The Avignon Quintet (97 page)

The potations of mid-morning, however, were different, consisting of hot grogs with brown sugar (despite the muggy climate) in a vain attempt to defeat the chronic bronchitis they shared, the result of smoking too many Celtiques – the
tabac gris
of over-run France. This affliction rendered the morning cacophonous, due to a joint symphony of coughing so violent that it brought the Swiss couples who lived below out on to the landing, wondering if they should call for help. Sutcliffe imitated a young cat being tried for size, Goddard a surly Turkish porter being mauled by a bear. Sometimes they united to imitate the national anthems of various nations, or else to repeat in musical coughs the phrase
“Le docteur Schwarz est un pot de chambre”
. Schwarz was the analyst who had fled from Vienna carrying with him his choicer and richer patients – for not all could find the money to move with him. (Sutcliffe’s overdraft did not bear thinking upon.) It was Schwarz who had been bitten by a paranoid patient and granted a month’s leave to recover and attend to his infected ear-lobe. “Such are the love-bites analysts receive,” commented Sutcliffe bitterly to Constance when she answered the phone. “I wish my wife would react as positively.” But Constance was not there to be made fun of; she turned the jest coldly aside, saying, “I will certainly see you if you wish for any information. I am abreast of the dossier, but I am only standing in for Dr. Schwarz, holding the fort. I am not treating her, though I have established contact with her and had several talks. You may come at ten tomorrow.” She was disposed to be rather priggish, and received a rather unfavourable impression of him due to his dirty fingernails and lack of physical spruceness. Sutcliffe was intimidated by her beauty, but had only the faintest idea of who she was. Then came an accidental reference to Blanford in the conversation and she saw his eyes widen. “Goodness!” he cried and sat staring at her. “You must be Constance, the other sister.”

“Then who are you?” asked Constance with hesitation, for a sort of feeling of familiarity had begun to grow up inside her, vague as a cloud. His name fell with a thud upon her ear. “It’s not true!” she exclaimed. But it was, it was he. They sat silent for a long moment, staring at one another, and then she began to talk rapidly, erratically, still not quite sure of her man. But the sofa of Freud clinched the matter – for she had seen his name on the invoice. “So after all you are real!” Sutcliffe laughed and said, “Everybody is real.”

It was a crazy thing to say, if you were someone who did not believe in fairies, but then he was given to immoderate optimism when in the presence of beauty, to which he remained forever susceptible. But he smarted under her coolness, he found her a right bitch and he told Toby so.
“Une garce,”
he said, preferring the French word with the broad vowel sound spread like legs: like those satisfactory words and phrases he treasured –
“gâtisme ou le relâchement des sphincters”
.

His friend looked at him with interest and asked, “Why are you so much up on end?”

Sutcliffe replied soberly, gravely, “I am sure that Aubrey will end up in love with her and I understand why. It’s those sea-green eyes and the snow tan. But she’s a real Swiss prig.”

“But she’s English.”

“She’s both: a double priggery.”

She had initially refused to meet him on social terms, outside the consulting-room, and he supposed this to be a question of medical etiquette, mixed with the evident distaste she seemed to feel for his company. So he was surprised when she telephoned to his office and said in her rapid, rather strained way, “I feel I was rather uncivil to you, and probably hurt your feelings; I am sorry if it is so. I would like to repent and also accept your kind invitation to a drink. This evening, if you wish.” He was both elated and nonplussed by the sudden change of wind. “Good,” said Toby when informed, “if she’s medical she might give us some tips about geriatric aid. I am putting up feebler and feebler performances with the typists’ pool. Little Miss Farthingale is languishing, and I am heartily ashamed of the poor motility of my product. The damn stuff can hardly swim, it turns over on its back and floats. The girls are right to protest.” Sutcliffe clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “We can’t ask her that. You will just have to live with your humiliation, Toby. But come to think of it, why don’t you try a Diplomat’s Aid?”

“What’s that, may I ask?”

“Get a nice thick office rubber band and make a tourniquet for your closest friend; place it rather high up and fairly tight. It will work wonders. I learned it from the little Indian typist. She says that in the Foreign Office …”

Toby was elated by this information and unearthing a series of rubber bands from his briefcase he retired to the lavatory in order to find something suitable for his troubled circumstances. Sutcliffe walked down to the lake to meet the ferry, for he despaired of anyone finding the little bar, just on a set of telephoned instructions. It was tea-time and the day was fine. Constance waved to him from the deck and he replied.

She was not at her best, she looked tired and strained. Indeed her general appearance, for a girl who liked to be well turned out, bordered on the unkempt; her white mackintosh was not too clean and a missing top button had been replaced by a safety pin. Her hair had been badly cut and was all puppy dog’s tails. The truth was that she was still in a state of semi-shock, almost collapse, due to the news of Sam’s death. It was simply amazing – for they had both imagined that they were strong enough to face up to such an eventuality, that the life-giving power of their magnetic love would resist even this sort of separation. Love makes you naive, she realised it now; they had been acting a part, the part of two golden immortals from some romantic opera. Now here they were, under the wheels of the Juggernaut – or rather, she was; in a sense he had escaped and left her to gather up the remains of the thought “death”. No, that was not all, for some days after the news she had received to her surprise one brief letter duly transmitted by the Army Post Office to the Consulate. It had made an elaborate journey, the voice of her dead “husband”. Yes, all of a sudden the word had resonance, an old-fashioned gravity and pith. The whole of her small apartment by the lake seemed impregnated with it. That is why she had taken to sleeping at her office in the clinic, on a camp bed against the further wall.

Everything, even her work, seemed suddenly insipid; the chance collision with Sutcliffe now filled her with conflicting emotions. She wanted to avoid talking about Sam with half of her: with the other half she realised that it might help her to find her way out of this temporary numbness, the way back into life. So here he came, patient as an old dog, to ask for news of the pale slender girl, who was now sliding away down the long slopes of melancholia which would lead only to mania.

“I should not visit her at the moment. She will only start wringing her hands and weeping again – all day long.”

“But you know as well as I do, she holds me responsible for everything, and it is not fair.”

She shook her head. “Nothing is fair with the insane.” Sutcliffe placed his hands on the top of his head like King Lear and said, “I destroyed her dolls. How could I have been such a fool?” But the trouble went deeper than that, much deeper.

“The negress calls every day, and with her she seems a little better. They play noughts and crosses.”

“It’s appropriate to the day and age,” he said bitterly. “Indeed when one sees the state of the world one wonders why one should call her back to it – supposing we could.”

Before going to join Toby in the bar they walked a while in the gardens which border the lakeside and she told him of Blanford’s wound, which made him, rather unaccountably, chuckle.

“I must get in touch with him again,” he said, nothing more. But when she mentioned Sam’s death – as a therapeutic measure in order to take its pulse, so to speak – he looked at her with sympathy and a certain rough affection. “It’s just the beginning,” he said. “Have you seen what they have reserved for the Jews?” Who had not? “Anyway,” she said, “Freud is safely away even though all the books are lost; but copies exist here, thank goodness.” He looked at her with interest and said, “Did you know him?” She nodded and smiled, as if at the memory of a pleasant and rich meeting. Indeed it had been the great turning-point in her life and she was prepared to defend the old philosopher to the death. Sensing this, Sutcliffe was prepared to tease her a little; under his breath he sang a stave of “Dear old Pals” in an amended version.

“Dear old Fraud, jolly old Fraud,

We’ll be together whatever the weather.”

“O cut it out,” she said, “I am sure you don’t believe it.” He grinned, for he did not. “I got to know him quite well,” he said, “and he was no humbug. He gave me several interviews and outlined his system with great elegance and modesty. He emphasised its limits. He gave me half a dozen consultations on the couch to show me how the thing worked, which was jolly decent. The thing is it doesn’t – not for anything really serious, anything like psychosis.”

“He never pretended it did.”

“But Schwarz did, and it is his messing about that aggravated the condition of my wife; but that’s not your affair, I suppose, since you are only a locum.”

“Well, I can’t pronounce on his cases,” she said with the light of battle in her eye. “But I am glad you met Freud himself.”

“He was very amusing with his Jewish moneylender touch. I teased him a bit about love being an investment – invested libido. But the old darling was serious. Jews can never see themselves from the outside. They are astonished when you say that they are this or that. They are naive, and so was he, very much so. The way his hand came out for the money at the end of the hour, when the clock struck, was a scream. I asked him if he would take a cheque but he said, ‘What? And declare it to the Income Tax?’ He insisted on cash and when he put it in his pocket he shuffled it until it tinkled, which put him in a great good humour. He looked just like Jules Verne at such moments; indeed there was a sort of similarity of imagination between the two fantasists. Anyway the idea amused him for he had read and admired Jules Verne. But when I told him that the whole of his system was a money-making plant, to be paid for just listening, and by the hour, he chuckled. ‘People want to suffer,’ he said, ‘and we must help them. It’s the decent thing to do. It’s not only Jews who like money, you know. Besides, the hand-to-hand payment is an essential part of the treatment. You feel the pinch or the pain in your infantility.’”

Constance mistrusted the depth of his knowledge in the clinical sense. It was one thing to talk all round a subject in terms of philosophy; it was quite another to adapt it to a therapy. “I am boring you,” he said, and she shook her head. “No, I was thinking of other things, of that whole period when I started medicine. Tell me more.”

Sutcliffe, when they had retired to the bar once more, called for drinks and said, “There is little more to tell. I was with him for such a short time – sufficient however to foster a great respect. The biggest pessimist since Spinoza. For the last session I brought him the fee in coin of the smallest possible denomination. I had a little leather bag with a drawstring round the mouth, which I filled with farthings or their equivalent. He was quite surprised when I presented it and told him that it was his fee. ‘Good Lord,’ he said with a laugh, ‘you’ve got diarrhoea!’”

Toby drew on his pipe and listened with half an ear; he was not really abreast of the subject and knew little of the personalities under discussion, but Sutcliffe seemed well enough informed. “And then we left Vienna, and old Fraud moved back to his flat to a new consulting room, abandoning his gloomy rooms and the old couch where she had set out all the elements of our married life like someone sets up toy soldiers for a battle, or dolls for a picnic. But when I spoke to the old boy about us he simply shook his head and said, ‘The story of narcissism is always the same story.’ I felt an absurd temptation to weep for myself and wring my hands, but to what end? He told me that I must sublimate the distress in a book, which God knows I have been trying to do from the very beginning – even before I felt the distress, so to speak. I have from early adolescence suffered from
Schmerz, Angst
, and for good measure piles. My first publisher gave me an advance to write a cookery book about Egyptian food. I was wild with joy and took ship for Egypt at once. But the very first meal I had – there was a French letter in the salad. And things have gone on like that ever since.” Under the rather lame banter she felt the massive depression and the stress. In his rough lumbering manner she found something comforting and helpless; he was like an old blind bear tied to a post. For her own part she had her own share of distress to cope with; she realised that she did not want to go back to her cold sterile little flat with its over-flowing bookshelves and undone washing-up. Since she had received the letter from Sam she had suddenly taken it into her head to flee across the lake; at least at the clinic she had the company of other consultants and nurses, while even the presence of the insane all round her seemed to afford a paradoxical sort of comfort. But now the evening was drawing on and Toby had a dinner engagement. He bowed himself away with solemnity, hoping to have the pleasure once more … The seventeenth-century sentiments became his vast form very well, he was made for awkward bows and gawkish scrapings. That left Sutcliffe. She thought: “It must be strange to exist only in somebody’s diary, like Socrates – we only have Plato’s word for his existence.”

He was thinking: “And this book which I have always had in deep soak, when will it be finished? When I stop breathing? But the idea behind this furtive activity has always been that ideal book – the titanic do-it-yourself kit,
le roman appareil
.