The Avignon Quintet (25 page)

What a mysterious business.

Wound up one day like a clockwork toy

Set down upon the dusty road

I have walked ticking for so many years.

While with the same sort of gait

And fully wound up like me

At times I meet other toys

With the same sort of idea of being

Tick tock, we nod stiffly as we pass.

They do not seem as real to me as I do;

We do not believe that one day it will end

Somewhere on a mountain of rusting

Automobiles in a rusty siding far from life.

Pitted with age like a colander

Part of the iron vegetation of tomorrow.

THREE

Sutcliffe, The Venetian Documents

A
RRIVED, THE GREAT MAN DUMPED HIS LUGGAGE AT THE
hotel and putting on blue-tinted glasses set out to have a little walk and smell, deambulating with caution however because somewhere in this fateful town was Bloshford, the writer he hated most in the world because he was so rich, his books sold like pies; Sutcliffe’s superior product sold well enough, but Bloshford carried all before him, and had managed to buy a couple of Rollses! It was vexing that he too spent most of his time in Venice – it was the site of many of his infernal novels. If ever the great Sutcliffe was in a bad temper his thoughts turned to Bloshford and the oaths mounted to his lips. Ah that bald pear-shaped conundrum of a best-seller – that apotheosis of the British artist, the animated tea-cosy! “You just wait Bloshford!” he might murmur aloud. A man who seemed to be held up by the bags under his eyes – every time he saw a bank-statement he breathed in and they inflated. A man who didn’t drink and couldn’t think. A man who could not plant a corkscrew straight. A heavy-arsed archimandrite of British prose … When the man approached you with his bone-setter’s grin you had to bite hard on the bullet.

Thus Sutcliffe taking an evening prowl among the humpbacked bridges and curvilinear statuary, a bit soothed by the breathing beauty of so much lonely water. What would Bloshford be doing now? At the flea market probably, buying a clockwork pisspot that played “Auld Lang Syne”. Doubtless he had begun a new novel …
La merde, la merde toujours recommencée
as Valéry remarked, probably thinking of Bloshford. Enough of this.

He bought some fruit from a stall, and furtively ate it as he walked. The other half of his mind dwelt in Anghor Wat.

All that colossal winter breakdown, the nightmares, the sedatives. After nearly a decade of marriage you expect something to wear out, to blow a fuse. In this case he saw himself sitting beside the breathing slender figure of Pia like someone in an old engraving – a beastly old Rembrandt exhaling the perfervid gloom of Protestantism and a diet of turnips. He could think of nothing except her condition, and how she had got that way so suddenly. Of course, he knew it was something that had been held back, festering, and had suddenly exploded. But what? Neurology at that epoch was medieval except for its chemistry. So we were sent to a feast of psychiatry at Vienna where darling old Freud put his magnifying glass over their lives, their dreams, our hopes. It was a momentous meeting for Sutcliffe the husband, but even more so for the writer, for here was an old humble man who had given birth to an infant science. To see through his eyes was an experience like no other on earth. The writer rejoiced, for the old doctor treated all human behaviour as a symptom – the intellectual daring of this feat changed his whole life. Lucky, too, that the suicide of Pia had misfired, for thanks to this endearing old Jewish gentleman with his pocketful of dreams, the true nature of her breakdown was varnished and framed. He had not guessed that a bad attack of conscience could lead to a complete mental overthrow. This was the case, and the doctor insisted that she tell him the truth about Trash and herself. The crisis had been precipitated by Trash’s threat to leave her and set up house with another girl. But this wasn’t all. Standing pale before me in our hotel room, and wringing her white hands very slowly as if wringing out wet linen, she said: “This is a terrifying predicament, to realise the truth about inversion, because I really have come to love you, Rob. With all my heart and as much of my sex as I humanely can. Really love.”

The great writer had to put that in his pipe and smoke it – there was nothing else to be done about the matter.

A winter of walking about in the rain down snowlit streets; overheated hotel-rooms with the smell of furry moquette; and money pouring away down the drain, down the sink, down … dull opiates which offered no Lethe. It was the turn of Sutcliffe to become neurotic, sleepless. But instead of losing weight he put it on, for the same reasons; he could not resist the Vienna cafés with their extraordinary range of pastry. He began to look tearfully like the fat boy in
Pickwick
, and his eyes began to give trouble. But in order to play his part he had to turn priest and listen to the whole confession of the only woman he had really wholeheartedly loved; and in her brave tearful stammering realise that really, for the first time in his life, he was truly loved. It was only this malefic predicament that had unseated them. “Robin sure is sicker than a cat, honey.” Yes, Robin sure was sicker than a cat!

I only saw the old man-in-the-moon a couple of times to talk about Pia. It was enough. He was full of endearing quirks of a strongly Jewish cast – after all, who else could rename love “an investment of libido”? It was marvellous. It kicked in the rear poor little Narcissus gaping into the stream. It was intellectually the most electrifying experience that Sutcliffe the writer had ever enjoyed. Reading up a bit of this extraordinary lore he began to see some of the reasons behind his own choice of an investment in Pia – the shadow of another comparable inversion. What he had admired sexually in her was that she looked so boyish. Abrupt gestures and hair tossed out of eyes. For all her daffodil fragility she was a boy. Then he remembered once that after a fancy-dress ball when she was dressed as a soldier she came to bed still in her military tunic and the result had been more than somewhat outstanding. Never had he been so excited! But this type of predisposition could not be cured by rushing out to a brothel and ordering a friend of Baron Corvo. It wasn’t sufficiently enracinated, sufficiently powerful, the strain; not as powerful as the corresponding strain in Pia. Meanwhile the great attachment had clarified itself as the genuine article … ahem, he coughed behind his hand, as Love.

There was plenty of time in this Venetian spring to go over all these scenes in his mind for the umpteenth time, his lips moving as he re-enacted them, as if he were reading the score of some strange symphony, as indeed he was. In the intervals he wrote a line to his ungovernable friend Toby – the accident-prone don – to cheer himself up with harmless sallies. Listen to the puttle of the vaporettos, finger that fine glass full of smoky grappa or sugary Strega with a meniscus left by the dying sunlight on the lagoon’s horizon. Sutcliffe, pull yourself together, man. What do you propose to do with the rest of your life? Surely somewhere there was a dusky Annamite girl to be found, softer than promises or cobwebs?

Stirring his cold toes in his huge lace-up old-fashioned boots he admitted that he was lonely, that he really hated Venice on that first evening. He wondered whether he should not take the train south right away down to Provence which though less rhetorical and emphatic than Italy has its own lithe grace of a Mediterranean kind; as Toby used to say “something of Sicily mixed with something of Tuscany”. But in the final analysis it was not landscape that irked him by its presence or absence. It was lack of company, it was lack of love. See the great man then staring into the water from a lonely table; his cigar extinguished, his book closed against the twilight. Nightfall.

But his real problem is to forget. The best way would be to let one passion cast out another. We see from this that he was rather disingenuous. He had come to Venice not only to cure his prose of words like
chrysoprase
and
amethystine
but also to cure his soul of its private hauntings. He had come here, in the last analysis, for peace of mind. There were still memories that made him moan in his sleep, or that when awake returned with such force that he dropped knife and fork and felt as if a ball of bloody rags was stuck in his throat. Such compulsive thoughts made the tweed-clad mandarin stand up abruptly and take a turn up and down the balcony, whispering curses under his breath.

To be more explicit still, it was here in Venice that she had elected to tell him everything, which explained the peculiar hold of the place. Those scenes had marked his mind as if with a branding iron. The old American duchess, for example, who entrained them into her circle. Pictorially alone the scene was extraordinary. Huge sides of oxen were delivered to the house in the Via Caravi, whole beefs split down the middle. In these bloody cradles they would lie and make love while the men in blood-stained aprons stood around and jeered. He could see the pale Pia like, Venus Anadyomene in a thoroughly contemporary version of Botticelli lying pale and exhausted in a crucible of red flesh with the black glossy body of Trash looming over her. … Once there had been a little blood in her footprint on the wet bathroom floor, but this was her period, or so she said.