The Avignon Quintet (37 page)

Ah God, for some simple mentholised concubine whose primitive telephone is all ears.

As dolls live on in children’s sleep;

So she in mine where angels come to weep.

Love tamed by a tolling life

Reason acclimatised by love

As below, so above. A wife, a wife!

My kingdom for a knife.

Wanted: a tripod not a pulpit

a poet not a parson

prophecy not homily

lux not lucubration.

Mon cher, parler c’est de manquer de tact.

Toby’s Old Man of the Mountains

His assassins’ balls were blue as fountains,

Their scrotums were deep umber

And their penises sweet lumber.

I often amuse myself by imagining a privileged communication about my case, if case it be, between Doctor Joy and Doctor Young. “This fellow Sutcliffe who is clinically suffering from an aggravated spleen due to the pangs of disprised love, much resembles the celebrated gentleman we find in Janet. Beset by a massive depression which induces listlessness, apathy, inactivity, he himself describes his state as a ‘crisis of lifelessness’. He has tried everything to wrench himself free of this fearful
cafard
– for six months he kept himself drunk on alcohol or smoke. In vain. Nothing amused him, nothing beckoned. He decided at last to commit suicide, and strangely enough the moment he came to this decision he felt very much better, quite toned up in fact. The excitement engendered by the decision to die perked him right up; he had not felt so gay for ages. He smiled as he wrote all his friends touching letters of goodbye. It put him in a very good humour and he began to really enjoy life. He amused himself by firing at his reflection in a mirror, and then actually turned the weapon on himself. But he only caused himself a scratch. With disgust he noted that suicide was really too painful, and he set the thought aside for a while. Then like a blue fruit the melancholia started to grow again.”

For a while he could see her very clearly when he closed his eyes. Tall lace-up boots of cream-coloured kid. A long closely buttoned coat like a guardsman’s trench coat with copper buttons. White kid gloves. A scarf of blue at her throat and a kind of Scotch bonnet on her brilliantly blonde head. The eyes could go sea-grey to bright periwinkle-blue, gentian-blue or soft plumbago. She walks by the lake this tall pale girl with bowed head; she is reading Amiel, and the tears of sympathy come into her eyes. Hidden away on her shoulder is the tiny vaccination mark, prettier than any beauty spot, which he had so often kissed.

The hair very fine and softly wavy, a kind of Circassian ash-blonde. For a while they navigated by the eyes, those plant-bulbs of the head, which convey everything without a sound. Two intuitives find language an obstacle, a clumsy hurdle. The eyes understand wordlessly – for words conceal more than they reveal. How hard it must be to be blind and desperately in love!

In her sleep she grinds her teeth; waking at dawn a glance of pale fire, like a sodium lamp. Naked and uncocooned I took the nymph in my arms, drawing a blank slip in the lottery of love. A doctor of literature with concrete eyes. The suave machinery of psychotalk. I walk the public gardens like a scalded hare. Fat quibbling bottoms of mothers and prams. In the shop windows I gaze eagerly at my own beauty – but all I see is a big baggy man obviously suffering from piles, sunk into his overcoat like a canvas-backed duck. I heard of an old artist who mounted the skull of his mistress on a velvet cushion with jewels for eyes.

It is night now, deep night, and my skull is full of grey mutter.

How I have come to hate this town! Full of negroes and fretful lepers with squints. Cold as a wife-swapper’s embrace, and full of unverified girls. It is dead; lunatics never take holidays. “Smoked out by smoke like old beehives, the stinging vestiges of other lives.”