The Avignon Quintet (43 page)

FIVE

Dinner at Quartila’s

B
LANFORD THE NOVELIST SIGHED AS HE SEPARATED THE
master copy of the typescript from the other two, and taking up a blank white sheet rapidly wrote down several provisional titles for this new and rather undisciplined departure from the ordinary product. After several faltering attempts he decided to give the devil his due, so to speak, and to call it
Le Monsieur
. Sunset had passed him by and now evening was falling in all its brilliant phosphorescence over the loops of the Grand Canal. He was filled with a vague sense of insufficiency at having at last decided to say goodbye to his creations – they had been together for a couple of years now and he had, inevitably, become fond of them and reluctant to part from them. Besides, had he said all that there was to say about them? There were so many corners he had left unexplored, so many potentialities undeveloped simply because he had firmly decided not to write “the ordinary sort of novel”.

That blasted Sutcliffe – he had grown fond of him; he had enjoyed even being pilloried by him under the disgusting name of Bloshford. Perhaps he should sue himself for libel?

Tonight he would have the first opinion on the book from the old duchess to whom he had sent the third carbon as well as many of the scenes from his notebooks which had not found their way into the definitive text. Never had he been more uncertain of a piece of writing, never had he needed advice and guidance more. Yet he implored her to say nothing until she received his telegram and the invitation to dinner at Quartila’s silk-lined cellar where he would listen to her in all humility, in order to discover what he had, in fact, done. Several beginnings and several endings buzzed around him like mosquitoes as he sat on his high balcony above the water and turned the pages of his notebooks. The suicide – was that right? And he felt that he should perhaps offer a final summing up from the diary of Bruce, let us say; something like this: “The year is on the wane, the month is already November. I have let a number of weeks slip by without making any entries in my diary. I have only a few pages left, just enough to summarise briefly the final history of Verfeuille and its owners. I have decided to cease keeping a diary altogether, to lapse into silence; too much paper has accumulated around us during this long history. ‘It is presumptuous to wish to record,’ writes Sutcliffe somewhere and goes on, ‘Anyway it is too late to alter anything; one has started to appear as a name on the death-map as if it were among the credit titles of some shoddy film.’ He is thinking of the map of Piers where death assumes the shape of a constellation hanging in the sky – the great Serpent Ophis we had once seen in old Macabru. How far away it seems now, watching the rain falling among the silver olives.”

Blanford re-read these words with a pang which translated itself into an actual touch of angina as he sat in his bath chair, high over the lagoons, and let his melancholy eyes wander along the delectable contours of dying Venice – the orchestra of divine buildings hallowed by the opalescent water-dusk. Soon he would have done with the book, done with the masks under which he had so successfully disguised his weaknesses and disappointments and misadventures. His cat slept with one paw still on the white ping-pong ball, eloquent and slim as the devil himself. He had chosen for his epigraph the well-known quotation from Shagbag: “The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman”. He felt ill and yet elated by the nostalgia of this farewell. Bruce’s Journal was to continue thus:

“The last few weeks at the chateau were long and burdensome to live through, so impregnated were they with the sense of our impending departure; mind you, we worked hard, and even sang while we worked at the olives, but it was a pretence for we were all of us heavy hearted. It was cold, and some days we were greeted by heavy cloud and skirls of young snow falling straight out of heaven, only to melt as it touched the grass. In the short brush there was often rime. Soon the colder December weather and the snowfalls on the high
garrigues
would drive the hungry wild boars down towards the lowlands where they could be hunted. With the first frosts thirst would set in, and game birds could be lured by simple tricks like leaving a mirror in an open field to suggest a pool of water. The short-sighted woodcock always came down to inspect it, whirring into the shooter’s range. Hares left their snug ‘forms’ in the cold grass. Ah, Verfeuille! It was hard to imagine any other sort of life, so fully had we lived this one among the green hills and soft limestone river-valleys. We did not know who the inheritors would be; but we knew that the long promised financial calamities had fallen upon the place in the wake of Piers’ death and partly because of it. Only a huge fortune could save the place. Mortgages had come home to roost, contracts now had to be met. It was obvious that by Christmas the whole place would be boarded up, given over to the field-mice, its life extinguished. Moreover those of us who were left would also be dispersed. Toby, for example, had decided to take his now finished and indexed masterpiece to Oxford to touch up the delegates of the press and arrange for its publication. With all the privileged matter he had found among the Verfeuille papers his book planned to overturn many accepted theories about the sin of the Templars. It was now clear that the original de Nogaret had become a Templar himself in order to penetrate the order and destroy it more completely from within. The role of Judas suited him admirably, and like Judas he went mad and at last hung himself. All this new evidence caused quite a throb in scholastic circles – for in order to drive Babcock mad with apprehension Toby had leaked some of his material to learned journals. Now his triumph over pedantry was to be complete. But he himself had decided to leave.

“On his last day we walked over to the Pont du Gard and sat in an icy wind on the honey-coloured stone which we thought that we might never see again, so definitive did this ending of the Verfeuille story seem to us. It was almost a relief to be done with the lame affectionate conversations and to climb at last on to the windy platform of Avignon to await the train. But inevitably we had one last drink at the café by the hideous and funny Monument des Morts with its cheap tin lions we had come to love so much. Winter had unstitched the planes and the leaves rained down in drifts scattering and skirling around our ankles. Yet it was warm for the season, autumn had been delayed. Toby blew his nose a good deal to hide his emotion. We promised each other that we would meet again very soon, and our warmth was effusive and genuine – but how heavy our hearts were! Then the long slowcoach of a train wound out across the darkness and I thought with a sudden jealous pang of Paris, and all the rich anonymity of a big city in contrast to this little town which lost all reality in winter; where the inhabitants stayed lost in their summer memories, listening to the iron mistral as it climbed the battlements, shivering their shutters as it passed.

“As for me, Bruce, I know that I cannot leave Avignon as yet – indeed if ever. I have taken a couple of rooms in the Princes Hotel, directly above those in which Piers … They are cheap. Here I propose to ‘tread water’ this winter – to use the rather disapproving phrase of Rob Sutcliffe. Already, when Toby’s train had borne him away I felt a strange sort of dis-orientation setting in. I walked back to the hotel on foot deliberately, precariously almost, listening to my own footfalls with deep attention. In my nameless furnished room with its ghastly wallpaper I sat listening to the silence and drinking small whiskies out of my toothmug. A vast paralysis had seized everything; I was caught like a fly in a chunk of amber. To shake off this feeling of unreality I turned to sorting my clothes and papers, and to entertaining these last details in the little diary.

“The rest is soon told. Before the chateau was closed and boarded up I had the contents of the muniments room transferred lock, stock and barrel to the local museum – including the heavy and copious files and notebooks left by Sutcliffe. Among them are several unpublished books and stories and essays, as well as all the letters of Pia. One day they will presumably be sorted out and see the light of day. Meanwhile his publishers have commissioned a biography of him from Aubrey Blanford, a novelist for whom he had scant respect, but who will be coming down after Christmas to examine all this material at first hand. Of course Rob Sutcliffe would have been horrified – but I do not see what I, ignorant as I am could do to avert this fate. I suppose publishers know what they are doing. I do not feel this is any part of my business. Rob knew that one day he would have to face the undertakers of the literary trade. Anyway there is no such thing as absolute truth, and inevitably he will become a half-creation of the novelist. Who will ever know him as we did? Nobody.

“The sleepers in the Nogaret vault are to remain there; but the place is to be bricked in definitively, and a high wall constructed around it before the chateau is handed over to the new owners – whoever they will be.

“Finally there is Sylvie – my one remaining link with this ancient town and indeed with reality itself, or the small part of it which we can share. I have lived a whole privileged life of concern for her beauty and of that I cannot complain. I cannot imagine how things could have fallen out differently, or made more sense. We have come full circle, she and I.” If I close my eyes I can see the dark Sylvie that Bruce must continue to visit every day till death us do bloody part etc. She sits at her green baize card table wearing tinted glasses to disguise the lines of fatigue under her eyes. Even though a woman be mad, some traces of concern for her own looks remain. Here she plays hand after hand of solitaire, her forehead smooth and unruffled. She whispers to herself and smiles very often. She is aware of his presence though she does not always recognise him – she calls him Piers sometimes. “But my silent presence seems to be comforting and sometimes dropping her cards she will sit and hold my hand for an hour or more, quiet and happy as a plant. When I leave her I usually go to the station on my way home and wait for the last train to come in from Paris. There is never anyone on it I know – how should there be. Often it is empty. Then I walk about the town at night with a sort of strenuous numbness, looking keenly about me, as if for a friend.”

Blanford went to the bathroom on a sudden impulse and took off his glasses to examine his face in the mirror. A trifle sardonically – or perhaps the impression was caused by the fact of a small strabismus, a half-squint – the sort of thing which would force one to become a sort of self-deprecating type of humorist. He regarded himself and then winked sadly at his reflection.

“Strenuous numbness,” he said aloud, finding the phrase a trifle mannered. He went back to the balcony moving with his swayback hesitation caused by the paralysis which always afflicted him after a day of sitting and writing with the light drawing board across his knees; soon Cade would come and massage him before he set off with the two linkboys to the cave where the Duchess awaited or would be awaiting him. She had already sent him a telegram signed by Sutcliffe which showed that she had read the manuscript to the very end, for the text read: “Refuse to be rushed off the planet in this clumsy and ignominous fashion. Kindly arrange to have me die by less theatrical means. Rob.” Perhaps the Duchess had not grasped the little twist about the
saut mystique?
He would see.

It is still a moot point whether Socrates, in fact, existed as something more than a character in a novel by Plato. And what of me, he thought? Am I possibly an invention of someone like old D – the devil at large? He hummed an air he had made up to accompany the riders who left the Canopic Gate etc. It had not found its way into the text. It was a plaintive little homemade air they sang in the desert.