The Avignon Quintet (60 page)

Summer Sunlight

B
UT AT LONG LAST THE SUMMER
,
HIGH SUMMER
,
WAS
upon them, with the promised arrival of the four firstcomers to the old manor house. Felix was in such a fever of excitement that on the expected day he hardly dared to quit the landing stage over the green swift water for fear of missing them when they stepped ashore. He walked distractedly about in the wind, talking to himself and ordering numerous coffees in the little Bistro de la Navigation hard by the river, with its one-eyed sailor host.

There was quite a group of people waiting there, on the
qui vive
for the premonitory whiff of sound from the ship’s hooter as it rounded the last bend – as much an accolade to the view of Avignon from the water as a triumphal signal of arrival. In the meantime he had been busy on their behalf; he had visited the house a number of times already, sometimes by car or bicycle, and indeed once on foot; and while he could not get into it until he obtained the keys from Bechet the notary, he had a picnic or two in the dilapidated garden and the herb
potager
, now run hopelessly to seed and weed. Sitting under one of the tall pines, inhaling their sharp odour, he ate his six sandwiches and drank his red wine, dreaming of the excellent company he would enjoy once they arrived. Nor was he wrong – their arrival and their gaiety exceeded all expectation; he was to find himself adopted at once, and the manor of Tu Duc was to become a second home. They were to spend many an evening together sitting round the old kitchen table playing twentyone; and he even once succeeded in inveigling Quatrefages to accompany him for a dinner, which rendered the boy less morose: the little clerk even expanded enough to show them a series of bewildering card tricks. But the chief factor in his happiness was without doubt the absence of Lord Galen, for the old man had decided to take his liver to Baden-Baden for a cure and had disappeared leaving no word as to when he would return. It was marvellous. The consulate remained closed almost permanently, while Quatrefages downed tools, left his Crusader maps pinned to the walls of his room, and embarked on a series of probably unsavoury adventures in the gipsy section of the town – the quarter known as Les Balances.

Livia appeared, fresh from Munich.

And with her a new element entered the camp, for the icy serenity of the girl, and the hard cutting edge of her character, made an immediate impression on them all – but of course mostly upon the too susceptible Blanford. Yet Felix too in his own fashion was enslaved, for she teased him into a sort of sisterly relationship which tightened his heart-strings with a youthful passion. He could refuse her nothing; even when she asked for the use of the spare room, a sort of glorified alcove, at the consulate (for she was too independent not to find Tu Duc oppressive) he could only limply agree while his spirit performed cartwheels at the thought, and Blanford turned pale. Blanford turned pale.

But despite all the dazzling variety and pleasure of that first summer encounter, more important elements were to form themselves which hinted at future developments and subtly transforming predispositions to come. Sam and Hilary, the inseparables, were the chief inciters to adventure and travel; only when Livia appeared did Hilary seem to take on a new constraint, his ice-blue eyes became evasive and thoughtful as he watched both Felix and Blanford foundering like ships in a gale. Constance and Sam somehow remained in a friendly comradely relationship – something not difficult for a knight-errant born to endure. Sam was not made of flesh and blood, but of flesh and books. And in the blonde, smiling Constance he had found a worshipful lady who only lacked a tower to get locked into.… All this, of course, has to be interpreted backwards – for while events are being lived they travel too fast for easy evaluation. Blanford noticed many things which his inexperience could not interpret. In part he reproduced all these errors in Sutcliffe to record some of the surprise they gave him when at last the truth (what truth?) dawned. One day Livia burned Hilary’s wrist with her cigarette and he smacked her – and in a trice they were tearing at each other’s hair like savages. Well, brothers and sisters.…

They had found a hunchback maid who came from the village every day; she had worked long as a
serveuse
in a brothel, so they learned afterwards. The experience had given her insight into the ways of men – she read a bedroom when she entered it, as one reads a book. She interpreted the whole scene like a sleuth, the disordered pillows and blankets, all had something to tell her. She often smiled to herself. One day Blanford, passing the door, saw her pick up a pillow and inhale it deeply. Then she shook her head and smiled. Turning she saw him and said in her hoarse way, “Mademoiselle Livia!” Yes, but it was the bed of Hilary that she was making. Things do not strike you at the time; ages later Livia bit his hand with her white teeth and he suddenly remembered the incident. And with it the kind of strained attention with which Hilary heard him say at the end of that summer: “Hilary, what would you say if I asked Livia to marry me one day?” The hard blue eyes narrowed, and then flared into rather factitious congratulatory warmth; he squeezed his friend’s shoulder, however, until it hurt, but he actually said nothing. Later when they were having lunch he said, out of the blue, “I think you should make sure, Aubrey.” And Blanford knew at once that he was thinking of Livia. It takes years to evaluate such tiny glimpses into the multiple meanings of any single human action. As Sutcliffe one day said to him in one of his notebooks: “Right girl, old boy, but wrong sex. Hard luck!” At another moment in another notebook the poor old novelist had jotted down the remark; “My mother’s sterile affect was cocked like a trigger to fire me into the arms of Livia, or of one of her tribe.” Then another thing, another glimpse – for Livia had now spent several days, or groups of days, lodging in the box-room of the consulate – with its clumsy cupboard in which Felix had found a place for a small wardrobe. When Blanford, at the end of the summer, said to Felix, “I am going to propose to Livia when we leave here,” he received a strange wondering look from the youth – which he rather condescendingly interpreted as jealousy. Several thousand light years afterwards when Blanford was recording the strange manoeuvres of his double Sutcliffe, he met Felix by accident on a rainy platform in Paris, as he was just setting off for the south; and now Felix told him what that lost and forlorn glance portended. He did not repeat the scathing estimate of her character by Quatrefages, who at that time spent one afternoon a week devilling at the Consulate, keeping the petty-cash box in order. This report on her was quite gratuitous and spontaneous on the part of the little clerk and somewhat shook Felix by its terseness. Yet … he himself had strayed into his guest’s room while the maid was cleaning it and had seen, hanging up in the shabby cupboard, some articles of male wear which aroused his curiosity. And there was no doubt that late in the evening she often disappeared in the direction of the gipsy encampment. Why not? She was young and adventurous and may well have felt the need of a male disguise. Indeed Felix said as much, on a note of mild indignation, to the little clerk; but the latter shook his head and said laconically: “I know. I myself frequent the
gitanes.”
And this too was true. Mind you (as Blanford told himself) it did not matter – he would not, for anything in the world, have renounced an experience which had literally scorched him awake, precipitated him from raw youth into adulthood. In a sense this was the worst part of it; somewhere, in some dim corner of himself, he must have perversely enjoyed the kind of suffering she was to inflict on him. When he said as much to Felix, the latter warmly praised his loyalty and generosity, which naturally disgusted our hero. “O God, Felix,” he said in anguish, “it’s not that. I’m trapped. I can do no other. I am fuming with impotent rage.”

But he was not the only one to be grateful to the girl; Felix was hardly less so, for Livia, by joining him more than once on his night walk, had performed a miracle – she had made him fall in love with this small and dismal city.
Venite adoremus
said the chipped gold sign above the chapel of the Grey Penitents, almost as if the church had divined his mood, his abandonment to his love for this mysterious and eccentric girl. She sat so docilely hand in hand with him in the silent pews, listening to the thresh and swash of the paddles revolving. She said, whispering, “Go on and pray, if you wish. I have never been able to.” But his shyness constrained him and he felt himself blush in the darkness. Nor would he have changed his position for anything, for the feel of her rough little hand in his was bliss. How marvellous, how romantic it all seemed, and how beautiful she was, this Livia who talked about painting and seemed to know everything about the history of the place which had for him been up to now an echoing prison. As for the gipsy side of her character – why, she had been the most brilliant student of the Slade School in the years when the influence of Augustus John was at its height; all students worth anything ached to become Carmen. One night when she disappeared he ran into her by chance in the eastern sector of the town, and she was walking arm in arm with a gipsy girl; behind the couple, as if offering protection or surveillance, came a couple of lean gipsies leading a mule. They were shabby as pariahs, and had a brilliant scavenging gleam in the eye – as if they had just done a successful robbery. Livia dressed in tattered pants and was bare of foot – another passion of hers was to walk about barefoot. That summer she cut her foot on a piece of tin and the wound turned septic; this immobilised her for a while and she accepted the ministrations of Felix with brusque good grace. In the evenings the gipsy girl hung about the consulate quarter, but she always made off when Felix appeared.

Only with Quatrefages nothing worked; Livia and he simply hated each other, and hardly bothered to hide the fact. Later they came to an interesting compromise, for the little clerk blackmailed her into co-operating with him in one of the numerous enterprises of Lord Galen – one which also concerned the gipsies.

What had happened was this: the gipsies had taken up a second headquarters in the corner of the town known as Les Balances, where a number of disreputable and tumbledown houses offered them precarious shelter. Prompted by a hint from Quatrefages, they had removed the heavy stone flags of the floors and started to dig down beneath these shacks, to arrive at a layer of civilisation much anterior to the Papal period of the town. Amphoras, grave headstones, armour, domestic remains, tessellated pavements, they had made one of the richer archaeological finds of the period; and all this material was surreptitiously placed in sacks and sent up to Galen’s chateau by mule. Livia, details of whose doings among the gipsies had come to the ears of Quatrefages, was content to lend her good offices to these ventures rather than have him tell anyone about her own tenebrous adventures; and indeed was responsible for securing one or two of the larger pieces which might have been salted away by the band who were vaguely aware that someone was making a larger profit than they were from these finds.

But for Felix the real felicity of that first summer was not merely the marvellous evenings spent at Tu Duc, it was to walk half the night with this dark girl with her haughty face and bare feet; her thin body was erect as a wand, and she seemed to feel absolutely no fear in the darkest corners of the town – some of which made the flesh of poor Felix creep; like the terrifying rue Londe for example with its one gas lamp set askew in a wall so mossy and so dribbling with damp that it exuded a death-chill. Here the shadowy doorways were set in such a way as to afford perfect cover for a footpad. Obviously she felt nothing of all this, for she did not cease her quiet conversation as they travelled down it – perforce in Indian file to avoid the contact of their shoulders with the rotting walls. One thing she had determined to find – a famous Avignon shawl such as her mother had had as a young girl. Alas, these fine kashmirs were no longer made in the old town.

But it was Livia who made him sit and listen to the wakening birds in little squares like that of Le Bon Pasteur, or the Square des Corps Saints with its ragged plashing fountain; or Saint Didier, set slightly at an angle to the rest of the universe, but not the less evocative. And with these night rambles the whole harmony of the Mediterranean south swept over him, filling his consciousness with gorgeous impressions of star-sprinkled nights in the old town – the six of them seated under a tree in front of some old bistro like The Bird, drinking the milky anisette called
pastis
and waiting for the moon to rise over the munched-looking battlements of the city. Once Livia managed to procure them horses from the gipsies and they rode across to the Pont du Gard, to picnic and camp the night on the steep hillsides, overlooking the jade-green Gardon as it swirled its way to the sea. Sometimes, too, Blanford invited himself into town for a consular walk with them both, much to the chagrin of Felix, who looked quite crestfallen when his friend appeared on the scene. But Blanford was as much subject to the magnetism of Livia as Felix was – he simply could not resist forcing himself upon them, though he inwardly cursed his lack of tact. Yet it was Livia who seemed glad, and who indeed seemed to favour him quite unequivocally over Felix. The crestfallen consul was forced to witness, with exquisite pangs of jealousy, the two of them walking tenderly arm in arm, while he followed wistfully after them in his college blazer, uttering fearful imprecations under his breath. Nobody took any of this with high seriousness – it was simply youth, it was simply the spirit of an intoxicating summer felicity among the olives and cherries of Aramon, of Foulkes, of Montfavet or Sorgues. Often, looking back on this halcyon period, Blanford had the sudden vision of them all, standing upon the iron bridge at the Fountain of Vaucluse, gazing down into the trout-curdled water and listening to the roar of the spring as it burst from the mountain’s throat and swept down past them, thick with loitering fish.