The Avignon Quintet (125 page)

They busied themselves in getting him washed and put to rights before tucking him up in his bed. While the valet was out of the room she said, “You know you will have expert nursing here; you could get rid of Cade for good if you wished.”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

There was a silence during which she was wondering whether her suggestion had upset him in any way; Cade reentered the room and went about his tasks in silence. His presence imposed a constraint upon them, so they smiled at each other and said nothing. Then the valet left the room again on some pretext and Blanford was able to say, “I can’t sack him yet. He is my only link with my mother. Every day he tells me some little thing, some little incident about her which enables me to see a bit further into why I hated her so much and so unjustly; I
must
have, to find myself in this situation – I don’t believe in chance accidents. It’s a situation which might keep me childless.”

“But that’s
Freud
on women,” she said with some surprise.

“Everything he says about women is true of men,” said Aubrey Blanford with a sudden return to the old curate’s tone for which they used to tease him so remorselessly in the past. It was so delightful, the serious way he said it, that she clapped her hands and laughed as childishly as she would have done had they both been at Tu Duc. She could not refrain from kissing him warmly, which made him blush with pleasure. “O childless one!” she said, adopting for a moment the mock-papal tone of Sam. “Will you let Cade psychoanalyse you?” And he made an impatient gesture.

The duty nurse came in to be presented to her patient and it was time to take her leave, so Constance felt, for her car had already been signalled as waiting in the drive. She would leave him to acclimatise and return on the morrow, she said, and he acquiesced. Kissing him again almost rapturously she said, “Thank God you haven’t changed – still the old sobersides Aubrey Blanford Esq. I am so happy about that.” He was less so: “I have changed profoundly,” he said gravely but with twinkling eyes, “but for the worse; I have become a cynic. I want you to take a message of disdain to Robin, for his cowardice in not daring to face me; I know he has retired to a flat with a lift too narrow to accommodate my wheelchair. There he is throwing a fit of influenza as an excuse. Tell him that he will be punished by the visit of a dark woman of unexpected force and glory with whom he will be forced to couple.” But she decided that she would leave him to deal with Sutcliffe on his own, without her interference. She bade him goodbye without precisely saying so. “Don’t be too annoyed with Robin, he really is under the weather.” Yet Blanford answered darkly, “I am annoyed because my power is not absolute over him – he is after all my creation; but he can sometimes break loose and show traces of free will. My domination is incomplete, damn him. I told him to come to the airport. He mutinied. He must be punished!”

Leaving him, Constance drove back to her old clinic to find Schwarz, who was delighted to see her, as always. Pia and Trash who were passing through a relatively tranquil period, were working together on an ambitious tapestry. The subject was Clément’s celebrated painting from Avignon,
The Land of Plenty: Cockayne
, which had been commercialised by Gobelin among other masterpieces. The quiet work, the skeins of colour, absorbed them both and they sat before the white window, quiet as nuns. Constance had to wait awhile for Schwarz to finish with a young ardent American analyst who was working with him, and who was submitting to his “control discussion” concerning some patients who were giving him trouble; they were apostates from the Rudolf Steiner groups so numerous in Geneva, and their astral theology was unfamiliar to the young man. His voice carried plangently and plaintively through the door of Schwarz’s office: “So I gave him the suppository you prescribed, but in his present state he can’t keep anything down.”

“Down?”

“Sorry, up.”

“I see.”

Apparently, though apostate, the patient still had fragments of theosophical belief clinging to his thinking. “What do you propose?” said Schwarz.

“He’s the most religious of the two; he’s been deep into what he calls Astral Communication – so deep he had an attack of Poetic Apprehension – that’s what he calls it. After that his wife refused to sleep with him. She said his breath smelt of embalming fluid. Boy, that Apprehension was certainly a bitch. I’ve locked him up with a sedation mixture.”

“What else can we do?” said the old man; it was a question he always uttered with a strongly flavoured Yiddish accent; and he repeated it now to Constance.
“Aber
, Constance, what can we do?” He had half a mind to try an insulin shock convulsion-therapy on Pia but Constance had pleaded so earnestly against it that he had abandoned the idea. “You’d blow out what little brain is left,” said Constance. “After all there’s a whole situation attached to the matter of her illness, and it concerns several people.” Since the discovery of Affad and the vertiginous glories of their affair she had become much more sympathetic to people in love – had even begun to see the elephantine love of Sutcliffe as moving rather than grotesque and preposterous; while the manoeuvres of the innocent and warm-hearted negress added both charm and despair to the whole business. Pia whined and whimpered like the sick child she had become, while Trash answered her with force and energy, saying stupid things with great conviction in that sweet dark voice, heavy as a bass viol. “I wanted us to sleep in one great bed,” she told Schwarz once. “There’d be room for everyone, for Robin and Pia, and even their friends could come for a fix when they felt that way. My mother always said Never Refuse; and the preacher at the church said Give It All You Got. But Robin won’t and Pia won’t. Would it help if I went away?”

“No. You’ve tried that; Pia is still too fragile for anything drastic. She would withdraw again. We want to keep her in the field of vision still.”

It was an unearthly waste of time and talent and medicine. Doctors nowadays are supposed to cure everything, even soul-complaints. But what could a priest have done anyway?

TWELVE

A Visit from Trash

T
HE AFFLICTION WHICH LAID ROB SUTCLIFFE LOW WAS
of his own making, compounded for the most part of sheer alcohol and
tabac gris
in immoderate quantities, irregular meals and unusually large doses of medicines like aspirins and vitamins plus a geriatric invention of the Swiss called Nix which was supposed to make you younger. Now he lay, feverish and snorting like a billygoat in a rumpled bed, smarting under the sallies of his co-sharer and workmate who resented having to play nurse to a man who would not see the Embassy doctor because he was called Bruce Hardbane. “I am superstitious about names,” he explained. Nor would he see a Swiss because that would mean his having to pay for a consultation; the Foreign Office provided free medical supervision. Toby was already late for the office but he stayed to mix his colleague a grog to take with his aspirin, and then swept into his threadbare overcoat and smartly disappeared from the flat. Sutcliffe sighed; another long day to spend supine with too much of a headache to read, and no company to divert him from gloomy and aggressive thoughts about Bloshford who lay also supine with a hole in his back, but in incomparably prettier surroundings, looking out upon the lake. He would have rung Aubrey up to insult him but the telephone was out of order for the nonce. There he lay like the Brothers Grimm, like the Brothers Karamazov, like the whole tribe of guttering Goncourts, steeped in sadness.

He was surprised to hear the lift start to mount in its cage, and even more so to hear it stop at their landing while its occupant vacated it and sent it down again before advancing up to the door of the flat and giving a little tattoo of the finger-nails upon it before pushing it open – for it was always ajar. He was delighted to think it was a surprise visit from Constance and called her name aloud triumphantly, but who should walk in with dramatic slowness but the negress Trash? “The ogre!” he cried aloud, swearing a little. “How did you find me?” She looked utterly beautiful, like a black pearl – as a matter of fact she wore large pearl earrings which looked divine on that black satin headpiece. Then the most magnificent furs in which she was sweating lightly, giving off incensuous musk of gorgeous body odour. Robin raised himself and snuffed her like an equatorial balsam wafted from the still vexed Bermoothes of his heart. He knew that she did a little mannequin work for Polak’s, and that they let her borrow furs sometimes – so this sombre plumage worthy of the helm of the Black Prince must be on loan. “I jest had to see you Robin, honey,” she said, advancing to sit on his bed, and at the same time laying a large hand, graceful as a coffee table, upon his forehead. “You’re quite a mite feverish,” she told him, and he lay back, putting on his haughty and disagreeable expression. “What brings you here?” he said, trying to “rasp” as one would if one wrote it in a novel. For a while there was no answer to his rasp. He watched rather uncharitably while she took a swig at his grog, burning her cherry-red mouth. “Is there anything wrong with Pia?” She shook that black mausoleum of hair in a negative sense. “She is being sedate until two,” she said. “But we’ve been talking and I told her I was coming to see you and tell you what we think.” She opened her red maw like some great sea-whore in search of some plankton; modelling furs had brought out the seal in her. She said confidingly, “You ain’t ill, Robin, you jest ain’t strivin’ enough; you gotta latch on to the affirmative, man, like the song says, and eliminate the negative. You gotta
be
it Bing’s way! I guess you are jest sad cause you ain’t got a good girl to plough, Robin. Them Embassy dames are mighty cold turkey, isn’t that it?”

He thought, “I could not love thee dear so much loved I not killing more.” But really she was right, this ebony glistening pillow consultant. What he needed was pillow music or even a pillow fight with an untrussed nun. The terrible thing was that she seemed half in love with him herself, even a little jealous of his cold turkey, for she slipped her warm hand inside his pyjama jacket as she talked and scrumped softly at his chest hair and Tiresian tits. “Listen,” he said, “I’m ill, Trash.” She shook her head playfully and said, “Not really, Robin.” He was just not striving, she repeated, but clearly her ploy was to soften up his resolve before producing her revelation, whatever that might be. But she smelt wonderful, like a whole coconut grove, and as her hand went slowly lower the most delicious ripples of sensuous reaction spread in slow curdles over the stagnant pond of his unused body. She began to hum softly now in her deeply melodious contralto, some sort of wanton spiritual to mine his defences – never very strong. It was a cradle song calculated to disperse influenza and restore health together with an unswerving and invincible erection. Rob groaned with pleasure, and as he did so her fur fell open and he discovered that she was naked under it save for stockings and shoes. “You can’t do this, Trash,” he croaked, but already she had guided his costive fingers towards the moist scarlet slit, her second mouth, where they found their tender purchase in the one place which made her lift her head with pleasure and snuff the air like a tigress, moving slightly to feel his finger caressing her vital trigger. When she was ready she threw off her fur and mounted him with delight, like a child with its first rocking-horse. He was angry with her and it put him on heat, so that he turned in an excellent dogmatic performance which had her groggy. They melted at last into the supreme fiction of joining with a sable orgasm of deep lust and pith. She was made for love, this nymph! Kiss, kiss, the taxonomy of virtuous compliancy with nothing grim, nothing furtive, just the cryptic vision of wholeness. It was Eros versus Agape. And here he was, condemned to spend his life shooting his brains through his fist because this nymph refused her jumps. He lay there in a tousle feeling that he must smell of babies’ milk stools and antiseptic soap while she panted beside him, her breasts as fresh as dewponds. “God, Trash!” he said with a sadness the size of a cauliflower. She had begun to recite the 16th Psalm in a whisper.
“Don’t,”
he said in an agony and Trash replied, “She said if I did you would say yes, you would agree.” He grew angry and said, “Come on now. Out with it! What do you want?” But she was rousing him again, her skilful hands were trying to rebuilding the sandcastle of his erection which the tide of their passion had demolished. “Give me that hangin’ fruit, Buster,” she muttered as she grabbed and manipulated his choicest possession. But now he revolted against her and refused to get an erection until she answered his question. He did this by closing his eyes and thinking of ice cream. She was dismayed by this unusual display of independence and took herself off to make water which she did with enough noise for four thoroughbreds. Then she came back and standing by the bed said, simply, pregnantly, “We have decided we want to go round the world. Will you let us?”