The Avignon Quintet (51 page)

“The hooter gave a hiss and a boom, while drops of steam dribbled down the funnel; we had cast off and were away almost before we knew or felt it. Lying at ease on the spacious deck we saw the sunlit world turn slowly about us, spin faster and faster, and begin to slide away to stern. We swept under a great bridge where the silhouettes of a few onlookers were set against the arc of a sky of utter blue. Constance settled herself among the cushions thoughtfully provided by the gallant old skipper and apparently fell asleep, which gave me a chance to observe her and be struck once again by her beauty, and her resemblance to her brother. The fine blonde hair at her temples was, I thought, finer than the work of silkworms; her sleep was light, she smiled at some happy dream or thought. I would never have dreamed that she was as shy as Hilary, so formidable did her self-possession seem to us poor Englanders, bursting with conventions and the need to worship. Many years later when in a letter I made a reference to this first meeting she wrote on a postcard the one word: ‘Shyness’.

“There was no sign of all this in the pose of the calm sleeping girl on the deck. Hilary, if my memory serves, rapidly got on good terms with the old poet and fired questions at him about the places through which we glode so smoothly, over a river suddenly widened by the green junction with the Saône. What I did remember was the droning voice of my geography teacher as he told us its history, softly touching the big wall-map with the black malacca cane which also, in certain contexts, served him to give us the brutal thrashings which were then the order of the day in most schools. They did no harm, I might add, and indeed were really useful as a rough and ready absolution – for one expiated one’s sins this way and forgot about them once the blue weals had gone. While those hundred lines or hundred Hail Marys never really did the trick.

“But this first enticing venture towards the south, towards the Mediterranean, has got itself mixed up and superposed upon the many other times when I returned to Tu Duc to spend the summers there. ‘The Rhône rises in Lac Léman,’ said the droning voice of my geography teacher.”

At this point in Blanford’s recital Robin Sutcliffe cleared his throat and chuckled and made a noise like someone snuffing. “I bet I can tell what you think of now in that context.”

“Carry on. Tell me,” said Blanford.

Sutcliffe said: “The Chambre Froide of the central abattoir at Geneva. Of all the extraordinary places to sit and watch the Rhône rise. It was there that Pia took me to tell me that she had met poor Trash. It was a singular place to choose, perhaps more apt than it appears at first sight. The great factory that is the abattoir is built over the lake, remember, and at the back of it there is a little glassed-in restaurant built right over the water, where the personnel of the place take their meals. They call it the birdcage, if I recall right, and it is certainly small. Naturally the prime food is the meat. Trash had found it one day on her wanderings – she had been sent to order a carcase for the old American lady’s birthday-party – one which would unite all the queers and queens and quaires of the town. Here among the swinging carcases on their big hooks the butchers in their bloody aprons had a festive air. They found Trash very much to their taste, and after several of the younger ones had refreshed themselves with her they invited her to the canteen for a glass of wine.

“Without this invitation it would have been impossible to find, for the entrance was actually through a huge meat-safe which was usually kept closed. Naturally the place was not open to the general public, it was reserved for the butchers and their friends. But a few people had discovered it and the supervision was lax. Well, I remember sitting over the water listening to this sad recital of Pia’s fears and regrets; and all about her love for me which made me blow my nose rather loudly because I was touched, and I felt awfully as if my heart had been broken with a sledge hammer. To be hugged by a boy in a blood-stained apron – Ugh! Of course it was Trash who had been hugged, but now Pia was going to try the same thing under the tuition of the negress. It upset me so much this recital (the foolish girl was asking for my encouragement, for my absolution, repeating that she could not live without me and that I must understand).… I got so damned livid with her stupidity in succumbing to the lures of that male succubus with a slit that I rushed out of the place and took a taxi to Trash’s hotel with the intention of thrashing her. Luckily she was out and I cooled down as I walked by the lake.”

“Lucky is the word,” said Blanford, “when I took a dogwhip to Livia for one of her misdemeanours I put her into a transport of sexual delight. Bathed in tears of pain and gratitude she fell to her knees and started licking my shoes. She was my slave now, she told me, utterly my slave. And she kept repeating, ‘O why didn’t you do it before?’ I was disgusted.”

“And the abattoir restaurant?”

“If I must disinter Livia’s thoughts – it was she, the original of Pia, who took me there – I must record that she adored the smell of blood and fresh water. Indeed everything about new blood delighted her. It reminded her of her first period – she had been so poorly instructed, and was so innocent, that she thought she was bleeding to death like Petronius. And then, of course, the sorrow because it was the first physical proof of the lack of manhood she so coveted inside herself. The tremendous sadness of realising, as she said in her own picturesque phraseology, that she was a boy scout with a vagina. My dear Robin, she did not actually suffer the embrace of bloodstained boys, but she dreamed about it; only in her case the butcher was an elderly man who looked like her father. While we sat over the water and I saw her face suddenly go dead and transform itself into the resolute face of a tough little sailor, something guttered out like a spent candle. My love, like a sick fish, rose to the surface belly upwards. Under the floor of our birdcage the lake-water, narrowed and sluiced by the two banks, gathers speed, as if it could smell Aries already.

“The driving channel was a dark shade of amethyst verging on ultramarine; but right in the middle there was a portion raised like a muscle in a forearm, a green muscle of water which seemed to have more thrust than the great body in which it was embedded. Following the direction of my gaze Livia said: ‘You see the green ribbon there? It’s the Rhône setting off on its race for the sea.’ I hear her voice, I see the water, and a thousand thoughts throng in my mind. The great rivers of the human sensibility threading the jungles and swamps and forests of lost continents. The big rivers like Nile or Mississippi ferrying their human freight from one world to another. Though short in length our Rhône was one with them as was its cousin the Rhine.…

“Livia told me that one night she had been taken by her lover to La Villette where an old kind butcher with the face of her father had, on request, hobbled a cow which was about to be destroyed, and made a swift incision in its throat, like slitting an envelope. He held it by the horns, though the animal felt nothing. But the jet of blood spurted out into the tall wineglasses they proffered. They drank copiously while the old man watched in kindly fashion. Later they had trouble with a policeman for they were both splashed with blood, and it was difficult to explain how they had acquired these smears. But you, Robin, above all will have easily explained Livia’s aberrations satisfactorily to yourself by now – didn’t you take a degree in Philosophy and Psychology?

“What always bothered me was the question of a stable ego – did such a thing exist? The old notion of such an animal was rather primitive, particularly for novelists with an itch to explain this action or that. Myself, I could hardly write down the name of a character without suddenly being swamped by an ocean of possible attributes, each as valid and as truthful as any other. The human psyche is almost infinitely various – so various that it can afford to be contradictory even as regards itself. How poor is the pathetic little typology of our modern psychology – why, even astrology, however suspect as a science, makes some attempt to encompass the vast multiplicity of purely human attributes. That is why our novels, yours and mine, Robin, are also poor. There were many Livias, some whom I love and will love until my dying day; others fell off me and dried up like dead leeches. Others were just larval forms in the sense of Paracelsus, umbratiles, vampires, ghosts. When she had definitely gone she sent me the taunting telegram which seemed to amuse you.

A little bit of addled Freud

Won’t take you far towards the void.

“But the letter to which the thought belonged was written from Gantok and she had headed it, ‘On the road to Tibet’. It was long, rambling and inconsequential, and it upset me so much that I destroyed it. But I remember one part in which she wrote: ‘You cannot imagine what it is like to find myself in a land where beautiful six-armed Tsungtorma raises her lotus-soft palms.’ It was a fair enough criticism of my literary method – why not six-armed psyches? Would it be possible, I wondered, to deal fairly with a multiplicity of attributes and still preserve a semblance of figurative unity in the personage described? I was dreaming of a book which, though multiple, embodied an organic unity. The limbs of Osiris, scattered as they were round the whole known world, were one day united. Out of the egg of futurity stepped that dark and serious girl who was to say one day, with a confident contempt, ‘Anyone can see which one of us he loves.’ One discovers these things years afterwards, in another context, perhaps even in another country, lying on the beach, pressing warm pebbles against one’s cheek. ‘What did you do?’ I asked Constance. She replied, ‘I suddenly realised that I must get free of her, she would always block my light, my growth. I embraced her so hard it drove all the breath from her body.’ “The Livia of that epoch was dark and on the thin side – a contrast to the fairness of her sister. She had beautifully cut cheekbones and eyes of green, while her black soft hair seemed to fly out of the crown of her head and flow down the sides in ringlets reminiscent of Medusa – the snake is quite an appropriate metaphor. Her beauty was not obvious, it came in a sudden kind of revelation. But of course, she slouched, and always had her hands in her pockets, and a cigarette between her lips. We were conventional enough to be shocked by this. But I was dazzled by her brains and her abrasive and articulate way of speech. The voice was deep, and from time to time an expression came into her eyes, a tense fierce expression, and one suddenly saw a man-at-arms peering at one out of a helm. I was too inexperienced to recognise the carapace of her defensive masculinity. But whenever she looked in the direction of Constance, whenever she found us laughing or talking with animation, another more calculating look came into those clever eyes. She could not stand the complicity of our obvious friendship whose warmth at that time was innocent of all ulterior purpose.

“Livia set herself quite deliberately to work upon my obvious inexperience. An easy target. Later when I came to wonder about the shape which events took in the lives of us all I thought that perhaps Livia’s role had been less conscious than I had thought; she also was just an instrument registering the electrical impulses set up by a suppressed childhood jealousy. Being wise after the event is one of the specialities of elderly novelists. Quack! Quack! Of course she had no choice, none of us did. It was the peerless beauty and brilliance of the elder sister which magnetised the younger; and I must go on to add, the brother as well. For Hilary, too, formed part of this constellation, and I think that he also found the easy rapport between Tu and myself disquieting, to say the least. But whenever a brother and sister are very close together they naturally fear that marriage, on either side, will wantonly separate them. But Livia was a born conspirator, and once she had decided to prevent anything maturing between Constance and myself she set to work to undermine us – with what success you know only too well; I was captivated by this lizard-swift girl who flattered me in ways which now I would find grossly obvious. But, inhibited as I was then, her praise was manna.

“At that time Tu was taking the first distasteful steps in general medicine, and already had decided not to continue it to the end. The coarse jokes of the students as they handled the fragments of human bodies disgusted her. They betrayed their fear of death thus, the internal shrinking from having to carve up the bodies of drowned, unidentified people, tramps, suicides and the like. Flesh bloated, disfigured, or smashed beyond recognition. And then the smell of formaldehyde following one about the draughty schools! It got into one’s clothes, aprons, skirts, white skirts. The loathing was impossible to overcome wholly, though for the present she persevered. Her only inspiration was her anatomy tutor; he was so mad on his subject that his enthusiasm fired her. Once after a particularly bad street accident in Gower Street she saw him pick up a severed arm, wrap it furtively in an evening paper and hurry off to the laboratory which was hard by. Perhaps there was a hope that some less taxing science like chemistry might answer where general medicine and surgery had failed her? She was waiting to see.