The Avignon Quintet (59 page)

How beautiful Max was to watch! The negro can do nothing which does not aspire towards dancing. Even his exaggerated shuffle round the ring with the hint of gorilla-like menace – the whole thing was light as air, volatile, buoyant and undeliberate; one felt it was almost as arbitrary as the flutterings of a cabbage-white among the flowers. Yet there was science in it even though the arms hung limp as empty sleeves. Suddenly this classical punch would evolve itself like a bee-sting. Max whistled to himself, little mauve tunes, blues. From time to time he breathed a word of advice to his partner, “You gotta breathe with yo bones, sah,” he might say, and shaking his head add, “sure damn thing.” And Galen would obediently try to breathe with his bones. After two rounds, speechless and puffing, the old man turned to whoever was watching (most often it was poor Felix) and said: “You see? It’s the secret of my iron constitution.”

Galen would rise very early in the morning and have himself driven to the main station to see the first train go out towards Paris; he had done this all his life, wherever he might be. Trains were an obsession. The intoxication of the platforms smelling of coal and oil, the bustle and clamour of passengers and porters loading baggage and freight – the whole indescribable chaos and order of the operation never failed to thrill him to the bone. And the farewells! A whole life, a whole human situation is illustrated in the farewells of lovers, friends, married couples, children, dogs. The clang of closing doors, the kisses, the shrill whistles, the red flag, and the steady champ of the engines belching white plumes into the blue sky – it brought him to tears still. It was perhaps by one of those cruel paradoxes in which fate delights that the railway had become connected to the sole tragedy of Galen’s life – the inexplicable disappearance of his adolescent daughter. He had spent a fortune trying to trace her or at least to solve the mystery of her disappearance. One supposes that this sort of thing happens every day – to judge by the press, which comments on it for a while and then forgets it. Fifteen schoolgirls accompanied by two nuns from the Sacred Heart Convent, took a Sunday excursion train to London from Sidcote. When they arrived at Waterloo one girl was missing – Galen’s daughter. It may be imagined what measures were taken to explain this extraordinary fact. Had she fallen from the train? No; had she absconded? The train was a through train. Her fellow pupils said that about half-way to London she absented herself to go to the lavatory. She never reappeared. Galen was beside himself with horror and incredulity. Every field of enquiry was pursued with all the ferocious relentlessness of a father almost beside himself. It was years ago now, but the memory was still fresh, his room was full of her photographs and hand-painted Christmas cards. He wept unaffectedly when speaking of her. One day in London he unburdened himself to his clerk Quatrefages, who was then buried deep in his alchemical studies. In some vague way Galen hoped, by revealing the degree of his own emotional weakness and commitment towards the memory of his child, to move the boy and win a little sympathy from him – he was such a taciturn creature with his bitten nails. To his surprise Quatrefages produced a ring on a pendulum and asked for a scale map of London and Surrey – so that his divining machine would plot the course of that fatal journey and perhaps offer a solution.

Galen watched with fascination as it swung to and fro in the lean hand of the clerk. Finally Quatrefages said, with a note of finality, “She was not on that train, the children were told to say she was. The nuns were lying to excuse their inattention; at the station she was taken by a gipsy.” Galen reeled with hope and delight. So she might still be alive, then? After all, through the whole course of Victorian fiction the gipsies were always responsible for the disappearance of children, and often of grown-ups also. “Is she still alive?” he asked in a paroxym of anxiety, “if so where should I look?” But Quatrefages did not know – or so he said. The truth was he did not want to go too far, as he was making all this up in order to secure a bit of a hold on this funny, aggressive little man. He had found a way. Soon Galen was dropping in for chats, and ineluctably the subject would drift towards his great obsession – the whereabouts of Sabine. He initiated an elaborate study of all the gipsy tribes, a sort of star map of their movements across Europe, and sent his agents hunting equipped with photos. At the yearly world gathering of gipsy legions his agents were waiting for their caravans to arrive from all over Europe at the Saintes Maries de la Mer. He began to find superior qualities in the French clerk – the boy became precious simply because one day he might find the missing clue to the child’s whereabouts. As their intimacy grew he offered him a new sort of secret job – one he would not have confided to just anyone. Quatrefages, stupid as it may sound, was now hunting for buried treasure, nothing less, in the tangled mass of documentation which surrounds the Templars and their heresy.

Sometimes Felix stood for a while in the little square beneath the inspiring square of yellow light where once a gallows had stood, and mentally hanged himself; in the pale moonlight his body swung to and fro in the wind, softly creaking and clanking in its chains. A felon of laziness and cowardice if ever there was one. Ineffectual, too. As for Quatrefages, for all his apparent youthful inexperience and all his pretensions to esoteric knowledge, he had kept a fine French sense of proportion where self-interest was concerned. Happily. It was largely through him that Felix had obtained the part-time use of the little Morris automobile, a blessing they shared in amiable enough fashion. The clerk had asked Galen for some form of transport to enable him to travel about Provence, examining ancient sites and ruins and consulting scholars. He used the machine a fair amount, but for the rest of the time it belonged to the Consulate and undertook other duties. Felix drove himself vaguely about the delectable countryside, swollen with his sense of loneliness, and trying to render it endurable by investigating the grand dishes and finer wines of the area; for though Avignon was not Lyon in richness and variety where cuisine was concerned, nevertheless much remained to marvel at in the realm of country cooking. Even in its poorest corners France seemed quite inexhaustible to one raised on ordinary English fare.

Yet the sense of vacuum persisted, and the healthy sleep to which a youth of his age might claim a right, resisted; hence the night patrols in a city where after dark so little life seemed to exist. The few bedraggled and furtive ladies of the night were amiable but hardly appetising; they packed up at two, with the latest
café dansant
. Only the gipsies had colour and movement, and the courage which he himself lacked. Seekers of a late night out were perforce obliged to “go to the gipsies” and risk a police sweep and an ignominious appearance in court. And then the other question … Felix shook his head. Wandering among the stray cats feasting on fish-heads and vegetable garbage from the over-turned dustbins outside the “Mireille” he pondered on the fate of consuls, and saw with hungry misgiving the manic moon in her slow dejected fall towards the lightening skyline. He yawned. Somewhere he had read that dogs denied sleep for more than four days automatically died. And consuls? He yawned again, this time from the soles of his feet.

Consummatun est
. It was nearly over now. In the darkness ahead he heard the sweet whisper of the great underground ovens of the bakery with its cracked sign
“Pain du Jour”
at street level. The shop was open though still in darkness. The sleeping woman sat wrapped in her black shawl like a rook. The clink of the bell woke her and she sat up to serve him. The little cubicle smelt heavenly – with the rack beginning to fill up with loaves and croissants, with
fougasses
and doughnuts and
brioches
. Felix walked slowly home inhaling the two croissants in their slip of tissue paper. The wind had dropped as it always did at dawn. He pushed open the rusty garden gate and let himself into the musty little house, greeting its familiar smell with a renewed spasm of depression. God, even the palm tree in the garden was dusty – while as for a hideous aspidistra on the balcony the maid would have to wipe it leaf by leaf with a damp cloth, as usual.

He went to the kitchen and made some coffee. On the floor in the corner lay a wooden crate he had cracked open; it bore the insignia of the Crown Agents, Gabbitas and Speed. He had ordered it to be sent on to him when leaving London. No sooner said than done, for the Crown Agents had been constituted to offer solace and comfort to diplomatic exiles with their combination tuckbox and gift-parcel deliveries. His was the smallest and most modest order of this kind – two whisky, two gin, two white sparkling Spanish wine and two Bass. That was all for the liquid solace; but there was quite a range of kitchen commodities which might be more welcome in Africa, say, than in Europe; but Abroad was simply Abroad for the Crown Agents: with a capital letter, too, as in Hell. You could also give these damned parcels to your fellow diplomats at Christmas if you wished – it saved time and thought. In the Service they were known as “consolation prizes” – consoling one against the horrors of foreign residence, among the lesser breeds of the Kipling kind, or simply among backward European states like France with its froglegs and polluted water.

Some of the tins like Plum Jam he had already extracted. On the kitchen table stood a tin of Bumpsted’s Bloater Paste beside a bottle of Gentleman’s Relish and Mainwearing’s Pickle Mix. The consul sat down and stared hard at these sterling products. Imperial Anchovies, Angostura Bitters. Pork and Beans, Imperial size. Lea and Perrin’s Sauce … A profound homesickness overcame him. He had seized in passing the postcard from Blanford with all its exciting promises for the coming summer; but their arrival was some way off as yet. He poured himself a large cup of coffee and hunted for milk in his little ice box which was by now iceless and dank. The milk smelt suspect. However … the sun was coming up; he had defeated another night. Today was his day with the Morris. He started to unpack the crate and put the pots in the cupboard, arranging them like a fussy old maid so that their names were facing forward. Then a sudden impulse overcame him and he did something he should never have done; he smeared bloater paste on his croissant and ate it with a groan. It was delicious.

There would be plenty of time for a couple of hours of sleep before the maid knocked, but lest he should oversleep by any chance he retrieved the little alarm clock by his bed and, rewinding it, set it for eleven. Then he undressed and climbed yawning into his virgin bed, turning off all the lights save the small bedside lamp, for he proposed to “read himself to sleep” as usual; and the book most suitable for this exercise was
The Foreign Service Guide to Residence Abroad
. It had a blue cover with the royal arms, rather like an outsize passport, and the text had not been revised for forty years owing to a mistakenly large first printing. Together with a Bible and a Book of Common Prayer, it was the statutory going-away present accorded to young officers on their first posting abroad. The hints and instructions contained in it had a wonderfully soothing effect on insomniac consuls. Take the chapter called “Hints to Travellers”:

Officers should take soft caps for sleeping, in a travelling bag; soft shoes to replace boots, a “housewife”, a couple of good mauds, a bottle of bovril, a small spirit lamp, a bottle of spirits with cups and saucers, spoons and biscuits. Also a stout sponge bag with two wet sponges in it, a soft towel, a face flannel, a brush and comb. The pillows should be made to roll up tightly and are best made of thistledown and dandelion-down. A travelling ulster with loose fronts is very useful as one can undo the clothes beneath; it should have deep pockets. Always carry an extra pair of gloves. Always take a small book of soap leaves with a small handbag; thus hands can be comfortably washed with one leaf. With a wet sponge and a soap leaf the dusty and tired traveller can always freshen up his face and hands. It is a good wrinkle to carry an Etna spirit lamp, also a tin of mustard leaves, a medicine glass, sticking plaster, a water bottle, and a flask of good brandy in case of sudden or obstinate illness en route.

On and on went this soothing and comforting rigmarole; across the sleepy vision of the consul passed a long, an endless, line of kindly, colourless yet courageous men in pith helmets followed by their baggage, bulging with brandy flasks and Etna spirit lamps. Now he had joined the long senseless safari – forever deprived of watching the ebb and flow of copper shares on the pretty coloured charts of Quatrefages. And what the devil was “a couple of good mauds?” He would give anything to know. But now sleep had definitely come to claim him: the book dropped from his hand to the carpet and with an involuntary gesture which had become mechanical one hand went out to switch off the little bedside lamp. Felix slept a surprisingly deep and healthy sleep which would be broken by the alarm just ten minutes before the maid arrived to set his little house to rights.

The trams had started squealing and with them came the battering of bells that had once irritated Rabelais so; but he heard nothing.

FOUR