so that in a sense he was everybody’s prisoner, and this was the start of my troubles because I progressively lost control over him myself – he was locked up for interrogation in the fortress of Avignon where a number of agencies started to interest themselves in his identity and his fate. The fact that he had lived in Provence before the war and knew the place and the language was intriguing for the Milice and they started claiming him as a common-law prisoner – he had not been in uniform when captured. Of course either way it could spell death – both agencies could invoke a firing squad once they had finished their interrogation … which was all I really cared about. Unhappily with this turn of events Liv came into view.

“Of course you know that there had always been something equivocal about Livia’s life and the way she chose to live it, and there were people who found everything about her somewhat suspect, including her political and philosophic views. In time of war, too, it is the fashion of intelligence agencies to suspect everyone of possible treachery. So that not everyone was friendly to Liv. And the more people knew about her past, and about the family relationship with prewar Provence, the more intriguing they found her. And now her brother had flown in direct from England with the professed intention of locating her. Well, all these brainless but suspicious creatures who collect around intelligence agencies like a sort of intestinal flora – they began to ask questions, and so indeed did I. The trouble of course was that whatever they found incriminated Livia, a development for which I had not really been prepared. When I told her about the arrival and capture of her brother she went as white as a sheet and sat down, almost fell down, into a chair, possessed by a total amazement. And then of course came the realisation that a sentence of death would be practically a certainty for him. Can we do nothing to save him, she asked me ironically enough, and I did not know what to say in reply, for it was far from my intention to save him. But her emotion was so intense that I hesitated, while she now said that she must see him, she must have an interview with him. He had already been tortured by the unimaginative Milice interrogator and plied with a great number of routine questions worthy of a fifth-rate medieval inquisitor, to none of which did he give anything but evasive answers. It was not a very rich dossier as intelligence went. But I now persuaded them that there might be richer material to be found if one organised an interview between brother and sister of which a recording could be made if we placed microphones in the place of rendezvous. They found this reasonable enough, and as a matter of fact the spot I chose for the encounter was right here in this pew, where we are sitting! Yes, I know, it is rather queer to choose the same place again, but I somehow felt it appropriate to our story – or at least to mine, for I often come here and sit here alone in order to think about her. I regret so much – and yet our misfortunes do not seem to be the outcome of our acts but just due to fate, to destiny! The meetings duly came about, right here where we are sitting, and the whole thing was duly recorded by a powerful microphone which I had installed carefully to transcribe it all on to wax rolls, to which you may listen if you are so minded. There is hardly anything about espionage on them – it is all about their extraordinary, unholy love. It makes my blood curdle as well, for it explained why our own love miscarried …”