The Avignon Quintet (32 page)

Under the famous broken bridge which the inhabitants of Verfeuille have always regarded as a highly symbolic structure, there are sometimes real dancers, during the frequent f
ê
tes and holidays. There is also the famous cockade-snatching fight such as someone has just rediscovered on the vases of Crete. It is kinder than the Spanish fight for it does not slay the bull: it is the white-clad man who is in danger. The bullring is easily and hastily improvised by placing the carts in a ring to form an arena. The audience is mounted on the carts. Here we have snuffed enough red dust to see the summer out, and drunk enough red wine to float a gunboat. And from time to time, in a trick of slanting light, one is reminded that the Middle Ages are not so very far behind us – as a reality rather than as an abstraction. Machicolated walls grin with the gap-toothed, helot-dwarf expression of the louts in Breughel. Up against the night sky the massive and ugly factories of God loom like broken fret-saws. In the green waters of the great fountain of V., which throbs on with the heartbeat of Petrarch’s verse, the polished trout swim and swarm and render themselves in all placidity to the gaff of idle boys. Darkness is falling. I am hunting among all these booths for young Toby, whose potations never cease to amaze me, and whom I will doubtless find at one of the wine stalls which offer free drinks as a kind of advertisement for country wines on direct sale at the fair. Sure enough. He stands in a clumsy and dogged way with a glass in his paw. Under his arm the latest Pursewarden much battered and full of river-sand (we bathed this morning). Vainglorious though I am I do not hold this against him for P. is the only endurable writer in England at the moment, and I gladly cede the palm to him as the saying goes. Toby has hiccups and is trying to cure them in the only way he knows. By drinking from the wrong end of a glass.

It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind. Piers is determined to meet Akkad on his next visit and to plumb all the mysteries of the sect; and by the same token Toby has suddenly seen the way into the centre of his own work. The little that I was able to tell him of the gnostic predispositions suggested a possible solution to the nagging old problem of the Templars – wherein had they sinned, why did they collapse? The suggestion that the central heresy might have been gnosticism suddenly blazed up in his mind and gave substance and form to all the dispersed material he had been wrestling with in the muniments room of the chateau. The mere possibility that he had a theory which might be fitted into a thesis to be offered for a Ph.D produced such a wild fit of exhilaration that it led to a three-day drunk of notable proportions. We kept meeting him and losing him in the town. At each encounter he seemed drunker, slower, more elaborate. And when Toby drank too much one was never sure what he might say or do. For example take the only taxi and cry: “Follow that neurosis!” Or recite nonsense verse: “The apple of my gender aches, I seek an Eve for all our sakes.” And then of course Byron – for he sees himself as Byron and is continually addressing an imaginary Fletcher – but this happens mostly in bed.

“Fletcher!”

“Yes, my Lord?”

“Abnegate.”

“Very good, my Lord.”

“Fletcher!”

“Yes, my Lord?”

“Convey my finest instincts to the Duchess.”

“Very well, sir.”

In the incoherent maze of his rocking mind all sorts of diverging ideas and thoughts bounced off one another. “I see little point in being myself O sage,” he might intone. Adding: “Sutcliffe, that huge platform of British flesh and gristle ought to be in a dog-collar. He is criminally drunk and has joined the engineers of sin. A murrain on his buttocky walk and chapped hands. Free will is an illusion honey, so is the discrete ego, say the Templars. Who impregnated them with this folly? The wrath of the nymphs was hidden from them until the last moment.”

Or simply fall down on a bench and go to sleep like any tramp using Pursewarden’s
Essays
as a scant pillow. Only the cold and dewy dawn would awake the unshaven sinner and drive him down to the Princes hotel, or back to the chateau.

“My advice to Robin Sutcliffe is as follows,” he might add, and recite aloud while his finger marked the bars:

Always shoot the sitting duck

Pass up the poem for the fuck

At worst the penalty may be

A charge on poor posterity.

“Fletcher!”

“Yes, sir.”

“By the naval string of the risen Lord

bring me some bicarbonate of soda tablets.”

“Immediately, my Lord.”

Somewhere, under a bamboo ceiling, hidden in a coloured transfer of tropical birds, there where the great philogists keep holiday, she may still be waiting for me. “Darling,” the letter said, “Burma was such a trap. I feel I am going mad.”

Wandering in the older part of the town, near the market, I found a few barrowloads of books for sale; among them a very old life of Petrarch
(MDCC LXXXII)
which I riffled and browsed through in the public gardens of Doms. It would make the ideal going-away present for Sylvie. I was not so hardhearted as not to feel a quickening of sympathy at the words of the old anonymous biographer of the poet.

J’ai cru d’ailleurs que dans un temps où les femmes ont l’air de ne plus se croire dignes d’être aimées; où elles avertissent les hommes de ne pas les respecter; où se forment tant de liaisons d’un jour et si peu d’attachements durables; où l’on court après le plaisir pour ne trouver que la honte et les regrets, on pourrait peut-être rendre quelque service aux Mœurs, et rapeller un Sexe aimable a l’estime qu’il se doit si l’on offrait ê ses yeux, d’après l’histoire, le modèle d’un amour délicat, qui se suffit à lui-même et qui se nourrit pendant vingt ans de sentiment, de vertus et de gloire
.

Alas poor Pia! My mind went instantly back to the lakeside of Geneva where I had the first glimpse of the slender pale girl buttoned into white gloves. Parasol, pointed shoes, light straw hat. They had sent her to a finishing school and on Sundays the girls strolled by couples along the lakeside. She was on the pale side, and a little too slender, too much waist to her severely tailored suit. I had a rendezvous with someone else, and was waiting in a little café among the gardens when she passed by, smiling at something her friend said, and left that little ripple of complicity in her kindly glance which provoked my interest – an interest which deepened as I watched her eating an ice, dainty as a cat. Nothing I learned about her afterwards surprised me – it was as if I had always known about that sad and solitary life among the great embassies, always taught by governesses and tutors, always forbidden the company of other children of the same age. The little brother was too young to be a companion for her. So that even the strict Geneva finishing school seemed a marvellous escape from her former life. The degree of freedom permitted the girls seemed to her to border on the dangerous. I followed her, and from a chance remark learned which church they worshipped at on Sundays. The next Sunday I made a point of joining them in these obligatory pieties. On the second Sunday I passed her a note asking her to dine with me and telling her the name of my hotel. I added that I was taking Holy Orders very soon. I did not believe for an instant that Pia would accept. But even staid and gloomy Geneva seemed to her, after what she had lived through, a carnival of freedom. For once in her life she showed a wild courage, an almost desperate courage – I mean, to use a back door and scale a low fence … I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was completely knocked off my plate in a similar manner to old Petrarch.

Le Lundi de la Semaine Sainte, à six heures du matin, Pétrarque vit à Avignon, dans l’église des Réligieuses de Saint-Claire une jeune femme dont la robe verte était parsemée de violettes. Sa beauté le frappa. C’était Laure
.

How simple, how ineluctable these experiences seem when they come one’s way. How calamitously they turn out. Perhaps not for the lucky, though. Nor for them.

The old doctor in Cz once told the Duchess: “I have always felt that I was a spare child, a spare part, a spare tyre. People only turn to me in distress. Nobody wants to share their happiness with a doctor.”

“Fletcher?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Hand me my lyre.”

“Very good, my lord.”

“And also some purple therapy. I am a bit

cast down by my hypogloomia or common

hangover. Some methylated spirits, please.”

“At once, my lord.”

Smoking living salmon

Stuffing living geese.

I’m a little Christian,

Jesus brings me peace.

(A spontaneous lyric outburst by Toby as he stood face to face with the Palace of the Popes.)

To feast on loneliness – it is too rich a diet for a man like me. Yet I have had to put up with it. Piers said: “People who can no longer fall in love can simply pine away, go into a decline, and select unconsciously a disease which will do the work of a pistol.” He is not wrong. Despite the new found freedoms the area of misunderstandings about love remains about the same. The act is a psychic one; the flesh simply obeys with its convulsion-therapy and amnesia. Yes, but now that the young have at last, thanks to Marie Stopes, found the key to the larder, it will be apple tart and cream for breakfast every day, and cakes and ale all night. Why should I make such extraordinary claims upon life when I have all the gipsies of Avignon to choose from? Because I am a fool. I remember that I wanted to bleat out: “I love you,” but she put her hand over my mouth and all I felt was her breath in my fingers.