The Avignon Quintet (120 page)

“I am sorry,” she said, all contrition at last, and sat down at the desk with a fair semblance of composure. “But I have been thinking of ways to formulate it. Look, it’s like the contrast between a cathedral and a mosque. The mosque has no altar, no centre of focus. In it the truth is everywhere, though the whole is in fact oriented only gravitationally, aiming at Mecca. The cathedral is not oriented geographically, but inside it is focused upon a special spot, the High Altar, where the critical blood-sacrifice takes place. This is, so to speak, the butcher’s slab of the Christian transaction. Here the wine is diluted, the bread is cut up and consecrated. This place is also the telephone booth from which one can ring up God and try to strike a bargain with him for one’s individual soul – that precious figment! All right, I know I sound rather like old Sutcliffe weighing into you about Pia, but there is the whole contrast between us – mosque and church. But this thing outweighs the difference, it’s common to either. Affad in discussing it spoke of it being calculated by an ‘engineer of love in terms
of puissance massique
– the mass-power of weight-ratio’ I must say it sounds as elegant as it is esoteric, but I know what he means.”

“Damned if I do,” said the old man doggedly.

“Of course you do.”

She felt as if she had been separated at last from the world against which their science was fighting – a world of attachments without resonance, adventures without depth, embraces without insight! The embrace of Affad had in some singular way acted upon her as the drop of scalding olive oil had done upon the cheek of sleeping Eros. Perhaps she had even been cured of that obstinate old dream of all women, to become indispensable to someone’s happiness – the running sore of self-esteem, the old dysentery of human narcissism.… Or was that too much to hope?

“I’m going home,” she said abruptly. “I am in no mood to work, and I have so much leave accumulated that …”

“I know,” he said with resignation. “Go on home.”

She felt she could not last another moment without seeing Affad again, so she took her leave and went back to join him at breakneck speed – but only to find an empty room and an unmade bed beside which, to her surprise, disdain and concern, from a medical point of view, lay the little hashish pipe which smelt recently used! He walked in while she was sniffing at it like a suspicious cat and she put it behind her back while they embraced. Then she wagged it at him, saying, “You didn’t say you smoked.”

“Must I reveal everything? I am Egyptian after all, yes, I smoke.” But he added that it was neither very much nor very often.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“Only because you do.”

“It’s harmless,” he said. “It’s ritual.”

She was relieved to hear it. She took herself off to the kitchen to make some tea while he searched slowly and methodically along the bookshelves for something which might interest him. “Ah, this bogus science!” he exclaimed as he caught sight of a series of blue-backed books, a psychoanalytic series. “It doesn’t go far enough.” She said, “How do you know?” and he sat down slowly balancing his tea-cup as he replied, “Hear my story, then. My parents were very rich, I was brought up very carefully but all over Europe to give me languages and make me quite at ease in every society and every circumstance. But I was shy, and, being sheltered, very slow to develop. I mixed badly. I preferred to lock myself up and indulge in abstruse studies like alchemy and mathematics – Egypt is the right place for that sort of thing, indeed everything occult. An only child, I became very solitary when my parents died, locked up as I was in a vast flat in Alexandria with few friends. My gnostic studies led me to a small group of seekers among whom I found Prince Hassad, and became his man, so to speak. Apart from these people – they were of every rank and circumstance – I frequented nobody. Then by an accident a charming and ardent young woman drifted into my life and took possession of me completely. Our marriage lasted seven years, but the child we had turned out to be deficient intellectually and the shock separated us for good. My wife went to live in the monastery of the Copts at Natrun as a solitary hermit. Her old mother took charge of the boy: she lived in Geneva, that is why I come here so regularly, to see how he is getting on, and to see her and give her the news of Egypt. After that calamity I went on alone, I had lost the taste for any other close relationship, so I made do, and got to like it. Once or twice I may have had a chance encounter with a woman but I made sure that it was ephemeral – some tired cabaret artist or street walker. But this was exceptional and due to loneliness – perhaps thrice in all these years. So I am hopelessly out of practice, and can be easily put to flight if you find this situation too demanding. It was in this state of fragility that I encountered you and was attracted, heaven knows by what, for I have known greater beauties and met more massive intellects. I took my courage in both hands and with great daring tried to stake a claim to an experience which – clearly I am wrong about this – seemed to me essential if I was not to die of spleen and boredom during this senseless war!” He yawned in an outrageous way.

“I have never heard a more self-centred, a more masculine declaration of love in my whole life!” she said with a certain amusement in her voice and an unwilling tinge of admiration in her heart – for this shameless egotism was accompanied by propitiatory caresses and endearments. They were lying down now, side by side, and had kicked off their shoes.

“Don’t you like omniscient men, men who are too sure of themselves? They give such confidence, they say. When first I saw you I had a tremulous premonitory feeling which told me that I would be excused every fatuity.”

“Wrongly,” she said, cobwebbed herself in the drowsiness which he seemed to project with every measured breath. My goodness, she thought, soon they would be making love again, it was quite deplorable that it should seem so inexorable. Also behind the sleepy persiflage of his speech – so belied by the gentle but perfectly assured rhythm of his caresses – she felt the deep vibration of an anxiety in him, a lack of confidence in himself which made him send out these wistful probes in order to take soundings in a possibly hostile world around him. Or was it that he found the habits of solitude hard to break and the society of a woman, even a cherished woman, menacing and disquieting?

“No,” he said, for all the world as if he had been reading her thoughts as they passed in her mind, “none of those things really – perhaps a little of the last might come later! My main concern was to preserve you in this world – I felt you might become suicidal in Avignon like your sister – and if possible to bring you back where I could approach you. That is why I told Smirgel to look after you very carefully, or answer for it with his head!” She was surprised. “So
that
is why he kept persecuting me with his solicitude? I thought otherwise.”

“Poor man! he was doing his duty. I even came down to Avignon once myself – it was a great temptation to call on you, I don’t know how I resisted, but I did. I knew your hours and movements. What heroism!” She felt a sudden pang of regret that he had not done so, yet it might have served no purpose at that time, living as she was. Affad then was hardly more than a thought in the back of her mind, without real substance, a faint beckoning thought without a tangible future. “What part did Livia play in all this?” He replied drowsily, “None. None at all. Smirgel loved her, that is all. You know he was there in Provence when you all were, working in the town gallery restoring the medieval paintings. He met Livia then. It was he who introduced her to the Nazi philosophy of the time. When she went to Germany it was to stay with him – he was an art critic in Hamburg.”

“Did they live together in the accepted sense?”

“I don’t know. I never asked him. They met in Avignon where he was staying. She became a party member through him and later on naturalised. He started by using her to spy on Galen, then went and fell for her.”

The thought was horrible to Constance and vastly increased her sympathy and regret for her dead sister. There was a long silence now, and she feared that they might both slide away into sleep unless some new topic were introduced, so she said the first thing that came into her head without quite meaning to: or perhaps it only
appeared to
be involuntary, one could not be quite sure. At all events what she said was: “Will you marry me?” This had the desired effect – it was sufficiently unexpected to make him open his eyes. “Did you say ‘would’ or ‘will’?” he asked cautiously. He placed his lips to her cheek and heard her answer quite distinctly, “I said ‘will you’!”

“Of course not,” he said at once. “At least not in fact. Whatever gave you such an idea?”

“I thought not,” she said, amused. “I just wanted to make you writhe, that is all.”

“Mark you, in certain undefined and relatively unimaginable contexts I would, I could, I
might
. But of course I won’t.”

“That was very closely argued,” she said.

“Surely you follow my reasoning?”

“Only too well; supposing I were pregnant?”

“Why should I when you are not?”

“Casuist and philanderer!”

“You are like the Catholic Church, Constance. This is nothing but a hold-up.” He quoted disgustedly, “Will you, won’t you, can’t you, might you, must you, would you … what a catechism for a right-minded gnostic to come up against. Of course I won’t!”

“Very well, then, goodbye!”

“Goodbye,” he said equably (how terrible it sounded to her ears), and shut his eyes once more, adding, “Marriage may be dead as a doornail but the real couple hasn’t begun to manifest as yet. At least not in the West. It will need a new psychology – or perhaps a very old one – to inaugurate the coming dispensation. O dear! It sounds terribly schematic, like cutting along the dotted line. On the other hand we can’t go on as everyone is doing. The world is coming to an end faster because of the waste, the misdirection of affect. I want to begin the new thing with you.”

“Truthfully,” she said, “I don’t give a damn about theoretical considerations. I just want to be loved by you, stop.”

But she was lying and they both knew it.

Their attachment had been born into a new age of sexual friendship which would create new responsibilities and problems in the measure of its new freedoms. But somehow not for them – what he had told her made her sure of it. Yet the whole subject-matter of his thinking was still full of mysteries – perhaps even absurdities, who could say? She was still, after all, a hostage of the logicians and consequently full of scepticism. He seemed so intellectually cocksure, a bad sign in a man, and particularly an Oriental. She lay beside him and watched him sleeping so peacefully, his head turned away in half-profile from her. What, she wondered, was the meaning of the little slip of thread round his throat? Some people wore a christening chain with a cross on it, or else their names graven upon a talisman of a saint. Perhaps, like a true Mediterranean, he wore it against the evil eye – but where was the usual blue bead? Beside the bed there was a pair of nail scissors which he had been using to clean out his pipe and settle his plug of hashish. Half in a spirit of idle mischief she took them up and placed them upon the thread as if to cut it. At this moment he opened his eyes and saw what she was doing. A look of horror and supplication came over his face, and he gasped, “For goodness sake!” Constance, delighted at the alarm she had created, withdrew her scissors and said, “I knew it! The Evil Eye!” And she put the scissors back on the side table. He said, “One can’t turn one’s back for a moment! You were actually going to sever my lifeline, were you? And so carelessly? If I had fallen back dead upon the pillows – where would you have been then?” She could not quite make out if this were banter or not. “Explain!” she said. “What is the thread?” And slowly fingering it, he told her dreamily that it was a signof his affiliation to the little Orphic group of which he had spoken more than once; it was the umbilical cord which united him with the buried world they were trying to bring to light with their association.

“The little thread is flax, grown on the Nile. We have imitated the Indians in that. It’s the sign of the yogi, of his frugality and his mental chastity. The Templars wore it as a belt – and those idiot Inquisitors took it for some secret sexual symbol arguing a homosexual affiliation. Idiots! The double sex was quite another thing, a syzygy of the male and female affect.”

“Would you have died if I had cut it?”

“Just to punish you I would have tried! But I would have regretted it, for it stands for other things. My fate, woven by Moira, the fates of Greece, my umbilical cord through which I connect with the rhythms of the earth yoga. No, not died, but been sad and regretful.”

“I am sorry. It was thoughtless of me.”

That night she asked her lover: “Did you know it was going to be like this?”

He looked at her and slowly nodded but said nothing; he closed his eyes and appeared to reflect very deeply upon her question. “Did you, tell me truthfully?” She put her fingers upon the drum of his chest and felt the deep rise and fall of his breath, the archaic oxygen-pump which fed his thinking and his love-making alike.

“It isn’t like a love affair at all,” she said aloud, echoing a thought which had been formulated by her mind a while since. Their relationship had developed an odd kind of continuity so that it seemed to be a succession of small surprises, their endearments were like stepping stones towards … towards what, exactly?

“It is in fact the prototype, the original love-affair which we’ve tumbled into by luck: or perhaps a design we are not wise to. Today’s loves are mostly debased currency, the timid investments of undischarged bankrupts with nothing to offer but undocumented sperm, trivial aggressive lusts, stuff of little richness. Sperm without oxygen, and with poor motility, will never reach the Grand Slam. All that is the domain of Unlove, Constance, it’s not our concern.”