The Avignon Quintet (84 page)

Had things been different, Blanford thought, what a pleasure it would have been to saunter away an evening thus in the sunny city, watching the pigeons turning and hovering among the soaring belfries, gossiping about nothing very consequential, just unpacking their idle minds of their dreams and thoughts.… But one felt guilty of enjoying such a luxury with the world coming apart at the seams.

Hilary unexpectedly joined them in the main square for a companionable
tisane
of
vervaine
, urged upon them by the Prince. He had not been seen all day at Tu Duc because he had come in to attend early Mass at the Grey Penitents. Now he was deeply despondent, though he tried to hide it – a mood brought on by a long talk to the curé who had assured him that France would not lift a finger to fight and would be over-run whenever the Germans wished. It was all the fault of the Jews, he had added, with all their infernal radicalism. Hitler was right. France was
pourrie jusqu’à la moelle
– rotten to the marrow with it. Hilary sighed and lit another cigarette. “A young Jewish couple committed suicide in the Princes Hotel last night, so the tobacconist told me. They were refugees from Berlin. Very young, too. He heard the shots.”

They took leave of the Prince, who promised to get in touch with Blanford the moment he had made up his mind when, if ever, he was going to move. Walking past the tall doors of the Museum, Blanford peeped into the courtyard and instantly felt an almost physical blow upon his heart, so vivid was the memory of Livia standing there. In the half light of dawn she had recited a line of Goethe in her “smiling voice”. He walked on now to overtake Hilary, thinking to himself, “What beautiful wind-washed days we lived this summer. I feel like an old king whose favourite cup-bearer is dead.” For he knew that it was definitive, her departure, and that though they might meet again they would never again live together. The thought was not unmixed with gratitude, for hers had been the kind of magnetism which matures men. He closed his eyes for a second and saw her turn the corner ahead of him. She had learned to walk like a Roman slave – that is how he put it to himself – and turning a corner she would keel and hesitate, like a hawk about to stoop. Hilary started to hum a tune from
Bitter Sweet
, and because the melody moved him Blanford hummed in unison, to disguise his emotion. So they strode over the famous bridge towards the hillocks and the winding road which led to the domain of Constance, who at that moment was aiding Sam in the business of stuffing pimientos with forcemeat and garlic against the evening meal.

After they had walked in friendly silence almost to the gates of the old house Hilary said, putting his hand on Aubrey’s wrist, “I don’t want to pry, Aubrey, but what the devil were you tearing up last night? It lasted ages, like in Chekov.”

“Aptly said,” replied his friend with a sardonic downturn of the mouth. “In fact old notebooks, bits and pieces. I wanted to clear the decks before leaving.” He paused, and then went on a trifle defensively, “Even a bit of a novel. I invented a man I called Sutcliffe – for lack of anything better – and he became altogether too real. He started following me about like gravity, as well as riding on my back like the Old Man of the Sea. I had to stop!” Hilary laughed. “I see,” he said. “You should have left them to the Museum. The papers, I mean.”

They turned the last corner to find Blaise the carter standing proudly outside the house, on the balcony steps, chatting to Constance and Sam, for he had come up from the station to deliver the old leather sofa which had been sent them for safe-keeping by Pia.
It had arrived!
It was covered in a clumsy skin of thick brown paper. Constance gazed at Aubrey with narrowed eyes and said accusingly, “I thought you told me Sutcliffe was invented.” She held the end of the invoice which contained the name of the sender. “We will see about that later,” said Blanford evasively. Together they picked up the shabby object and placed it in the conservatory among the palms, where it looked not inappropriate. Blaise did not take part in this, but stood and coughed on the balcony until the girl came back with a tray full of brimming
pastis
glasses. This cough of his was no stage effect – he had been gassed in the 1914 war. Constance had managed to secure the services of his wife as a cleaner as well as laundress, which was a great help to them.

So they all chatted awhile in the course of which, inevitably, the subject of the war rose again to the surface. “The President spoke last week
– quel con!”
said Blaise without undue animosity. “He has never seen what war is. He spoke of freedom!” It was the usual mental rigmarole without any form of pith – how could there be any in a country where the leaders themselves were so confused and so pusillanimous? As for freedom … The Prince had indeed remarked at Lord Galen’s dinner table, “Freedom is an evanescent thing – you only remark it by its absence, but you can’t define it. That is why the British refuse to understand us Egyptians with our desire for freedom. We will make a mess of things, no doubt, but it will be an Egyptian mess, our own personal mess – and what a mess it will be! But an Egyptian mess!” He had raised his head proudly and gazed fondly around him.

Sam set about undoing the string and tearing off the wrappings in which the old couch was swathed. “It’s Emily Brënte’s sofa,” he said. “No,” said Hilary, “guess again.” Constance said, “No more impiety, please. It’s the chair of prophecy, the sofa of divination. I shall spend the afternoon reading my psycho-whatsit pamphlets upon it and praying for guidance.”

Blanford had collected a Poste Restante letter from a school-friend, bookish like himself, who furnished a bewildering description of a Paris not so much frivolous about the war as totally unbelieving in its reality. “Sitting at the Dôme you feel that it simply
cannot
take place, not in this century, after all we’ve seen. Yet the danger gives a strange unreality to everything—the quality of amnesia. Actions become automatic. Look, sitting here on the
terrasse
I am watching the evolutions of some hirsute porters in uniforms trying to hoist an appalling statue of Balzac by Rodin on to a pedestal; finally they have waddled it up, like a penguin on to an ice-floe, where it will soon be almost invisible because of foliage; this week it is the turn of Georges Sand whose bust will appear in the Luxembourg accompanied by speeches which give one gooseflesh. Such rhetoric! Yet so highly appropriate for a people which can solemnly put a notice
Défense d’uriner
on the railings outside the Chambre des Députés! They are the true inheritors of the Anc. Gk. sense of civic anarchy.… And yet, like a douche of icy water, reality suddenly steps in with a
fait divers
like ‘René Crével commits suicide’. (He is a poet friend of mine you don’t know.) I was bemoaning this tragic fact to a painter at the Dôme, but he cut me short, saying:
‘Ce que je lui reproche …
What I reproach in him is that he had good
reasons
for so doing.
C’est pas ça la suicide! C’est pas sérieux!
He has brought suicide into
disrepute!’“

Blaise the carter, rosy as the setting sun, took his leave now, and his cart crunched its way back towards the town. Sam cleaned the paraffin lamps against nightfall and cracked open some packets of candles which they would set up in old saucers on the terrace table. This week Constance and Sam had been elected to perform all those tasks which come under the heading of “fatigue” – and some of the fatigues like the blocked lavatory had been distinctly onerous ones. Sam groaned and swore, but it was rapture to be alone with her. “They lived forever after,” he said as they worked, “in a faultless domestic harmony which gave people quite a turn to see.”

They dined early that eve
– entre chien et loup
as the French say, to indicate a “gloaming” – and afterwards the boys grew restless and elected to go for a swim in the cool waters of the weir, leaving Constance the washing up. Nor did she mind this – she wanted to be alone for a while, and the mechanical actions soothed her and enabled her to think of other things like, for example, those enticing pamphlets, so many of them with their pages uncut, which lay beside her bed. Love had rather got in the way of her studies and she had a bad conscience about the matter. So once she had put everything to rights in the kitchen she went upstairs and secured a couple which she proposed to read there and then, and in the most appropriate of places: the verandah with the conservatory. This involved some juggling with candles to obtain adequate light, but once all was in order, she lay down with a sigh and plunged into the labyrinth of suggestions and speculations which had completely altered her way of looking at things – given her an extraordinary new angle of vision upon people, upon individuals and cultures, upon philosophies and religions. It was as if her mind had been released from its cocoon of accepted verities, released to take wings on this extraordinary adventure into the world of infantile relationships, of demons and gods of the human nursery, and bestiary. God, it made her rage to find how lukewarm everyone was about these matters – the insufferable conceit of the male mind! Sticky old Aubrey blowing hot and cold down his long supercilious Oxford nose; bigoted Hilary; silly Felix …

She read for an hour, listening abstractedly with half an ear to the noise of their laughter, and the splashes as they dived. Then on a sudden impulse she got up, took her pamphlets and a branch of candles, and mounted the stairs to her room, which was now filled with rosy shadows reflected back from the giant old-fashioned cupboard with its full-length mirror. She sat down upon the edge of the bed and arranged her candles upon the floor so that they threw their light forwards and upwards towards her. Then she slipped out of her clothes and sat upon the edge of the bed, stretching her legs to their greatest extent and keenly gazing at the slit between her legs as reflected in the tall mirror. With her hands she spread wide the two scarlet wings of the vulva and stayed thus, staring at this terrible scarlet gash between her white thighs – a horrible gash, as if hacked out by the clumsy strokes of a sabre. Her vagina, her vulva – what a horror to contemplate such a primitive and horrific member! If a man saw this, why, he would go mad with disgust! She gave a small sob such as a bird gives when the shot strikes its breast in mid-flight. “My cunt,” she said in a low voice, still staring at it, “O my God, who could have thought of such a thing?” She was filled with a barbaric terror as she stared at the red gash. He would never stay with her if he should once glimpse this terrible bloody sinus between her two beautiful and shapely legs. She craned back, spreading the scarlet cretinous mouth wider so that it assumed an oval shape with part of the hymeneal net still across – it gaped like a whale in a Breughel painting. Poor Sam! Poor Jonah! She felt quite weak with despair and horror. In her imagination she seized him by the shoulders and clutched him to her while her heart cried out to him: “Hold me, suffocate me, impale me! I am dying of despair. What good can come of poor women with this frightful handicap?” She rose with such impulsiveness – gestures winged with despair – that she overturned the candles and had to plunge after them and set them upright again. She could have wept with vexation, but she thought it would be better not to let herself go so far until he was there to comfort her. Nevertheless she did weep a little so that should he come very late he would see the tears upon her cheek and realise that she had suffered from his absence. He would be very contrite. She would forgive.… She drew a veil over the scene of reconciliation.

At that moment Sam himself was experiencing a wave of despair of roughly the same calibre; a chance remark of Blanford had set it off like a firework. Aubrey had said, in his gloomiest tone: “The power that women have to inflict punishment on men is quite unmanning, quite terrible; they can reduce us to mentally deficient infants with a single glance, make us aware of how shallow our masculine pretensions are. With their intuition they can look right into us and see how feeble and infantile and vain we are. My God, they are really terrifying.” Listening to this wiseacre of twenty Sam felt a sympathetic wave of horror pass through him as he thought how superior Constance was in every way to himself. Yes, what good were men? The role of Caliban was the best they could aspire to! He hated himself when he thought of all her perfections – a whole Petrarchian galaxy of qualities which made her, like Laura, supreme in love. And now they would soon be parted. He jumped to his feet. Here he was wasting valuable seconds talking to these fools when he could have been with her. How like a man! What idiots they were! He took one last plunge and rose panting like a swordfish, with arms extended. How delicious the water was, despite the desperate fate which lay in store for men! How he longed to feel her in his arms once more!
He must try to be worthy of her!
He was so intoxicated by the thought that he fell over a tree stump and ricked his ankle quite severely.

And when he did arrive at the bedroom door it was to find her asleep with the marks of tears upon her cheek. How callous, how thoughtless men were! They were just ogres with a sexual appetite, and apart from that quite unfeeling, brutal, philistine! He crawled into bed with wet hair and snuggled up close to her warm body, stirring now in sleep.

Despite these emotional polarities he was at once soothed by the physical warmth of her, and like a diver immediately plunged back into those refreshing innocent dreams of his early puberty, which always figured, like some mystical
mandala-
shape, in the form of a brilliant green cricket-field upon which the white-clad players, like druids, performed their slow reflective evolutions until the evening bell sounded four from the clock on the pavilion. The deep grass which bordered the field was where the schoolboys lay with their books and cherries. A population of rabbits almost as numerous had stolen to the edge of the field to watch as well. (The same rabbits now on many a secret airfield had tiptoed to the edge of the mown runways to watch the Spitfires as they rehearsed, landing and taking off.)