The Avignon Quintet (47 page)

He risked another thought of Tu again and suddenly felt as if he were running a temperature. Breathless, he rose and succeeded in unfastening the French window, to let in a cloud of snowflakes and a rush of cold air. Then, bending his head, he lurched out on to the lawn, watching his breath plume out before him. He rubbed a little snow on his temples with a theatrical gesture. Then he laboriously returned to his fireside seat and his thoughts.

Cade now sidled into the room with the tea things and set them down beside him without a word, his yellow puritanical face set in expressions of fervent concentration such as one only sees on the faces of very stupid but cunning people. He bore in his arms with a kind of meek pride the new orthopaedic waistcoat-brace which had at last arrived from the makers, tailored to size. There was a good hope that this contrivance might allow Blanford one day to throw away his crutches. He gave an exclamation of pleasure while Cade, expressionless as a mandarin, helped him off with the ancient tweed coat he so loved (with its leather-patched elbows) and locked him into the new garment of soft grey rubber and invisible steel. “Stand up, sir,” he said at last, and the writer obeyed in smiling wonder; yes, he was free to walk slowly about, to navigate on his own two legs. It was miraculous. But at first he was only allowed to wear it for an hour a day to get his muscles used to its stresses. “A miracle,” he said aloud. Cade watched him attentively for a few moments and then, with a nod, turned away to his domestic duties while Blanford, feeling newly born, leaned against the chimney-piece, staring down at his fallen crutches. Cade would never know how much this new invention meant. The valet looked like the lower-class ferret he was. Blanford watched him curiously as he went over the room, emptying the ashtrays and refilling the saucer of water on the radiator, refilling the vase with its hothouse blooms. “Cade,” he said, “Constance is dead.” Cade nodded expressionlessly. “I know, sir. I was listening on the extension in the hall.” That was all. That was Cade all over. His work done, he took himself off with his customary silence and stealth.

Carbon into diamond

Sand into pearl.

All process causes pain, and we are part of process. How chimerical the consolations of art against the central horror of death; being sucked down the great sink like an insect, into the
cloaca maxima
of death, the
anus mundi!
Sutcliffe, in writing about him, or rather, he writing about himself in the character of Sutcliffe, under the satirical name of Bloshford in the novel
Monsieur
had said somewhere: “Women to him were simply a commodity. He was not a fool about them; O no! He knew them inside out, or so he thought. That is to say he was worse than a fool.”

Was this true of Constance or of Livia her sister, the writer wondered. The blonde girl and the dark. The girl with the velvet conundrum and the girl with beak of the swan?

Grind grain, press wine,

Break bread, yours mine,

Take breath, face death.

Where had he seen these lines underlined by Constance in a book? At that moment the telephone seemed to thrill again, and he knew at once who it was – it could only be his invention Sutcliffe. He must have heard by telepathy the news about Constance (Tu). He realised now that he had been expecting this call all day.

He did not bother to utter the usual Hullo but immediately said to his
confrère
, his
semblable
and
frère:
“You have heard about Tu,” and the voice of Sutcliffe, speaking through a heavy cold, and nervous with regret, replied: “My God, Blanford, what is to become of us?”

“We shall go on sitting about regretting our lack of talent; we shall go on trying to convince people. I am as grieved as you are, Robin, and I never thought I would be. I had so often thought of dying that I thought I had the hippogriff under control; yes, but of course like everyone I cheated in my mind by being the first to die. I suppose Constance did the same.”

“You made my own life come to a halt when Pia died,” said Sutcliffe both reproachfully and gravely, and then blew his nose loudly. “So I set up shop here for a while to completely rewrite Toby’s book about the Templars – to apply a bit of gold leaf here and there, to give it such orotundity as befits a fuddled don. But now he is famous and I feel the need for a change, for a new landscape. Tobias has the Chair in History which he coveted. Why not the Sofa? He will live on in a conical dismay, lecturing loudly on the plasticity of pork to the new generation of druggie-thuggies.” He chuckled, but mirthlessly. “What about me?” he said. “Have you nothing I could do short of entering the Trappe?” “You are dead, Robin,” said Blanford. “Remember the end of
Monsieur?”
“Bring me back then,” said Sutcliffe on a heroic note, “and we shall see.”

“What happened to the great poem and the
Tu Quoque
book?” asked Blanford sharply, and Sutcliffe answered: “I was waiting to get over Pia a bit before finishing it. It was cunning of you to make Pia a composite of Constance and Livia, but I never felt I could really achieve the portrait of her simply because I was blinded by love. I wasn’t cruel enough. And I wondered about Trash, her black lover. I think your story is better than mine, probably sadder. I don’t know. But the death of Tu, of poor Constance, should be celebrated in verse by an Elizabethan.”

For some reason this irritated Blanford and he said with asperity, “Well, why not a poem called ‘Sutcliffe’s Salte Teares upon the tombe of Tu’?”

“Why not?” said his fellow writer, his bondsman, “or perhaps in seventeenth-century style, ‘Sutcliffe’s Big Boo-Hoo’.”

“Poetry,” said Blanford on a lower key, talking almost to himself, “which always comes with sadness; poetry, in the jumbo version of the supermarket, enough for a whole family. The economy size. Robby, you can’t go on being cheerful in Oxford. Shall I send you to Italy?”

“Another book? Why not?” But Sutcliffe did not sound too sure. “I really think it’s your turn to write one – and this time the true story of your love, our love, for Constance and indeed for Livia despite what she did to you, to us, to me. Would it hurt too much if you tried?” Of course it would. Good grief!

Blanford did not answer for a long moment. Then Sutcliffe said, in his old flippant vein: “Last spring I went to Paris with a girl somewhat like Pia-Constance-Livia. The word
archi
had come into vogue as a prefix to almost everything. Our own translation would be
super
, I suppose. Well, everything was
archi
this and
archi
that. I realised that one might describe me as
archicocu
, what? Indeed I went so far as to think of myself as absolutely
archicocuphosphorescent.”

“In a way I did tell the truth about us,” said Blanford haltingly. “Livia carried me out of my depth. I had always needed a feather-simple girl; but Livia was only fit to have her tail spliced by a female octoroon. Damn!”

“Aha! but you loved her. We both did. But where you lied was to graft onto her some of the femininity of her sister. You made her a female quaire not a male.” After a pause, during which both writers thought furiously about the book which Blanford had called
Monsieur
and Sutcliffe
The Prince of Darkness
, their faltering conversation was resumed. If lonely people have a right to talk to themselves couldn’t a lonely author argue with one of his own creations – a fellow-writer, Blanford asked himself.

“A hunt for the larval forms of personality! Livia was, as far as I am concerned – “ Sutcliffe gave a groan.

“A powder-monkey in Hell,” said Blanford almost shouting with pain, because her beauty had really wounded him, driven him indeed mad with vexation.

“A dry water-hole,” agreed Sutcliffe. “Who is Livia, what is she?”

All our swains commend her.

Perfection’s ape, clad in a toga

And beefed up by the shorter yoga

A Cuvier of the sexual ploy

You forged a girl out of a boy.

You wielded flesh and bones and mind,

She was attentive, tough but kind,

Yet unbeknown, behind your back

She sought the member that you lack.

“Enough, Robin,” cried Blanford in a wave of regret and mind-sickness as he thought of the dark head of Livia on the pillow beside him. Sutcliffe laughed sardonically and tormented him with yet another improvisation.

I am loving beyond my means

I am living behind my moans!

O!

Tra la la! Tra la la!

Toi et moi et le chef de gare

Quel bazar, mais quel bazar!

Blanford supposed him to be right; for the story for him could have begun in Geneva – on a sad Sunday in Geneva. It was cold; and ill-assorted, straggly and over-gummy were the bifurcated Swiss under a snow-moon. He closed his eyes the better to hear the tumultuous chatter of stars, or dining later at the Bavaria with her face occupying the centre of his mind, he engulfed the victorious jujubes of mandatory oysters. Ouf! What prose!
Nabokov
, à
moi
! In hotels their lives were wallpapered with sighs. Then tomorrow on the lake, the white stairways to heaven splashed with a wrinkled sunshine. “My sister Livia arrives tomorrow from Venice. She is anxious to meet you.”

That was Constance, made for deep attachments as a cello is made for music – the viol’s deepness on certain notes, in certain moods. It was ages before they had both realised that the words which passed between them had a certain specific density; they were registered and understood at a level somewhere below that of just ordinary speech. The sisters had just inherited the tumbledown chateau of Tu Duc (hence the nickname for Constance). It was near the village of Tubain in the Vaucluse. Not too far from the one city which, above all others, held for him the greatest number of historic memories.

Here, Sutcliffe interposed his clumsy presence on Blanford’s train of thought; sniffing and adjusting those much repaired spectacles of his. “But Livia had what excited you most – the sexual trigger in the blood; she deserved to be commemorated in a style which we might call metarealism – in her aspect of Osiris whose scattered limbs were distributed all over the Mediterranean. Enough of the pornocratic-whimsical, Blanford. For my part I was hunting for a prose line with more body – not paunch, mark you, but body, my boy.”

“Remember, Rob,” Blanford retorted, “that everything you write about me is deeply suspect – at the best highly arguable. I invented you, after all.”

“Or I you, which? The chicken or the egg?”

“The truth of the matter is that we did not really know much about ourselves in those old days; how happy it made one just to squander our youth, lying about in the deep grass eating cherries. The velvet English summers of youth, deep grass, and the clock of cricket balls marking the slow hours of leisure between classes. The distant clapping when someone struck a ball to the boundary merged with but did not drown the steady drizzle of crickets. We slept in the bosom of an eternal summer.

“Tu once said that nature cured her own fertility imbalances by forcing sterile loves up on – illicit in the biological sense. Of what avail our belief in freewill? For her we were sleepwalkers caught in the current of an irresistible sexuality.” He said aloud: “Poor enough consolation for the cowardly Robin Sutcliffe, sitting in that sordid house, drinking his way towards his goal – the leap from the bridge. His Charon was the twisted black woman with the crow’s beak, who could procure something for every taste.”

“I suppose so,” said Rob with a sigh. “The bandages, the whip, the handcuffs – I should have put more of that into the book, instead of leaving it for you. She let her dirty rooms out by the hour. I came there hunting for Pia, just as you came in your turn hunting for Livia and found her in bed with that little hunchback with the pistachio eyes.”

Blanford winced; he remembered the cracked bronchial laugh, gushing out amidst cigarette smoke and coughing. She had said of Livia:
“Une fille qui drague les hommes et saut les gouines.”
He had struck her across the face with his string gloves. He said to Sutcliffe sternly: “It is your duty to demonstrate how Livia was tailored down to the sad size of Pia.”

“Pia dolorosa,” said Sutcliffe. “It would be more than one book, then?”

“Well, squinting round the curves of futurity I saw something like a quincunx of novels set out in a good classical order. Five Q novels written in a highly elliptical quincunxial style invented for the occasion. Though only dependent on one another as echoes might be, they would not be laid end to end in serial order, like dominoes – but simply belong to the same blood group, five panels for which your creaky old
Monsieur
would provide simply a cluster of themes to be reworked in the others. Get busy, Robin!”