The Avignon Quintet (33 page)

In the evenings I take a long slow bath by firelight in my room; a large hip-bath does service for something more modern. A big sponge with dilatory squeezings warms my body. Then to wander the lamplit maze of the old house, taking always the direction pointed out by the distant piano. Lights blaze upon the wine glasses. How much longer will this life go on for them – living in the quiet parenthesis of Verfeuille’s pulse-beat? After dinner to play a round of cards or drowse over a book. I feel all the magnet’s deep slumbering passivity, the bare weight of inertia. Toby accuses me of being selfish because I pay no heed to social problems, but there is no social answer to private pain, to loneliness, alienation, the need for love. Once a French girl, grubby and unwashed, lips hewn apart with yawns, smelling like the Metro in summer, completely absorbed my affections for two months. Her reactions had been slowed down by a youthful meningitis – it had slurred up her speech, and the stiffening of the muscles on one side of her mouth gave her great beauty and stealth. A committee cannot love, a society still less. She brought me an unusual happiness, which is only the sense of wonder suddenly revived. I told Pia all about her and she listened with her patience coiled up in her like a cat saying nothing at all. I snatched off her fresh straw hat and kissed all those sunpilfered freckles with gratitude. In those days I was lighthearted and used to sign all my letters: “Well cheerio, best agonies, Rob.” I little knew!

“My whole philosophy is this: that people who give one too much trouble should be arrested and turned into soap.” (Toby. The last words roared out and punctuated by a bang on the table with fatuous fist.)

As for Trash, her terracotta beauty was proof of the pudding; the plum-tones softly dusted by her powder – a Greek vase dusted with bonemeal. In the morning, naked, she did what she called her personal Intonement. The text went as follows, rising on toes, hands and arms spread out to heaven:

Who’s the Bestest?

Who’s the Mostest?

Who’s the particularly particular?

Who’s the specially special?

All together: “Why, Trash of course!”

The little lap-dog with its coat of scarlet velvet was named after Pia. It walked on its hindlegs with enthusiasm. When she showed it the whip it immediately got an erection. Afterwards when it died they buried it by moonlight, in tears, with loosened sphincters. Ah, the sweet mooncraft of the dark lady of the soblets!

Trying to explain to Piers that the stream of consciousness is composed of all too painfully conscious bits with the links suppressed; free association does the hop skip and jump along these points, behaving like quanta. He will not believe that the art form of the age is not the diary any more but the case-history. Anyway stream of consciousness is a misnomer, suggesting something flowing between banks. Milky Way would be more accurate. Consciousness is a smear. Come Trash my love, throw them coal black haunches over the moon! Pia’s love will do you good, it will cure both your pretty dimples.

At night poor Robin’s slanguage fails;

He feels his mind go off the rails
.

Out there on the plateaus of his loneliness he feels the freezing pelagic spray drying on his cheeks. He stares and stares into the eye of the blizzard but all is wiped away by the softly falling snow. “Toby the minute you start to have opinions about day-to-day matters you cease to be an artist and start to be a citizen. Choose.” But I was angry with myself for getting lost in the shallow meshes of such an argument. One should never explain, merely hint. Bruce said: “When we were younger we were actually and physically moved by books.
Seraphita
so disturbed Piers that he threw it aside and rushed into the open air; feeling suffocated at being found out. He writhed on the grass like a dog to drive away the vision it raised of a perfected love between himself and his sister.” Yes, when one was young – poetry with requisite built-in shiver. Then later one finds oneself facing love affairs as full of bones as any fish – beauty bold and sweet or full of peace and weariness like Pia,

en pente douce

au bout portant

glisse glisse chérie pourtant

vers bonheur bechamel

love, the surprise parcel

will never treat you well
.

A kiss like an interval between points in mathematics, like a cigarette-end burning in the dark. I asked her once when we had been drinking a very human wine to tell me what it felt like with Trash. She coloured deeply and was silent for a long while, her eyes all the time fixed truthfully on my own, a little wrinkle of thought on her brow. Then: “Trash’s body smells of wedding-cake.”

FOUR

Life with Toby

W
ITHOUT THE COMPANY OF TOBY I SHOULD NEVER HAVE
had the courage to return to the chateau; and the fact that he began so earnestly to work gave a high seriousness to our new life there. While he laboured in the old muniments room on the medieval deposits of several generations of Nogarets, I sifted softly through the archives of a more recent time – Sutcliffe’s papers, his letters from Pia; from the Duchess, and from other people in his life. I occupied Piers’ old studio and Toby the three guest rooms – this purely for company. So, like a couple of retired bachelors we put up a common front against the gnawings of solitude. Once or twice the lawyer came up to Verfeuille on some business connected with Piers’ affairs, and once I glimpsed the Abbé in the grounds though he did not greet me, and did not actually enter the chateau. He had a long talk with one of the older servants and then sent to demand permission to visit the vaults where the family had for generations buried its dead. This was at once granted. He disappeared into the wood for an hour or two and then returned, once more to the servants’ quarters, to give back the keys. Summer came and we went for long walks in the heat, in the perfumed dust of the Provençal countryside. Toby’s great study, entitled
The Secret of the Templars
, was well on the way to being finished; it had taken him a number of years as far as the execution was concerned, but of course many more if one counted the length of time he had actually spent reflecting upon the subject and reading round it. It was a lifework, and his reputation as a historian would stand or fall by it. It was a strange period for me. We spoke little about the tragedy of Piers, and once a week we rode down to Montfavet to spend a few quiet hours with Sylvie. But for the most part it was long walks and early rising. I felt less of an orphan.

It was during this period that Toby decided to read me a few of the opening passages from his book in a suitable décor for it – a deserted Templar fortress which stood on the dry flanks of the steep ravines beyond the Pont du Gard – that bronze masterpiece of Roman plumbing, constructed apparently of a stone like honey-cake and set in its steep context of rock over the slow Gardon. We slept in the fort, and that night a bronze moon rose over it like an echo. The situation was suitably romantic for the reading of a work which was designed to surpass Gibbon in style and mellifluousness.… At least these were the pretensions of the author expressed for the most part when he was slightly flown with wine. Appropriate too was the great fire of thorns and furze which he had stacked against the walls of the inner bastion. This huge fire bristled and roared up into the calm sky making the gloomy precincts as bright as noon – and enticing the lizards and snakes out of the rock to bask in the glare. Our blankets we had spread in a sheltered corner. Toby, placing his gold-rimmed spectacles on his nose, set our dinner to simmer and uncorked a demijohn of the old Verfeuille red which glowed in our glasses with the embers of old recollections of half-forgotten journeys and excursions of our youth by the light of the moon. Then he seated himself on a stone and took up the thick manuscript, a whole life.

“Even after six centuries of silence the name echoes on, troubling and mysterious, vibrating in our memories with a kind of tragic uncertainty, tragic doubt. The Templars! What was their sin, what caused their sudden, almost inexplicable destruction? The dust lies thick upon the manuscripts which should provide an answer to such a query, but which in fact only seem to accentuate the mystery by their extraordinary ambiguities, their improbabilities. The more one studies the evidence the less convinced one becomes that the truth has not been tampered with: that the secret has been deliberately hidden, that the so-called facts lie, that the existing evidence darkens judgement. Is there, then, no answer to the secret of their strange fate-or must we rest our case for ever upon surmises and evidence as baffling as it is circumstantial?

“Across the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, from the fogs and rains of the north to the sunshine and orange – lands of Syria, Portugal, Morocco, are spread the sad relics of this order – abandoned castles and keeps which still insist, by their malefic silence and desuetude, that something momentous and tragic came to pass on that faraway Friday the thirteenth in 1307. On that date one of the most powerful religious orders the world has ever known was struck down overnight, to founder and disintegrate without defence in the fires of the Inquisition at the instigation of a weak Pope and a criminal French king. Fantastic accusations were formulated which stupefied the finest minds and hearts of this order, so long renowned for its piety, self-abnegation, and devotion to duty. The Templars were the foremost fighting arm of the day, in terms of military strength quite capable, one might have thought, of conquering the whole of Europe; moreover, from a political point of view, the knights were the bankers who handled the gold of the Kings …..

“Yet at dawn on Friday the thirteenth in 1307, in conformity with the
lettres de cachet
sent out by King Philippe Le Bel to all the seneschals of France – (orders they were forbidden to open and read before the twelfth of October) – the 5,000 field officers of the Templar order, from the least important up to the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, together with his personal bodyguard of sixty armed knights, were arrested at the instigation of the Chancellor of France, Guillaume de Nogaret. They were taken up in one night like rabbits. There is no record of a protest of any kind nor of any resistance. The main attack was launched at the world headquarters of the order, the Paris Temple. Why?

“The accusations formulated against them seem, even in retrospect, astonishing in their extravagance; one has the impression that the knights themselves were dumbfounded by them, rendered incapable of reacting out of sheer astonishment. A religious order world-renowned for its frugality and chastity was suddenly accused of heresy, sodomy, secret practices, and religious beliefs hostile to the Christianity of the day. The suddenness of the blow, the perfect timing of the attack, and the devastating nature of the charges left no time for thought, no time to prepare a defence against such outrageous suppositions. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the whole of Europe was struck dumb also with surprise; and then became scared and uneasy about the gravity of the charges and the increasing flimsiness of the evidence brought against the knights. The long sad trials began which were to drag on and on into what must have seemed an infinity of cruelty. The less the Inquisitors found, the more summary their judgements, the higher burned the pyres on which the bodies of the Templars smoked. Nobody was convinced: yet everybody was silent.