The Avignon Quintet (2 page)

And yet we had been lucky, given the circumstances of our occupations and voyages, to have enjoyed an almost continuous association with each other; our initial friendship which later turned into love, had never withered on the stalk. As a youth I had come into contact with the brother and sister who lived so strange an abstract life of beauty and introspection in their lonely chateau: and from then on we had hardly quitted one another. Piers became a diplomat, I a Service M.D., yet despite all the vagaries of fate we were, at the very worst, posted simultaneously to adjacent countries. On several lucky occasions we even achieved the same posting, he to the Embassy of France, I to the British. Thus we knew Cairo together and Rome, we shared Pekin and Berne, we divided Madrid. Sylvie was our lieutenant, and when we were apart she shared us, moving from one to the other. But always we spent our summer leaves in Verfeuille together. So that despite all the changes of place and person the whole pattern of our lives (and in consequence our love) had continuity and design.

Later I had deliberately married Sylvie because she wished it. It further cemented our fierce attachment to each other. Nor was I sleepwalking, for I knew full well the psychological implications of the act. I also knew that one day the centre might fall out of Sylvie’s mind; that she might have to be sent away, sequestered in the green quietness of Montfavet, the great straggling asylum which hovers among the lush streamlets and sunny bowers of the Vaucluse, exhaling something like the kinetic calm of an Epidaurus. On this score I have never had anything to regret. This three-cornered passion has held me spellbound for a lifetime and will see me beyond the grave. I knew I had found my
onlie begetters
. I was reliving the plot and counterplot of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in my own life. I had found the master-mistress of my passion. Who could ask for more?

I had been walking all winter long in a country of snowbound lakes, locked in the steel grip of ice, where the wild geese hooted all night long as they straggled south. Thus walking in the grey winterscapes one comes, at every turn, upon little bundles of dispersed feathers – the snow like a rumpled dining table in the woods. The diner had left already. Sometimes the fox may have spared a bird’s head, but mostly only a clutch of unswallowable feathers. A walk in the ancient world, I thought, must have been somewhat similar, with the remains of animal sacrifices at every crossroads, in green groves, on the seashore. They offered up a sacrificial death to the Gods as later on men were to offer up the first fruits of their garden plots. I felt that perhaps the suicide of Piers (if such an improbable thing were true) somehow partook of this sort of offering. But I still didn’t quite believe in it. But then, if not by his own hand, then by whose? Nothing that had happened to us in the past offered an explanation for this astonishing development. And all the more so because of the gnostic ideas of Akkad which Piers claimed to have understood and to have believed in. But wait a minute!

A phrase of Akkad’s comes to mind. It went something like this: “People of our persuasion gradually learn to refuse all rights to so-called God. They renounce the empty world, not like ascetics or martyrs, but like convalescents after suicide. But one must be ripe for this sort of thing.” Suddenly an absurd idea has entered the sleeper’s mind. Piers’ self-inflicted death as being a part of a ritual murder … What nonsense! I had a sudden picture of my friend, quixotic to the point of innocence, repeating the words after Akkad. He had always been prepared to push things to extremes.

And Sylvie? What might she not have to tell me? The thought of her, up there in Montfavet, ached on and on in my mind, as it had done for the last two years.

And so at long last to reach home, to clatter softly and wearily into the empty station – that historic point of return and departure: but this time alone. It has always afflicted me with a profound love-dread, this shabby little station, because so often when I returned Sylvie was waiting for me on the platform, hand in hand with her nurse, distractedly gazing about her. I was always looking out for her, I suppose. The train sighs to a halt and the rasping announcements begin in the accents of the Midi. I stand paralysed among the lighted windows gazing about me.

It never changes; it looks so homely, so provisional, so grubby-provincial. You could never deduce from it the existence of the cruel and famous town to which it belongs.

Outside the mistral purred. In the slowly thawing gardens were the memorable flaccid palms set in their circles of moulting grass. There was still snow-rime in the flowerbeds. And of course a queue of rubber-tyred
fiacres
, waiting for whatever custom the dawn train might bring in. They looked half dead with boredom and disgust, the horses and the drivers. Soon they would be sauntered away into the sleeping town, for the next train arrived after eleven. I managed to wake a driver and strike a price. I was heading for the old Royal Hotel. But as we yawed about and made some disjointed lurches towards the battlements I was siezed by a sudden counter-influence which made me direct the driver towards the river. I felt a sudden desire to see it again, its existence seemed to confirm so many things, the old river-God of our youth. So we slobbered and slid along the ancient walls, outside the bastions. It was dark as pitch, one saw nothing. Trees arched overhead. Then suddenly one heard its voice coupled with the snarl of the wind. Like cats making love. I got out and walked beside the slow cab, feeling the wind clutch my shoulders.

In the greyness the water was inky, swollen and curdled with blocks of ice which thumped and tinkled along the banks.

A faint light touched the east but dawn was not yet breaking. You might have thought yourself in central Asia – the cloudy sky in close link like chain-mail and the fading stabs of moonlight. The driver grumbled but I paid no attention. I even walked out gingerly upon the famous broken bridge, clutching the handrail as well as my hat, for here the wind whirled. A frail ghost-light lit the chapel, but there were no worshippers at that hour. A broken and renowned relic of man’s belief, pointing its amputated fingers of masonry westward. I thought of Piers. In expounding Akkad once he had said something like: “What really dies is the collective image of the past – all the temporal selves which have been present in a serial form focused together now in an instant of perfect attention, of crystal-clear apprehension which could last forever if one wished.” How hollow all these grave lucubrations seemed in this wind-tugged night. Nevertheless they were perhaps appropriate to the place. For a hundred years this shabby village had been Rome, had been all Christendom.

This was, after all, Avignon.

Confused messages waited for me at the hotel, but there was nothing to be done about them at this hour. I dozed on my bed until sunrise and then set out resolutely to find a coffee, traversing the old city with affection and distress, hearing my own sharp footsteps on the pavements, disembodied as a ghost. Avignon! Its shabby lights and sneaking cats were the same as ever; overturned dustbins, the glitter of fish scales, olive oil, broken glass, a dead scorpion. All the time we had been away on our travels round the world it had stayed pegged here at the confluence of its two green rivers. The past embalmed it, the present could not alter it. So many years of going away and coming back, of remembering and forgetting it. It had always waited for us, floating among its tenebrous monuments, the corpulence of its ragged bells, the putrescence of its squares.

And in a sense we had waited for it to reclaim us after every absence. It had seen the most decisive part of our lives – the fall of Rob Sutcliffe, Sylvie’s collapse, and now the suicide of Piers. Here it lay summer after summer, baking away in the sun, until its closely knitted roofs of weathered tile gave it the appearance of a piecrust fresh from the oven. It haunted one although it was rotten, fly-blown with expired dignities, almost deliquescent among its autumn river damps. There was not a corner of it that we did not love.

I had not given much thought to Rob Sutcliffe until now, sitting in this grubby café, waiting for the clocks to strike eight. After my sister Pia … after her defection had become absolutely unequivocal and Rob knew that they would never live together again, his decline and fall began. It was slow and measured at first, the decline from clubman and adventurer and famous novelist into … what exactly? From a dandy with a passion for clean linen to a mountebank in a picture hat. His books passed out of public demand, and he ceased to write any new ones. He took dingy lodgings in the lower town, two rooms in the house of an “angel maker” as the ironists of the town called those old crones who took in unwanted or illegitimate children for a small fee, and with an unwritten, unspoken guarantee to turn them into “angels” in a very few months by ill-treating them and literally starving them to death. This old crone was Rob’s only company in the last years. They sat and drank themselves silly at night in the den he inhabited in that ghastly house full of hungry children. His physical appearance had changed very much since he had grown a straggling black beard, and taken to a cloak and the broad-brimmed hat which gave him a striking appearance. But he had long since ceased to wash, and he was as physically as dirty as an anchorite. He was fond of the cloak because it was impregnated with dirt and spots of urine. He had deliberately taken to wetting his bed at nights now, gloating over the deliberately infantile act, rubbing his own nose in it so to speak. In micturating he always allowed a few drops to fall upon the cloak. The stale odour of the garment afforded him great pleasure. For some time he continued to see Toby, but at last he refused him the right to visit him. All this ostentatious display of infantile regression was all the more mysterious for being conscious. After all, Sutcliffe had started life as a psychologist, and only turned to writing afterwards. It was his revenge on Pia I suppose, but all the stranger for being so deliberate. Sometimes when very drunk (he also took drugs) he would beg a hack from the livery stables and ride slowly about the town, with his head bowed on his breast, asleep: the reins left on the horse’s neck so that it took him wherever it wished. Even when it came to the act of defecation he chose to smear paper and fingers alike. The change in Rob was almost unbelievable. It was his friend Toby who told me all this in his low sad voice – the voice reserved for matters of gravity or distress. He had forced the old crone to disgorge all she knew after Rob’s body had been recovered from the river into which horse and rider had plunged.

It was strange to sit here in the early sunlight thinking about him, and also about Piers who had also met his end not two streets away, in the Hotel des Princes. Why had he not returned to the chateau, why had he stayed on in the town? Was he waiting to greet me? Or was there some other factor involved – perhaps it was easier to see his sister? All these things remained to be discovered. It would soon be time to take up the telephone and sort myself out. Nobody as yet knew I had arrived. I wondered whether perhaps Toby was already here in response to my cable.