The Avignon Quintet (69 page)

And then somewhere in the middle of all this period comes a spell in Paris with Livia, a spell which ended in that fatuous marriage anchored by a wedding ring which was never to be worn. A disorderly, roughcast sort of student existence in the fourteenth arrondissement. A Livia who was always busy and preoccupied though he never found out what she was doing. But she was out at all hours in all weathers, and she talked in her sleep and drank absinthe with disquieting application. The little rented flat was a shabby enough place, but there was a table at which he could write so that one basic need was satisfied, though at this time he wrote mostly long letters. Yet stirring deep in the jungle he could hear the rustle of those animal doubts which came creeping upon him. He began to wonder what he had indeed done. At times when she was drunk her laughter was so extravagant as to be insulting. At times he caught glimpses of unusual expressions on that pale face – hate, malevolence, disdain. It made him feel fearful and sad, as if some vital piece of information was missing – the presence of a shadow which stood forever between them. There was. She had become so much thinner that her looks had changed. The head of the cicada had become narrower, the face an adder’s.

Then his mother’s health began to falter and flicker and he was called back to her bedside where he gazed long and earnestly into that once familiar face, now pained to see that the long illness had altered all its stresses, composed it in new planes and lines, as if to copy on the outer skin the fearful loneliness and despair of the inner mind. She had things to tell him about her small fortune, and she had discovered that she could not trust Cade, the valet. He opened her letters and in general kept a spying eye out over her affairs. She had longed to give him notice but in all his other duties he was so perfect and so dependable that she had not dared. In this, as in all other things, she was lucidity itself, and even when she sank back into a last deep coma he did not think that she would die – indeed the doctor warned him that she might linger on a long time yet, so strong was her heart. Nevertheless he spent that day at her bedside, holding that frail hand in which the pulse continued to beat like that of a captive sparrow. In these long silences his mind went about its business slowly and densely. He wondered much about Livia and about his own future. His mother was leaving him a small marginal income, as well as the London house which could be let. There was also a small cottage on a farm outside Cairo where his father had spent many summers pursuing his entomological passion with silent assiduity. This was a mere shack, though, and there was hardly any land around it. Nevertheless, it was like a window open upon another country.

Another problem: if she should by any chance wake, ought he to tell her that he was married to Livia, or was it better to keep the whole matter a secret? Already there was a sneaking premonition that he had embarked upon something which might become a capital misadventure. Sitting in that grey light of a suburban nightfall, trying mentally to align her ticking wrist with the ticking of the grandfather-clock in the hall, he wondered a little bleakly what would come of it all. In a sense it was good to have the war to think about – for it dwarfed purely human schemes, and one could shelve them temporarily. And yet he did not think there would be a war, despite all the signs; history was like some lump of viscid porridge sliding slowly down a sink, but with such an infinite slowness! Their gestures, their hopes and schemes, seemed to be somehow insubstantial, chimerical. Meanwhile the frenzy of Paris was still teaching, and he realised how pregnant were the lessons he had learned in this all too brief residence there – the capital of the European nervous system. So many valuable acquisitions: how total freedom did not spell licence, nor gastronomy gluttony, nor passion brutality.

The old streets down at the fag-end of the rue St.-Jacques which smelt of piss and stale cooking were the mere folklore of life lived in a relatively waterless capital where the women did not shave under their arms, and preferred stale scent to soapy bath water. In summer the smell of armpits in the cafés was enough to drive one mad. Yet everywhere the river winds cradled the velvet city and one could walk all night under a canopy of stars worthy of grand opera – the brilliant glitter of outer space impacting upon the shimmering brilliance of a world of hot light.

Appropriately enough she had given him a rendezvous (for the marriage) at the old Sphinx, opposite the Gare Montparnasse, where the respectable exterior – a family café, where families up from the country came to eat an ice and wait for their train – masked a charming bordel with a high gallery and several spotless cubicles. A simple bead curtain separated the two establishments, but such was the pleasant naturalness of things in the Paris of that day, that often the girls, dressed only in coloured sarongs and with the traditional napkin over the arm like waiters (“no spots upon the counterpane, please”) came out to meet friends and even play a game of chequers with elderly clients whom time had ferried lightly into
impuissance
. “How marvellous,” she said when she came, “if you could take all this with you to smoky Euston.” He had told her about his mother, that she was dying; he would leave immediately after the ceremony, which was performed by a very deaf consul and duly entered in the Consular Registers. The Minister then offered them the traditional glass of champagne under the tactless portrait of an idealised Wellington. He was a kind old man but he could not keep his horrified gaze off the dirty feet of Livia in her sandals. Later, much later, when Blanford asked Livia why she had done it at all she replied with a contemptuous laugh: “It seemed so unimportant; so I made you a present of something you wanted.”

All this and much more passed through his mind as he sat holding the wrist of his dying mother – a flight of impressions like a brilliant surge of tropical fish across the dim aquarium of his student life. On the other side of the curtain of adolescence was a Paris full of bountiful surprises – a Paris where all the whores had started to take German lessons. The teachers of the German Institute were overwhelmed with requests for classes! A Paris where nobody shaved under the arms. At the Sphinx where he went rather sedately to play
belotte
and drink (with a timid air) an absinthe, which he hated, he had met a charming friend of his new wife, a negress of great beauty with a smile from here to there, and hands which roved into any pocket that presented itself. Livia found her “killing”, and derived such amusement from her Martinique French that he was forced to enjoy her as well. Curiously enough she did shave under the arms, though she said the girls in general did not because a swatch of hair excited the customer and was good for business. He was extremely frightened of these unexpected revelations of turpitude, but it was after all romantic and he was in the rapt middle of Proust, and France was after all … what exactly? He had never been in such an extraordinary ambiance before, a sort of ferment of freedom and treachery, of love and obscenity, of febrility and distress. A life which was so rich in possibilities reduced one to silence.

Nor for that matter had he ever been really in love before, whatever that might mean. The brilliant little taxis which flashed about the town like shooting stars were their favourite transport. Whenever they rushed off the macadam on to a cobbled thoroughfare the kisses of lovers in the back began to hobble and shake as if with an extra passionate emphasis conferred by the
pavé
. And quite apart from the greater beauties of this most beautiful of cities they were made freemasons of the company of its lovers, holding hands dutifully on the Pont des Arts, sitting heart joined to heart at the Closerie des Lilas or the rumbling Dôme. Floods of new books and ideas swamped them. He read relentlessly to keep abreast in quiet cafés and parks. It was the epoch of puzzling Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and the earlier convulsions of the American giants like Fitzgerald and Miller. He was sufficiently mature, however, to reflect that Europe was fast reaching the end of the genito-urinary phase in its literature – and he recognised the approaching impotence it signalled. Soon sex as a subject would be ventilated completely. “Even the act is dying”, he allowed Sutcliffe to note, “and will soon become as charmless as badminton. For a little while the cinema may conserve it as a token act – as involuntary as a sneeze or a hiccough: a token rape, while the indifferent victim gnaws an apple.” He added: “The future is more visible from France than anywhere because the French push everything to extremes. An audio-judeo-visual age is being born – the Mouton Rothschild epoch where the pre-eminence of Jewish thought is everywhere apparent, which explains the jealousy of the Germans.”

Standing at night on a quiet bridge with the whole of reflected heaven flowing beneath them, silent, rapt. “One day you will despise me,” she said, talking as if to herself.

One star was ticking over the lemon water. He said to himself: “Pity and she don’t match and never will.” And here he was – most inappropriate of men, a writer, watching from the abolished tower of his male self-esteem refunding his youth into these silences with this dangerous girl. “In two months’ time I am going away, perhaps for good,” he said, but he didn’t take it seriously, just as he didn’t really take the war seriously. Sutcliffe chided him from Geneva where he had landed a temporary job tutoring. “It’s all very well to sit up there in your private Pisgah,” he said, “but kindly note that Pisgah is the Hebrew word for an outdoor shithouse. It was here that old Moses quietly, while shifting the load of guilt, in the posture of Rodin’s
Thinker, thunk
. My last words on leaving the school were as follows: ‘The school will get no more half holidays unless secret practices cease and a new detachment is born, say a detachment of dragoons, firing off maroons.’” He went on after a pause, “But when I left, after my scandal, such is a frailty of the female organism that there was an outbreak of mumps, chiefly among the nuns.”

But in spite of the confusion of this period Blanford was thinking, he was looking around him and taking stock as well as taking notes in his little student’s
calepin
. Like: “The old seem to be praying for a war to carry off the young; the young are soliciting a plague to carry off the old. Fortune’s maggot, I nestle in the plenitude of my watchful indifference.”

She was his, and yet she was not really completely present. Reality, fine as a skin on milk, was called into question the whole time by this disturbance of focus aided by alcohol or tobacco or other unspecified drugs. Shaving himself in the bathroom mirror he realised that he had been pretending to be sane all his life. Now, even while kissing her he did not know which state of mind to assume. To overhear a thought thinking itself, to eavesdrop on a whisper of a truth formulating itself – this was his new state of mind. He began a book – the whole thing seemed to write itself. It was the purest automatic writing. It was a vignette of life in the country somewhere – a country which he himself had never seen. It was overwritten and shapeless so he destroyed it. Yet something important had happened to him – on the mystical plane, though that seems a rather pompous way of speaking about the intervention of “reality prime” into his scheme of things. (He tried saying “I love you” in several ways, in several keys, at several speeds, just to try and imagine what it was she heard when he did.) But what he realised was that from that moment onwards nothing he did was frivolous. It could be bad or good or even just inadequate or indifferent but it would be fraught with his own personal meaning, it would have his fingerprints on it. When he dared to say as much to Sutcliffe, his bondsman groaned aloud: “I see it all,” he declared, “another novel written by the automatic pilot,” and when Blanford looked at himself in the mirror he could see that in fact his expression was a trifle portentous – swollen, as if he had a gumboil. His self-esteem had boiled over.

Anyway, would there be time? They were pushed by the anxieties of the age to try and drink in everything before the war swallowed it up – that meant Edith Piaf looking like a cracked plate and singing like a cracked dove.
“Mon coeur y bat!”
That meant the new cinema – which had by now forfeited its chances of becoming more than a minor art by the invention of sound-track. It meant piles of saucers growing up under one’s drinks at the Dôme while voices spoke of Spengler and the thirteenth law of thermodynamics. … God! it was good to be alive, but it was an agony also, and he felt it all the more when the slow measured rhythm of England replaced the throbbing Paris rush. He managed a brief visit to Oxford to see friends and collect belongings, and found it strange and secretive and tongue-tied – “theological dons in their Common Rooms dancing round the
filoque,”
as Sutcliffe was to put it. For his part the great man had started to do yoga by the lake. “Come,” he said in magisterial fashion, “sharpen your intuitions in the cobra pose.”