The Avignon Quintet (83 page)

Now they lay in each other’s arms, burnished dark gold by the sun, and asleep, oblivious to scurrying of mice in the old house, or the remote snore of one of their friends from an upper attic. It is strange, too, that they did not feel more helpless – but then they were full of the delusive elation which love brings. Thoughts scurrying in the attics of the brain, the feet of mice among the dying apples, the presence of ghostly women whose voices were brought by the wind, conversing, complaining, keening. The house was like an old schooner, creaking and groaning with every shift of wind. And yet in their dreams sadness came, sadness overtook them as they thought of separations and bereavements and death – yes, even death was there sometimes; and the tears of distress at their goodbyes trickled down the sirens of booming liners, saying farewell. What a confusing business! In dreams they felt the pains which waking they cared not to show.

Lord Galen’s bizarre mansion up the hill was also being snugged down for the winter, and his last dinner parties became more improvised and more perfunctory; his trip to Germany and his financial gaffe with the Nazis had thrown him into a deep depression. But he was glad to see the youthful band from Tu Duc – he had taken a great fancy to Constance and regarded Sam as a highly eligible young man despite his lack of fortune. The Prince was also often there at the hospitable table of Lord Galen, and it was indeed during one of these dinners that he had proposed outright to take Blanford on the strength as Private Secretary, and to sail with him for Egypt within a week or so. Originally it was in this context that the word “conscience” had cropped up; it represented a key consideration, after all, but it somehow stung the Prince like a gadfly. “Conscience?” he exclaimed sharply. “No one comes to Egypt to struggle with his conscience!” He gazed keenly round the table under frowning eyebrows. “Egypt is a
happy
country,” he went on, “and when you think that, in terms of gross inequality of wealth, criminal misgovernment and civic profligacy it takes the highest place of any nation in the world, one wonders how this can be. The poor are so poor that they have already starved and died and come out the other side, roaring with laughter. The rich are negligent and callous to an unimaginable degree. Yet what is the result? A
happy
people! Indeed the people, wherever you go, throw up their clothes and show you their private parts, roaring with laughter as they do so. It puts everyone in a very good humour.” Lord Galen looked somewhat unnerved. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed feebly, “What effrontery!” It sounded enchanting to Blanford. “What does one do in reply?” he asked amid the laughter, but the Prince was not saying. “One responds with good humour,” he said evasively.

Max, the violet negro, who was Galen’s chauffeur and general factotum, spent a part of every morning now draping white dust-covers over the furniture; he had started on the upper floors and had worked downwards, to leave the inhabited rooms free for living in. But it was like a swimming-pool slowly emptying itself, and at the last occasion there remained only the grand salon and the dining-room free. A piled mass of waiting dust-covers was stacked in the hall. Galen sighed. It was very sad to have the summer cut short like this, and not even to be
sure
that the whole spectre of war might not melt away into some last-minute treaty of peace. What would they do then? Could they just resume the old life as if nothing had taken place? No, something profound in the heart of things seemed to have suffered a sea-change. The beating of the German drum had presaged something – some new orientation. But the future was still so dark and ambiguous and full of portent. (“Making love to her,” thought Sam, “is like doing a double jack-knife with a sword swallower.”) Blanford rolled breadcrumbs and reflected. There was another, a more private reason why he loved Livia – but it would have sounded fatuous to relate it. She had left him the new Huxley, his favourite writer, with the first essay on the nature of Zen Buddhism in it, the very first mention of Suzuki, which had opened like a shaft of light in the depths of his skull. It had set him dreaming once more of faraway peoples educated in harmlessness, in places like Lhasa, by the reading of golden sutras engrossed in golden ink.… This, like the discovery of his avocation as a poet, was also her gift to him, a gift no other woman would ever match. Who could understand such a thing?

Yet the failure of communication between them as sexual and affective animals had been nothing less than calamitous; at times it so enraged him that he could have picked her up and shaken her like a rat, shaken some sense into her – or out of her! And where was she now? He could only guess, though it very much depended on whether she had the money to stay in such a place, even though it was only middling-expensive: the Fanechon. Up in the bustling raffish and dirty Boulevard Montmartre with its
couscous
joints and tinny Arabic cinemas. She loved this small, select hotel because the side-door of the lounge opened directly into the Musée Grevin, and, slipping out of it, she would spend quite a large part of her time wandering among the waxworks, and tracing the path of French history (or the bloodier part) through its tableaux, her face taking on a new beauty from the soft abstraction into which these shadowy scenes threw her. The agony of Marie Antoinette, the death of Marat (the authentic bath was the one on view!) and the sweet limpidity of expression with which Jeanne d’Arc walked to the stake – hours passed and she was still there, sunk in thought before these waxen reinactions of a vanished yet still living past. The fête on the Grand Canal, too, with its thrilling blue night sky and shining waterscapes, or the evening, the momentous soirée at Malmaison with the entire cast of a Stendhal novel as guests! The modern exhibits hardly stirred her interest at all. But in the suffocating little hall of the distorting mirrors she lingered a good while, trying out different postures and studying the distortions with attention, never with amusement. Then she might buy some chewing gum and slip into a cinema to dream about the length of Descartes’ waxen nose or the sly expression on the face of Fouquier. Blanford thought of her with a dull ache now and said to himself, “Poor girl, she has a past like a paw full of thorns.”

It would have to be Egypt, then. “In Egypt,” he assured Felix Chatto, “the girls have independent suspension, it is the latest thing.” It was the latest fad on the new cars like the Morris which Chatto shared with Lord Galen’s clerk, Quatrefages, and in which he promised to take Constance back to Geneva and her studies – for come what may these at least must be terminated in due and correct fashion. Sam insisted on it. Later, when he returned from the wars with the appropriate bullet-hole in the breast-pocket bible he would be carrying, she would be there waiting for him, with the whole weight of science heavy upon her shoulders! “Then you will realise how stupid I am and decide to leave,” she cried out in protest. Actually these studies were helping her to understand the nature of her love for Sam. An only child, his mother had overwhelmed him with her love but, wisely, never encumbered his own powers, his need to fly. She had detached herself from him at the correct moment. She had, in the new lingo Constance was learning, broken the transfer at the fruitful moment to set him free. No
Sons and Lovers
would ever be written about
him
, she reflected. He had bathed in the mother flow, his flesh was sated and at peace – hence the sexual magnetism which those lazy brown limbs held for her. He had a skin of velvet because he had once been correctly, sensually loved as she, in some miraculous fashion, had also been. They were made for each other, their sensibilities mixed like dyes! “O! Stop
gloating!”
she told her reflection in the old pier-glass – she had become solicitous for her beauty and now made up carefully each morning and evening, lest he look elsewhere! When, however, she asked Aubrey whether her beloved did not look like Donatello’s David, he had irritated her by replying in that negligent, weary, Oxonian manner, “Everyone sees himself or herself as somebody quite different. Hence the confusion because everyone is acting a part. He sees you as Iseult, whereas you are really Catherine of Russia. You see him as David, but I see only the eternal British schoolboy in love, elated because he is undressing his mother.” She was furious. “Damn you!” she said and went on doggedly making up while he tried to shave in one corner of the great mirror with equal doggedness. The royal steam-yacht sent by Farouk signalled its arrival at Marseille, prepared to carry the Prince to Alexandria. Blanford called on him at his hotel in Avignon in order to find out what plans he had made for the journey and found the little man hastily wrapping up his treasures and distributing them about the numerous cabin trunks with their brilliant filigree-worked Turkish designs in leafy gold – he must have inherited them from some Khedival ancestor. At the door stood the outsize remover’s van which housed the larger effects of the Prince – his chairs and folding tables (he gave numerous bridge parties); a couple of palm trees in tubs; opulent vases and gold plate and the two peregrine falcons. He showed Blanford round all these items with evident pleasure. But he did not propose to get on the move for a day or two. Asked if there were any special clothes which might be
de rigueur
for the new post he said in an offhand way, “The Princess will kit you out. Just come with one
tenue de ville
and a tie so I can introduce you respectably. Later on you’ll need some shark-skin dinner jackets, I suppose. But I know where to get them cheap for you in Alex. Here, look at this.” He produced a large scarlet velvet-covered hat-box, the kind a conjuror might carry about, or an actor. It was a sort of oriental wig-box, in fact, but inside it there was a shrunken human head, a male head, coated heavily in resin but with the eyes open. Blanford was startled. “Good Lord!” he said, and the Prince chuckled appreciatively at his reaction. “It’s the head of a Templar; it comes from the Commanderie in Cyprus – I had it traced when I bought it in the Cairo Souk. The Museum wanted it, but I thought it would make such a nice present for Lord Galen that I brought it to offer and please him.…” He paused on a note of dismay. “But, you know, he is so superstitious that he refused it; he is afraid to have the Eye put on him. Specially as he is hunting for the treasure of this Order – or rather Quatrefages is hunting for it, for him. So I’ll take it back. If I tell the Egyptians that it is a Prophesying Head my enemies will go pale. Egyptians are just as superstitious as you English, more so.”

He popped the cover of the silk-lined hat-box with its grisly remnant and ordered his servant Hassan to wrap it up softly in tissue paper and convey it to the wagon with all the other effects. “Phew! It is hot,” he said, fanning himself with a reed fan of brilliant hue. “Egypt will be a furnace still. Never mind. Sit down, my dear boy, and let me tell you a funny joke. Laughter makes one cooler, and Hassan will bring us some jasmine tea and some crystallised fruit. You laughed, remember, when I told you about the Egyptians throwing up their clothes and showing their private parts as a greeting,
n’est-ce pas?”
Blanford said, “Indeed. It sounds delightful.” The Prince, whose mind slipped from perch to perch, from branch to branch, like a bird, suddenly was diverted by a twinge of rheumatism in one of his fingers. “This damned arthritis deformans,” he cried, and started to tug at the joints until they cracked aloud. When he had done he resumed his theme. “About the greeting I can tell you a funny tale which makes Egyptians laugh – it shows that we are not devoid of humour. It concerns Sir Charles Polk, the last British Ambassador. This fashion of greeting so worked upon his mind and upon his imagination that he became an insomniac. I have it from the Embassy doctor, Hassim Nahd. Poor man, if he slept he always dreamed that the peasants were greeting him in this way, and he had an irresistible impulse to throw down his trousers and return their greeting! It put him in a fever of anxiety, Hassim was all the time prescribing sedatives, but to no avail. Then one day the blow fell. London told him that the King had decided on a state visit to Egypt and that he even proposed to travel the whole length of the Nile. Sir Charles had to start making all the necessary arrangements. Naturally the Palace offered him the classic old steamer
Memphis
which had always served for this kind of state journey. The problems were not insoluble. Or rather there was only one that stuck out – if I may use the phrase without indelicacy. It was the traditional greeting. It is a long way up the river, and there are thousands upon thousands of peasant
felaheen —
in fact for such an event they would probably line both banks solid. Poor Sir Charles went pale as he thought of what might happen. He tried to reason Whitehall out of the visit, but no, it was deemed both advisable and apt on political grounds.” The Prince gave a tiny snort or chuckle and, banging his knee softly, went on, “One imagines the dilemma of poor Sir Charles. What should he do? Well, you can say what you like about the British public servant, but there is nobody like him for probity and unflinching devotion to duty. He explained his position and offered his resignation. The thought of exposing his Sovereign to such an outrage had been too much. The F.O. was so impressed by his dignity and firmness that he was transferred at once with promotion to Moscow, while the Egyptian trip duly took place under the aegis of a Chargé d’Affaires, who was afterwards put on the shelf and held
en disponibilité
for nearly ten years until all was forgotten. I sometimes see old Charles in London and we talk over old times; but I never ask him what the unusual peasant greeting is in Russia!”

With such pleasant exchanges the morning wore on until the mayor called for the usual pre-prandial glass of
pastis
which enabled him to resume the state of the world for the benefit of the Prince. He, the mayor, was in constant touch with Paris and with every bulletin of news or rumour things seem to be deteriorating further. It must end in war and yet …
“Drôle de guerre,”
said the mayor, quoting the current slogan of the day. “They will never attack us, for they know that the French army is the best in the world. It would be madness. And then the line, the Maginot line!” On such ephemeral delusions they based their hopes for peace. “They have given us some air-raid sirens,” went on the mayor with pride, “and today the
pompiers
are going to have a rehearsal at three o’clock. Do not be afraid when you hear them. It will only be for a few minutes. But we must be prepared for anything with the modern aeroplane.” There was so much sunlight on the terrace and so much laziness in the air that they had the greatest difficulty in treating this sort of conversation with the seriousness it deserved. Blanford lunched at the hotel with the Prince and afterwards they sauntered across the glowing town and climbed the Rocher de Doms, the sharp spur from the platform of which it was possible to see the even sharper snout of Mont St. Victoire raising its dogged crest, bare and mistral-tormented. There was no snow now, of course, but the cold afternoon mistral had furrowed the green Rhône and bent the bushes and cypresses on the dry garrigues around them. They spent a while looking down on the town with its brown pie-crust roofs and its crooked dark streets. Suddenly the sirens started to wail, and in spite of themselves they were both startled – the more so because a real plane passed over the town in slow gyres. “One of ours, I hope!”