The Avignon Quintet (44 page)

ALL

Long long ago in time

Far faraway in space

When health and wealth

And slimth and stealth

Were
données
of the case

PIERS

There dwelt a man de Nogaret

TOBY

So overbred

So overfed

PIERS

Who threw his life away.

It might have been fun perhaps to print it with the music. He would reflect on the matter. He played abstractedly with the little cat Satan, as he waited for the valet. He supposed he was simply another vainglorious fool of a writer with insufficient courage to tell the whole truth about life. Always gilding the nipple, sugaring the pill. But after all what was the truth about these importunate, nagging people of his, trying so hard to get born and achieve the fugitive identity of a penurious art; he thought long and sadly of his dark wife Livia. Crumbs of her had been used for Sabine (the looks and the slashing style) and for Pia, and even a certain disposition of the eyebrows (when she was lying) which was one of the features he “saw” every time he put down the name of Sylvie. “How real is reality?” Blanford asked his cat which gazed back at him unwinkingly, unseeingly – like Livia saying: “Of course 1 love you, silly.” By a singular paradox (perhaps inherent in all writing?) the passages that he knew would be regarded as over-theatrical or unreal (“people don’t behave like that”) would be the truth, and the rest which rang somehow true, the purest fabrication. He wondered if in the next book about these people he could not cut down a layer or two to reveal the invisible larval forms, the root forms which had given him these projections? Like an archaeologist cutting down through successive cultures until he reached the neolithic stage of his people, their embryonic selves? He had half decided to let Sutcliffe finish and print his
Tu Quoque
if it could be found among his papers. “Poor Bruce,” he said aloud picturing the boy wandering the windy streets of Avignon in the rain, waiting for him to arrive on the night train one day.

In a passage in one of the unpublished notebooks of Sutcliffe he had written: “How can Bruce, a so-called doctor, not be aware that he and Piers between them brought about Sylvie’s collapse, the downfall of her reason? The division of objectives in loving is something woman finds impossible to face; it threatens the fragile sense of her identity, the unity of her vision of things seen through the unique lens of human love. Once this sense of uniqueness is put in doubt or dispersed the self breaks up (itself the most fragile of illusions) and all the subsidiary larval selves, demons and angels, come to the surface to splinter and confuse the central ego.”

Perhaps he should have included that? He felt so close to these people, he saw them everywhere; yesterday he had lunched at Sardou’s right behind Sutcliffe – at any rate it was the back of his head. At the end of the meal a hunchback woman came in to speak to him; she was very striking and resembled Sabine – except for the disability. This version of Sutcliffe picked his teeth with a silver toothpick of great beauty and wore a green baize apron with metal buttons – was he a hall-porter from the Majestic Hotel? He looked such a
savant
from behind.

Where was Cade? Night was falling and the plaintive rivercraft crossed and recrossed among new shadows. The real Sutcliffe, so to speak, who had loaned a physical wardrobe and a few light touches to the book Sutcliffe, had indeed committed suicide but only after a great nervous upheaval. For some reason he had not wanted to deprive Rob of his reason before despatching him. “I wonder why?” he asked the cat. “Perhaps I didn’t want to steal thunder from Sylvie?” He riffled among his notebooks and recovered the passage on the Bridge of Sighs, and the nervous breakdown which prefaced the final act – so theatrical, so Byronic: yet this is precisely what Sam (the original of Sutcliffe) had achieved in reality – that word again, it has a dying fall …

“He was filled now with a delicious vertigo, the winged consciousness of freedom which heralds general paralysis – liberty without precariousness or guilt. The kiss of euphoria. Death was no longer even an event. He existed adjacently to it, could reach out and practically touch it, it was so real. Hurrah. He heard his mind turning smoothly like a motor; it gave him powerful traction. Yes, he would go to India for a year. Learn Sanscrit, write out a cheque for a million, apologise to God. To laugh aloud suddenly and for no reason in a crowded restaurant was delectable. He found he was being naughty, mischievously eating matches or tearing up paper napkins; but he was soon coaxed to behave more correctly. When reproved he would stand up and offer a very stiff arm for a handshake. Sometimes he was forced to hide his smiles in his sleeve. His eyes seemed to have pupils of different sizes. At the café he calls for a paper and proposes to read it aloud but all that results is a deep humming noise. Nothing really outstanding; a little compulsive talk and laughter. And in the evenings in his shabby
pension
some silence, moodiness, followed by catatonic stupor.”

Poor Sam, poor Sutcliffe, which version …? So many of these states were interchangeable, particularly if you took drugs. (Sometimes under the influence of the drug he found the taste of mineral water altered so much that he had the illusion that he was drinking warm flannel. Next morning, however, a burnt mouth … But he was an honourable morphinomane as Brutus was an honourable man; his back was still a mass of shrapnel from a low burst. They had not dared remove most of it. So he was the man with the iron spine, dwelling in the shadow of multiple sclerosis which was held at bay by the stubby fingers of Cade.)

Where the devil was Cade?

Blanford rolled his way to the balcony and stuck his head over it, calling out as he did so: “Rob! I say, Rob Sutcliffe!” A few faces in the street below turned up a vague white expanse whose curiosity soon evaporated. “You see?” he said to the cat, “Rob doesn’t really exist.” In every rainbow there is a gap which one must leap in order to slide down to the pot of gold on the other side.

He heard the whirr of the lift rising to his floor. This would be Cade coming to set him to rights – his Fletcher. The door of the flat was open, it only needed a push. Cade had been his batman during the war and had stayed on afterwards – from sheer lack of imagination. What a cross he was to bear with his insane hatred of foreigners and their ways. The pale soapy face with its skull almost shaven, though with a water-waved spit-curl over his forehead. He was sanctimonious, superior, disapproving. He had no sex, never frequented bars or brothels; did not drink, did not smoke. And spoke so very carefully in his low Cockney whine that you feared he would sprain something by making the mental effort. When he was abroad, among “them foreigners” he always wore a peculiar expression – a slyly superior look; and his nostrils were narrowed as if he could smell the carrion. Blanford always wondered in an amazed way why he went on keeping Cade in all his loutish ungraciousness.

The valet came into the room and without a word started to clear up with a wooden methodical air. He made the bed, tidied the bathroom, and gathered up the notebooks and placed them in a cupboard. If Blanford addressed a remark to him he did not reply but simply went on with his work with the air of someone fulfilling his destiny, an insect of utter rectitude. He had been extremely cowardly in action, and hardly less objectionable in civil life. But he was a good masseur and grudgingly did what was asked of him in the ordinary affairs of everyday life. Yet …

“Cade, I am dining with the Duchess of Tu tonight,” said Blanford rippling the irresistible ping-pong ball along the terrace. Cade without a word laid out a clean suit and went on with his mysterious operations inside the flat. The flowers were dead and would have to be replaced. The whisky decanter replenished. When he had finally completed his work he sidled out on to the terrace with his cunning ingratiating face set in a half-smile. His finger-nails were bitten down to the quick. But he put a hand upon Blanford’s forehead and reflected gravely. No word was said.

They breathed quietly and evenly – Cade like some heavy mastiff. “No fever,” he said at last, and Blanford added, “And no cramps last night, thank God.” For a long time they stayed like this, master and bondsman, unspeaking. Then Cade said, on a note of command, “Go limp, then.” And Blanford allowed himself to flop. Cade picked him up by the armpits and with surprisingly agile movements like a lizard, wangled him into the bedroom and laid him down on the bed. He was to be massaged, bathed and then dressed – Blanford always thought: “Just like a lovely big dollie, with a D.S.O. and Bar, and a spine full of shrapnel fragments, and a male nurse for a mama.”

Cade dressed him with method, moving him back and forth like some ungainly lobster; Blanford stayed with his eyes closed inhaling the grubby smell of tobacco and boot polish which his batman gave off when he worked. He chewed quids of tobacco, did Cade, and spat black and viscid. “Got the crutches back, shod with rubber,” he said, but Blanford replied: “I won’t need them tonight at any rate. I’ll take the roll chair and the sedan.”

“Very good, sir,” said Cade.

Within the hour he was suitably washed and dressed for his dinner engagement; Cade helped him into his light wheel chair and thence into the lift which deposed him two floors down almost into the arms of Guido and Franzo the linkboys. It was a pleasant fancy of his to travel by this old sedan chair with its brass polished lamps, swung on the shoulders of the two linkboys. The distances were short, and it saved his energy for better things. He abandoned his wheel chair and limped the few yards to the chair, greeting the boys as he did so. Quartila’s was not far off, but he directed them by a slightly circuitous route in order to enjoy the movement and noise of the canals, now settling fast into their night routine.

The old Duchess of Tu still went on sitting in the once fashionable inner room of the place whose walls were lined with opalescent satin and where the lights, tamed by oval mirrors, were kind to her wrinkles and her fine white hair. A famous beauty in her day, she still had young hands, the celebrated swan-neck and eyes of sapphire blue which quizzed a world grown stale and old with an unrelenting candour, and without vainglory. Once they had been famous, those extraordinary arched brows, the expression at once pious and mischievous, devout and impudent. She was waiting for Blanford now as she smoked her slender gilt-tipped cigarettes in a little jade holder and sipped absently at the typescript and notes which lay before her. She smiled as she did so – perhaps a little sadly. She had been his friend and reader for a lifetime, remaining always astonished by the quality of his work and disappointed by its shortcomings. “I finished this morning, Aubrey,” she called to him as he came limping over the floor towards her – having abandoned his sedan outside in the street. And as he kissed her hand and sank into his place she added, “I have ordered a well-earned champagne.” He thanked her and fell silent, holding her hand. He had decided not to talk about the manuscript unless she did. He had not come to dine with an old friend in order to cross-examine her. But she said: “Did you get my telegram about Rob – he was awfully like Sam, I had to laugh. But to go so near the truth …?”

Relieved, the writer said: “In the case of Rob, it was literally him or me. We couldn’t both commit suicide. Composite he may be but a large part is not Sam, it’s me.”

She paused and thought about her husband for a long moment with narrowed eyes. Then she quoted:

Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies.

These are the pearls that were my father’s eyes.

And without giving him a chance to catch up with her train of thought she added: “What laughter must have echoed in heaven when Sutcliffe went to the altar. It still rings in my ears.”

“It did in his, as it still does in mine. In the
Tu Quoque
he re-enacts all the great roles of the race with himself in the part, starting with the role of Jesus – the famous film script he wrote which caused so many suicides that they had to stop turning it. You remember – how could you? I haven’t written it yet. When the door of the tomb was rolled back they found that the body was gone, but on the stone floor were patches of bloody hair and chewed bones which suggested that the disciples had had a midnight feast in the dorm. Or dogs perhaps?