The Avignon Quintet (27 page)

Forking up mouthfuls of fish he said: Now about this
Tu Quoque
book, and about Oakshot; let us suppose a man world-weary and world-travelled, who has spent a lifetime hunting for a philosophy and a woman to match.… Hum. The woman is dead. But he, who has walked the Middle East, has been marked by an encounter with a tribe of Druse-Benawhis. They feed him on lotos or whatever and induct him into the beliefs of the tribe – a kind of pessimism of an extreme cast. Actually the word is a misnomer for truth cannot be either pessimist or optimist when you reach bedrock. These ideas had come to him after an encounter with a young Alexandrian in Paris, who spoke a beguiling and negligent French, and who appeared to be in possession of a number of farfetched and recondite beliefs of a gnostic cast. He was a member of the saddest profession on earth – a banker and man of affairs. Between ulcers, which he came to Paris to have darned, he lived in opulence in Alexandria where Oakshot had been invited to visit him. Akkad, the name. “I am not really a banker so much as a student of cosmic malevolence.” The propositions of this languid fellow with the enormous soft doe-like eyes much beguiled Oakshot. Sutcliffe. “What happens after that? I don’t know.”

He clung obstinately to the image of the man in the train eating a sandwich as it raced through the night. At the station his wife’s brother, the doctor, would be waiting, with some privileged information about the death. Or perhaps Trash would be waiting in a white sports car. “Robin, honey, I jest had to do it to her.” He shied away from Bruce a bit because he judged him to be a dull fellow and incapable of anything really dramatic as a role. He was a good chap and all that, but pretty humdrum. Nevertheless Pia had loved him and some of her pollen had come off on him, so that he himself felt a certain affection of kinship for him. But he was a dull dog on the whole, and inspired no fiction.

Akkad insisted that the whole of man’s universe of sorrow was the result of a cosmic lapsus – something small in scale but absolutely critical in effect. Something as small as a slip of the tongue, or a moment’s inattention – on the part of God, that is – which reverberated throughout the whole cobweb. A slip of memory, the bicycle-chain of recollection, which threw all the gears out of true, altered the notions of time and place. Thus human reality was a limbo now peopled with ghosts, and the world was embarked on a collision course with the spirit of default, of evil, at the helm, guided to destruction by inferior demons. That is how cosmic justice works – one little slip and the Pit yawns open. Man becomes an
être-appareil
, an
être-gnome
. He dare not face this reality. But the gnostic boys say that if you do face it you start to live a counterlife. (Oakshot grunted in a philistine manner and decided that people who talked like this deserved to have their hands cut off above the ankles.) Alternatively, Oakshot was profoundly marked by this little discourse and felt that he had tumbled upon something which related quite distinctly to his own life, the sad marriage that he carried about inside him like a dead foetus. Another kind of life beckoned to him; these beliefs did not promise happiness, there was nothing cosy about them. But they promised truth. Oakshot sighed and lit a pipe.

Leaving Oakshot to smoke his coarse shag Sutcliffe abandoned ship, so to speak, and pushed off for a stroll. All these ideas rattled around in his noodle like nutmegs in a tin, and he made no attempt to sort them out. He promised himself instead several days of gallery-going, to bathe his wits in colour, wash out his soul in rainbows. Memory dawdled him along diverse canals in a delighted trance of architectural circumlocution to where at last, in his little shop, Gabrielli hovered like a most ancient moth, among his exquisite vellums and moroccos. He was finishing the little Tasso which had taken him so many years – and had been destined as an anniversary of marriage present for Pia. It was at last done, and he had been about to send it to Sutcliffe, who made no mention of Pia, simply saying how very pleased she would be. All of a sudden he had the impulse to lift that withered old craftsman’s hand to his lips, to kiss it with reverence. Looking into the glaucous old eyes he thought: we are the vestiges of a civilisation gone dead as dead mastoid. No doubt those desert boys were right – evil was at the helm and the pace was increasing. One could hear the distant thunder of the falls towards which we were sliding – the distant cannonade of doom. Meanwhile here was this little old man who had lived to see so much, frail as a leaf, still quietly working among his colour blocks and gold-leaf. The little book glowed in his hand like a fire opal. Her name in gold upon the spine. Gabrielli was at peace because he was the master of his method. This was the key of all happiness. Why couldn’t he feel that way about writing books? Oakshot hated books in which everything was carefully described and all conversations woodenly recorded. So did Sutcliffe as a matter of fact.

Back on the canals he suddenly found that he no longer cared whether God existed or not – so fantastic was the sunset that it all but sponged away his consciousness. You could have proved anything from such a display – about God he meant. So incredibly and painstakingly worked out and executed. Imagine the Venetians subjected to this on every evening of their lives. … It was too much. Only a blessed colour-blindness could save them from becoming madmen or at least ecstatics. “Look!” he cried to the gondolier who was slithering him back to his hotel along the darkening canals, dipping like a bat.
“Che Bello!”
Pointing like a demented Ruskin to the western quarter where already the dying sun … (space for ten lines of description full of sound and fury)
“Che Bello
, you bloody mole.” The man stared dazedly along the parabola described by Sutcliffe’s cane, shrugged and grunted, finally admitting
“É bello signore.”
The great man registered impatience at this lack of spirit. “I knew it,” he said. “Colour-blind.”

He went up to his room at the Torquato Tasso to brush his teeth. There was a letter from his agent with a press cutting about his last book, faintly damning it in a supercilious way. He stalked to the bathroom again and with gravity dabbed out the bags under his eyes with Vanishing Cream. He was afraid of getting to look like Bloshford. As a matter of fact Oakshot had a steely bluish gaze, and hardly ever blinked, which made people uncomfortable at what they felt might be an implied reproach. People who blink too much are inevitably stupid, and Oakshot was not stupid. A little emotionally retarded perhaps from lack of sexual experience. Ever since he had climbed Everest with Tufton … At night one found sherpas in one’s sleeping-bag and could do nothing. They suffered so from cold. Oakshot lost his trigger finger to frost bite and had to give up lion safaris. To hell with him.

But it was still going on, the day; up at this level there was still a last splash of sunlight. He thrust open his shutters and stepped out on to his balcony. At the same moment the occupant of the room directly facing his over the narrow street, did the same. They came face to face, nose to nose, so close that they could have shaken hands with each other. The little street was gay with hanging washing of all shapes and colours. He stared at the girl and she stared back at him. They laughed and sketched out gestures of helplessness. His posture said: “What is to be done? Fate is stronger than either of us. Clearly we were doomed to meet, perhaps doomed never to part.”

“So it would seem,” said the young lady. And emboldened by this hopeful departure of fate he permitted himself to look reproachful and ask her why she had abandoned him to his fate in that paltry fashion, condemning him to a solitary and far too early dinner?

She looked somewhat constrained and after a long hesitation said: “I knew your wife,” and was suddenly silent. Sutcliffe felt out of breath with surprise. The girl added: “Not very well, but I knew her, and consequently I knew who you were, and thought that sooner or later the subject might come up and be distasteful to you. So I ran.”

“You knew my wife,” he said, almost as much to himself as to her. It had cast a strange kind of shadow over this incipient flirtation of minds. “I never met you, but I saw her in Avignon one summer, with her brother. I live quite near the place at Verfeuille.”

Sutcliffe sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette. The girl said: “I saw your picture in the paper once.” Instantly it was like a bruise which suddenly decided to ache again for no known reason. The girl facing him turned to hang up some small clothes she had washed, on the window-sill adjacent. “You need not have been unduly afraid,” he said gravely. “I would have welcomed a talk about her – from anybody who knew her.”

Actually this balcony meeting would be quite a good thing to happen to Oakshot; the girl would be different, a ragamuffin he had found in the stews. They spent all night in a gondola heading for the sea. Wrapped in a cloak, listening to the heart-breaking serenades of a Goldoni gondolier.

He would have to change Akkad’s name of course, perhaps he might call him Barnabas or Porphyrius? You could have him saying to Oakshot in despair what he once said to me – I mean to Sutcliffe: “You are the worst kind of man to whom to express these ideas because your interest in religion is purely aesthetic – that is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.” Oakshot puzzling over the grand strategy of the gnostic, the fateful grammar of dissent which … and of course Oakshot would consider all logical development of such ideas in the direction of suicide or refusal to propagate in cathar fashion as damnably unhealthy.

The girl had turned back towards him and her attitude had changed; she seemed confused now and sad, as if she felt guilty of an indiscretion or a gaffe. “When you knew Pia where was I?” he asked and she replied that he was in Paris and expected daily to appear in Avignon. That more or less situated the date – it was while the great nervous breakdown of Pia was cooking. His own behaviour at that epoch hadn’t helped either – drink and gipsy brothels and a dose of clap. He felt guilty not to have been more responsible at a time when she needed his help. The girl stared at him wistfully, almost commiseratingly, as though repenting for having broached the subject. Sutcliffe pondered. Then she said: “Would you care to come and have coffee with me? My father has gone to the opera and I am alone.” His heart leaped up when he beheld … He stood up and decreased his trousers with his fingers, saying: “I would of course love to, but only on condition that you don’t feel sorry for me, or vexed at yourself. Otherwise you will bore me and you haven’t done so yet.”

She nodded and gave him the number of her room. So lightly and albeit sadly (Pia’s frail shadow) he crossed the little square and found her hotel, the Lutece; curiosity prompting him to consult the register in order to discover her name. It was Banquo, and he wondered for a moment if she was not a member of the famous banking family of that name. Yes, her father must be the famous man he had heard of. “He describes himself as a famous ghost,” she said later when he asked her.

She was sitting in an old-fashioned cretonne-covered armchair, clad in a green silk kimono with dashing chrysanthemums stitched all over it. In the rosy light shining from the standard lamp in its scarlet velvet hood her throat and hands were gipsy brown. Her toes with their lacquered nails were now shod lightly in Athenian thonged sandals. Well, there she was, calmly composed and amused, and very much mistress of the situation and of herself. Her confidence had come back, together with a new sympathy and she appraised him with a serious and sweet arrogance which seemed to say: “Sir, for me man is a mere epiphenomenon.” It was clear to Sutcliffe that she was a darling, a heart-gripping creature, at once brilliant and disdainful and a little sad. And she was so brown, so musky. They would make brown love, musky love, full of the sapience and wisdom of disenchantment, full of the sadness of fortuitousness, wishing it might last for ever. Yes, safe in each other’s arms they would watch the rest of the contemptible world as if from a high observatory. Her warm and capable hands touched his. Somewhere in the romantic and water-wobbled city bells rang out, the tongues of memory, and the faint engraving of human voices scribbled the night with song. They both sat quite quiet, just breathing and looking at each other quietly, with the innocent eyes of the mind. It was the right moment to speak about Pia for what she knew was of the first importance both to the husband and the novelist Sutcliffe. There was one conversation in which Pia described how she suddenly woke up and realised that she loved this loutish tousled man. And by one of those extraordinary paradoxes in which life delights, the blow of realisation came just when he was at his most odious and had been behaving abominably. (In the morning he wrote down the whole scene just as the girl told it, on the back of a menu.)

With the inevitable distortion caused by too much art it would read something like this: “She had been planning to leave him for several weeks because of his scandalous behaviour, his insulting thoughtlessness, his vulgarity: when all of a sudden it was as if a bandage had been ripped from her eyes. Suddenly in this gross overfed disagreeable man she saw the artist, divined the fragility and dignity of the enterprise which had driven him to destroy himself as a husband, lover, bank clerk, priest. Even as a man. She was impelled to walk out into the street in a state of pitiful bemusement, scuppers awash with a host of new and singular impressions. So this at last was love, she told herself; and just at the wrong time, and with the wrong man. She could have howled out loud like a dog with the vexation of it. She had done nothing to deserve this. She must never tell him. She walked up and down the dark pavements of Avignon until the number of men accosting her drove her back to the café where he had just been slapped by a waiter. A mass of spilled change jingled on the floor. His cane had been impounded and was raised against him by the barman. They were phoning the police while he sat there, white as a sheet, like some frightened stupid animal, like a wart-hog, refusing to leave the place without an apology. This could only go from bad to worse. “Come with me, quick.” And she jerked his sleeve, hoisted him ungainly up. He shambled into the street with her and was at once sick against a wall. A hoarse sob doubled him. He said: “I finish the book tomorrow.” She wept now as she hoisted him along, the silent tears of horror flowed down her pale cheeks. All was over with her. So this is what they meant by the phrase “till death us do part”.