The Avignon Quintet (103 page)

“Is beauty no help, then, in healing?”

“It’s a great hindrance; it’s only in loving that Beauty is a help, in my opinion. And when you are dealing with science there is no place for it.”

All three men echoed the word “Science!”

“Yes,” she said defiantly, “Science!” Affad lit another cheroot and murmured, “In an ideal world science should be love!” He stared curiously at the girl; she had a way of concentrating her eyes as she stooped to a shot which fairly made them shine with blueness. “But you will still be connected with medicine,” he said, “even if you take the Red Cross posting, no?” She nodded and said, “In a sense. But it’s purely administrative – distributing medicines and food. What a relief that will be! But first I must go and see for myself.”

“A descent into the pit,” said Toby dramatically. “I hope nothing goes wrong.”

“What could go wrong?” But Toby shook his head and did not answer. In truth he hardly knew. Constance, when she thought of this journey with the Prince, felt a sudden little wave of exultant excitement. It must have been, she reflected, much the same for Sam when he put on his uniform and let a train carry him away towards a war. It was stupid, of course, but one could not help it.

She was meeting the Prince for dinner that evening in the old Hotel Orion where he was always pleased to lodge because of the mirrors. “Wherever you turn, wherever you look,
there you are!”
he said exultantly. “Sometimes you are taken by surprise because you didn’t know you were there, but you
were;
and then sometimes people can watch you without you knowing, or you can watch them. When one is alone there is nothing like a lot of mirrors to make you happy!” He busily counted the number of his reflections as he attacked the smoked salmon. Constance followed suit, wondering how long the Swiss would manage to live in such luxury, ringed about as they were with battlefields. “When do we set off?” she said and the Prince replied, “Tomorrow afternoon. Remember, no very heavy baggage as we have to change trains at the frontier and walk with our valises. And wear the grey uniform with the markings. I thought of abolishing my tarboosh for fear of being shot at or taken for a spy, but I think on the whole it’s better to stay natural even though distinctive! And after all we are to be met. And then, finally, we are
only
staying for ten days or so initially, eh?”

“Very well,” she said, and returned home to pack her exiguous possessions which included stout walking shoes and tweeds and a heavy overcoat, for the season was late, and despite the marvellous summer the winter was upon them. Then, as she tested her two little valises for weight, she felt some of the excitement wear off, to be replaced with a mixture of curiosity tinged with dread. It was not necessarily going to be specially tough – just different, that was all: or so she told herself. Her taxi brought her to the station at the prescribed time, just as the Red Cross car drew to a halt with the Prince sitting upright in the back. He waved gaily.

After many a delay they were shown to an unheated train which promised them ample discomfort. It went slowly, too, and the Prince, a true Egyptian, groaned as they mounted into the snowy alpine passes on the way to the frontier. He worked his toes in his polished boots. Their breath turned to spume, whitening the air; they shrank into their coats and buried their hands in their pockets. “Well, we mustn’t complain,” he said with an attempt at cheerfulness. “Nobody invited us.” This was somewhat obvious, for apart from their own presence aboard there were no other civilians – everybody else had an apparent function. There were a few railway officials, some police and soldiers, and a
douanier
in bright uniform. Moreover their speed was funereal – it was as if they feared an ambush or explosives planted on the line. Soldiers swarmed in the countryside, and the signals seemed heavily guarded. And so at last, somewhere at the level of Culoz, with its double helix of line, the train came to a halt and all the lights went out. This was apparently the temporary frontier. The uniforms changed with the language and everything became much louder and more imperative.
“Schnell!”
cried voices, and feet trampled the dark confines of the railway sheds. Their hearts sank, it was so dark. They had to navigate by the light of lanterns and torches and to carry their baggage for several hundred yards of dark permanent way; then at last round a bend they came upon the new French side, a brightly lit station full of soldiers and officials. There were long wooden forms in a customs shed, presided over by officials and soldiers, aided by a group of French Fascist Milice, looking sinister and depraved in their dirty mackintoshes with distinguishing brassards ornamented by swastikas. Eyeing them with distaste the Prince said, under his breath, “When the sewers are flooded up come the rats!” It was most apposite, for the swarthy line of faces, insolent and rapacious, were indeed rat-like. Their papers were scrutinised with an insulting thoroughness; as if these riff-raff were trying to memorise their very passport photographs. After this they entrained once more and this time they had a carriage to themselves, albeit once more unheated. After another delay they moved off into the night, but with an elaborate stealth, and with no lights on, sometimes drawing to a halt, sometimes accelerating: the whole impression created was one of indecision, as if they were now travelling through unmapped country in which anything might happen. Around them spread the white snowscapes of this winter land – they dared not hope for more clement conditions much before Valence where the olives of the French Midi began. It was eerie. Aloft there was a dazed-looking moon. It looked as if it had been bled white. Constance dozed, or tried to do so, while the Prince produced a pocket torch and a thriller and proceeded to read for a bit, nibbling at a ginger biscuit the while. “I am trying to put myself into a good mood,” he said. “One
must!”

It was the right attitude, at any rate, and she tried to compose her mind to influence the quality of her sleep. She was in a bad humour, though, and obscurely enough this passing irritation had been provoked by the fact that at the frontier she had heard a group of French soldiers, but regular ones for all their grubby disarray, discussing with great earnestness whether snails were tastier if simply roasted, or whether a sauce improved them. It was so very French that it made her want to laugh and swear at one and the same time! The French attitude!

“Tell me more about Affad,” she said.

“He’s a strange fellow, a queer fellow,” said the Prince, thinking with great rapidity like a bird, his ideas beating in his breast – but at the same time remaining absolutely motionless on his branch, so to speak. He was seeing his friend “in his mind’s eye”, as the saying goes. “You see, his wife’s mother was a friend of ours, still is, in fact, an old school-friend of my wife. It is she who lives here in Geneva and looks after the little boy. She has a vast house on the lake and is still very beautiful, tall and dark like a statue, and never speaking, just huge dark eyes. Affad was between the two Lilies, as we used to say, to tease him. Both mother and daughter were called Lily: there was no father, it was something of a scandal at the time. But they were absolutely alike, both dark and statuesque and unspeaking, with the power of looking at you as if they looked down a well. Uncomfortable, their silence and their regard. First he was friends with Lily the mother; he says she often used to ring the bell of his flat and when the servant let her in would come into the sitting-room and stand by the fireplace looking at him, never saying a word. Sometimes she lit a cigarette and smoked thoughtfully for a moment, but silently. Then, as if a new impulse stirred in her, she turned and left the room, just as unsmiling, just as vague. He got used to these visits, but they hardly exchanged greetings even. It was uncanny, he said. Then he met the daughter Lily and to everyone’s surprise he married her. She was a striking beauty like her mother, severe as an Egyptian goddess, selfish as madness but of great purity and justness. Many men were after her, but she was unaware. One day in her hearing Affad said something like: ‘There is a certain kind of independence in piety,’ and the remark – I’m not sure it’s right, but something of the kind – had an extraordinary effect on her. She fell hopelessly in love with him. I repeat what he told me. It was at a crowded cocktail party. She said to him, as if to confirm her bursting heart, ‘Would you say those words again, please?’ and he did. So she stayed with him, true as a magnet until the break. That is how our Egyptian women are – tuned to the mind like feathers.”

“And the child?” she asked with curious sympathy. “Where is he?”

“Here. That is why Affad comes so regularly to the place. The boy has the same eyes as his mother, indeed also as his grandmother. Lily’s eyes, violent deep eyes, wounded eyes, they burn in his little head like suns, Constance, like suns.”

He paused for a moment, deep in thought, caught in an abstraction of memory as he re-enacted these scenes in his mind and tried to evaluate them.

He went on: “In English poetry they say ‘orbs’ for eyes – yes, that is what he has, two black
orbs!”
The word took on an extraordinary colour as he rolled it out. “I think they all hoped that some medical treatment might cure him, something new like your analysis, whatever that is.… But so far nothing has.
Orbs
!” he repeated, thrilling to the sound.

“Analysis!” she quoted hopelessly, overcome by the realisation of her professional helplessness. It worked in such a limited field, this cherished analysis of theirs. You could only reach a certain depth; after that your penetration was compromised and involuntarily you began to invent, you began to start reading in Braille; distortion set in. The vision grew turbid. Limits were reached, the ship grounded on hidden reefs. Intellectual insolvency set in – the so-called cure was really only a promissory note. “It would not work,” she said, “that is not the sort of thing to do any good.”

“It is like a culmination of the two women’s speechlessness, his … what d’you call it? Yes, autism. O dear, such sorrow we have all had for poor Affad, such sadness when you thought about his reality. At first they seemed to have found a unique relationship, they drifted about like clouds together. They gave the impression that they thought the same thoughts, even that their breathing synchronised. It is a long time now and he has recovered his calm, I suppose. But he still comes here to see about the boy. He told me that before going to the house he goes down to the Corniche – he knows the hour – to watch the great black car pass along the lake. Lily takes the boy for a short drive every afternoon, still looking sincere and beautiful, without a crumb of discontent, staring ahead of her just as the child does. He sits beside her in his sailor suit from Harrods with H.M.S.
Milton
lettered on the hat. You see what I mean? Once he took me to watch them pass. Afterwards he asked me what I thought and I did not know what to answer. What was the sense of his question, I wondered? The boy’s eyes were full of energy, he seemed to see everything, he turned from side to side. Why would he never speak? Affad told me that only once did he hear Lily – the mother – take the initiative and speak before a crowd of people. That was at the theatre during a performance of
Phèdre
. She all at once stood up very gravely and raised her hand, crying out in a deep hoarse voice, yet calmly: ‘No! It must stop. It is too much.’ Then, turning round just as calmly, she left the theatre with her hands over her ears. People are so strange, don’t you think? Her beauty was phenomenal and her gravity was like a charm, it silenced people.” Constance found herself dozing at last.

The train jogged on across the snowlit fields with the sleeping girl and the reading Prince. They trailed through Grenoble which was in darkness, and thus down into the plains which led them onward towards Valence. It was late when they finally drew into the silent and empty station. The city around them was asleep, though here and there shone sporadic lampbulbs in tenement rooms. By now, too, they were tired, and hardly realised that the train was no longer moving. Indeed the dawn was breaking when once more things started to warm up again. A covey of grey soldiers clanked down the platform at the double with their equipment and embarked, but in absolute silence, which seemed to them very singular. But now, as if stimulated by the new arrivals, the train gathered speed and in the icy dawn they found themselves running through a countryside as yet untouched by the snow, along the Rhône of “hallowed memory”: the catch-phrase came into her mind as she watched it gliding beside them, and recalled their own youthful descent of the river – now it seemed a century ago. The willows, the fortresses, the vines – they were all still there, then? It seemed inconceivable. The consciousness of distance and separation suddenly afflicted her with a pang of sorrow for that last memorable summer. Superficially, then, nothing had changed, Provence was just as it had always been.

As if to celebrate the cold sunrise in an appropriate way the Prince produced a thermos flask of hot coffee and poured her a cup. It was delicious, as were the ginger biscuits which he always carried with him against emergencies. “How clever of you to think of it,” she said. “Like a fool I imagined there would be drinks and sandwiches available.” She had somehow not associated war with shortages, she realised; yet it was obvious. “I shall have a good deal to learn, I can see,” she told herself, settling more deeply into her overcoat. Thank goodness for the sunlight on the plains, glinting among the mulberries and the olives. But her education in war was not complete – there was more to come.

Some way before their destination they came upon an old-fashioned railway viaduct which spanned the line, and gazing absently up at it she saw, turning in slow evolution at the gusty tugs of mistral, six faraway swinging forms which some part of herself instantly recognised as human. They had been suspended from the iron balustrades which spanned the viaduct arch, and then allowed to tumble into the void beneath. Brought up short with a jolt, they must have endured a brief moment of agonising discomfort before paying the price for whatever offence it was that they had committed. They lay there against the sky, hanging from the reddish spars of the old viaduct like dolls, turned by the wind as if on a slow spit. Their heads were set crookedly enough on their shoulders so that they looked like quizzical members of a Greek chorus, or else perhaps like strange birds. Their presence there, so high in the air, served as an elaborate warning – but for whom and against what? Once she had seen dead magpies nailed to a barn door with a similar intention. She felt cold. “Look!” she cried sharply on an imperative note and the Prince looked, studying them for a long moment before saying, “Signs and portents of the master race! Six human beings!” To himself he thought, “Their long quibble with reality, circumstance, contingency is over, and so quickly and direly! A small, small click, a tiny bone displaced.” Suddenly he felt very old and very vulnerable. He went to the window and watched the swaying figures intently, following them until they went out of sight, as if to steep himself in the notion of war, the reality of war. “I see the Germans have made themselves quite at home,” he said bitterly and took up her hand to kiss it before sitting down once more. They fell into a gloomy silence which was only broken when the engine shrieked and slowed down – they had reached the station of Avignon, their destination.