The Avignon Quintet (184 page)

The wine had done its work, the music exercised its charm, the leafy shadow and white light had expressed all the ample beauty of a late spring; and then to crown it all they stood to gain fortunes tonight and to revive the memorable saint who for years now had been forgotten. The roving and curious eye of the Préfet quested about for a moment, he was on the lookout for someone. Presently she came into view and threaded her way through the crowd to his side; it was Sabine, and he was obviously waiting for her. In her deep voice she said, “Monsieur le Préfet, I have made the inquiries you asked of me and the girl is available, and can come to your residence whenever you wish. Her husband has assured me that she is not ill – I appreciate your concern as so many of these folk have venereal troubles. The only trouble is that he wishes somediing from you
en contrepartie
, and you may not feel like giving him what he asks for …” “Anything, within reason,” said the Préfet, who was blushing with pleasure, as the girl in question was a magnificent young bird of paradise – or perhaps more appropriately a golden pheasant. Sabine went on: “He wants the centre stall for the Avignon fairs, the stall which is to the left under the old bastion – stall G.” The Préfet groaned: “But everyone wants that stall, it is strategically the best in the town. Very well. I shall speak to the
placier
in that sense and he can take possession of it as from tomorrow. And I hope tomorrow evening the girl will make herself available at about eight o’clock. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your personal intervention on my behalf. Sometimes these things are so hard to arrange when one is an official. Thank you a thousand times.” Sabine smiled. One is always in a strong position when one is in need of nothing. But she knew that if ever she needed official help with any scheme she could count on her
piston
with the Préfet, and that was important.

But as yet neither had spoken of what was uppermost in their minds – the question of Julio’s embalmed legs. It invested their silence with a kind of pregnant significance for on neither side was the conversation broken off, it simply tapered off into silence, into a pause. She left the official with the onus of referring to the subject. “Of course,” he said at last, “I am fully aware of the political significance to the tribe of finding the shrine untouched and in working order. In a sense I am as much concerned as you must be – for my job is to see that nothing troubles good civic order.”

“Indeed,” she said, looking down at her hands as if the answer to the secret might be hidden in them. “Indeed!”

The official drew a deep breath and plunged. “Have you thought any more about my suggestion concerning the legs?”

“Of course I have.”

“I am having repeated offers from the Musée de l’Homme; as you know they want to add the originals to their collection. It seems to be a matter of vital interest to them and I am sure the matter could be arranged without anyone knowing. After all with a pair of plastic copies who would be any the wiser?”

“That is not the question. I quoted them a price for the whole transaction. Will they meet it or not? If they will then I agree from my side. If not, not!” The Préfet coughed behind his hand. “They have agreed to your price,” he said and his face broke into a smile. But not hers, there was no corresponding smile on her face. So
this
was the discreditable act she must perform according to the cards – for of course plastic copies could not, would not, conduct the lightning flashes of healing to suppliants! She took the proffered cheque and stared at it with puzzled amaze, dazed by her own behaviour. It was a ritual sacrifice of something, though she did not know of what. And it would lead, as the cards had warned her, to her murder by the tribe – ritual murder by stoning. She shook herself like a sheepdog with sheer disbelief. “What rubbish it all is!” she exclaimed. “Rubbish?” said the Préfet. “It seems a fair price to me for such a thing. It’s all superstition anyway, so what are the odds?”

He moved slowly on and left her standing there in amazement wondering if she should tear up the cheque but knowing she would not.

Everything was unrolling in the most satisfactory fashion; an unruffled optimism reigned. It was time now to broach the food, and the official approached the gallant spread with all the ardour and enthusiasm of a true Frenchman who is confronted with something good to eat. It is practically a religious duty to do justice to the fare. And by now everyone had caught the mood, and started to follow suit. Fragments of thoughts and snatches of conversation floated about in the breezy darkness of the Roman treasure. Old relationships between acquaintances who had not met for years renewed themselves. Glasses were raised to Saint Sara, and
“trinc”
became once more the password!

“As for Saint Sara, I don’t suppose we shall ever know for certain who she was: the repudiated wife of Pilate, the servant of the Virgin, or some forgotten queen of Egypt, reincarnation of Isis, who once ruled over the Camargue. Perhaps it does not matter except to these swarthy children who so reverently kiss her belly button during the fête.” Thus the Prince who was enchanted by the excellence of the food and drink and the manner in which things were shaping.

Twinkling with love-bites Cleopatra came,

Saint Sara had resolved her of all shame,

The belly-button of a virgin’s kiss

Transformed her very breathing into bliss.

In the unwinking gold of the candlelight all the brasswork in the little caravan twinkled and flashed. Sabine gazed at the two palms of Rob Sutcliffe, allowing her concentration to sink into them, to founder in them until they seemed to her as transparent as glass. “We will be saved if at all by the Jews coming into a new heritage; the persecuted make mistakes and they once made a false identification of interest on capital with safety; this translated into blood as a kind of alchemical investment plus material usury. There will be other ways of stabilising the finances of state and they will show us a new road.” Sutcliffe was clad only in his shirt. In his notebook he had written: “The untouchable dreams of licit caresses.” He had asked her to marry him, as he had asked so many people to do, and like so many people she had refused. (Can you (ex)change lives? Can you (ex)change deaths?)

Lord Galen was discoursing upon dreams. “Sometimes,” he said, “I want prophetic dreams, lucrative dreams which come without warning. Last year, for example, I woke with a cry of astonishment to hear a voice say: ‘The obvious thing at the end of a war as wasteful as this last one is a contract for scrap metal.’ It was a revelation – the obvious always is! Within ten days I was negotiating with ten governments to take over their deserted battlefields!”

“Yes, I also used to be scared of snakes,” Max was saying, “until I went to India to study. In the
ashram
there was a king cobra with a mate and they were quite tame; they came out at dusk and drank milk from a saucer with little flickering tongues. You could describe them as good-humoured when not alarmed and quite unaggressive. But in another part of India they killed snakes and there I noticed how faithful the female was and how deadly. She always returns to avenge her mate, and for days after a male has been killed the whole place is in a state of acute anxiety waiting for her certain reappearance. Usually she comes three or four days after the killing of her mate. They say that this is the better to plan her ambush because she is careful to execute her retaliation according to a set plan. She lies in wait in some place where people are bound to pass – on a thoroughfare or pathway, in a kitchen or at a shrine. If any unwary person approaches she strikes with all her might. But I was very impressed by the anxiety with which the whole household awaited her coming. My teachers used this as a metaphor. The state of watchfulness as if for this second coming!”

The noise of the music rolled over his words and he felt snatches of sleep invading his whole consciousness in little paroxysms of pleasure. The collision of different languages superposed and mingled gave a wonderful barbaric note to the fair. One could imagine whole conversations when one did not understand what was being said.

Who is your friend over there? The cannibal one?

Death!

He looks rather nice.

He improves on acquaintance. The man with a pocketful of deaths.

I thought he looked familiar.

The Prince’s car was full of small gipsies – they had asked for a ride and were being driven over the bridge and around, the leafy roads with their dapples of frenzied light. The great engine purred, soft as elephant fur, emissary from the world of Pelf and Vox Pop and processed citizen. “Everyone is here save the lovers and Smirgel,” said the Préfet on a note of deep anxiety, as he wished to begin his alembicated discourse well before the advance into the caves.

“They will come,” said Felix soothingly. And truth to tell they were not far off. As for the lovers, they had elected to ride up from the sea and with the falling of darkness had reached Remoulins when the meandering roads led them steadily towards the bridge; from time to time through the forest they caught glimpses of insinuating light against the distant sky. Soon the distant clamour of mandolins would greet them. They advanced like riders in a dream, his arm through hers. They had decided to separate for a while, perhaps for several months, in order to give themselves the possibility of concentrating all their forces upon the book which he had decided to begin at long last. But this could not be done without a finalising meeting with Sutcliffe for whom now the enormous sense of utter despondency had once more gained the forefront of his mind – the despair over the inaccessibility of Sabine. As they wound slowly through the dark glades he told her his plan and asked for her permission to execute it.

She was vehemently in favour of it; she felt, in fact, that the whole
oeuvre
for which he was going to try was as much her work, her responsibility, as his – which was indeed the case. To celebrate the mystical marriage of four dimensions with five skandas so to speak. To exemplify in the flesh the royal cobra couple, the king and queen of the affect, of the spiritual world. “My spinal I with her final she.” Some of this they tried to express to Sutcliffe who remained somewhat unconvinced. “Very well,” he said at last, “on condition that you don’t write like a hundred garbage cans. But first we should clap eyes on the treasure, no? To console ourselves against the cold and damp of our native island – that barbaric place with its two tribes.” The Prince explained the allusion. “At first you have difficulty liking the inhabitants. Then you realise that they come in two sorts, the British and the English. The first are descendants of Calvin, the second descendants of Rupert Brooke! Poets and Idealists against Protestant shop-keepers. Hence the divided voice which so often fills us with dismay. After all, in this hideous war we have just passed through never forget that Halifax would have treated with Hitler: it took Churchill to refuse. England over Britain!” It was one of his favourite themes, and one very congenial to a typically Egyptian temperament. As who should know!

The remaining two persons – Smirgel and Quatrefages – arrived in an old fashioned gig with a somewhat superannuated horse drawing them. They looked somehow dazed in a vaguely triumphant way, and the German, true to his promise, had brought the Austrian sapper’s map of the workings without which all access to the treasure would have proved impossible. But first the warnings, and here the Préfet could afford to wax somewhat rhetorical as he pleaded for care and circumspection and civic respect for the saint – if they managed to locate her. His voice was from time to time drowned by the moan of mandolins. But at long last the great moment announced itself; Cade manifested in a puff of smoke and a flash – an optical illusion which the light created as it flashed among the leaves. He had with him a whole bundle of lottery tickets which he wore over his shoulder like a bandolier. This had been Smirgel’s idea. “It would be wise to keep a check on those who go in. The gipsies are such a rabble I am scared to let them in. But if you give them a ticket each we can do a count later on if something goes wrong.” There were also torches to be distributed and fairy-lights … All these elements had to be coaxed into some sort of order. Slowly the mellifluous periods of the official French wound to a halt.

“And so, my children,” – for he could not resist the avuncular note – “let us go in all humility in search of our Saint who alone will secure the well-being of all who live here. Viva Sara!” The cry went off like a pistol shot and for a long moment the music swept upwards towards the sky in a glorious arpeggio while individual voices barked the savage message to the shade of the Saint. “Viva Sara! Viva Sara!” And now the fireworks ranged upon the aqueduct started to splutter and whizz – crowns and globes of spinning light in a deep blue sky. The volume of the music turned itself down and a single plangent woman’s voice started to sing a lovesong, an Andalusian folk-tune with its curious peristaltic rhythm and alternative breaths suggestive of the human orgasm. Sutcliffe said grimly, “Sex – the human animal’s larder.” And his double said, “Yes. Or the fatal power-house. We could do so much with it if we learned the code!” But the Prince who had learned of the mortal illness of the Princess and was planning to leave for Cairo at dawn, was thinking of other things – of mortal sin, parodied by illnesses of the physical envelope! He could see so clearly into the future of her death, clearer than any gipsy. On the anniversary of it the telephone smothered in tea-roses – white roses and red. In this way to conspire against console, and hope in their love. Aubrey said, “When we separate shall we correspond, do you think?” Sutcliffe said, “Of course. We mustn’t neglect to think of the collected correspondence – an exchange of hieroglyphs between two cuneiform personages, what? A correspondence in Mandarin?”