The Avignon Quintet (126 page)

The question was so astonishing that for a moment he was nonplussed. “What world?” he asked at last. “The war is nearly over. Pretty soon we shall be able to get going. You see, she wants to give me all the culture you gave her, Robin.” “What on
earth?”
he said, genuinely puzzled. She must have heard of the Allied landings and the latest triumphant battles which had all but driven the Germans out of Europe and back to the fatherland.

“The war is far from over,” he said, and she said, obstinately, “Yes it is, soon will be, now the U.S. Marines have landed. You don’t know the U.S. Marines, Robin. I know the U.S. Marines. They got the biggest pricks in Christendom.” He did not know what to say. “Do you mean they
are
the biggest pricks?” but she shook her head determinedly and said, “No. GOT the biggest I said.”

“The Lord be your shepherd,” he said, praying to heaven for sweet reason to supervene. “Sit down, Trash, and let me explain about the war.” He took a deep breath, and assuming the sort of tone and accent of the B.B.C. producer of “Tiny Tots’ Hour” he explained to Trash that even if by some miracle everything stopped tomorrow and peace was declared, it would mean years before conditions returned to normal: certainly all travel as private individuals would not be possible for years as yet, unless one managed to represent some organisation civil or military. She sat listening to this logical exposition with bright and attentive eyes, nodding from time to time, and moistening her lips as if about to speak. But on he went, listing all the ugly calamities of the past and the present, and trying to draw a portrait of a future which would be heavily compromised for ages yet; to demobilise, to repair cities, to revive shattered economies, to rebuild civic habits … it would take an age! And here they were talking about travelling round the world like tourists.

“Don’t you see, Trash?” he said, with something like agony, for now it looked as if she had been thinking of something else all the time he had been exposing his case to her.

“You could come with us, Rob. She told me to tell you. So long as you don’t get mad at us. She only wants to give me the culture you gave her.” He snorted wildly. He had inherited a sum of money from an old aunt which carried with it a condition: that he spend it in travel. Nothing more desirable, what with the war coming on – at least everyone seemed to feel it was. So he took Pia on a lightning-rod tour of the basic antiquities of the world, first Europe, then as much of the Orient as was within the reach of railways and flying-boats. They came back dazed and confused, but with all the money gone, and a library of prospectuses and travel brochures. Pia went through it all with speechless gratitude – God only knew how much she had taken in, but the journey marked her. And it was invaluable to him, of course, as a guide to places he knew he did not want to see again. To do India, cockroach by cockroach, for example, was beyond all imagining; the original
cafard
must have dwelt there in the plains. But the Himalayas now, there one could stay forever. He found Pia lacking in all serious instruction, almost analphabetic, yet they met a Nepalese lady nun who said that she was spiritually very advanced – higher up than he was. “You do not have to be clever to be wise,” said this pleasant woman who had been educated at an English school and spoke Druid fluently. He loved Pia more than ever after that, he smothered her with instruction and kisses thicker than flying fish in the Indian Ocean. But she turned up her nose at the
Kama Sutra
and said it was “unhealthy”. She thought the Taj Mahal would have looked nicer in brick. Now she wished to impart all this wisdom to Trash, darling Trash, who sat with her hands in her lap – her coat lay open like her thighs. She looked a bit crestfallen, as if her mission had failed. “When would you go?” She shrugged and said, “Whenever it’s possible. We only want you to say YES, because she won’t do nothing without your okay; you know that, Robin. But if you jest say yes we can start collecting the guide books and planning. It will save her mentation, honey, just to be told ‘Go Ahead’.” His face cleared. “So
that
was all you wanted? Just my okay?” She nodded. “Of course you can,” he cried robustly. “Of course you can go. You
shall
go!” Whereupon she threw off her skin and did a soft shoe routine crying, “
Wow and Superwow!”
over and over again. And then a short eloquent verse which went:

“When I wanta

I’ve simply gotta

When I have ter

I simply Must!

Babe, have I got a Wanderlust!”

It was clear that she was already on the journey. “What a gift-horse you turned out to be,” he said, and made as if to re-open sextilities, but she had to rush off and tell Pia. In a flash she was gone, forgetting her earrings.

Sutcliffe tried them on and found that they rather suited him; he put them carefully aside. One day he would walk into the Consulate wearing them. It would create, he hoped, quite an effect. But now the telephone thrilled and he took it up to hear the central exchange assure him that the line had been re-established. His heart sank a little for there was no longer any excuse not to ring Aubrey, the Blanford-Bloshford who presided over his life. He took up at last his battered address book in which Constance had jotted down the clinic number. He asked in an agitated falsetto if he might speak to Mrs. Benzedrine Papadopoulos, but of course Aubrey recognised his voice. “Speaking,” he said, and Sutcliffe groaned aloud. His mentor said, “Why are you groaning like a Heathcliff in labour when you are only a common Sutcliffe in disfavour; what have you been triturating, you common fellow, while my back has been turned?”

“I have been ill,” said Sutcliffe with a deeply dramatic expression, “and now I am ringing to tell you that I have been raped by Trash – very enjoyably but against my will. Pure rape!”

“It is not possible; you are fictions.”

“Have we no future, then?”

“You have contexts, but no future and no past.”

He laughed and then recited:

“Tell me, how do fictions fuck?

All our swains commend their pluck!”

Sutcliffe improvised in return:

“Like shucking grain, expressing pain,

Emptying opiates to a drain.”

But he was listening with close attention to the timbre of Blanford’s voice. He knew that very often his emotions under stress were masked by a deliberate and perverse flippancy – he retreated into his private despair like a crab under a stone, and was not to be dislodged. Fundamentally there was a lack of passion in him, a power-cut now so markedly symbolised by the physical disability under which he laboured. He grunted, and Blanford who had been following his thoughts said, “Everything you say is true.”

“I said nothing,” said Sutcliffe. “I merely thought a lot. It’s as if we were versions of one another set upon differing time-tracks. Reality is very fatiguing.”

“Exactly,” said Aubrey. “Be ye members of one another – the good book invokes you.”

B. “Which book? Yours or mine?”

S. “Mine. It’s a better title, I think.”

Blanford sighed and said, “Mine is still unfinished, but I have an ant-hill of notes which should help me complete it. When did you finish yours?”

“When I heard you were coming.”

“What is it called?”

“
The Prince of Darkness.
”

“Hum.”

Sutcliffe could not forbear to quote his Shakespeare: “The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.”

“You must manifest at last,” said Blanford in a changed, sharper tone; his bondsman recognised the grim note and agreed with surprising meekness. “I knew we must meet one day in order to exchange versions – it’s in the order of things. Maybe we can help each other solve a few problems – some of yours, for example, are not easy. What about the lovers?”

Blanford replied with irritation, “Since you like Shakespeare so much you’ll know that journeys end in lovers’ partings.”

“Ah, the pity of it!” said Sutcliffe ironically. “How are you going to make a job of that? My own version corresponds to the reality. She will be hurt by his going but unbroken. In my version he offers to take her with him and she refuses.”

“Dead true!” cried Blanford with pleasure and surprise. “How the devil did you know?”

“You know how I knew!”

Blanford paused and then said, “You must come now, the sooner the better. Come to tea at four, and don’t forget to bring your version since it’s complete. It will help me, as I am in a bit of a muddle. Yesterday she spent the afternoon with me and I started to read her bits of my book; but in the middle dozed off, and I fear with without permission she did a brief riffle of the rest, while I slept. I am vexed, she was supposed not to know until he went back to Egypt.”

“Unconscious sabotage?”

“Of course. I’m jealous!”

“You are no artist, then.”

“Let’s leave that open. I am waiting for you this afternoon at four. I shall recognise you at once. I will cry, ‘Doctor Liebfraumilch I presume’, removing my topee.”

He put down the phone and reflected for a long moment; a sudden world weariness afflicted him. What would he not have given to tip the whole damned bundle of manuscript into the lake. The incident of yesterday afflicted him, nagging like a toothache. Constance had come to spend an hour with him, unfortunately towards siesta time. He had read her a passage from his book, but sleep had overcome him. He turned back to it now and re-read it, recalling the scene between them. It went:

“Akkad in his stained brown
abba
, looking so fragile, so weightless, as he sat upon the sand went on: ‘From the cosmic point of view, to have opinions or preferences at
all
is to be ill; for by harbouring them one dams up the flow of the ineluctable force which, like a river, bears us down to the ocean of everything’s unknowing. Reality is a running noose, one is brought up short with a jerk by death. It would have been wiser to co-operate with the inevitable and learn to profit by this unhappy state of things – by realising and accommodating death! But we don’t, we allow the ego to foul its own nest. Therefore we have insecurity, stress, the midnight-fruit of insomnia, with a whole culture crying itself to sleep. How to repair this state of affairs except through art, through gifts which render to us language manumitted by emotion, poetry twisted into the service of direct insight?”

“Art?” she cried, angrily. “Rubbish, Aubrey!”

“Art!” he echoed firmly.

“Out!” Constance, wearied and exasperated beyond reason by this wilfully mendacious reasoning, put out her hand thumbs down and stared sighing out upon the calm lake. Suddenly he broke out, as if to refute her thoughts, “You see? He is not joking, the fraternity is quite decided to pre-empt death by voluntary suicide – you might call it that, though actually the blow is struck invisibly, by someone or something else, an instrument of their collective fate, so to speak. O God, can’t you see?” He could read the expression of angry disdain upon her face.

“Well, it’s one way of saying goodbye,” she said coldly. Truly, Affad might have spared her all that had grown up between them, luxuriant as some tropical jungle, since he had known from the beginning that it must all come to nothing – that sooner or later they must come up against the blank wall of his voluntary disappearance – despatched by an unknown hand selected by an invisible committee in conclave back there in the deserts of Egypt? The whole of her training, her science, her practice was dedicated to working against this cowardly principle of suicide and abdication. And they spoke about art as if it were some sort of vitamin. “Art!” she said aloud with disgust. She was dumbfounded by the pusillanimity of men! The psychologist in her recalled all she knew about aberrant states like autism or catatonia, with their stark suggestion of a narcissism overwhelmed by reality. She thought of the diffident and troubled gaze of her lover’s sea-green eyes with compassion mixed with hatred. So he was a weakling really, and not a man. And this playing about with abstruse gnostic states was surely dangerous for him, for his equilibrium? She told herself, “It’s when the mind strays out of touch with its own caresses – its own catlicks upon the body-image of itself – then it loses the power to cherish and restore itself through self-esteem. The actual tunic of the flesh dries up, man becomes an articulated skeleton, that is to say, a machine.”

Art! Who cared about that? Inwardly she laughed sardonically; outwardly she looked cold, white, numb and a prey to a thousand indecisions. “I think I shall leave the Red Cross and get back to my job if it is still possible,” she said, and he gazed at her in puzzlement. “I know,” she said, staring back, “it’s running away, and I don’t approve of it. But I need time to think.” But escape in the direction of Avignon was, she knew already, no more possible; and anyway surely her excess of feeling was itself misplaced, for surely they were all under sentence of death, the whole world? All Europe was a suicide club, was it not?

These notions increased her vexation. Why did she feel such a keen sense of reproach towards him simply because he was a card-holding member, so to speak, of this absurd suicide confraternity with its cowardly refusal to face the world as it was? It’s because (she thought) Eros demands a false reassurance, a promise of immortality, in order to flourish – and “flourish” simply meant to bear a child. That was it! In the depths of herself she had planned to love by extension into the future, to share a child with him. This abrupt reminder of his possible disappearance at any moment, it was unnerving. The feeling that it compromised the continuity of love – the purest illusion – made her draw back. And now she became furious, not only with him but with herself as well. She had been cheating at cards, so to speak. The sleepy Blanford watched the play of thought and emotion on her angry face with curiosity.