The Avignon Quintet (12 page)

We agreed to meet at ten in the hall, but I slept so heavily that I did not hear the maid’s knock, and when I did get there it was to find a message from Toby to the effect that he had gone out to the Café Durance for a
croissant
and a cup of coffee. It was not hard to follow in his footsteps and find him there, in the early sunlight, half asleep at a table, gazing with deep affection at his own personal corner of the city, the corner that meant the most to him – the main square. Ah! That romantic square with its horrible Monument des Morts festooned with its mangy tin lions, so typical a fancy! All squared off by the beautiful mature trees sheltering the intimate little fringe of cafés and restaurants where one could dawdle away whole days, whole holidays, whole lifetimes. I can never see it now without seeing the phantom of Piers cross it, limping to the
tabac
for cigarettes with his slight suggestion of wolf-slink; and as often I see Sylvie walking there with him, arm in arm and pressed tight to his side like a scabbard. She had that special walk with him, pressed snug to his side, proudly. In the Greek islands one has seen little seahorses walking like that, innocent sensual and upright … My friend was dozing; or rather he was in the benign stupor which overcame him always in his favourite city. “Ah! Avignon!” he said quietly, as much to the sky as to me. So one might have exclaimed “Ah! Childhood!” Today was just one day added to a long tapestry of days woven by memory. At every time, and in every season, he had known the town, by summer and winter, perhaps better than any of us. For while we had so often been far away Toby had spent several months each year working on the documents in the chateau. Piers had put at his disposal an enormous cache of original material which had a bearing on the history of the Templars, the subject of Toby’s
magnum opus
– “a work which will deflower the detestable Professor Babcock, and secure me the throne of medieval studies at Garbo College”. It was to be understood that Babcock held diametrically opposed views about the Templars and their mysterious history. But the old man’s fate was sealed, for the great three-volume work of Toby’s was almost finished, and it made use of much unpublished material which he had found in the muniments room at Verfeuille. Toby as a victim of the historical virus could not look at the town without seeing it historically, so to speak – layer after layer of history laid up in slices, embodied in its architecture. There was no corner of the place which did not conjure up for him delicious reveries, vivid associations.

“Will I see Sylvie?” he asked softly at last, “or would you rather not at the moment?” On the contrary, I said, he was expected and a visit might do a great deal of good. “We can go up this evening if you wish. I only have to telephone Jourdain and let him know.” But at the thought I felt weighed down again by the prehistoric depression caused by her plight – and my own. Here was time running away with us and still we were plagued by these fearful misadventures of the reason and the flesh. Moreover here I was in roughly the state of an orphan – I mean that I had severed all my ties with the outside world and had come here to settle. The few personal possessions I owned were on their way to join me. The crates of books and paintings would not be long delayed. I should soon have to make up my mind about the future – stay here, hobbled by Sylvie’s plight, or go away, somewhere far away, using some medical excuse? Cowardice, I know, but when one is desperate one toys with desperate solutions. Toby suffered from no such doubts. “Of course you will have to go back to Verfeuille now,” he said stoutly, “you can’t leave Sylvie – unless you took her on a long sea voyage or something like that.”

But I hadn’t the strength to undertake a long journey in which I should have to nurse her night and day, with always the danger of a
fugue
staring me in the face, or a complete relapse into something like catatonia. Would I be forced to stay, then? (Walking alone at night, when thoughts won’t sift properly, down dark roads in the rain, in the roaring northern rain which brimmed over the edges of the world I had been over and over the problem of Sylvie. Months of solitary walking.)

I ordered wine. It lay before me, glinting in the sun. It was hardly done to drink Tavel so early in the morning but I could never resist the colour or the taste; Toby, true to form, gulped at an
anisette
. His ample presence comforted me no end. Perhaps I might consider a return to the chateau if he himself were going to stay there and work for a month or two. His company would help to make me acclimatise myself perhaps?

So we sat and watched little scenes from the life of the Midi enacted before our eyes – a delight because they confirmed the unchanging character of the place and its inhabitants. Some workmen were trying to mend the defective machinery of the old Jaquemart without success. At last the little waist-high couple of figurines gave a spasmodic jerk or two and advanced a little in order to strike midday twice – as a pure concession to the workmen it seemed, who were using extremely bad language, and didn’t appear to know how the thing worked. It was a pity. The Jaquemart was one of the prettiest features of the square when they did work – the little man trotting out punctually, to hammer out the hours with his tiny mallet. But from time to time they stuck, and this was at least the third time we had witnessed an attempt to put the machinery to rights, and this time the whole project seemed to be beyond the workmen, for in a while, after a lot of desultory messing about, they started to climb down the tower. They were half way down when, as if in derision, the little figures jerked into their curving trajectory and without prompting struck midday (or midnight). The men shook goodnatured fists at them and shouted expletives.

It was reassuring in its amiable futility, this operation. Clearly the task was beyond them, and a specialist would have to be summoned to deal with the problem. We walked back to the hotel in silence, strangely reassured by this trivial scene, by this cold but benign snatch of sunlight, by the taste of good wine. I rang up Montfavet and spoke to Jourdain. He was quite delighted to hear of Toby’s arrival – as I knew he would be. “She has been speaking about him quite a lot, and complaining that her rooms smell of his tobacco. Let him smoke a pipe tonight as a mark of identification. No; there is no marked change for the time being. What else have I to tell you? Yes, the morgue people have sent me round a plaster cast of Piers’ face, taken by the
médecin-légiste
, or someone assigned by him. I will hand it over to you when you come.”

Things were beginning to sort themselves out – or was that just an illusion born of the friendly presence of Toby and the fact that Piers’ funeral had become an accomplished fact, was over? At any rate I felt much calmer as I spent the morning with Toby walking round the town, visiting the bookshops and he more immediate historical antiquities. He always felt the need to reverify his city, to make sure that it was still there, still insisting on its poetic role in the world which had by now so far outstripped it. We walked and talked regardless of the hours; then returned to our rooms for a short rest before the affairs of the evening. At dusk we jogged up to Montfavet in a
fiacre
, Toby obediently smoking his foul shag in a bull-nosed pipe and speculating on what the future might have in store for us.

Well, she was dressed in rather a haphazard fashion – in a long, old-fashioned hobble skirt and a number of brilliant scarves of different colours and materials. Eccentric, if you like. But she gave her evident disorientation a sort of tropical brilliance, like a bird of paradise.

It was depressing, it hurt, because it was such a close parody of good reason. The capricious evolutions of a child, say. Yet it was not. She seemed to be expecting us or at any rate me – perhaps Jourdain had told her something? At any rate she wore a red velvet carnival
cagoule
through the slits of which her eyes looked at us, unblinking or perhaps glittering with malice. Who can say? “There you are!” she cried, and went on: “There is no need to speculate on my identity,” giving a little gesture which was somehow a forlorn caricature of an imperious one. She was like an amateur actor in a difficult play. Standing up now she said: “After all, it is all mine to do with it whatever I wish, no?” Toby lumbered up to her like a bear saying: “Of course it is,” and took this velvet animal in his arms. “I recognise you,” she said, “because of the smell of your tobacco. And you, too, Bruce.” This was a great encouragement. But it did not change the constraint we felt, I suppose because neither of us quite believed it. Then she surprised and encouraged us by quoting a phrase of her brother’s. “Here comes Toby, with shoes like boats, and a handshake as hot as a busby.” This at least showed that she knew who he was. Laughter. We were both delighted, and Toby, in search of patterns of reminiscence which might, like grooves, familiarise her back into phase, went over to the piano and began to pick out tunes with one finger. This had a surprisingly calming effect: she laughed and clapped her hands, and sitting down at the card table dealt herself a hand of solitaire. The evocation of Verfeuille in winter was perfect. Toby had just returned wet through from a walk in the rain. He sits on one side of the fireplace, literally steaming. On the other side Rob Sutcliffe. Both smoke infernal pipes. Piers lies asleep on the sofa – too much wine at lunch and a late night. The rain swishes down in the park, teems on the window panes, brims the gurgling gutters. Piers sleeps; the two giants argue with acrimony about the Templars. I whittle a stick. The gun-dogs snore and tremble. It is one of those long afternoons where imprisonment by the weather becomes delightful. She deals herself a hand of solitaire. Propped in front of her is a notebook of Rob’s from which she occasionally reads out aloud, though nobody pays any attention to the words. “Identity is the frail suggestion of coherence with which we have clad ourselves. It is both illusory and quite real, and most necessary for happiness, if indeed happiness is necessary.” Toby, in the act of blowing his nose, cries “Bad Nietzsche!” over his shoulder. This was the scene which we were now busy re-enacting except that Piers was gone and Rob was gone. It was a frail thread to hang on to, but it held. With bowed head and concentrated air she played on, listening to the dislocated one-finger noises of Toby on the Pleyel. “Do you remember Akkad? He used to say to us: ‘Hurry. Hurry. The minutes are leaking from the clocks and as yet we have only brushed the Great Cryptics.’ Well, Bruce dear, I tried to hurry like he said, but I missed my footing somehow. Anyway it was always appproaching me, what Piers called ‘the old fern-fingered neurasthenia’ and now Jourdain thinks he understands a little but he doesn’t. It’s the merest presumption of medicine.” I knew that only too well. In a while she got up and walked about as if she were trying to rehearse for a play. She had unmasked herself now and her eyes were full of mischief. She poured out an imaginary drink, added soda, and took it over to Toby who thanked her and drank an imaginary mouthful before setting it down on the piano. Then she lighted a real cigarette, but almost at once threw it into the grate. There was a fire laid there, and the gesture drew my attention to the fact – also I seemed to recognise some fragments of manuscript in Piers’ hand. “Are you burning Piers’ papers?” I said, and she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, hand on her heart. As if recovering full possession of herself she fell on her knees before the grate and, bursting into tears, began taking out the crumpled papers and smoothing them in her lap. “Why did I do that?” she cried. “When there was nothing to hide, nothing at all to hide?”

No, there was nothing to hide. I took the crumpled papers from her and sat down to sort them while she returned seriously to her game. They were by several hands and not all by Piers as I had surmised. Sutcliffe’s large florid feminine hand was very conspicuous, as was the brilliant inks he used. His loose-leaf notebooks were always exploding and letting their contents tumble about in hopeless disorder.

Meeting on the threshing floor to wrestle with death and with love like Digenis

A railway strike produced strange things like this mountain of motionless roses laid up in a siding

Intuition has no memory, it jumps off the spool, it eludes thought memory and also causality

another tiring dream of grave allegorical figures, of sleep, cathedrals sitting in blue water on canals with wet shoes at night

a letter to Pia written in my sleep by braille

out of this tremendous chaos, Pia, I am trying to build my new and perhaps my last book. The studio floor is littered with fragments of this great puzzle

when the age gets swept out to sea and dispersed by the tides what remains will be the result of the purest accident; one-fifth of Anc Greek Drama one-tenth of Elizabethan is all we have left so why worry?