The Avignon Quintet (57 page)

But his real calvary began well after midnight when he rose, made himself a pot of vervain
tisane
and slowly dressed, pausing for long intervals to gaze into the bathroom mirror or stand in bemused silence before the cupboard mirror gazing at his own reflection in it, watching himself dress slowly, knot his old school tie, draw on his shabby college blazer with the blazoned pocket. Who was this familiar shadow? He felt completely disembodied as he looked, as he confronted his own anxious, unfamiliar face. He drew on his black felt hat, stuffed his wallet into his breast pocket; then he stayed in the sitting room gazing at the print hanging over the chimney – a pastoral scene of goats and cypresses. With one half of his mind he heard the throbbing of the wind and registered its diminution with something like satisfaction. Perhaps in another twenty minutes it might sink away into one of its sudden calms. He would pause awhile before setting off on one of his all-too-frequent night walks round the town which he had come to regard as the most melancholy in the whole world. Its eminence, its history, its monuments – the whole thing drove him wild with boredom; mentally he let out shriek after shriek of hysteria, though of course his lips did not move and his consular face remained impassive, as befitted a Crown Servant.

Yes, the wind was subsiding slowly; a clock chimed somewhere and there was the long slow moan of a barge from the river like some haunted cow. He licked his finger and traced the dust upon the mantelpiece. The little hunchback maid who came in for an hour of dusting every morning was fighting in vain against the ill-fitting shutters. As for food, Felix arranged his own light meals, or crossed the square to the little penurious café called Chez Jules where they made sandwiches or an occasional hot dish filled with chili and pimento. He threw open the door of the office and stood for a while gazing down at his own imagined ghost – he saw himself writing a despatch about the flag. What furniture, what entrancing ugliness! He enumerated it all as he sipped his tea and stirred a loose tile with the toe of his suede shoe. There was a mouse-hole in the wall which he had stopped with a pellet of paper manufactured from a particularly exasperating and stupid despatch from head office. It had assuaged his feelings and had apparently discouraged the mouse – though God knows what such a poor creature might expect to find here to eat. Books? He was welcome to the consular library. Felix had a small suitcase of private books under his bed, mostly poetry. But now he was looking at the shallow office bookcase with its reference books which were apparently all that a consul ever needed in order to remain efficient. The F.O. List with its supplements made quite good reading. It soothed him to discover the whereabouts of long-lost London colleagues. When he wanted to gloat he looked up some fearful bore like Pater and read (his lips moved as he did so) the small paragraph which recited all his early posts, sinking in gradual diminuendo towards the fatal posting. Consular Agent, Aden. He could hardly forbear to let out a cheer, so much had he disliked Pater while he was being “run in” in the London office. Then there was Sopwith too – another victory of good sense. He had been posted to Rangoon. On the whole then, Avignon might not seem so bad. But he had no money to get to Nice or Paris, and Galen would never have lent him the large slow Hispano which coasted everywhere with its goggled negro chauffeur – trailing long plumes of white dust across the vernal olive groves. What else was there for a decent self-respecting mouse to feed on?
Consular Duties
in six volumes? A volume of consular stamps and some faded ink-rollers which thumped out a splayed crown if properly inked.
Wagner’s Basic International Law
– a huge and incomprehensible compilation.
The British Subject Abroad
, a guide for Residents. Skeat’s
English Usage. The Consular Register. The Shorter Oxford
. All this to keep his despatches in good trim. There were also a few grammars and detective stories. The whole thing was pretty shabby and anyone having a look around would realise (he told himself) that Chatto was very poor, and that Lord Galen was either quite oblivious of the fact or wanted to keep him so. As for pro-consuls in posts as remote as these, they were hardly paid at all, and certainly never got accorded consular
frais
, expense accounts, which they might disburse in the pursuit of pleasure. Moreover Felix had no private income, so that his mind was always pinched by the thought of overspending. Even when people found him agreeable and invited him out to functions he was apt to decline for fear that he would never be able to invite them back. Nothing gives one that hunted look like poverty; and there is no poverty like having to swallow the backwash of extravagantly rich relations, who cannot help patronising you, however much they may try not to. And on such an exiguous budget, in a remote place, everything became a terror – the necessary doctor’s visit, an operation, a false tooth, broken spectacles, a winter overcoat. All these possibilities gnawed at his mind, depleting his self-confidence, poisoning the springs of his happiness.

Well then, night after night, as he lay in the coarse sheets, he went over these factors in a trance of sleepless misery; his history seemed to stretch like an unbroken ribbon of distress and anxiety right back to the father’s death and his sad schooldays. (His reports always said something like “Could do better if day-dreamed less”.) His only refuge had been books; and now he was beginning to take a faked interest in Catholicism because it made one friends and took up time. He felt that unless he could find himself fully occupied the weight of his present boredom and anguish might unseat his reason and lead him towards what was then known as “a brain fever”. He whispered, “Oh God, not that,” under his breath when the thought came into his mind. Someone to talk to, for the love of God! When he received a note from Blanford telling him of the summer to be spent near Avignon, tears came into his eyes and he gave an involuntary dry sob of pure relief.

In these long night-silences he felt rather like the town itself – all past and no recognisable present. Did Galen know about them coming down – he did not know if Blanford was an acquaintance of the old man. How could one tell? Galen never even bothered to signal his frequent absences and returns – he spent several months a year in the tumbledown chateau which he was too mean, Felix supposed, to restore.

He moved about all over Europe following the threads of the cobweb he had spun with his fortune, playing the game of banking and politics. Everywhere he was accompanied by Max, his negro valet-chauffeur, who in certain lights looked dark violet; and the dumb (literally) male secretary whom Galen had deliberately chosen for himself, saying with a laugh that he knew how to give orders and get them obeyed. A secretary did not need a voice, a nod would suffice.

It should be noted also that where Galen went Wombat went too, seated on a mouldering green velvet cushion with a monogrammed crown printed on it as befitted the animal’s pedigree, for Wombat was the imperial cat of this strange, rather sad, motherless household. Max, who loved the thing, carried it everywhere most ceremoniously, as if he were a chamberlain carrying the royal chamberpot of a King. Wombat was half blind and dying of asthma, and if offered the slightest attention or civility like an outstretched hand or a friendly sound, would react unamiably by opening its throat to hiss, and rearing up in anger. When Galen had had a drink or two in the evening he used often to wax sentimental and inform Max that the cat was his only friend; everyone else loved him for his money. With Wombat it was real love. But when he reached out his hand the animal spread its throat and reared like a cobra opening its hood as it hissed – thus avoiding the old man’s caress.

No, he had little enough thought for Felix, though every Christmas he received a penny Christmas card of the Woolworth type featuring holly and a robin. It was always signed by Galen but the envelope was made out in the secretary’s awkward hand. In summer, then, it was dust and wind and noise, and Keating’s Powder and ceremonial processions of scruffy nuns and priests; in winter it was frost and ice and the river swollen to three times its mean summer levels.
Le cafard
, in fact, in its most exaggerated form.

Perambulatory paranoia, they would one day christen his case, of that he was sure.

He had set Blanford’s postcard up on his desk as a talisman; he leaned over to read it anew now curbing his impatience by breathing slowly several times. Then he locked up his petty-cash box with its sheets of stamps and the six blank passports in the little wall-safe. He stepped out into the garden of the house, drawing the door to behind him with a soft click. How he hated that door with its ill-fitting lock. It was a glass door with a feverish design executed in squares of cathedral glass; when the sunlight fell upon it it produced extraordinary colour effects on the face of anyone crossing the hall to open it. The features became suddenly the colour of a blood-orange; then, in sharp succession, blue, green and livid yellow. Such theatrical changes often gave the unwary caller a start.

He turned up his coat-collar and, placing his cane under his arm, drew on gloves as he began the slow martyrdom of his night march across the town.

The westering moon drooped towards the battlements and as he turned the dark corner by the abattoir which rang all night to the sound of flushing waters like a public urinal he saw the familiar little lamplighter trotting along ahead of him with his shepherd’s crook with which he turned off the street-lights – for only a few corners of the town had been able to afford the new clean electric lighting. He reflected with a selfish pang that he would be sorry when the whole town went electric because the little lamplighters not only marked the hour for him (the lights were turned off at two) but also afforded him a kind of welcome night-company on his walks. He skirted the smoky grey battlements with their crenellations. By now perhaps even the gipsies would have retired to their tents and caravans – they kept up the latest in the town, as far as he could judge; he followed the little lamplighter who padded along ahead of him making almost no sound, and only pausing to put out a lamp with his little crook. It was like someone beheading flowers one after the other; the violet night rushed in at once with its graphic shadows. At the rue St.-Charles he mentally said goodnight to his familiar and turned sharp right towards the Porte St.-Charles which here pierced the massive walls of the town. One emerged upon the apron, so to speak, of the bastion – a dusty
terrain vague
punctuated with tall planes whose leaves had begun to turn green. Here were great areas of shadow and few lights – a fitting place for the enactment of mischief, a corner made for throat-slitting, settling of accounts and active whoring. The gipsies had not been slow to find it and to settle on it – in defiance of the law which from time to time ordered them to leave. In vain. But now their fires had burned low and they had taken to their caravans where frail night-lights burned behind curtains. A point or two of lights could also be seen in the tents and the makeshift shelters where they lay, piled together for warmth like a litter of cats. Felix half envied and half feared them, and as he heard his own dry footfalls change in tone as they passed between the ramps of the tall gate his hand always strayed involuntarily to the electric torch in his pocket, though as yet he had never had occasion to use it in an emergency.

Yes, their fires had burned down to the embers and even their few donkeys and dogs appeared to slumber. But from one of the smaller tents a girl, awakened by his echoing footfalls, arose, seeming to materialise from the very ground, and sidled towards him whining for alms. Yes, she sidled yawning towards him like a pretty kitten, stretching out her slender arms. She could not have been much over sixteen and she was dressed as vividly as a pierrot in her patchwork quilt of bright rags. He felt a whirl of desire overcome him as he saw her beautiful face, so full of the sexual conceit of her people. He felt almost like fainting. Hereabouts the stout ravelins made whole barrows of dark blue shadow – an impenetrable darkness safe from prying eyes. Why did he not simply beckon her into one of these pools of black and sink his consular talons into that lithe and swarthy flesh? She would surely follow him at the mere promise of gold?

Ah! There was the rub – gold! How much would she want for her caresses? He did not know. Anyway he knew that he had not the courage to do such a thing; he would have had to undo the constraints of his whole upbringing. A giant despondency seized him as he waved away the tempting creature. He hurried past her, feeling her predatory fingers brush his sleeve. She was barefoot, and moved soundlessly. Why didn’t she hit him with something and then rape him sublimely while he lay insensible – then at least he would not feel guilty about so natural an act? But what about the dose which would almost inevitably follow such an act? It would be very expensive to cure a dose here, as well as unbearably painful. It was a subject on which he could speak with feeling as he had once accompanied a panicky undergraduate friend to the Lock Hospital in Greek Street. The poor boy was expiating a twenty-first birthday party spent at The Old Bag O’Nails in the usual way. Felix out of sympathy accompanied his friend to his first few drastic “treatments”: he watched these agonising sessions with fear and repugnance. The background, too, was daunting – the long marble-walled latrines hushing with water, the rows of high white enemas and their long slim tubes.… Could this really be the only cure for this foul disease? First the bowel filled and refilled with permanganate (Condy’s Fluid) which the patient was encouraged to piss away with whatever force he could command. Then he must submit to the cleaning and scraping of the sensitive mucus surfaces inside the urethra where the infection lay. The surgeon inserted a small catheter shaped like a steel umbrella in the organ and gradually opened it in umbrella fashion, to distend the member. This was supposed to break down and detach the infected parts so that they could be ejected and discharged. It was agony for the patient. Once seen, never forgotten.