The Avignon Quintet (28 page)

Somewhere, thousands of miles away, Akkad was writing: “They refuse to accept the findings of direct intuition. They want what they call proof. What is that but a slavish belief in causality and determinism, which in our new age we regard as provisional and subject to scale.” And in another corner of Europe Freud was formulating the disposition of the artist as a hopeless narcissist, incapable of love, of investment. The old bastard, who saw so clearly the pathology of the artistic situation. “People who have violent emotions but no feelings are a danger to us all,” he said to Sutcliffe once. Ah but in that ideal world where everyone would be forced to do what they most wanted toan intolerable situation would be created!

At some point in time, much later on, with a new sympathy and kindness this girl closed her eyes and put her hands on his shoulders, smiling a little rueful smile of complicity. It was marvellous to feel liked, desirable. The great man felt quite tearful with gratitude when he thought of the beauty of this youthful person. He felt he ought in all honesty to inform her that he was heartwhole, and well armoured against her after all that he had learned in Vienna, first from Stekel (shaped like a pipette) and then those findings of the momentous old gent called Joy. What a fool he was to ask himself if it was quite fair to make love to her on these terms. He succumbed like a sleep-walker. How marvellous to love her and yet … once below the photic zone where the great fishes gawped, their eyes on stalks, like untrained neuroses: somewhere in that domain comes the clickety-click, the classical
déclic
, of the cash-register consciousness, of the obdurate thinking soul. He knew it only too well, but closing his eyes he bored into her with his mind, trying to lose himself. He had forgotten everything now, even Oakshot. He was flirting with the truth of things now; he knew that all meetings are predetermined even though (perhaps because) one hunts for the person one is anyway doomed to meet. Someone with whom one could make models of one’s anxieties and set them free to float, then catch and exorcise them.

Predators, within each other’s eyes lay a hundred mirror-marriages. She watched him out of the corner of her eye like an investment – the
mot juste
of Uncle Joy. What a marvellous prison, then, these self-declaring kisses, spent at random as soon as ripe, self-seeding like cypresses. He had done the mental trick that he had learned from his yoga teacher long ago. To elicit a sexual sympathy strong enough to seduce you start by copying the breath, breathing in chime with the girl, feeling your way into her rhythm. Closed eyes. Concentrate devoutly, piously. Then mentally polarise your sexual organs and enter her very softly going up and down rhythmically until she feels your sensual drive and accepts it. Touch her breasts softly, her flanks, her nipples until the gravy starts and she starts to breathe quickly, turns pale and opens her eyes. Talk to her softly, lovingly … In this whole transaction there was no vulgar forcing. The girl was paramount, her yes or no decided everything. But plead one could and with the power of thought and words one could excite and rough her up. O yes!

Sutcliffe was in luck; for this is precisely what the girl was doing to him. The result was that they met in a head-on collision of passions which rather scared them both. Ah this knowledgeable genius of a man, what didn’t he know?

Come, tax that pretty strength

And try the thing again

From pain to gather pleasure

From pleasure gather pain.

She was lovely beyond all others, this Jewish dervish, with her sense of space and history, her echo-box of racial memories, her gallant hypomania. How deeply the night seemed perfumed by her and the silences after her deep soft voice had fallen still. That voice, O barracuda-music to the Gentile heart. A pensive cocoon of a sleeping girl with a pleasant tilt to the East. Sabine was surely her name, Sabine Banquo. Ah love with such a girl was like eating a cannibal’s ear. She perfectly understood that man and woman were a single animal tragically divided by Plato; that it was a notion of the Muses. A deep friendship flared up between them between two and three-thirty in the morning – something irreplaceable and unrepeatable. And he was not even drunk. It was absolutely essential to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Anyway this was not love; for that is irrational. This had all the pith of an equation. “You don’t want to ruin your lives?” said Sutcliffe, admonishing them both from the depths of his profound experience.

Then sleep came – we were entering the countries of sadness, deep below the photic zone with its huge gogglefish, where in the darkness the real task outlines itself like a sort of flare-path, namely how to make sense of oneself. You do not have to be an artist to recognise the imperative which is every man’s. Yes but how? In this domain right sex is capital, it flenses the feelings of all the poisonous artifices brought in by the think-box in the guise of clever ideas. It is a conversion of the revoking mind into irresponsible cloud-soft laughter and smiling passion. With what a sag of misery did the genius reflect on the matter of capturing this experience in words. … Writers, those prune-shaped hacks in hairpieces sitting down to make a few lame pages hobble out of their typewriters – what would they see in all this? Custom-built Jewesses with desultory undercarriages made over by the diving heart into the dark hovering bird presences of history?

He had no idea what time it was when her father came in, softly opening the door with a small asthmatic wheeze. It woke her and she pulled a cover over his head. The old man said: “Asleep?” in a discreet whisper. She replied: “Almost,” on a pleasant loving note.

There was late moonlight thrown back from the mirror. The old man was in full fig, with his opera cloak on, decorations blinking on his breast, and a flap-gibus in hand. He crossed the room softly, almost precariously, to place himself in front of the mirror which was full of white moonlight and the reflection from the watery streets of the city. It was not as if he were drunk, no, but rather as if he were afraid of stepping on a loose board and so making a noise. He stood there, happily but sheepishly, gazing at his own reflection and saying nothing. He stared and stared at himself as if hunting for the least defect in his appearance. Alone, he nevertheless seemed deeply and serenely aware of her sleepy presence. “How was the music?” she asked at last in French and he replied, with a deep sigh: “
Mortelle, ma fille.
” He leaned forward to touch the reflection of his right ear and then drew himself sharply upright, giving a reproving shake of his head. “I am staying on a few days,” he said. “I have to raise a loan for the City of London.”

Sutcliffe suddenly wanted to sneeze. He tried very hard to remember which musical comedy he had decided to be influenced by on the spur of the moment – or a Sacha Guitry play – and then pressed his nose between her warm breasts until the impulse left him. The man in the mirror said “It is not enough just to keep softly breathing in and out as the years pass. One should try to achieve something.”

“Yes, father,” she said obediently and yawned.

‘I wasn’t thinking of you,” said the old man.

He turned, as quietly as ever, and passed through the open door into the lighted corridor with a soft velvet goodnight. He closed it softly and she lay back with a contented sigh. Sutcliffe, replete with her caresses and disarmed by the old man’s extraordinary air – for he looked like Disraeli – snuggled back into his niche and sought the deeper reaches of sleep, while she lay awake, but happily so, at his side. What was she thinking of? He could not guess.

It was almost dawn when, because she could not sleep, she switched on the subdued light at her bedside and from the drawer of the night-table took a pack of cards. She spread them out, fanned them out in a prearranged pattern on the counterpane and began to ask them questions. Suddenly she stiffened and the timbre of her curiosity had the effect of awakening him. “Do you see what they say?” she asked, smiling. “That you killed someone very close to you, I think your wife.” Naturally he was by now wide-awake. What a marvellous thing to happen to Oakshot, and all the more beguiling as this lady gave herself out to be a rationalist, and then started to behave just like Newton on Sunday! “Deliberately or just by accident?” he asked, curious to judge the effect of this information on his hero.

“Deliberately.”

“Tell me more,” he said, aware that all this kind of fortune-telling was bogus. But to his surprise he found that she was outlining, with tolerable accuracy, the plot of the book in which he had actually managed to do away with Pia, albeit in a semi-accidental fashion. She was in fact “reading” a version of a book which had enabled him to exculpate himself from his feelings of deep aggression against Pia – his desire to murder her. He asked her if she had read the novel in question but she had not. Yet in her slow and thoughtful description it was all there: the whole Indian Ocean around the couple, the calm night sea, the tropical moon like some ghastly mango sailing in clouds. The lady in her evening gown; tippet sleeves and sequins, every other inch a memsahib. Which of the many versions, all disastrous?

Sabine laughed suddenly and said: “I cannot guarantee any of this. I have only recently started playing with it as a system. The Tarot.”

System! In the book they went onto the boat deck after dinner to take the air – the still ambient sterile air. Their quarrel had been a momentous one – they had each said wounding, unforgettable things, things which could never be sponged away, excused, taken back. They were buried deep in the ruins of this collapsed edifice of their marriage, their love. How pale she was! They went slowly aft and stared down at the throbbing white wake which stretched away under the moon to a dark horizon. He tried desperately to think of something clever and healing to say but nothing came to his lips except curses. “I see it all now,” she said in a low voice, and with an inexpressible bitterness. Then with a kind of effortless gesture, gravely as a dancer leaning into her opening steps in time to music, she vaulted the rail, fell, and disappeared. He had made no effort to stop her.

An alarm bell sounded and for hours now the ship turned, the waters were sprayed by searchlights. Boats were lowered clumsily, accidental manoeuvres of the oars, heads nearly banged, etc. Floats and lifebelts spattered the calm sea, voices crackled and boomed from radio and loudhailer. Nothing came of it all. Yet she had been an excellent swimmer and had won many cups and medals. In the first-class bar where he at last shambled to drink an exhausted cognac the gramophone, albeit tactfully lowered, played “Bye-Bye Blackbird”. To his surprise the whole thing only irritated him; he was ashamed not to feel Pia’s sudden death more acutely. In the book he had called himself Hardbane, an Anglican clergyman.

Sutcliffe dozed off at last in a mild amazement, to awake much later and find that dawn’s left hand was in the sky. No; he had not pushed Pia, though in the novel someone distressed him by hinting at it. Their quarrels had been overheard. Sabine had thrown the cards down now and was talking in a low voice about travelling through central Europe with the gipsies in order to learn their language. Despite her warmth and cherish he dragged himself awake and betook himself to the bathroom to dress. He embraced her tenderly and extracted a promise to meet him in the afternoon at their first café by the water. And so with confident tread back to his own hotel, tipping the sleeping night-porter royally.

Once back in his den he pushed open the balcony doors in order to feel nearer to her and crawled sweetly into bed as if into the arms of his mother. What could be more divine than to sleep one’s way forward into a sunlit day on a Venetian canal? He would wake for a stroll and a late breakfast among these stone galleries now made doubly beautiful by the experience she had offered him. But his own sense of prediction was not as acute as hers for that afternoon in the sunny café the waiter handed him a message. A premonition of the envelope’s contents flashed into his mind. Yes, it was so. She was leaving Venice with her father (had she forgotten what he had said to the mirror?) Vaguely she expressed the hope that they might meet again one day, but added, on a minatory note: “I try never to let anyone become indispensable.”

If anyone had asked him why he laughed so ruefully and struck his knee with his hat he would have replied by quoting Flaubert:
“Je ris tout seul comme une compagnie de vagins altérés devant un régiment de phallus.”

He determined there and then that the whole city lay in ruins about him, and that it would be as well to depart for Avignon at once. To reinforce the decision he sent Toby a telegram and set out to locate a little car to rent for the journey.

In his little red notebook the following random thoughts formed and were jotted down, like the slow interior overflow of a stanchless music. Often they made no sense at all when he looked them over, but he believed firmly that one should have the courage to write down even what one did not fully understand. Somewhere it was “understood”.

As follows:

An excellent lesson in generosity. It was clear that there was no future in an affair for her – I am too old. Steatopygous novelist.

Trash’s voice echoing all the gluttony of fiddles, so deeply rosined. Coughed on her cigarette smoke like a tuba. The moon glow of her warmth, an emphysema of cordiality. Said: “Robin has enough sympathy to float a ship, honey child.” Alas.

Sitting at Quartila’s on the canal with Sabine watching the stars flowing by – our loving minds simultaneously ignited by a falling star. “Look!”