The Avignon Quintet (183 page)

“I’m on the look-out for that Sabine lady,” said Lord Galen, “to try to get a really detailed and authoritative reading out of her. She was rather unsatisfactory last time when we went to the Saintes Maries; and yet there was sufficient truth in what she said to be very striking, and give me the hunger to know more if possible.”

“Did she tell you if you would get the treasure?” asked the Prince curiously. “No! I thought not. Nor me exactly! But she defended her limitations very ably, I thought, by saying that she could only see what lay within her personal competence, just as a human eye can only see a certain distance. Yet I was like you impressed by what she had to say.”

Felix Chatto who had decided to resign everything to fate and had a poor opinion of fortune telling was nevertheless just as anxious to see Sabine whom he admired deeply and thoroughly appreciated as a conversationalist. He had himself grown up so much and in so many unexpected ways that he felt the need to test out his new maturity upon someone whose sensibility seemed to be the equal of his own, whose notions echoed his. And he could see that the woman was hungry for good conversation in her own tongue which offered her the comforting support of humour and lightness of touch. But where was she? She did not reach the great viaduct until nightfall, owing to some minor trouble with the transport. She had lost a very great deal of weight within the last year or two – indeed, she already knew that she was starting a cancer; but for the moment she had gained much in simple beauty which she could offset with the dramatic apparel of the gipsy tribe in all its brilliant grossness; and her body answered the change, reverting to the old swinging walk of the past, her head slanted to one side, as if she were listening to her own beauty from some inward point of vantage. They heard her hoarse voice in the crowd and exclaimed (or Galen did): “There she is! Let’s waylay her before she gets carried away by the French Préfet!”

Meet they did, but it seemed that Sabine had been on the lookout for Felix, for she advanced upon them with impulsive speed and took his hands, ignoring the arms of Galen, keen to share a handshake with her. “I must talk to you alone for a moment,” she said breathlessly, “if your friends will permit me. I have something to tell you.” And so saying she drew him aside into the forest and sat him down on a fallen block of golden stone, an ingot broken off the bridge. “When we spoke of Sylvie I did not tell you the whole of what I saw because I realised that there was something capital which you did not yet understand, and that was the provisional nature of prophesy. The fact that I see something does not automatically mean that it will come about, for sometimes it does not; yet statistically it falls out as I see it about seven times out of ten. You questioned me about her illness and her possible death by suicide and I turned the question aside at the time. I wanted time to consult my Mother as to what I had a right to reveal and what not – for I saw quite far into your future, or my version of it. In that version she does not die that way, but she is buried alive in a mountainous snowdrift somewhere north of Zagreb some years off, some years from now. In between you will experience absolute bliss with her, for you have, by recognising the nature of her so-called illness, given her the courage to reassume her reason. As a young Ambassador I see health and riches and professional success. But this catastrophe comes quite unexpectedly. They are there silent; the uniformed chauffeur is dozing. They are waiting for help to come in order to dig them out. She is playing chess with a pocket chess set. I hear Smoke, the cat, purring contentedly and also the soft tick of the dashboard clock of the great limousine. Help will come, but too late; the rescue team have laboriously dug a tunnel down to the bottom of the drift to remove the bodies but the car is jammed in rocks and incapable of being moved. It will have to stay all winter and wait for the spring thaw. By then of course the moisture will have blurred the contents of her last two notebooks – a great loss to literature, they seem to believe.” All this while holding his wrist and staring down at his palm with a trance-like expression. Then she sighed. “That is all. And now you must please excuse me for a few moments because I think the French have arrived.”

Indeed the French had arrived; that is to say that representatives of the Press with their cameras had already started to put in an appearance, reassured by the promise offered by the more than adequate buffet which was still only halfway mounted. This creation had been confided to the great chef of Nîmes, Tortoni, who amidst a multiplicity of highly comestible cakes and pâtés had prepared the pedestal for the most important of his creations, a recumbent woman fashioned in butter with trimmings uttered in caviar of several different provenances and helpings of
saumon fumé
and an archipelago of iced potato salad to round out the offering. Venus rising from a Récamier of Baltic caviar with the smile of a redeemer on her lovely face, just to remind everyone that Tortoni had attended Les Arts before turning aside into a career as a gastronomic chef which had brought him fame and fortune. But all this superlative invention had to be kept chilled and here again great ingenuity came into play, for the whole creation was offered in a disguised thermal showcase upheld by captious looking Cupids with sweet erections and honeyed grins. “I must say,” said Galen proudly, “you really do have good ideas sometimes.” For it was the Prince who had thought up this little gastronomic frolic, as the Préfet’s budget for such a feast was somewhat cheese-paring. “I only hope it wasn’t too expensive,” he added, for the Prince in his lordly way had sent the bill to the company. He shook his head reproachfully and said, “Ah! you and your money! I dreamed last night that you died and were incinerated and that your ashes were scattered over your bank in Geneva by helicopter.” Galen laughed heartily: “And that you built a funerary memorial in the crypt of the bank itself!”

But Galen’s mirth was superseded by a thoughtful look, as if in afterthought the idea didn’t sound too unreasonable! The Prince continued on his mischievous teasing way: “I remembered Voltaire’s advice to people visiting Geneva and wondered if you knew it.” Galen did not, so the Prince obligingly repeated it: “Voltaire said, ‘When you visit Geneva, if you see a banker jump out of a third-storey window jump after him. There will be three per cent in it!’” This put Galen in a thoroughly good humour. “Old Banquo used to say that if you put your ear to a Geneva bank you could hear it purring just like a Persian cat. The noise was the discreet noise of the interest on capital accruing!” Felix clicked his tongue reprovingly at so much flippancy, but he was only pretending to disapprove. The Prince said, “Admit it, Felix. It’s a Mouton-Rothschild world with far too little merriment in it. As for me I’m dying to plunge my spoon into the buttery buttocks of the Tortoni Venus; but I think we will have to wait for the Préfet, no?”

Obviously they would have to, in the interests of correct protocol as well as a sense of occasion; but of course it was obvious that the gipsies themselves could only be allowed a limited share in this upper-class celebration. Though it was in their honour they seemed to accept the fact with equanimity. The Préfet’s congratulatory speech had been copied and its distribution to the Press Corps achieved; its actual construction had proved something of a puzzle for he saw that it would have to be written in a manner which suggested that the statue had been in fact found – yet delivered before the fact, so to speak! It contented itself with expressing itself on a warm note of benevolence and goodwill – turns of phrase habitual enough in speeches of an official kind. But the actual gipsy participation was of a limited kind inside the official marquee, though in fact they completely dominated the musical fete which had grown up around the events: already the smoke from the flares and the lights and plangence of the music provided a wild note of romantic colour, a felicity and unbridled expansiveness to the proceedings which was reminiscent of other more important gipsy rejoicings – such as the one in honour of the original Saint Sara at the Saintes Maries de la Mer at the end of May every year. So much colour to delight the eye that Sutcliffe was drunk prematurely, without the ever-present aid of wine. He had asked Sabine if she would consider sleeping with him, and she had looked at him for a long time in a very strange manner. “But I don’t know which one of you is more real – for Aubrey has already asked me that.” To which Rob testily replied, “Is one not permitted a practising
alter ego
in the modern world? I am the ape-carrier of tradition, for in great houses the Fool customarily carried his Lord’s ape! Why all the mystery? When you are writing from the hither side of a deeply privileged experience a certain hilarity is quite in order if only to express your elation. That is why I love you, for you have realised that as far as individual identity is concerned we only give an illusion of coherence. Your I, me, mine, has about as much consistency as a vapour. Sabine, I am turning into a rainbow! I can feel it. Slowly but gracefully. I am full of love and misgiving for I have learned how to write poems. There comes a struggle, a feeling of suffocation, an agon, a convulsion – before you can take that vital step forward into the unknown! I want to escape from time through the perfect amnesia of the orgasm. Time! Have you not noticed how much one second resembles another? All time is but a uniform flow of process. It is
we
who age and disappear!”

“Come to my caravan,” she said. It was an order.

But though they had not advanced upon the food they had started to broach the champagne, and were beginning to enjoy the twinges of elation it brought. Flash bulbs began to pop off and everyone began to feel that he was about to be immortalised. And the music soared together with the general conversation which had reached the pitch of coherence common to cocktail parties – as if a whole collective unconscious had like a wine-bowl been overturned. Galen was saying: “You scared me so much with your talk of serpents and buried treasure – the Egyptian folk stories, remember? – that I bought myself a stout stick with a steel spike atop, and I shall take it with me just in case.” The Prince chuckled: “How typical!” he said, “when the real danger is of stepping on a mine!” New arrivals began to put in an appearance, like the doctor Jourdain and the saturnine Quatrefages and even (surprisingly) Max, looking even more like God-the-Father than ever: it was as if the very spirit of old age had come to nest, to find its apotheosis in his white-haired gravity and beauty. Galen had paid for him to be present, since he also had been created a sleeping partner in the company. “What has happened to Constance?” he wanted to know, and was delighted when Felix replied: “The best and the worst! She has fallen in love with Aubrey and disappeared. But they promised to appear tonight for the ceremony so perhaps we shall see them here before long.” The old man bowed his head. He was thinking to himself, “Love not disembodied must end in despair and forgiveness. One will ask oneself if that is all that life has to offer. But life has its own imperatives and everything must take its turn. So she was perfectly right to behave as she must. The only art to be learned was how to cooperate with reality and the inevitable!” And then immediately he reproached himself for this rather specious formulation, but at the same time he recognised that it came out of his yoga practice – the fidelity to insight and to oxygen! Nevertheless he was dying to see Constance again and hoped that he would be able to stay awake to talk to her; recently (and regretfully) he had fallen into the habit of dropping off to sleep in a quite involuntary manner after dinner, an annoying symptom of old age against which he was quite powerless!

The Préfet according to his rank was entitled to three kettle-drums for public appearances of importance, but out of modesty he only convoked two for this cultural manifestation. It was almost the only way of subduing a rowdy Mediterranean crowd, of announcing your presence, or making it clear that what you were about to say was supremely important, because official. Kettle-drums create the required hush before a public speech!

Tonight, however, he was possessed by a pleasant fancy – of descending from his official car and effecting the last few hundred yards to the bridge on foot, preceded by his drummers. And this he succeeded in doing, walking at a calm unhurried pace, clad in his frock-coat with decorations proudly mounted. The drummers walked before him, uttering their deep rallentando to mark the step; and as he advanced the gipsies espied him and made way for his advent, orienting their music in a manner of speaking towards a welcoming demeanour. Meanwhile the experienced eye of the official ran over the scene taking everything in – above all to see if the leaders of the gipsy tribe were seated correctly in consonance with that invisible and inscrutable element, protocol. He was reassured to see that the old lady, the “Mother” of the tribe, who looked rather the worse for wear already, had been planted firmly at a side table which adjoined the main one, with her implacable bottle of gin before her, and some lighted joss to keep things savoury. Her husband and a whole tribe of sons kept her company, though they were a tiny bit ill at ease because of the light and the signs of “officialdom”: yet manifestly flattered also. The Préfet made a slow official circuit now to shake the hands of the invitees, noting with interest that some of them came from other time-fields or other contingent realities – like Toby and Drexel, who was there with his two charming and juvenile
ogres
who seemed rather like impersonations of Piers and Sylvie of the past. In fact there was hardly anyone missing except for the two lovers who were still acting out the long detour of their age – the biography of that first look exchanged on the river bank at Lyons so many years ago!

The official presence now authorised the official arc-lamps of the shrine, and suddenly it was possible to admire the magnificent presence of the whole monument pressed up against the sky and coloured by the white arcs in all its perfectly proportioned grace. No, it was not possible to dismiss it as an adequate piece of Roman plumbing, thought Felix as he gazed at it with newly kindled emotions. It raised once again the old tormenting problem. (Beautiful is valuable against Beautiful is precious – which?) It was a question of market value against aesthetic or spiritual value. Max at his elbow spoke as if he had read his thoughts for he said, “No. It’s full of spirituality; you could do a very good yoga here and it would be appropriate enough!”