The Avignon Quintet (144 page)

“It’s the truth,” she said.

“I myself hardly believe you. Swear!”

“I swear! Cross my heart.”

“They will think you have interfered with … well, with what they regard as Affad’s destiny. I suppose you have been told about the letter, the death-signal, so to speak, and where it fits into their gnostic arrangements. O Lord!”

“Yes, I know what it means, though I take a rather poor view of all the mumbo-jumbo, and the secret society business. It’s a very perverse and foolish philosophy.”

“You are very pig-headed,” he said angrily. “After all, the metaphysical problem is a real one. How to turn back the tide of spiritual entropy. The sacrifices are real, too. Affad is not alone, there is a man before and a man behind; he is part of a tradition which hopes to interrogate death itself. Now the old boy will certainly think you have made an unwarrantable intrusion into the affair. Probably that you have even opened the letter, or destroyed it. Do you know what is in the letter?”

“No. I swear!”

There was a long silence during which she could hear him whistling softly to himself – a sign of great perplexity and exasperation. “The whole thing is incredibly childish,” she broke out, “and so Egyptian: why can’t he get a copy of the message from the central committee or whatever? It is not the first time a letter has gone astray, been mislaid, is it?”

“Apparently he can’t.”

“Even the Prince?”

“So it would seem!”

With mounting irritation at all this portentous and childish behaviour she described the situation to him, adding that perhaps the problem would be solved when Mnemidis was woken from his artificial sleep. Sutcliffe sighed. “Well, I will do my best to put things in a favourable light, though I can foresee a good deal of scepticism about your own good intentions. They are bound to feel you are playing with them.”

“If they do, then let me speak to them. I can quite easily convince them, I am sure.”

But she was reluctant to push things further until this last avenue had been explored; suppose the madman had just hidden it somewhere – behind a radiator, say? Yes, but they had looked everywhere, specially in such places! “I’ve got to get back to my job,” she said. “Schwarz is abreast of my movements and my work, if there is any untoward happening!”

It was puzzling that there was no news of Affad’s return to Geneva: however, she did not wish to seem over-curious about the matter, and rang off, regained her car and set off for the chĊteau.

There was apparently nobody at home except the Swiss girl and she had to ring for a while before the door was opened; she was however radiant and smiling, though she put her finger to her lips and said, “Shh! He is having a nap. But my goodness, what a change! I hardly recognised him today. Constance, his eyes are open, he is looking, they have depth and being in them!” She clapped her hands, but noiselessly. Together they mounted the staircase and gained the elegant dressing-room which had been set aside for them, and where Constance divested herself of her coat and handbag while she listened to the report of the assistant therapist. “He did not weep for me – I’m afraid the whole transference thing is all yours! But the change was very marked, his whole face has opened up like a flower. And his smile! It’s so new he hardly knows how to wear it. But don’t listen to me; come and sit by him for a moment.” Their silence was no longer necessary for the child was awake, gazing round him as he lay in his little bed, curling and uncurling his small hands as if he were about to employ them in doing something.

But no sooner did she lean down to kiss him and pick him up than it started again, the weeping – but more slowly, more consciously. He was in the middle of a yawning fit, seized by a kind of fatigue; but he looked at her keenly, touching her hair and putting his finger almost in her mouth. And wept. As if it were the end of the world, the end of time. She took him up and cradled him once more, mentally encompassing his whole being with her circling arms. She felt that he had embarked upon the perilous attempt to forge for himself a human identity, and that the principal wound in the unconscious had been found if not identified. Would that he could weep his way back to articulate health! And today, as for some weeks to come, this cathartic weeping was the only fruitful dialogue which took place between them. But it also evolved, it did not remain static. There were days of anger and days of gloom; but very gradually, like the sun piercing clouds, elements of relaxation, almost of joy, manifested themselves. And these could be read upon his new face – one in which the eyes now played their full part, expressive, curious, sometimes almost roguish! Sometimes during his weeping he would let her put her finger softly on his nose, chin, forehead. But always he went the full length, crying until he was completely exhausted, worn out, hypotonic.

Gradually, too, as she advanced tiptoe into this uncharted territory, it seemed that she could “read” the infantile dilemma which had stunted the psychic growth of the child. What was also new was the feeling that now he was cooperating unconsciously with her. His muscle schemes were relaxing, he was drawing strength from her, and from the admission of his own weakness.

Some of the encounters sparked off other feelings, for example aggression; he would stab at her eyes with his fingers, or put them in her mouth with a rough intent, but which faded into helpless tears, as though the impetus had spent itself. In the aggression she read his reluctance to surrender to the soft appeals of reason and health. Then at other times the weeping ceased and he would lie in her lap for a spell, brooding as he listened to her singing. Sometimes he carefully touched her mouth again, and smeared his spittle round it carefully, as if following out some inner ritual. And sometimes also he might lie as calmly as a nursing infant making soft sounds with his voice, “
da da va va
”. Once he put his mouth to her cheek in an involuntary gesture of affection, but was immediately seized by contrition and reverted to his blank, sightless look, turning his head away from her. But his eyes were at least open now, and he could now gaze even at the world outside the window of the playroom; or at the slowly unrolling lake scenery opening like a Japanese fan during the afternoon drive. The old grandmother reported that while he was still restless at night he had long periods when he was in a good mood, and his gestures and impulsive movements seemed less uncontrolled. The process would still be a long one, Constance felt, but the orientation had now changed in a more fruitful direction – the ship was on the right course. And with the first successes in this field she felt the whole weariness of her profession surge up in her. What was the point of effecting a psychic repair of this kind if one could not leave the patient to continue the work in competent hands? Who would replace her, who would communicate the loving care and the warmth to the little robot when she was forced to leave? For the moment the very evident success of the treatment was enough to keep her happy and enthusiastic, but already queries about the future rose in her mind; she had begun to divine what old age was all about! It would have been so good to spend the night with a man, instead of staying sealed off and frigid like this, incapable of warmth, of a simple, lustful response to life. This was the terrible weakness of setting too serious a valuation on experience. What to do? Once she had tried to break out of the prison of her sensibility by getting drunk at a cocktail party and succumbing to the charms of a pleasant younger colleague. But the episode had been like trying to ignite damp straw. She was humiliated not by his ineptness so much as her own inadequacy. How right Affad had been to insist so stoutly that all sex attachments are psychic and that the body is simply a reservoir of sensation. Loving from this point of view meant that reality was not compromised, and one faded into nature as if into a colour wash!

But if there was any fatuous disposition to self-congratulation over the increasing success of her treatment it was nipped in the bud by an incident, trivial in itself, which showed how intricate and strange are the associative schemes which provoke and underlie human behaviour. Or at least so it would seem from a remark made by the grandmother one afternoon as they drove slowly round the lake. The old lady who, for all her forbidding silences, was very observant, turned her large dark operatic eye on Constance and said, “You are not wearing the scent today!”

“It’s probably because I went for a swim in the lake – but in fact I am, though it’s much fainter. Do I smell of it so very much?”

The old lady smiled and shook her head. She said, “No, it’s just that it is my daughter’s scent, Lily’s.”

“You mean Jamais de la Vie?”

“Jamais de la Vie!”

Constance was dumbfounded, exasperated and professionally delighted – perhaps
this
is what had given her such an immediate associative transference with the child, had enabled her to penetrate his emotions so swiftly. And the tears … She went back over the old diagnoses in the light of this new gleam of knowledge. How lucky she had been, for her choice of a new scent to match a new hair-style, a new character change, had been quite haphazard. Had it in fact been a key? She turned to look at the small abstracted face beside her in the looming automobile and wondered. And if all human emotions and action depended on such an affective pattern of association-responses … It was a pure wilderness of associations, a labyrinth in which the sources of all impulse lay. Besides, it was after all sound psychology to trace the roots of emotion and desire to the sense of smell – its vast ramifications had never been completely worked out, and never would be. She tried to remember the smell of Affad – it was a sort of non-smell, like the smell of the desert: yet somehow at the heart of its airless-ness there was a perfume, the odour of muscat or of cloves? (I hate literary emotions, she told herself!)

“I shall soon be leaving you,” she said to the old lady, “as I must sooner or later return to my other cases. No, don’t look alarmed! Not until I feel sure that everything is going well and that Esther can take over. Besides, I am always there if need be to consult. At the end of a phone!” This seemed to reassure the old lady and no more was said about the matter.

At the end of the excursion she carried the sleepy patient up the stairs to his playroom and set him down among toys which now were becoming objects of interest to him.

It was in the same week that another significant departure took place; the Swiss girl greeted her one day with a triumphant expression and said, “Eureka! Today he lifted the glass of milk himself and tried to feed himself. Constance, it’s really marvellous!”

And Constance knew that she would soon be leaving; the obstinate Mnemidis had refused all knowledge of a letter in the bible, or indeed in any of the other books. It was quite baffling. Could he be lying, and if so why? And to make matters worse she at last received a letter from Affad, couched in the form of a reproach which she did not feel she merited. It made her feel furious, and also guilty. After all, in accepting the letter from Blanford she had had no clearly formulated plan – indeed, had she met Affad as she expected to do, she would have handed it over in the normal way. And here they were accusing her … It was really most vexatious and short-sighted.

Dear Constance: I really did not think, my dear, that you would meddle in my affairs in such a resolute fashion; it is all too painful, and I understand your feeling that things can be prevented from happening by an act of resolution … But they can’t. I regret having told you as much as I did about the structure of gnostic belief and the grave experiment our group is engaged in trying out. This stupid letter would have only contained a death-date, with no indication of how or by whom. That is the little bit of essential information which enables us to complete our
devoir
– without it we are just ordinary people, dispossessed, taken unawares: the original sin! It is the equivalent of letting me die unshriven! The knowledge of this simple fact enables one to take up a stance consciously towards the only basic feature of human existence which is never studied, is always avoided, is funked! People expire, they don’t
die
in a positive sense, “mobilised in the light of nature”! I ask you to restore the letter to me. You have no right to it, and I have. I cannot believe that you would betray me like this even though you are a determinist, a behaviourist. Ah! What a stupid charge to lay against you! I am terribly sorry for such a sudden explosion of bad temper, but I am both frustrated for myself, my own
salut
, to use an ironic phrase, and also for the man or men after me. I am only a link in a long bicycle chain. I believe you understand this, as it is also expressed in sexual terms in our love for each other – has it
forever
vanished? Are you cured of me? Have you forgotten the beginning when we played cards by candlelight with the dying Dolores?

It came back to her now with a shock; no, she had not really forgotten, she had just put aside the memory, perhaps out of pain, for Dolores had been her best friend at school and then later in medical school. When her husband who was a musician died she cut off her beautiful hair and threw it into the coffin. But it grew again, as beautiful as ever, and so did her only child. She was a brilliant surgeon among the younger ones, but by ill luck she infected herself and contracted a fatal type of poisoning. Constance used to take Affad to the ward at night to keep her company, and the three of them would play cards on the night table. As she grew weaker the effort increased but they kept up the habit out of friendship. One night the dying woman handed over her cosmetics and said that she would like to be sure that if she died suddenly in the night her face would be made up for her before her son was allowed in to see her. They promised, and set about playing the usual game of rummy. But tonight she felt much weaker, and kept fading away, drifting into quiet dozes; until with a small contrite shudder she simply stopped breathing. They were both shaken with sadness and resignation. Constance checked pulse and breath and then drew the lids down over the sad and dignified eyes. Affad put his arms round her and she embraced him with a triumphant abandon, touching his hair and throat and ears as if she were building up his image as a sculptor might from the moist clay of the primary wish for love; to affirm, to unite, to triumphantly rescue him from time. And later on when they went hand in hand down to the deserted buttery to make a cup of coffee, Affad had said, “As you know, when one has seen someone die, someone stop breathing, one realises with a start how one breath is hooked into another, is attached to another. In between the breaths is the space where we live, between the beforebreath and the afterbreath is a field or realm where time exists and then ceases to exist. Our impression of reality is woven by the breathing like a suit of chain mail. It is in that little space, between the breaths, in that tiny instant that we have started to expand the power of the orgasm, as a united synchronised experience, making it more and more conscious, mobilising its power and fecundity with every kiss. Constance, we can’t go wrong. Love can’t make any other sense now for us! God, how I wish I could make you pregnant in the light of this! She had replied, “If you go on talking like this, you will!” But he had not. Nor would he now. Well, it was something real and for her something new in orientation and intensity. Better than the usual business, making love in a sort of moral pigsty of vaguely good intentions. Or not at all. Or not at all.