The Avignon Quintet (74 page)

In contrast to the affairs of the world, his own were more or less in order; the little flat would revert to its owner automatically for the rent had not been paid. He had wound up all household bills, debts to the newsagent, and the like. He was vacating Paris – it was a hollow enough feeling. He passed by the Dôme and scanned the letter board which contained as always a wealth of messages which waited patiently to be reclaimed. There was nothing from her, and he was a fool to have expected anything. On an impulse he copied out a poem from his notebook and placed it in an envelope with her name on it. It was valedictory enough to suit the occasion; he felt inexpressibly sad about the whole business, about the whole failure to connect, to unite. He was also alarmed for her safety – for he was, unaccountably, still deeply attached to her.

BURIED ALIVE

for Livia

A poem filling with water,

A woman swimming across it

Believing it a lake,

The words avail so little,

The water has carried them away

Frail as a drypoint the one kiss,

Renovation of a swimmer’s loving.

Attach a penny calendar to the moon

And cycle down the highways of the need,

The doll will have nothing under her dress;

With an indolence close to godhead

You remain watching, he remains watching.

When she smiles the wrinkles round her eyes

Are fitting, the royal marks of the tiger,

The royal lines of noble conduct.

Virtuous and cryptic lady, whom

The sorrows of time forever revisit,

Year after year in the same icy nook

With candles brooding or asphodels erect,

Stay close to us within your mind.

These winter loves will not deceive,

Unplanned by seasons or by kin

They feast the eye beneath the skin.

SEVEN

Prince Hassad Returns

N
OR WAS HE THE ONLY ONE RETURNING TO AVIGNON
, he discovered, for he later found it bruited that Lord Galen and the Prince had already come rumbling and roaring and careening out of Germany together in a high state of emotional and intellectual disarray. It had not taken long for the gimlet eye of the Prince to pierce to the heart of Galen’s romantic folly; he could hardly credit what it revealed of the whole catastrophic investment. Among so many miscalculations of the same order, this one stood out as a monument of the purest insanity – and so fearfully expensive to boot. Never in Galen’s long career as a “gentleman-adventurer” (he was fond of the phrase) had he committed such a fearful “bloomer” (another he favoured). Indeed the blow appeared to have all but demolished him – at all events temporarily. His sang-froid had turned its back on him. He walked with a stoop, giving the impression that the disaster had actually aged him. You felt he was worn out with the long and humiliating journey back to sweet reason. At all events they drew up at Les Balances in Geneva for an orgy of accounting and numerous vital meetings with paler and paler executives. To tell the truth Prince Hassad was less bruised, less cast down, for he had invested nothing in the scheme. In fact he hovered on the edge of smiles, although his cumbersome coach caused endless annoyance in the parking spaces of the city and his staff much excitement. It was Galen who bore the brunt of it all; try as he might there was no disguising his asininity.

The Prince had, heaven knows, been the soul of tact, but from time to time a mortal chuckle escaped him. He struck his knee and wrinkled into lizard-like smiles of a private nature; but Galen could quite well guess why. Though the little man in his royal green-striped flower-pot actually
said
nothing his chuckles lodged like barbs in the tender cuckold flesh of his associate’s consciousness. Things had gone so far that they had actually been threatened with arrest unless they decamped – and this by the Nazis! Galen rather wished now they had been arrested – his sadness would have been sublimated by an expiation of sorts. “Well,” said the Prince, “it is no use just going on brooding. We have made a ghastly incoherence. You must save what you can.” He was kind enough to pretend that he had shared the misfortune. “Look on the brighter side,” he said, turning Stoic. “In two or three months we shall all be dead – you have read about the nerve gas in the
Tribune?”
Galen obediently thought about his approaching death and felt quite cheerful of a sudden. Yes, there was no use brooding. The Prince picked his teeth and reflected; he had spent all day at the Egyptian Embassy, telephoning and sending telegrams in cipher. “My dear friend,” he said, “you will go on to Provence and arrange your affairs. I have things I must attend to. I will follow in ten days’ time and we can decide everything else.”

“You aren’t leaving me?” said Galen, pulling his under-lip and pouting. “Only for a while,” said Prince Hassad, “and I think the best thing for you, my friend, is to wind up things here and then go back south. I will send off the coach ahead. In ten days we meet again and then there will be big decisions to make. I fear I must leave all my new friends in Avignon and return to Egypt for a while, until we see what form this war takes. There is a big Italian Army on the frontiers of Egypt, for example, and we don’t know … well,
anything
as yet.
*
As for you, it is impossible to disguise your incoherences.” (His perfect English had nevertheless small and unexpected flaws of usage.) “So why not make the best of them and just be frank. Eh?”

Lord Galen considered being frank, with his head on one side, like a fox-terrier. “Just admit I’ve been a fool?”

“Exactly.”

“I never thought of that,” said Galen and looked suddenly relieved. Nevertheless his sorrow and humiliation were not unduly lightened by this decision of the Prince to desert him in Geneva for a few days and take the express for London and just when he needed company and sympathy too! But Hassad insisted that he had a number of things to attend to before returning home, and that these must be despatched before, in the popular phrase of the hour, “the balloon went up”. The image of a bright Montgolfière – Europe itself no less – floating up and out into the unknown empyrean of the future was suitably frivolous.

After the comparative calm of Geneva, the cud-chewing capital
par excellence
, it was strange to sit in a first-class carriage of the Golden Arrow as it drew away from frenetic and gossipy Paris where one could secure a laugh at cocktail parties by giving the Nazi salute. (The Prince was terrified when he thought of it.) He sat bolt upright in his corner seat mechanically doing the
Times
crossword puzzle and waiting for the lunch gong to summon him swaying down the corridor towards a hearty but insipid meal.

Yet the quicksand of an international lethargy was still the factor which so mysteriously dominated everything. Time, from being a solution, had become a jelly. On the outer fringe of things everything seemed in a state of violent agitation. There were trumpet-calls, denunciations, sabre-rattlings, government pronouncements … but the whole in a sort of void. People scurried about like rats, hoarding food or making testamentary dispositions or booking tickets for America. But these gestures were somehow shapeless and without pith because, in fact, nobody could believe that human beings in this present stage of civilisation could conceive of a war – after the lessons of 1914. The little man said to himself: “It is because it is quite unthinkable that it must happen. People want death really, life poses too many problems.” Things proceeded, he had observed, by cruel paradox. He sighed heavily, for not the least of his concerns was with the vulnerable and defenceless England towards which his train was racing, shrieking aloud in tunnels, and leaving behind it a thick black plume of smuts which always managed to settle themselves on his grey spats and on the astrakhan collar of his finely cut overcoat. Everything would have to be cleaned the instant he got back to: London! The word made his heart race, for surely there would be a letter from his little Princess in the diplomatic bag? It was cruel to have left her for so long alone in the dusty old palace on the Nile with nothing much to do save to paint and read and dream about his return. “My partridge!” – the endearment escaped him involuntarily as he thought of her.

The ceremony of the passport control, followed by the abrupt change in the scale of things – the new toy landscape after Dover – set his thoughts wandering in the direction of his youth as a young secretary of Embassy in an England which he had loved and hated with all the emotional polarity of his race. How would she withstand this cataclysm? Would she just founder? He trembled for her – she seemed so exhausted and done for, with her governments of little yellowing men, faded to the sepia of socialism, the beige of bureaucracy. And Egypt, so corrupt, so vulnerable, was at their mercy, in their hands.… Long ago he had made a painstaking analysis of the national character in order to help in the education of his Ambassador, dear old Abdel Sami Pasha. But it had been altogether too literary, and indeed altogether too wise. He had distinguished three strains in the English character which came, he was sure, from Saxons, Jutes or Normans – each Englishman had a predominance of one or other strain in his make-up. That is why one had to be so careful in one’s dealings with them. The Saxon strain made them bullies and pirates, the Jutish toadies and sanctimonious hypocrites, while the Norman strain bred a welcome quixotry which was capable of rising like a north wind and predominating over the other two. Poor Sami had read the whole memorandum with attention, but without understanding a word. Then he said, “But you have not said that they are rich. Without that …”

The long struggle against his English infatuation had coloured his whole life; it had even imperilled his precious national sentiment. How would they ever drive them out of Egypt, how would they ever become free? But then, would it make sense to replace them with Germans or Italians? His glance softened as he saw the diminutive dolls’ houses flashing by outside the window, saw the dove-grey land unrolling its peaceful surges of arable and crop, like the swaying of an autumn sea. Yes, this country had marked him, and his little Princess used often to tease him by saying that he even dreamed in English. Damn them, the English! He compressed his lips and wagged his head reproachfully. He lit a slender gold tipped cigarette and blew a puny cloud of smoke high into the air, as if it would dispel these womanish failings of sentiment! Womanish! The very word reminded him that the whole of his love-life and his miraculously happy marriage had been tinged by London. He hoped that Selim had not forgotten to book the suite at Brown’s Hotel – the Princess loved Brown’s and always sent the porter a Christmas card from Cairo.

But then Egypt was one thing and the Court quite another; their education had modified fanaticism and turned them willy-nilly into cosmopolitans who could
almost
laugh at themselves. It came from languages, from foreign nannies and those long winterings at Siltz or Baden-Baden or Pau. It had etiolated their sense of race, their nationalism. The French distinguish between knowing a language and possessing it; but they had gone even further, they had become possessed by English. The other chief European tongues they knew accurately of course, but for purely social purposes. There was none of the salt in them that he found in English. … Nor was everyone at the Court like him, for some were more charmed by French, some surrendered to Italian. But it was his first firm link with Fawzia, the passion for England. Even when he was at Oxford, and writing anti-British articles in
Doustour
under his own signature! And paradoxically enough she loved him for it, she was proud of his intellectual stance. The thought made him stamp his spatted foot on the floor of the compartment, stamp with delight like a little Arab horse. He had first met her at the Tate; poor darling, she was piously copying a Cézanne, pausing for long drowsy moments to dream – so she afterwards averred – of a Prince who would suddenly appear from nowhere and ask for her hand in marriage. This made her copying somewhat haphazard. She was chaperoned by the widow of a Bey whose son had been at Oxford with him, and this gave him the excuse to exchange a few words with her, and then to be presented to the Princess. She curtseyed in an old-fashioned manner, and he bent over those slender fingers, feeling quite breathless. Indeed they both paled at the encounter. “It was a moment of silk,” in the Arabic phrase. Her dark eyes were full of ardour, idealism and intelligence. He put on his gold-rimmed spectacles in a vain attempt to seem older than he was. The three human beings – everything had become dream-like and insubstantial – took a slow turn up and down the gallery, emitting noises about the paintings displayed. He could feel the words coming out of his mouth but they were like “damp straw”. Inside him a voice was saying, over and over again, “Fawzia, I adore you!” He was terrified lest his thoughts be overheard, but she preserved her demure dispositions, though her heartbeat had reached suffocation point. The kind duenna absented herself for a moment and they talked on. He was electrified.
She appreciated Turner!
“We must place him beside Rembrandt,” she said firmly, indeed a little school-marmishly. But how right she was! He felt he would start vapouring with devotion if this went on, so he abruptly took his leave with a cold expression on his face which dismayed her for she thought that it was due to disdain for her artistic opinions. She stammered upon the word “Goodbye” in a way that made his heart exult, though he continued to look grim as he stalked out of the gallery. Outside he smacked the back of his hand with his grey gloves, then smelt it to see if any trace of her perfume remained before continuing this reproachful simulacrum of self-punishment. Towards the next religious festival he permitted himself to send her a large and handsome folio of colour reproductions from Turner, expressing the hope that she did not own it already. She did, but she pretended the contrary, and expressed a rapture not the less sincere for being feigned. They met briefly at a number of functions and exchanged quaint fictions of conversation in public, almost suffocating with desire as they spoke. He did not quite know how to advance from this point. He was now a graduate, yes, and though heir to a large fortune in cotton and land, had no precise job. Moreover, their attachment having been launched upon such a high romantic keynote, could not be allowed to sink down the scale and revert to the humdrum. I suppose it was very Shakespearean, but they both believed – privately, secretly, separately, passionately – that nobody had ever loved with such intensity. He was anxious to keep their love free from every taint of Parisian frivolity for he considered French notions about love to be so much straw, vanity and
trompe-l’oeil
. In this period of indecision they made several important discoveries. She found, for example, that his eyes turned violet-green under the stress of aesthetic emotion, as when he spoke of the Turners in the Tate. On his side, he became more and more enraptured by her small vivid hands, so swift in action, and yet folding into her lap like rock-doves. His doctor told him that he was suffering from heightened arterial tension, and gave him a sleeping draught, but he preferred to lie awake and think about her.