The Avignon Quintet (49 page)

“Tonight,” said Blanford coolly, with a reserve he was far from feeling. “In the chateau vault, by dispensation, and no ceremony, no flowers. Some lanterns, I suppose, perhaps some torches.”

“Will you go down to Tu Duc?”

“Later, when everything is settled and the château boarded up for the winter. I love the rain falling over Avignon with all its memories. There is a certain melancholy luxury in feeling that everyone has gone, one is completely alone. The place to experience this best of all is on deserted railway stations at night, empty airport lounges, all-night cafés in the town.”

Sutcliffe said: “And Livia, who in my own personal life and book turned into Sylvie and went mad? What about her in this context?”

“Livia disappeared, was last heard of on the road to Spain with the old negro pianist. My last news of her was some years ago now, from a girl who had known her; it was in one of those houses which cater to special inclinations – indeed the identical house where you lodged with the old crone. From time to time I passed by just in order to check, because once I had found Livia there, shaking with fatigue or drugs, trembling from head to foot. She said, in a bleary tearful way: “Unless someone takes care of me I am finished.” I realised then that I loved her and would never desert her; and all the while a voice inside me was raging and shouting ‘Fool!’“

“That was where I hunted for Pia.”

“We took her to the kitchen, tottering, and set her down on a stool, imploring her to eat something. The hag buttered some bread. Livia suddenly burst into tears and said,
‘J’ai failli t’aimer,’
and the tears ran down her long sweet nose into the plate. Still crying, she began to eat, looking so like a small child in her tearful hunger that I was overwhelmed. I sat there biting my lips and remembering so much that she had told me.

“One day in a dark cinema a woman placed her hand lightly upon her thigh and she felt her whole nature tilt like a galleon in a wind, to run seething through fresh seas. She did not move. She did not speak. She offered no response. Then she got up and walked out of the cinema without looking round. In the vestibule she felt so ill she had to lean her head against the cold tiled wall. A hand touched her sleeve and a voice said, ‘Come, let me help you.’ And so it began. And as she diminished in my life I started to reinvent her on paper as accurately as I could. Once when she had gone and I was lonely I took another girl from the same establishment to a hotel – purely for the comfort of sleeping with someone who knew her and could talk about her, even though what she had to tell me was wounding. Cynically and with a strong twang to her French this poor creature told me about Livia’s exploits in great detail, adding as she did so: ‘She gives good value, that one. Among the girls who like it she is known as Moustache.’ My dear Rob, my beloved was known as Moustache to her ingles!”

“Perhaps you were wise to make Pia passive rather than active – it gave her a dimension Livia lacked, a pathos.”

“But Livia was magnetic, and much harder to paint. I was forever trying to push a bit of femininity back into the lady, like trying to fill a dolly with sawdust, trying to fill an eye with a drip, trying to fill a mind with a prayer. Then she would disappear for a few days, to be brought back by the police dead drunk or else be run to earth in a bar, guttering down, guttering out. You, know, her health was a worry, she was never very strong, and she persistently brutalised it. But her charm! She was irresistible, she smelt of perils and disenchantments. Men could not resist her, and she longed to be able to respond. Yes, she gave herself, but it was only a smear of a woman who responded to the kiss. Affectively she was anaesthetic, her soul was rubberised.”

“How funny,” said Sutcliffe. “I suppose you discovered the real truth once the wedding-ring was on her finger. It was just like that with Pia, I had all sorts of vague notions that even though she was wild and unstable she was redeemable – a little bit of settled ways and stylised married life … I should have known by then how to detect the quaire (feminine version of queer). After all she could neither swim nor dance, and in love she went all anaesthetic but kindly – her kisses were one-dimensional and softer than moths.”

“That was not Livia. Her favourite nail varnish was called Sadist Red, and she operated with a violence and zeal of a piglet at dug. A real predator, she liked to wear the fur of wild animals. Lean tomboy of the sexthrust, it was she who impregnated me with her despairing, anodyne, phantasy sensuality.”

“Why were you so annoyed about the ring? In my case I felt that Pia had taken an unfair advantage, and wanted to continue in her old style under cover of the status and the stability I offered her. I felt swizzed.”

“In my case it was the ring itself – it had belonged to my mother. I had all the tortured and confused impulses of only children, sickly in youth and consequently spoiled. School was torture, other people were torture. She was my only girl, mama, and I remained a
vieux garcon
, a bachelor, until she died when I thought that my loneliness might be less unendurable with a woman about the house. Of course I had had this long love-affair with Constance in between; but she never wished to remarry. Anyway Livia had disappeared somewhere in Asia and in those days it took years before a presumption of death permitted one to dream of divorce. You deformed her a bit in Pia.”

“But you are to blame, for making her passive instead of active. Pia, looking so lovely in her white night-dress, obligingly put herself into a state of abstraction to pump out her husband (tenderly, dutifully) but like a collector ‘blows’ a bird’s egg. For the rest, lying warm in bed she played with a masturbatory little curl, and I suppose dreamed about her
fouetteuse
, or her
frotteuse
. Why not? What is cheaper than dreaming? But infantile dreams which recover an early sex life are as feverish as the dreams of an anchorite. Great Amputator of Egg Bags, save us! The lady was a
station de pompage
merely.”

“Childhood, with its gross sexual and psychological damage to the psyche – what a terrible thing to be forced to undergo. No really, Rob, one does not stand a chance!”

“They believed in God. Jesus on pedals! How could they?”

Blanford threw his cigar into the fire and thought with a sudden wave of nostalgic passion of Tu. She rose before his inner eye walking by the lake where they had once and for all staked a claim in each other’s minds and bodies; he heard her low voice reading from the book about Nietzsche, whom they had come there to seek.

“What happens,” said Sutcliffe thoughtfully, “according to the wiseacres you consulted with so little profit – what happens to the penis is coronation followed by decapitation – the king bowing so low before the ladies that the crown falls off on to the red carpet. Isn’t that right?”

Blanford agreed and amplified the statement with a voice full of distaste. “The head lends itself particularly well to the expression of bisexual conflicts, and can cunningly represent both male and female genitalia. Both girls were highly specialised in migraines of great intensity. There are vaginal haemorrhages which can be stopped by the cocaine pad to the inside of the nose. The guillotine, remember, was called
La Vierge.”

“A fig for all this folklore,” cried Sutcliffe. “All will end in munch and you know it. The black flag of pure cannibalism will be unfurled. If narcissists (artists) cannot love, what right have they to kick up such a row?”

“You’re right.”

“
Si on est Dieu pourquoi cochonner
?”

“You’re dead right, as they say. What a useful phrase.”

Blanford could hear his creation tearing open a bag of potato chips and starting to champ them as he reflected furiously upon these all too alembicated ideas. Blanford thought of his childhood. “An only child is doomed to nostalgia and uncertainty. Nobody will ever guess what it cost me against all my fears and despairs, to teach myself the profession of letters. Solo, solitude, solace … everything beginning with Sol the father, Sol the Son and Sol the Holy Ghost. She lingered for many years, did my mother, bedridden, suffering from an ill-identified malady which purported to be a heart condition. I think now that it was some grave glandular disturbance – the thymus perhaps. It gave her languor, it gave her a skin like a magnolia; her breasts remained firm and her teeth good to the very end. We lived, she and I, without a father in number twenty-seven Ruskin Road, South Norwood – a gloomy house called The Larches, with arch statuary on the lawn and a fountain which had rusted and would not play. We shared everything, even sleeping – as one might share careers of common silence. Yet I hear her sighs in my dreams now. What a torture it was to pack up my little tuck-box, count my money and set off to school, having assembled my books and kissed mama goodbye. Sterling, the old butler, drove me shakily down to the country – my school was near Arundel – in the ancient Morris. He was a randy old Cockney and he used to say: ‘Next week, d’you know what, Master Aubrey? Why, I’m going on a right bender – don’t tell your mother because she thinks I’m respectable. In a way she’s right, I am. But not on my holidays. I’ve got a couple of birds right over the pocket in Brixton, and I’m simply thirsting for a bit of knuckle, Master Aubrey, really thirsting.’

“My father had been a scientific don in a minor university; the photographs depicted a large, discordant-looking man with black lace-up boots. I stared and stared at the vague memory-bank of his face but it radiated nothing. ‘Come, hand me my pins, my net and my killing bottle, and leave me in peace.’ He said that to my mother once who found it inconsiderate. It upset her. The house was full of badly stuffed geese and wildfowl, and in his study was a cabinet containing shelves and shelves of brilliant butterflies all mounted expertly on slabs of cork. I would have to do without all this until the end of term when Christmas came round. Again! The smart toy of the crib, and sex awoken in some little old mistletoe-man with a red peak, at night, in the snow, driving his tinkling harim of reindeer across the snowy roofs.

“Sometimes at night, walking across London, to see scores of silent frozen girls offering their bodies for sale under the blobs of yellow gaslight. Hurrying home to mother with castdown eyes, dying of smothered desires and the all too real fear of syphilis. So my whole life took its direction from there – my mother had rendered me a lamb, ripe for the slaughter; Livia supplied the shears. Cause and effect, my lad, that is why I had to encourage you to have a richer and more robust childhood. Your people were millers, say, from the north country, with a firm fortune and coming of authentic peasant stock. I saw your prototype once, dining beside me in Avignon and I jotted down in my notebook. ‘She is rather frail, but he huge with an egg-shaped cranium and a face which had funny and rather unworldly expressions on it. They smelt of industrious love-making and yawned all through dinner.’“

“Thank you. Was I at school with you?” “We were both at different schools together.” Sutcliffe answered a ring at the doorbell and then came back to the phone to say briefly: “Toby has arrived. For my part I told everybody that I lived in Ireland in a fairy’s armpit. They gave the impression of believing me, I never had trouble like you. Your laughter was a private strategy, mine was whole-hearted.”

“I am not so sure,” said Blanford thoughtfully, “though it is true that I was loved by a mummy without margins. Result: I wrote tonsured poems in the style of Morris. But I soon came to my senses. The result was not vastly different – we both ran into Livia, but in my case I presented a very simple target, and the motive of course was my unrecognised love for Tu. By the time your turn came you were less vulnerable because of your tough youth and were able to surmount the catastrophe with commendable humour. You at least were able to stand on the Bridge of Sighs and, waving your stick, exclaim aloud: ‘Help me, Pia, help me! I am going down by the stern like Laurel and Hardy!’ I could never have done that. I was after something else – a cumulus of thought subsumed in one bold metaphor. I had realised something concrete, namely that small art creates a throb, big art a wholesome vertigo. I tried to teach you this in your dealings with the people around you, so that your writing might have pith and irony. But since human consciousness distorts in the act of observing, you and I, seen by a third person, are perverted images of one another. We exchange highly diversified memoranda about the state of our attachment, just like real lovers entering that state which probably never existed. Poets exchanging cowrie shells, not real coin. Unless the images sting you awake. Robin, before you obediently killed yourself, you scribbled in the margins of your unfinished manuscript poem – the
Tu Quoque
– the words, ‘Of course like Tiresias I have breasts which see all, and a forked tail in the shape of a lightning conductor. And yes, hooves.’“

Sutcliffe roared with laughter and crunched away at his chips, while in the background Blanford could hear the bearish sounds of Toby clearing his throat and the voice of a girl. He could not imagine her face as he had not yet invented her. That would come, he supposed. O God! Writers! Sutcliffe said: “Toby has been making up an imaginary obituary for you for
The Times
– you know he makes a little cash from working in the graveyard bringing obits up to date. Here’s a passage which will please you: ‘It is said that when rich he twice refused the thistle.’ “

“But the money gave me books and travel and secrecy. And anyway one can’t do better than one’s best. What more would you like to hear from me if I bring you back to life?”

“About Tu; about Livia; about Hilary the brother and Sam. About the lake, and about Tu Duc and the Avignon of those early days. About us, the real ones.”