The Avignon Quintet (157 page)

He gazed around him with fatuous self-satisfaction, swollen with an innocent conceit at these antics. Sutcliffe banged his glass on the table approvingly and said, “I appoint myself your advertising manager. I will write you slogans of utter irresistibility like … ‘Bring splendour to your marriage with our hand-knitted french letters.’ Or for the Swiss something a bit aphoristic like ‘C’est le premier pas qui coûte quand c’est le premier coup qui part!’” Galen shuddered, but with gratitude. “For the moment,” he said hastily, “we need nobody. Perhaps later.”

A Swiss military band with a pedantic goose-step marched across the middle distance against a blazing wall of Catherine wheels pounding out the music of Souza. Schwarz went on quietly swearing, with resignation, almost with piety, oblivious to the restraining caress of Constance’s hand upon his elbow. Soundlessly, one might say, inside all this triumphant noise. His lips moved, that was all.

“I do not see,” said Toby with a judicial air which could not hide a certain insobriety, “that the future can resemble the past in any way. Thanks to science the world has come to an end, for the woman is free at last, though she remains bound to the wheel of generation; she is free to spread sterility at will. The balance of the sexes is beautifully disturbed.” Galen looked both perplexed and alarmed. But Sutcliffe nodded approvingly and said, “Exactly what I have been telling Aubrey, to his intense discomfiture. He also hoped that things would go on in the same old way. I was forced to disabuse him. Soon we are going to have to collaborate on a terminal book, and it’s important that we should see eye to eye, so that it will be written, like all good books, by the placental shadow, me! Actually if it is to be historically true it should be entitled WOMAN IN RUT AND MAN IN ROUT. And of course the secondary result of this confused situation will be an increasing impotence in the male –
un refus de partir, mourir un peu beaucoup quoi!
My basic genetic alibi, my cockstand, will go all anaesthetic.” He gave a low moan on a theatrical note. All this was calculated to increase the distress of poor Schwarz. If Sutcliffe was to be believed, what hopes could one hold out for the future of medical practice – specially something as fragile and contestable as psychoanalysis? Moreover they were
joking
about such a situation – joking about tragedy! He rose unsteadily to his feet and gazed wildly about him as if he were seeking a weapon. For the appropriateness of the subject-matter to the specific night – the victory carnival after nearly a decade of war – made the whole context ironic in the extreme. Constance rose also in warm sympathy with her colleague’s fury, and prepared to set sail with him despite the protests of the others. As they walked away from the braying and banging of the spectacle towards the shadows Schwarz filled in the picture in his own mind with bitter thrusts of thought: yes, after all, Sutcliffe was right. Semantics would replace philosophy, economic judaism democracy, sterility potency … and so on. There was no way round the omens. But at least he, Schwarz, refused to be flippant about the matter. He
cared
, he was
concerned
!

At last they came to the last depleted taxi rank and he turned to bid her goodnight, for she had elected to stay at her flat in town for the night. “I am sorry to have been so very subversive on Victory Night,” he said ruefully, “but what is there left to hope for, eh?” They embraced and he gazed long and tenderly at her before turning aside – a look which would remain with her for years, for this was the last time she was to see Schwarz alive; a look which summarised the tenderness and professional zeal which linked them in the name of their defective science.

She stood gazing after the taxi, touched by a dawning premonition of something momentous about to happen, she knew not what!

NINE

End of the Road

“ A
TTENTION CONSTANCE
,”
SCHWARZ HAD WRITTEN ON
their common blackboard in violet chalk before copying the phrase again upon a sheet torn from his prescription pad; this latter leaf he propped against the dictaphone. It bore an arrow and an exclamation mark and indicated the pyramid of wax cones upon which he had imprinted the true story of his death, his suicide. It would have been sad if by some inadvertence they had been overlooked or cleaned of their story. The cones were sorted most carefully and numbered; it was possible to hear his description and exposition of the whole business in strict sequence. Schwarz had always had a mania for order – it seemed to him to confer a sort of secondary truthfulness. And in this particular case he had been anxious to present his decision as reasonable, the act as pardonable because quite logical. Nevertheless there was some guilt mixed up in the business, for he had felt the need to make a case for himself.

They had both always despised suicide!

And now what?

“Constance, my dear, I foresee that perhaps you may be a little shocked by my decision, but I did not take it lightly; it has matured slowly over a period of time, and has only come to a head during this week, after receiving the letter which you saw Cade hand me – a letter which contained strange news after so many years of silence. It told me that Lily had been found at last and still alive! Found among the dregs of Tolbach, the notorious camp for women, in Bavaria. At first of course my heart leaped up, as you can imagine, and a variety of conflicting and confused emotions filled it; but then the letter contained news which was disquieting rather than reassuring. She had lost her teeth and her hair, was suffering from malnutrition as well as experiencing moments of aphasic shock … My first impulse was to rush to her side, but when I phoned the units working on the problem the doctor in charge advised me to give them what he called “a breathing-space”, for he did not want me to be too shocked by her condition. He needed time to feed and rest her up a little. He posted me some photographs taken at the camp, of those who had been still alive when the place was discovered. Lily was only one of many, but fortunately she had been sufficiently coherent to give an account of herself, and they had found her dossier in the camp files. But the photographs they enclosed were hair-raising in their fierceness – this bald and toothless old spider, worn to the skeleton with hunger – this was all that was left of Lily, the lovely Lily!

“Connie, you know just how deeply guilty I have always felt about her – about my cowardice in escaping from Vienna without her, and leaving her to the mercies of the Nazis – to almost certain death. There was no excuse, and I never
tried
to excuse this terrible failure of nerve. But I lived, as you know, bowed under the guilt of this act all through the war – even sometimes perversely hoping that she might never return to judge me – though I knew it was not in her nature to judge! But it was there, the guilt. And then at other times I thought of her possible return as a joyful event: it would give me a chance to make it all up to her, to repay her for all her sufferings … How skilfully we can untangle the delusions of others! Yet when it comes to one’s own one is powerless not to believe in them, not to swallow our self-manufactured fictions!

“Of course I was impatient with myself. I tried to treat the situation in a masterful fashion; I took up the phone and implored the doctor to put me in touch with Lil, direct touch. He deplored the idea but agreed and gave me a time of day which would be suitable. But I was unprepared for the dry clicking of her voice with its shy pauses, its lapses of memory. It was like talking to a very old and half-mad baboon.” (Here the terse narrative was caught up with a dry sob. After a long pause the grave measured voice of the old doctor resumed the thread of his story.)

“I was gradually coming to a new point of realisation about her; it was dawning on me that her return to me in this new form was something to be dreaded rather than wished for. For so many years the thought of her had acted upon me like a sharp reproach; but now she threatened to become something altogether more fierce still – a living, breathing reproach to the man who had been responsible for her distress, her imprisonment! I suddenly realised that I simply could not face such a
dénouement
. I was completely unable to swallow such an idea. Moreover this sudden violent revulsion was completely unforeseen. It surprised me as much as it shook me. What was to be done, then? To deny her once more? To repeat my original act of cowardice, apparently because she was in poor physical shape? Such a thing would be unthinkable, unpardonable! Then what alternatives were there? None. The only choice before me was either to submit or else to vanish from the scene. The solution printed itself on my mind with a simple finality which was incontrovertible! I could find not a shadow of doubt with which to counter its cold and absolute truth!” Schwarz paused for breath and one could hear the scratch of a match as he lit up a cigar and puffed reflectively before resuming his account.

“Naturally I envisaged something very swift and decisive, a bullet in the brain no less. And I unpacked the old revolver, broke it, and checked the shells. Then I put it carefully in my mouth like the well-briefed suicide I was – God knows, when I was a young intern I had helped clean up messes of this kind when on duty with a police ambulance. Memories came back to me as I sat there, feeling and looking foolish, with the icy barrel of the revolver pressing upon my soft palate. I knew of course that revolvers throw upwards as they fire and that one stood a fair chance of error if one fired it through the temple – one case I recalled had shot out his two eyes without inflicting upon himself the death he sought. The only foolproof way was to shoot upwards into the skull via the soft palate. This is what I proposed doing. What, then, was making me hesitate like this? Partly for company, and partly for encouragement I switched on the time-clock of the telephone and sat there listening to the disembodied voice repeating: ‘At the fourth stroke it will be
exactly
…
Au quatrième toc il sera exactement
…’ Don’t smile! I just could not press that cold trigger. The seconds ran away like suds down a sink and there I sat, pistol in one hand and telephone in another, riveted. Another memory had surfaced – of a suicide who had actually done the trick classically, pistol in mouth. But the force of the explosion had removed the whole crown of his head like somebody’s breakfast egg. An appalling mess for a young and shaky intern. I vomited violently as I worked at the cleaning up. Naturally I suddenly felt that I could not inflict this upon our own ambulance people. I rose and hunted out an old skull-cap of mine and a prayer shawl. Draped in these I resumed my vigil with the telephone and this time I stayed there obstinately, urging myself to show the necessary courage to complete the act. I had already sorted my papers, cheque books, identity kit, etc. so that Lily would have no problems when she re-entered civil life; I had even written her a cheerful note of welcome to my flat which she would soon own.”

In the pauses of his discourse you could hear the puffs as he drew on his cigar and formulated what he wanted to say next. “Constance, I found I could not do it. A new cowardice had come to replace the old. I laid the pistol down – it is where you will find it. I am substituting a peaceable injection for it. It is less dramatic but just as efficacious. Goodbye, darling Constance.”

His sighs expended themselves on the queer silence, and one was able to imagine what he was doing from the tinkle of the syringe against the ash-tray. He muttered a short prayer in his own language, but it was perfunctory and full of disdain for God in whom he believed only intermittently. Constance listened to all this sitting with the dead man at her side slumped at his work-desk. Then she called the Emergency Unit.

TEN