The Avignon Quintet (4 page)

“Even death has its own precise texture and the big philosophers have always entered into the image of the world it exemplifies while still alive, so to become one with it while their hearts were still beating. They colonised it.” But it was when Akkad said things like that, which had all the air of being quotations from some forgotten gnostic poet, that Sylvie, beside herself with admiration, would spread her hands towards him and say, “O convince me, dear Akkad, please convince me.”

Unlike her brother she shared my native incapacity for belief, a lack which prevented either of us advancing very far into the tangled jungle of the gnostic world; whereas Piers took to it at once like duck to water, and only just managed to prevent himself becoming a bore, a fervent.

Time was moving on, the sunlight was slanting across the planes in a last conflagation before dusk. I broke off my reverie and rejoined the little cab. “To
Monfavet-les-Roses”
, I said, and the driver looked at me curiously, wondering, I imagine, whether to feel sympathy or not; or perhaps he was just curious. The idea of the roses gave a singular tinge to the notion of madness. Indeed in the vulgar Avignon slang
“tomber dans les roses”
which had been waggishly adapted from
“tomber dans les pommes”
signified going mad enough to be incarcerated in the grey institution. We were moving through the cool evening light towards Sylvie. I wondered how I should find her.

You would say that they were simply two old dilapidated rooms with high ceilings and a predisposition to unreachable cobwebs, but they were rather glorious, belonging to an older age, part of the original foundation. But they had always been hers, set aside for her, and now it was as if they belonged to her completely. The authorities had allowed her to move in her own graceful furniture from the chateau, carpets and paintings, and even a large tapestry rescued from the old ballroom. So that it was always a pleasant shock of surprise to come upon this haven of calm and beauty after traversing the rather forbidding main buildings, and the succession of long white corridors with sterile-looking glass doors painted over with doctors’ names. Moreover her own high french windows gave out directly on to the gardens so that she could virtually live in the open all summer. Hers was the life of a privileged prisoner, except when she happened to have a period of remission when she resumed her place in the ordinary world. But the rooms stayed hers, and while she was away they were kept scrupulously dusted.

She worked under the great tapestry with its glowing but subdued tones – huntsmen with lofted horns had been running down a female stag. After the rape, leaving the grooms to bring the trophy home, they galloped away into the soft brumous Italian skyline; a network of misty lakes and romantic islets receding into the distance along the diagonal; fathered by Poussin or Claude. The stag lay there, panting and bleeding and in tears. None of this had changed and I found the fact reassuring. The beautiful old Portuguese writing desk with its ivory-handled drawers, the rare bust of Gongora, the autograph of Gide enlarged and framed above the piano. Jourdain stood by with a quiet sad smile, holding his passkey in his hand, and giving me time to take it all in. My eye fell upon a bundle of manuscript, and a tangle of notebooks lying about in a muddle on the carpet – as if a packet had exploded in her hands. “The spoils from Piers’ room,” said Jourdain following my eye. “The police allowed her to carry off some of the stuff in the hope that she might reveal something of interest. But so far nothing. She seems to have been the last to see Piers, you see? Come; we can talk later.”

Well, but she had gone away to lie down and sleep in her vast unmade bed with its heavy damascened baldaquin holding back the light and neutralising it. Her eyes were closed but she was not asleep. I could tell by the movement of her inquisitive fingers – they were playing something like the slow movement of the A minor; but slowly and haltingly, as if sight-reading it for the first time. We made little enough noise, but I could tell from long experience that she knew we were there, sensing the fact like an animal. Nor was there anything mysterious in the fact that it was I, for she had been expecting me. It was the purest automatism for me to go down on one knee and place my finger on her white wrist. I whispered her name and she smiled and turned; without opening her eyes she kissed me warmly on the mouth, lingeringly. “Bruce, at last you, Bruce.” But she said it as if I were still part of a dream she was enacting in her mind. Then she went on in a different register and in a small precise voice. “So then everything smells of burnt rubber here. I must tell Jourdain.” My companion grunted softly. Then she went on at a headlong pace. “I think really that it was his way of eating that repelled me. Toby always ate in that way. Poor Toby.” I took her hand, forgetting, and said, “Has Toby arrived yet?” But she only put her finger to her lips and said, “Shh. They must not overhear. He will be coming soon. He promised me.” She sat up now in a masterful mood, clasping her hands, but still keeping her eyes fast shut. “Piers’ diaries, they are all over the place, and I can’t sort them properly. Thank goodness you have come, Bruce.” Her lips trembled. “But the smell of rubber and sulphur – I can’t tell which is the worse. So now I am completely in your power, Bruce. There is nobody left now who can hurt me at all except you. Do you want to kill me Bruce, to drive me to it? I must know the truth.”

“Please.”

“I must know the truth.”

She opened her eyes at last and turned towards us smiling – a trifle tearfully to be sure but with a basic composure that was reassuring. It always amazed me that whenever I reappeared after a long absence she suddenly shed her sickness. It was like watching a diver slowly surfacing. After a moment she lay down again and turned her face to the wall saying, but this time in a confidently rational tone, “Part of the confusion is in myself, you know, but mostly in all three of us at once. It is horrible to be a battleground of three selves.” I knew only too well what she meant, though I said nothing, simply keeping my fingers on the precious timepiece of her pulse.

She lay sighing, and then after a while it came back, the sensation that by some enigmatic act of willpower I drew her slowly back towards reality once more. It was still a factor of control over her (which did not always work) that I would have liked to rationalise, to use like a real healer. I tried to explain it to myself by saying that with me she gradually began to forget that she was mad. In ascribing a rational value to everything she said, however confused, I provoked her into trying to provide one for herself. I pretended that it all had a meaning, and of course in another sense it did have one, if only one could have deciphered it. It was indeed literally drowned in meaning, like a flooded boat.

There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear – if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one’s hold also on one’s own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage to hold on to our reason. With the spectacle of madness before one’s eyes one feels the odds shorten. The eclipse of reason seems such an easy affair, the grasp on sanity so provisional and insecure. While I was feeling the weight of these preoccupations she was saying: “Everything seems to have come to an end now, but has it? Three little nigger boys … then there were two. I am afraid of you. Bruce what shall we do?” The question was asked on such a rational note that I took the plunge and asked: “You were with him? How did it happen? Did he do it himself?” She gave a small sigh, and closed her eyes once more; she was fading back into sedation again, that marvellous defence against the importunities of the world; I felt a fool for having adventured such important questions at such a time. Jourdain had the grace not to look quizzically at me. He shrugged. A tiny snore escaped her lips, and the doctor drew me softly out of that submarine bedroom into the study.

I waited there for a long while, suspended as if in a solution of silence, watching her and listening to her gradually deepening breathing as she edged her way towards the dismemberment of a drugged sleep. Jourdain was very patiently waiting too; he was an endearing man and the slight cast in one eye gave him always a sad juridical air, a tiny touch of melancholy which invaded his frequent smiles and inflected them with sadness. He sported dark suits even in summer, when they must have been stifling to wear, and white wing-collars with ties almost broad enough to be stocks. He whispered that he would come back for me at dinner-time and then quietly tiptoed away. I sat beside her for a while longer and then followed his lead. But in the outer room I started to gather up all the litter of papers and notebooks which were lying about on the carpet. It was typical of the sort of jumble of paper that Piers accumulated around him – everything unfinished, down to the last aphorism! One might have thought that a mad magpie had been at work among this heap of old concert programmes, maps of cities, rare pamphlets, notebooks and letters. I did what I could to sort and tidy, but it was not easy. Among the letters, some still in their envelopes, there were a number from me, and a number from Sylvie to me which I had sent on to him – so much did I feel that we were one person and obliged to share each other’s lives, both inner and outer.

Then there were some from Piers to her, all written on the notepaper he affected which bore the legend
Outremer
. (I had noticed on her finger Piers’ seal ring with the same rebus. He had always ironically referred to himself as “the last of the Templars”, and the word expressed not only the family tie, for he was indeed a de Nogaret, but also the Templar pride in the overseas commitment of the order. For such a romantic going to the Middle Orient was a thrilling experience – of a quasi-historical kind. He felt he was returning to the roots of the great betrayal, the roots of all anti-Christian dissent. Piers was a worshipper of the Templar God. He believed in the usurper of the throne, the Prince of Darkness.)

I pondered all these contingencies as I sat in the green armchair, sifting the papers and dreaming. “In the face of such evil, creative despair is the only honourable posture,” he said once and was annoyed when I smiled at his serious expression. I turned the pages of a diary in which he jotted down the visits he had received during the days preceding his death. Had he given his sister the seal ring which she now wore, the
Outremer
ring? I shook a copy of
A Rebours
and more letters fell out on to the carpet. One was a note to me from Piers giving an account of one of his sister’s relapses. “When these periods come on, Bruce, she hears my voice everywhere, in the woods, in the hot-water pipes, in the drone of a mosquito, crying out always ‘Sylvie, where are you?’ Followed by a sudden ominous wail ‘I have killed my sister.’ She is terrified at such times. What can I do?”

Such periods corresponded neither to the phases of the moon nor to her own physical rhythms. They seemed perfectly arbitrary and unpredictable. If we came to see her at such a time she would recognise only one of us, Piers. And here was a long rambling letter which she had written to me, but dedicated to her brother. “Dearest, you have been away so long. Soon it will be my birthday and I can scent the eachness of numbers, they mate with such reluctance. I know you cannot come as yet but I pretend. Today I waited all day for you, clothed from head to foot in a marvellous seamless euphoria. The throbbing of the almond-blossom has been almost unbearable, I cried myself asleep, back into reality again. Now the fruit is forming and I know I love you. Bruce dear, this is Man Friday’s sole in the sand, I have it in the carpet now. Even Jourdain says he sees it, so I know that I am not romancing. Piers was a Friday child remember? My dearest, they say that now you are back from India, and yet no word. Why? You will certainly have your reasons, and everything will be explained when you come. Forgive me if I am impatient.

“I am impatient to hear about India – O how was India; how calm was India? Starving and God-drunk and tattered with dry excrement? I feel I know. Every drawn breath an infanticide, every smile an enigmatic option on inner loneliness. When I was there long ago I felt the moon of my fragile non-being was at full. The smell of the magnolia remembers me supremely. A deep sadness seemed very worth while. But locked up in the first-class waiting-room of my mind I have come to repine. Yesterday they let me pretend and I went down to our Montfavet church to say hullo to the people on the wall. Nowadays at night I seem to hear Piers walking about in the other room, but he is never there when I run to see. This place, this mockery of a place, is full of a special sadness. Jourdain feels it too. He is still here, still talking of retiring, fastidious as a leper; I taste his smoke after he has gone. The taste of iodine too.”