The Avignon Quintet (3 page)

The reaction of the long journey had begun to tell on me; I started to doze in the café. But jumping up I went back to the hotel where I knew that a hot shower would give me the energy I needed to get through the day – the memorable day of this return to Avignon and to Sylvie.

It is much later in the year now, when I try to reassess the meaning and value of all these episodes on paper: in search of some fruitful perspective upon my own life here in the old chateau – the queer solitary life which I have at last adopted. Scribbling all this gives me something to do, I am resetting the broken bones of the past. Perhaps I should have begun it long ago, but the thought of the old muniments room with its books and memoranda and paintings, that depressed me. At every point there I am in touch with them all through their diaries and manuscripts and letters. Moreover I myself must hurry a bit also, for a personal shadow has fallen into step with me, a more prosaic medical one which I can hold at bay for a while with the needle. But I am playing my hand slowly so as not to risk deserting Sylvie if I can help it.

I knew that I would have to undertake a few of the official duties in connection with Piers’ death, and later that morning I rang up Jourdain at the asylum, the doctor who had been a family friend, and into whose charge Sylvie had always been placed. He was a cheerful man for a neurologist, and made even melancholia sound like something pleasant and enviable to have. “At last!” he said with evident relief. “We have been waiting for you. She has had excellent remissions, you know, and spent a great deal of time with Piers, until this extraordinary business came about. Yes, I am as puzzled as you must be … Why? They talked of nothing but your arrival and the new life you were going to start together in Verfeuille. Naturally she collapsed, but it’s not a total relapse. Some twilight, some confusional states, but the picture isn’t entirely hopeless. And now you are here you can help me. I am holding her under fairly heavy sedation at the moment. But why not come out to Montfavet this evening and dine? We can wake her together.”

I said I would do so. Apparently Toby had given no sign of life either. I wondered if he had received my cable.

That afternoon, to fill in my time, I took a short cut across the part of the old town which lies inside the fortifications and climbed past the ugly palaces of the Popes; I climbed the green-fringed ramps which led up into the marvellous hanging gardens of the Rocher des Doms. From this vantage point one can look down on three sides to see the loops and curls of the Rhône carving out the embankments of its bed in the carious limestone, sculpting the soft flanks of the nether hills. A frail sun shone upon distant snowlines leading away towards the Alps. A little island lay below this cockpit, frozen, like a wild duck trapped in frost-glittering sedge. Mount Saint Victor stood up in the distance, erect as a martyr tied to its stake of ice. But the wind still blew steel, although the faint sunlight had coaxed out some fugitive perfumes, orange or thyme, upon the air.

Here we had so often wandered, Sylvie and I, moving from one panorama to the other. And repeating the journey now I seemed to recapture many fragments of our old conversations. Events had given them an entirely new resonance. They had become part of past history, that part of time we had shared with Piers. I saw us now as figures – rather as in Rob’s novel – projected anew by the force of memory upon this vernal landscape. Sylvie’s dark-lashed eyes, “borrowed from the thrush” as her brother used to say, and the black hair with its violet blackness shining like carbon paper. Yes, the past now had attained a curious nervous density, a weight which was not composed (as one might suppose) of multiple nostalgias. It was full and rich, plump as an autumn fruit. It had been so fully lived that there was nothing about it one could dare to regret. The feeling of fatality, loneliness, and so on, were constituents of the present. Up here spring was scratching at the door like a pet.

I walked absently about the garden in the cold afternoon air, retracing in my mind the slopes and contours of these ancient conversations and wondering what the future held in store for me in this bereft world.

Sylvie was now the great question mark. Would she, I wondered, ever come to herself again enough to resume some sort of life with me? Funny how confident I had been that the presence of Piers would somehow make this possible, make her return to reason, to reality. There had been neither more nor less reason for optimism than there was now, yet I had felt it. Now I was not sure – I feared the imponderables of mental illness with its imperfectly demarcated boundaries, its sudden changes of temper and altitude. It was Sylvie herself who once said: “One should always distrust the insane. They are of bad faith somehow and they know it. But they don’t know how to alter it, and you doctors don’t know how to cure it.”

And what if the worst should happen? Why, she would elect to stay on at Montfavet in the rooms which had for so long been set aside for her, trusting only in Jourdain, her old friend and confident. I sighed to think that she might never roam the world with me again, making one member of that sad trio, husband, wife, nurse: nor even that other trio of brother, sister, lover. How close we had been before all this unhappiness supervened! I kept thinking back to those days. Piers, Sylvie, myself, Toby, Rob, Pia and Sabine with her pack of fortune-telling cards – where was she now? Did she know of Piers’ death from the cards? – that would be like her. My slow footsteps crunched on the gravel. Below loomed the sinfully ugly palaces of the Popes in all their blockish magnificence, overshadowing the town which despite the resonance of its name was still hardly more than an overgrown village. The quasi-death of insanity with its small periodic remissions, its deviations into good sense, even into brilliant insight, was almost more cruel really than outright death. In my own case it seemed gradually to have worn me out emotionally – the word castration does not sound too exaggerated in the context. An affect dammed and frozen. And of course (doctors are always on the lookout) I could trace the spoor of some deep new inhibitions in my dreams, not to mention my phantasies in which I surprised myself by poisoning her. It is unbelievable when I think of it, yet is true. Standing beside the bed in grim silence with my fingers on her pulse until the shallow breathing filtered away into the silence and her extraordinary marmoreal pallor announced the advent of the rigor. And then the sweet scent rose to my nostrils, the imaginary scent of death which I always smelt: I suspect that it was the odour of morphine. Yet in this dream fantasy it was always Piers who came up and put his hand on my arm to restrain me, to exorcise me.

There was plenty of time that evening. The light was faltering away into moonlit dusk when I set out to walk across the town to the station and pick up a
fiacre
. I wanted to jog in leisurely fashion through the green fields and chestnut avenues, over the rushing bubbling streamlets, to join Sylvie. I had so often done this in the past. I was anxious to see again the little church which had always been our point of rendezvous. Did it still stand in its humble little square planted with tall shady planes? Did the old cracked bistro still have the yellow letterbox nailed to its wall? A small, a fragile point of reference in the incoherent and echoing world of her madness, of her life behind the walls of the great establishment.

I used to catch sight of her waiting for me so shyly among the trees, listening with bent head for the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves. Her tremulous anxiety ignited the dark beauty of her face with its luminous eyes and white-rose pallor. And somewhere near at hand always lurked the tall, military-looking nurse clad in her stiff field-grey uniform, her white hair tugged back on her scalp and pinned into a coif. She would remain watchfully in the shadow of the trees while Sylvie advanced on tiptoe to meet me, her arms outstretched, her lips moving. It was like meeting a small child. The queer little camel-backed church was always empty too, smelling of wax and cats and dust. We entered it always with our arms about each other, the ice broken at last by the first tremulous kiss of recognition. And as always we gravitated, as if by instinct, to the little side-chapel marked with a Roman five, and sat down face to face with the large rather anodyne painting which we had come to love so much. Here she always insisted that we talk in whispers, not from respect of the place, but lest the eavesdroppers in the painting should overhear – though why these so manifestly harmless images should menace the endearments of two lovers in the silent church I do not know.

Jogging slowly along now, down these long green avenues already touched by the first spring shoots, I felt the full ambivalence of my thoughts swinging from side to side as the little
fiacre
itself swung. Queer thoughts passed through my mind, the anarchic thoughts which sprang from those unresolved childish conflicts and fears: thoughts I could identify at least. Perhaps out of Piers’ death I might extract a horror and sweetness which brought me much closer to her? I, who had never been jealous of Piers while he was alive, or so I thought, managed to surprise myself with such a thought. I would have her to myself! And if she were to become sane again, then why not fecund? It was not too late … But here my mind balked. Once before we had taken this path, and it was a distasteful and dishonourable one. Surprised by Sylvie’s pregnancy one spring some years ago, and not knowing for certain whose the child would be, I tried to solve the problem by marrying her, only to have all this uncertainty end in a provoked miscarriage. It was cowardly to pretend that her state of mind dictated it; it was our state of mind which should have been called into question. Nobody likes being a homosexual, just as nobody likes being a negro or a Jew. The marriage was only another mask for the hold I had on her brother through his affections. And yet love is a real thing – perhaps the only real thing in this bereft world. And yet how to achieve the only sort which is viable, enriching – one with no sanctions, no reservations, one without guilt?

It was no longer fashionable to ask too much of oneself; we three must have seemed a somewhat pathetic trio to the outside eye – I think of the mordant phrases of Rob about us. We were old-fashioned, we belonged to the age of piety, and perhaps Avignon was the perfect site for this kind of blind adventure which would leave no trace behind, except for a lot of mouldering papers in the old chateau which would interest nobody, and one day would be sold for scrap.

Outside, in the shade of the trees, the German nurse in field-grey waited for us, standing upright as a soldier, her arms folded, watching the door of the church from which we would eventually emerge. Once Sylvie had written on the walls of the gutted ballroom at Verfeuille the phrase:
“Quelqu’un en gris reste vainqueur.”
And I knew she had been thinking of this tall dour custodian of her reason.

Yes, the church was still there, thank goodness, and the little square had hardly changed. My eyes at once sought the familiar corner under the trees, but now there were only a few aged men stooped over their
boules
. I halted the
fiacre
and went into the nave for a moment, bemused by the sleepy silence, and thinking of nothing in particular. I sat for a while absently in our little side-chapel, staring at the familiar painting which had presided over so many of our conversations. Then I set myself to think hard of her, wondering if perhaps by telepathy I might project some of this sad calm towards her. I closed my eyes and counted the breaths for a while, recreating her form mentally the while in the shape of a target, an ikon. I conjured her up – all the small-boned litheness which issued in such abrupt but sure gestures: she wore clothes of a slightly old-fashioned cut, and little jewelry. It was not hard to forge her image, her “eidolon”, in the grey gloom of the little church. I tried to project towards her that part of a man which is his knowing, thinking and caring part – beyond the ego and the tricks of the mind. Yes, I saw her and another phrase of Akkad came into my mind. I repeated it softly to myself.