The Avignon Quintet (5 page)

I tested each phrase on my inner ear, my inner mind, as I thought of her sitting in the fifth side-chapel of the Montfavet church under the three oil-painted witnesses, so gauche, so awkward. On the wall at her back there was a plaque commemorating the death of a forgotten priest. If I closed my eyes even now I could read it off.

ICI REPOSE

PLACIDE BRUNO VALAYER

Evêque de Verdun

Mort en Avignon

en 1850

I was so far plunged in reverie that I forgot the sleeper next door, and when at last Jourdain came tapping on the glass for me I wondered who it might be. I was half asleep I suppose, fagged out after the long journey. However I sprang up and followed the doctor to his own bachelor suite at the other corner of the main buildings. They echoed his lifelong passion for painting, and I noticed several new additions to his collection of oils.

In order to emphasise his civil capacity, so to speak, he had put on an old and cherished English blazer — to underline I suppose that his stay as a student in Edinburgh has been a most enjoyable period in his existence. The wines were thoughtful and tenderly chambered. The food was slight but choice. And for a good while we said nothing, which is the prerogative of old friends, but sat sipping our cognac and smiling at each other. “I was about to ask you if there was any reasonable explanation,” he said at last with an exasperated laugh, “and I see that you are just about to put the same question to me.” He was right, I had been on the point of asking him what the devil had got into Piers. As he was fully informed of our plans of retirement and so on I could speak to him quite freely. I had always suspected him of being in love with Sylvie, but he was a man of great pudicity; when it was once a case of doing a mild psychotherapy on her he passed her over to someone else, in order, I thought, not to prejudice his doctor’s control: or was it because he did not wish to feel the jealousy caused by his probings? “Let me tell you what is what for the present,” he said at last as we sat down to the meal. He drew a long breath. “Piers came here on retirement nearly a year ago, and set up shop in the hotel in order to be near Sylvie as he waited for you to arrive. Everything was in order for the execution of your plan, he spoke about it twice to me with enthusiasm. Sylvie herself celebrated the whole thing by several splendid remissions – you would never have thought she had been ill at all. Piers was beside himself with joy, and she spent nearly every day with him, either walking about the town or sitting in his rooms helping him sort papers or playing cards with him – you know his passion for cards. For the last week before this … well, extraordinary act … he had been in bed with a slight cold, nothing really to worry about. You will see when you look at his diary that quite a lot of people dropped in to see him, but it does seem that the very last was Sylvie. The nurse used to collect her in the evenings around seven and bring her back here to her rooms. Mind you, it was quite appropriate that the last person to see him alive was his sister. What is odd is that she was almost in a state of collapse when the nurse arrived, so the inference is that he had already done it or had told her that he was going to do it. But at any rate she knew. From then on such facts as she produced must be held suspect, for she went right round the bend. The nurse produced one interesting point – she said that she (Sylvie) was in a fearful state because she thought herself guilty of killing Piers, for she poured out his sleeping draught for him that night and thinks that she made a mistake. The empty bottle was beside the bed, where inevitably those flat-footed police found it, and insisted on an autopsy to settle the matter. Did he poison himself, or did she accidentally do so? That is the question.” “An accident sounds more plausible. I’m reassured.” “Exactly. He gave absolutely no indication of a desire to commit suicide. I was too late to prevent the police having him carved up, but I did get on to the
préfet
who assured me that unless there is very special evidence to the contrary the thing will be treated as an accident. Which solves the question of burial. I have also contacted that strange uncle of his, the Abbé of Foulques, who has agreed to lend a moral support should the police become tedious. You know he had permission to be buried in the family vault at Verfeuille? We should get all the formalities settled by tomorrow evening. Well, that is all I can tell you for the moment.” He placed his fingers on the table and reflected deeply. “It may have been Sylvie,” he said, “in which case we can absolve her of any ill intent; it could only have been an accident. Yes, it must be so.”

I was strangely comforted by this exposé of the situation which had at first seemed to be so full of ambiguities. At least now the whole matter was plain, and when the police came back with the obvious result things could take their normal course, the funeral could take place. As Jourdain talked, however, I saw in my mind’s eye the long casual autopsy slit which stretches from below the breast bone to the
mons pubis
.

“And Toby?” asked Jourdain with a sudden testy note in his voice, “where the devil is he?” It was a question I could not answer for the moment. “We have all cabled him in Oxford. But perhaps he hasn’t yet gone up, or is away on a walking tour in Germany as he so often is … I don’t know.” Jourdain nodded; and then with an exclamation he stood up, recalling something he had forgotten. “I completely forgot. I borrowed the police photos for you to see. They show the room exactly as it was when the police photographer was called in by the inspector and the
médecin-légiste
. Of course in part it is due to the fact that it took place at the Princes Hotel – what the devil induced Piers to stay there instead of somewhere like the Bristol? Funds? It’s virtually a
maison de passe
. Perhaps he had special secret vices we don’t know about? Anyway, whatever happens at the Princes is automatically suspect for the police. Hence these awkward questions, photographs and so on. Of course he was an amateur of
quat
– hashish – which delighted the cops. But there was precious little else of interest.”

As he was speaking he was undoing a heavy black briefcase which had been lying against the sofa; from it he extracted an official envelope which held a number of photographic prints, as yet hardly dry. The glossy surface stuck to one’s fingers as one peeled them. They were extremely beautiful, these still-lifes of Piers’ disorderly room. Jourdain spread them out on a green card-table and drew up two chairs, at the same time producing a large magnifying glass through which one could study the detail of the room with its strange inhabitant, who lay in bed, in the very posture in which he had been found. I felt a shortening of the breath as I contemplated them. Jourdain was talking on softly, anxious to give as complete an account as he could of this strange affair. “There were several sets of prints on the empty bottle here, on the bedside table. One of them Sylvie’s, which is interesting. As you know he took quite large doses of Luminash, as a sort of sedative as well as a sleeping draught. Presumably this is what they’ll find in the organs.”

Piers lay on his side with his knees drawn up – in almost a sketch of the foetal position; he had thrown back the sheet and the covers and appeared to be about to get up from his bed. His head was turned round towards the camera, presumably in the direction of the door, and he was smiling as if in delighted and surprised recognition, at someone who had just entered the room. It was clearly a smile of welcome. The flashlight threw into relief his pleasant patrician face and the brilliance of his bright blue eyes, which had a sapphire-like luminosity. He wore one of his old white nightshirts with the little monogram on the breast. It was like a frozen shot in a film, and it was difficult to interpret what he might have been about to do; instead of rising perhaps he was just sinking back luxuriously, and smiling goodbye as somebody left the room?

Yet one outstretched hand with its firm fencer’s wrist was stretched out towards the bedside table as if to switch off a light, take up a book or a cigarette. I passed the magnifying glass across the field to examine the detail with more precision. A novel lay beside the bed. His wrist-watch and his ebony cigarette holder lay in the silver ashtray on the bed-table. In a second and larger ashtray lay a mountain of cigarette and cigar ends. I recognised the stubs of the cheroots he smoked. For the rest the room was in a state of chaos; everywhere were tea-cups, jars of jam, flowers, packets of joss, picture-magazines and mountains of books and papers. “The room looks as if it had never been cleaned,” I said, and Jourdain shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the Princes,” he said as if that explained everything.

To tell the truth the appearance of his room was, for such an untidy man, relatively normal. Cupboards hung open revealing his wardrobe. Though he had always been a little bit of a dandy his choice of apparel was scanty, but choice, with a distinct leaning towards clothes made for him in London. A couple of medium-sized trunks were enough to house personal possessions of this kind; but the books were a different matter – Piers could not live without books, and plenty of them. This explained the sagging home-made bookshelves knocked together from pieces of crate. And there was the oil painting he liked so much, of the three of us. Sylvie in the dappled sunlight under the planes, sitting in a yellow hammock, her lap full of flowers. On either side of her we stand, Piers holding her straw hat in his hand, as if he had just retrieved it from the grass. I stand leaning against the tree, lighting a cigarette. The sky has the peculiar peeled look which is conferred by the mistral only, cloudless, hard as enamel. I went through the prints with a feeling of weakness, with a lump in my throat. Yes, there was nothing unexpected here. The only other decoration would be the famous death-map which he had been compiling of late and which had a bearing on his intention of writing a memoir on the subject of his own approaching death. But more of this later. My hand is tired tonight. I must get some order into my thoughts. Something troubled me in all this. What was it?

Jourdain dropped me at my hotel that evening after dinner, and grunted as he saw through the glass doors of the patio the shapes of two men who sat waiting for me. They sat with such an air of involuntary boredom, smoking patiently, that I almost divined who they were before he spoke. “That’s old Bechet the notary, and Tholon the police inspector. They probably want to take you to see the room and ask you for any notions you might have.”

I turned and bade him goodnight. “Keep in touch,” he said as he let in the clutch, and I said I would. I opened the glass cage and stepped into the patio with its undusted potted palms and introduced myself to the two men – or at least to one of them; for Bechet I had already met some years before with Piers. We exchanged shocked commiseration at the news of his death, genuine enough in his case because he had dearly loved the family. He puffed and blew in his fussy way, and used his hands to say what his tongue could not.

It was unthinkable that it should have been anything but an accident, he told me, more than once. The little policeman, who looked so undistinguished in civilian clothes, did not intrude his speculations upon us. “We must see,” he said quietly. “Tomorrow we should have the results of the autopsy, and the body will be returned to the morgue, to the
chapelle ardente
, where his relatives may visit him if they wish.” My soul shrank back however at the thought, which was unworthy of a medical man like myself–I know it. Bechet plunged into the details of the funeral which he had rememorised from the will. The details rendered him somewhat plaintive, for Piers was to be taken to the family
caveau
after dark, by the light of torches, there to be placed among his ancestors. But no service of any kind was to be read. “It’s awkward,” said Bechet, “I don’t know what the Abbé will have to say. He will think that Piers was an atheist.” Tholon sighed and I gathered from the volume that he harboured anticlerical sentiments. “It’s vexing,” said the old lawyer scattering ash over his rumpled suit, and on the end of his spotted bow tie. “In a way it was worse,” I said thoughtfully, “for he belonged to a sect of gnostics who live in Egypt – and they are certainly not Christians but dissenters. Hence the provision in his will, I suppose.” Tholon began to look impatient now and asked me if I would care to see the room in which my friend had died. It was being held under police seal for the moment, but perhaps the contents might give me an idea to help explain the affair. I was reluctant, but felt I could hardly refuse. Despite Bechet’s obvious distaste (he was like all Mediterraneans superstitious about the death of friends) he allowed his courtesy to rule him and agreed to accompany us on the short walk across the square to the hotel. I had decided to get the thing over and done with.