The Avignon Quintet (61 page)

But if ever in the years to come Blanford might feel the need to account for the enigma of this fierce attachment to Livia there was one scene which quite certainly he knew would rise in his memory to explain everything. Once when Felix was away for a few days Livia gave him a rendezvous at the little Museum in the centre of the town – at four-thirty in the morning; punctually a sleepy Blanford turned up to find the barefooted girl waiting for him at the dark portals of the place with a swarthy gipsy. Dawn was just breaking. The gipsy had a massive pistol-key in his hand which fitted the lock; the tall doors swung back with a hushing noise and ushered them into the red cobbled courtyard; and as they did so they heard the inhuman shrieks which came from the interior garden with its tall dewy plane trees. It was the crying of peacocks on the lawn. They passed through tall glass doors to reach this interior courtyard which exhaled a strange sort of peace in that early light of day. The taciturn gipsy took his leave, having confided his key to the girl. Together they loitered through the galleries with their massive water paintings of the Italian school – lakes and viaducts and avenues depicting imaginary landscapes during the four seasons of the year. Portraits of great ladies and forgotten dignitaries stared urgently at them in the gloom. Then they came to the Graeco-Roman section and after it to a small glass-roofed room with manuscripts and documents galore.

Livia, who seemed to know the place by heart, opened the cases one by one and showed the bemused Blanford medieval documents which mentioned the marriage of Petrarch’s sweetheart, and hard by, some pages of handwriting torn from the letters of the Marquis de Sade. It was strange in that silent dawn to hold the white paper in his fingers and read some lines etched in a now rusted ink. He had forgotten that both the libertine and the Muse were called Sade, and were from the same family.… Now Livia was at his side, then in his arms; she closed the precious cases and led him back to the cool lawn where they sat side by side on a bench trying to feed the peacocks with scraps of stale sandwich which he had had the forethought to bring with him. “Soon I shall be going back to Germany,” the girl said, “and you won’t see me until the next long vac – unless you come with me; but I know you can’t as yet. Such wonderful things are going to happen there, Aubrey; it’s bursting with hope, the whole country. A new philosophy is being built which will give the new Germany the creative leadership of Europe once more.” It sounded rather puzzling, but Blanford was politically quite ignorant. He had heard vague rumours of unrest and revisionism in Germany – a reaction against the Versailles treaty. But the whole subject was a bore, and he presumed that some new government would bury all these extravagances once and for all. Besides, a new war was unthinkable and specially for such trivial reasons.… This is why Livia intrigued him with her romantic talk. So, more to humour her – for he adored the flushed cheeks and the joined hands which showed her enthusiasm – than from real interest he said: “What was the old world, then?” Livia shook a lock of hair impatiently out of her eyes and said: “It died in 1832, with the death of Goethe; the old world of humanism and liberalism and faith. He exemplified it; and its epitaph was pronounced by Napoleon after he met Goethe; it was an unwilling tribute to the world which the French Revolution was then destroying.
‘Voilà un homme,’
said Boney, himself a child of the Directory, and the harbinger of the Leninised Jewish coolie-culture of today. With the death of Goethe the new world was born, and under the aegis of Judeo-Christian materialism it transformed itself into the great labour camp that it is. In every field – art, politics, economics – the Jew came to the forefront and dominated the scene. Only Germany wants to replace this ethos with a new one, an Aryan one, which will offer renewed scope for the old values as exemplified by Goethe’s world; for he was the last universal man of the Renaissance. Why should we not go back to that?” Blanford did not see quite how; but her sweet enthusiasm was so warming, and the tang of her kiss so unmanning that he found himself nodding agreement. Livia’s new world sounded like the Hesperides – as a matter of fact any new world which had a Livia in it elicited his instant support. He said: “I love you, Livia dear. Tell me more about it, it sounds just what we need to escape from all this fervent dullness.” And Livia went on outlining this marvellous intellectual adventure with heart-breaking idealism and naivety. When he mentioned Constance she cried: “I can’t bear her devotion to all the Jewish brokers of psychoanalysis, to the Rabbinate of Vienna. It’s dead, that whole thing. Its barren mechanism betrays its origins in logical positivism.” Blanford was far out of his depth here – he knew very little about these factors and personalities. Livia went on in torrential fashion: “Long before these barren Jewish evaluations of the human psyche, the Ancient Greeks evolved their own, more fruitful, more poetical and just as reasonable. For instance, before that bunch of thugs who ruled Olympus there were others like Uranus who ruled the earth and was castrated by Chronos. Those severed genitals were thrown still frothing and writhing into the sea, and the foam they generated gave birth to Aphrodite. Which world do you prefer? Which seems the more fruitful?” Blanford could only repeat, whispering in that small stag’s ear the stupid words, “I love you and I agree.”

She touched his face – the haptic sense – and the poor fellow was mesmerised; he was in love, and so full of glory and distress that he could have accepted anything without query provided Livia was part of it.

Here on this moist fresh grass they lay, with their arms under each other’s heads, staring up into the clear warm sky with its rising sunlight and light musical clouds – herald of another perfect day. It would soon be time to slip quietly away, locking the doors behind them, and make their sleepy way back to Tu Duc through the olive groves turning to silver in the breeze. The kisses of her hard little mouth with its thin lips, sometimes cut in expressions of smiling contempt or reserve, held a world of promises for him. She had promised to spend her last few nights in his room. “I shall be back in Paris again in three months if you want me,” she added, and Blanford began actively, resolutely, planning ways and means to accept this marvellous invitation. Gazing into the
camera lucida
of the eye’s screen he saw a vastly enlarged version of Livia, one which filled the whole sky, hovering over them both like some ancient Greek goddess. It seemed a fearful thing to have to share this marvellous creature with the others – but there was nothing to be done for the terms of reference dictated that they should do almost everything together. As their departure began to shape itself into a fact – at first the summer seemed endless and their return to the north a figment – it became imperative to go on as many excursions as possible, to see as much of the country as possible before the fatal day dawned. Constance was staying on in Provence to try and fix up Tu Duc a little against future habitation; Sam and Hilary and Blanford were to affront their final examinations before selecting a profession. The centre of gravity was slowly shifting. At dawn, unable to sleep, and heading for the lily pond for a dip Blanford came upon the two sisters naked upon the flagged path, walking with sleepy silence towards the same objective in the dusky bloom of daybreak. Slim and tall, with their upright carriage and hieratic style they looked like a couple of young Graces who had slipped out of the pantheon and into the workaday world of men, seeking an adventure. Blanford turned aside and waited until he heard the ripple of water; then he too joined them, sliding soundlessly into the pool like a trout. So the three sat quietly breathing among the lotus flowers, waiting for the sun to rise among the trees.

It was like a dream – the wet stone heads of the sisters, like statues come to life; the dense packages of silence moving about the garden suddenly drilled by a short burst of bird-song. “Perils and absences sharpen desire,” says the ancient Greek poet. In all the richness of this perfect summer Blanford felt the pang of the partings to come – vertigo of a desire which must for the time being rest unrequited. Her wet hair made her look shaven; her pretty ears stood out pointed from her head, like gnomes at prayer. From the sunny balcony where breakfast waited they could see the swifts stooping and darting; how beautifully the birds combined with gravity to give life to this wilderness of garden which Constance had sworn never to have tidied and formalised. It was full of treasures like old fruit trees still bearing, strawberry patches, and a bare dry section of holm-oak – a stand of elderly trees – which had a truffle bed beneath.

Days had begun to melt and fuse together in the heat of Provence, their impressions of heat and water and light absolutely forbade them to keep a mental chronology of their journeys, jogging about the gorges of the Gardon in the old pony-cart, or taking the little toy train down to the sea to spend a night on the beach and attend a cockade-snatching bullfight at dusty Lunel. Ah! the little pocket train, which plodded down to the flat Carmargue, to take them to the Grau du Roi. It had such a merry holiday air; the carriages were so bright – red for the first class, yellow for the second, and green for the third. All with the legend
PLM
modestly painted on them. The long waits in tiny silent stations where the guard sometimes braked to a walking pace so that he could loiter in a field beside the track and gather a few leeks. When you were dying of thirst how good the fresh water from the pump at Aimargues tasted; it was really intended for the engine, but once the machine had drunk its fill it was the turn of the passengers. Once Hilary even used it as a shower while they were waiting for the connection which was to carry them down to the Saintes. In the dry heats of summer the odours of the sand and the sea came up to them from the beaches – and from the inland maquis that of thyme and rosemary bruised by the flocks of sheep. Sometimes they sat in a siding and let a train pass through from Nîmes which was full of the little black Carmargue bulls used in the cockade fights. Small stations on the roads to paradise, signal boxes at the end of the world; they would return after these excursions dazed with the sun and sea. And then in the evening Blanford would hear the sweet voice of Livia intoning the
AUM
of yoga as she sat in the green thicket behind the tower, recharging her body, re-oxygenating her brain. Remembering a phrase from another life, “The heart of flesh in the breast is not the
vagra
heart; like an inverted lotus the valves of the flesh heart open by day and close by night during sleep.”

The sleep of the south had invaded also their love-making, giving it a tonality, a resonance of its own; with Livia it was simple and rather brutal. He would never forget how she cried out “Ha” as she felt the premonition of the orgasm approaching; it was the cry of the Japanese swordsman before the shock of his stroke. And then, so extreme was the proof that she lay in his arms as if her back were broken.

Eating their picnic lunch among the brown rocks above the Pont du Gard, watching the eagles wheel and stoop, they all – as if by sudden consent – felt their minds drawn towards the thought of the impending future with the inevitable imperatives which choice would force upon them. Blanford was perhaps the luckiest for he would inherit a modest income which he would have no difficulty in supplementing by academic work – or so he thought. The brown-skinned Sam was less self-assured as he mused. “I shan’t have a private income, and with the little intelligence I have inherited I don’t suppose I could get anything sensational in the way of a job. To tell the truth the Army seems the likeliest
pis aller
– though I am not very militant.” He had been an active member of the Oxford Officers Training Corps and could with luck get a commission in a line regiment. Constance rested her arm lightly in the crook of his brown arm and smiled up at him, confident and at ease. There was no stress in their loving, while between Livia and Blanford there was a kind of premonitory hopelessness; they were in that limbo where destiny, like an undischarged bankrupt, waited for them. They had gone too far to retreat now even if they had wished.

Hilary said: “I am going to surprise and perhaps pain you. I have been seriously tempted by the Catholic faith. I have the notion of really taking it up – if that is the word. I thought after next term to go into a retreat and receive instruction in it. I can easily do a little tutoring for a living. Then we’ll see if the thing is lasting or wears out.” He smiled round at the others, feeling suddenly abashed and unsure of himself; once these sentiments had been uttered aloud they seemed far less substantial and enriching than they had been before. He climbed down to his favourite diving plinth, above the river, poised, and suddenly fell like a swift to furrow the jade water far below. Sam sighed and rose to follow, followed by Blanford. Suddenly, by this brief conversation, the future had materialised before their eyes.

Blanford had brought a pretty little ring which he hoped to give to Livia, but the act seemed somehow embarrassing and confusing; he had not sufficient courage to indulge in definitive declarations – the only kind which would approximate to what he felt. And Livia needed none; she stared at him, smiling her hard little smile, holding her hand in his. They would meet again in Paris! Ah! in the cafés of that great epoch one arrived, distraught with love, and called for ink and paper, envelopes and stamps, while a concerned waiter, having supplied them, rushed for a
cassis
. Thus were great love-letters born – they would be sent by
pneumatique
and a helmeted motor cyclist would deliver them, like Mercury himself, within the hour.

Blanford decided to send her the ring by post when she had returned to Paris. On the last evening but one they went for a short walk together among the olive groves and Livia surprised him by saying: “I always think of you as a writer, Aubrey; people who keep copious diaries like you always have – they are really writers.” She had noted his habit of scribbling in a school exercise book nearly every night before he got into bed. It was a self-indulgence he had, like most lonely people, permitted himself from early adolescence. And it was here, unwittingly, that Sutcliffe got born. Once at school one of his diaries had been pilfered from his locker and a teasing youth read out some passages aloud to a circle of laughing and taunting schoolmates. It was fearfully humiliating; and to guard against a repetition of such a torture Blanford had attributed his thought and ideas to an imaginary author called S. He also firmly lettered in the title “Commonplace Book”, and put a few genuine quotations into it, to suggest that he was simply copying out things which struck him from the books he read. But slowly and insidiously S began to take shape as a person, a flippant and desperate person, a splintered man, destined for authorship with all its woes and splendours. To him he attached the name of the greatest cricketer of the day – also rather defensively; Sutcliffe was, in the cricket world, a household name. Yet over the years he was fleshed out by quotations which suggested the soliloquies of a lonely and hunted intellectual, a marginal man; Blanford took refuge in him, so to speak, from a world which seemed to him quite insensitive to intellectual matters, in fact calamitously philistine. Later when the great man actually emerged on paper and started his adventurous life of sins and puns Blanford was to adapt a hymn for his use, the first line of which was “Nearer My Goad to Thee.” But this was much later. Now he simply looked into the eyes of Livia and replied steadily: “I don’t think I could be imaginative enough, I’m too donnish I think.”