The Avignon Quintet (50 page)

“Then let me ask you one question,” said Blanford sternly. “Just how real do you feel to yourself, Robin Sutcliffe?”

“I have never stopped to think,” said his only friend after a pause. “Have you?”

“And you want to know about your own youth? Of course I endowed you with mine, for we are about the same age.”

“But different milieux nourished us.”

“Yes, but the age was the same, and an age is a state of mind. The twenties – that was purely a state of mind.”

“Tell me the details, it will help me to act.”

“Very well.”

Blanford closed his eyes and let his memory draw him back to the very beginning of the story.

“It was to be their last term at Oxford and Hilary had invited them both to journey with him to Provence for the long vac. Neither he nor Sam had then met his two sisters, Constance and Livia. Indeed, they knew nothing of them at all. But recently, with the death of an old aunt, young Constance had inherited the little chateau of Tu Duc in the southern Vaucluse, not far from Avignon. The Duchess of Tu, then, was the obvious nickname for her. The children had spent many holidays there once upon a time in their extreme youth; but in her old age the aunt became first eccentric, and then mentally unstable; she turned recluse, locked herself up, and allowed the whole place to fall into ruins around her. The rain and the wind settled down to finish what negligence had begun; the weight of winter snow cracked the black tiles of the roofs and entered the rooms, with their strange scrolled bull’s-eye windows. In the rambling, disorderly park, old trees had fallen everywhere, blocking the paths, crushing the summer-house under their weight. The once-tended green plots were now a mass of molehills, while everywhere hares skirmished. They were to live largely on jugged hare that summer!

“Hilary, to do him justice, did not minimise the hardships they might have to face; but the prospect of southern sunlight and good wine was enough to offset any qualms they might have had. And then there was another capital factor – they had both youth and good health. Constance would meet them in Lyon, while Livia would come on later to join them, in her own time. Hilary mentioned Livia’s name and frowned affectionately as he did so – as if he found the fact of her existence somehow troubling. His deep family affection for her had a sort of qualified, formalised air, as if he did not wholeheartedly understand her as did Constance. His way of talking gave one the notion that Livia was the wild and unpredictable one, while Constance was the stable and utterly dependable one. This proved to be more or less the case later when they got to know the truth about them – whatever that might mean. But Livia now spent all her time in Germany.

“It was this promise of a wild and somewhat primitive holiday which explained all the heavy camping impedimenta they found stacked up against their arrival in Lyon – they had sent it on in advance. Massive camp-beds and sun-helmets, sleeping-bags, mosquito nets – perfectly ridiculous items which had been invented for safaris in lion-country or for scaling the Indian Himalayas. But none of them knew old Provence at first hand, so perhaps these precautions were excusable.

“Today the world which fathered them is a remote and forgotten one; it was a world wallowing in the wake of one war, trying to gather itself together before plunging irrevocably into a second. Their youth had enabled them to escape the trenches – in 1918 they were still just under military age, though Sam nearly managed to join up by a subterfuge; but he was found out and sent back to school; whence, to Oxford where the three, though so different, became inseparable. Hilary was the ringmaster of the little group, for he had more experience than either of the others, and he always led the dance. As a boy he was blond and tall and had ice-blue eyes like a Teuton. Sam was tow-haired and rather massive in his awkward gentle way. I was … how was I, Aubrey Blanford? Let me see.

“A bit of a slowcoach, I suppose. Sam boxed and Hilary rowed, while all three of us hacked a bit and when possible rode to hounds in a post-Surtees manner.

“I was the least mercuric, the most sedentary of the three, and my poor eyesight made me an indifferent athlete, though I fenced well and even got my blue for it. The post-Wildean twilight of Oxford was no longer a place to cool the mind – the stresses and strains of the war years still weighed on us by proxy, for many of the men who had seen blood and action in 1918 had come back to university to finish studies interrupted by the war. A disturbed and wild crew they were, like foreign barbarians.

“Yes, it is difficult to describe that world, now so forgotten; its values and habits seem to have retreated into the remotest recesses of time. Do you remember it – a world in awkward transition? The new thing was violent and brash, the old had ankylosed. All that the war had not killed outright lived on in a kind of limbo. Intellectually, let us say, Anatole France and Shaw were at the height of their fame; Proust despite his prizes had not yet won the general public. Henry James versus Wells.

“Was I born old? I never seem to have had a proper youth – mine began at Oxford when I met Hilary. If he was by far the most sophisticated of the three of us it was due to chance. His father had been a diplomat and the children had always travelled with him to his various posts. This stiff old gentleman was something of a stickler for ancient forms, and wherever they went they had tutors and learned the language of the place. Thus Hilary and his sisters became good linguists and thoroughly at home in places which were, to me, semi-mythical – Middle Europe, for example, or the Balkans: Rumania, Russia, Greece, Arabia.… It is true that Sam and I spoke laborious French and Italian, with a smidgen of German. But in the case of Hilary he ‘possessed’ three languages in the French sense of the word, and smattered in four others. All this he turned to good account and took excellent degrees at Oxford. His objective then was archaeology, his hero Evans, and his heart he had set upon exploring the labyrinth at Gortymna which remains unmapped to this day because of its great extent.

“And Sam? I have a picture of him in the back of my mind, lying in the deep grass at the edge of a green cricket-field crunching an apple and chuckling over Wodehouse or Dornford Yates. You must remember that we were overgrown schoolboys then to whom even dull, but raucous London was an excitement, a dream. While Paris was Babylon. Sam’s ambitions were simple – all he wanted to do was to climb Everest single-handed, and on his return rescue a beautiful blonde maiden from a tower where she had been imprisoned by an enchanter, and marry her. Later on he would like to set off on his travels with her disguised as his page and join the Knights of the Round Table. You will see the disastrous effects of Malory on a guileless mind. In my case, I wanted to be a historian – at that time I had really no inclination towards this hollow servitude to ink and paper. I pictured myself doing a definitive book on some aspect of medieval history and winning an Exhibition to Wadham, or something of that nature. As you see the bright one was Hilary, with what he called his ‘Minoan tilt’ – for his plans and projects opened windows on the world of Europe. Am I right?”

“I suppose so, but it’s a bit pedestrian your exposé – it proves that the dull historian is not quite dead in my poor Aubrey. I would have gone about it differently myself.”

“Tell me how.”

“I should have enumerated other things like school ties, huge woollen scarves, Oxford bags, college blazers, Brough Superiors
à la
T. E. Lawrence, racing cars with strapped-down bonnets, Lagonda, Bentley, Amilcar.… The flappers had come and gone but the vamp was present in force with her cloche hat and cigarette holder.”

“I had forgotten all that.”

“It is the small things which build the picture.”

“London.”

“Yes, and the places we frequented in London most of which have disappeared – wiped out one supposes by the bombings?”

“Like the Café de Paris?”

“Yes, and Ciro’s and The Blue Peter, The Criterion Bar, Quaglino’s, Stone’s Chop House, Mannering’s Grill, Paton’s, The Swan.…”

“Good, Robin, and then the night-clubs like The Old Bag O’ Nails, The Blue Lantern, The Black Hole, and Kiki’s Place.… We simply never slept.”

“The music of shows like Funny Face (‘Who stole my Heart away?’) Charlot, and the divine Hutch smoothing down the big grand piano and singing in his stern unemphatic way ‘Life is just a bowl of cherries’.”

“Just before dawn Lyons’ Corner House, everyone with yellow exhausted faces, whores, undergraduates, all-night watchmen and workers setting off on early jobs. The first newspapers appearing on the icy street. Walking back in the pale nervous rinsed-out dawn, the whole way back across London – over Westminster Bridge and into the baleful suburbs of the capital; perhaps with the memory of some whore in mind, and the ever present worry of a dose. Marry or burn, my boy, marry or burn.”

“I did both.”

“So did I. So did I.”

“And so we come to the misty slip at Lyon where we waited impatiently for Constance and filled in the time by loading all our ludicrous equipment aboard the
Mistral
, a huge flat motor-barge with a capacious hold and enough deck space to take a few passengers. The hold was already battened down and covered with a tarpaulin which gave us a large flat area for lounging and eating; it was not envisaged that we should spend the night on her, but ashore. And then, amidst all these foolish deliberations, the stacking of our gear – you would have thought we were setting off for the Pole – the girl arrived; and with her, suddenly the whole summer too took place – I mean the consciousness of it, the density of its weight. As yet we were only in the mulberry-tree belt of dishevelled Lyon and its sprawling green surroundings. Far from the dustry garrigues as yet, the olive oil, and the anisette. But with Tu one saw what it was: it was sunlight filtered through a summer hat of fine straw onto bronzed shoulders and neck, creating a shadow that was of the darkness of ripe plums. It was ash-blonde hair made rough but silky by too much sun and salt water. It was a neck set perfectly on slender but strong shoulders, it was an eye of periwinkle-blue, which could turn green with the light, an eye full of curiosity and humour. She had cut her foot bathing, and her limp was explained by a bandage. She looked at us without much ardour or interest, I think, but with friendliness because we were her brother’s friends. I felt at once that she shared some of his superiority over us – some of what I would call nowadays sophistication. ‘Sorry I’m late; it was the train as usual.’

“Our skipper was a grave rotund man, who had the air of a great character actor out of work. His old sea-wolf yachting cap was cocked at a jaunty angle, and his liberality was not in question, for he produced frequent glasses of strong wine and urged them on us as a protection against the inclemency of the weather. What inclemency? The weather was perfectly fine, the old man obviously raving. Nevertheless the full beakers of Côtes du Rhône put us all into a great good humour; Constance sipped from her brother’s glass and asked permission to put on shorts which he gravely granted. We winked at one another. The skipper’s wife allowed her to make this transformation in the little cabin below which contained a cage bird and some old prints of the days of water haulage on the Rhône – really not so far away in time.

“We were fully loaded for Aries but were waiting for two more passengers who had been delayed. But they were not to detain us for long, and they were profuse in their apologies. One was a lanky, raffish-looking individual with a yellowish complexion and hair all in tufts about his greatcoat collar. He had a kind of shabby air of majesty, but it was only much later, when he advanced to the prow and let fly with an aria from Verdi, of tremendous volume, that we realised we were in the presence of a star from the opera of Marseille. The other was a humble, elderly man with a crown of white hair and the venerable appearance of a beadle. He had a brown old face which was full of character, and he regarded the world around him with an air of slightly impudent amusement. He seemed, however, a man of some real cultivation, not only from his manner but also because he carried under his arm a volume of poems, and actually sported (it is only now in retrospect that I recognise the fact) in his lapel the golden cicada which betokens a member of that famous poetic society the Félibre. Everything about our skipper – his rotundity, his accent, his gestures seemed to fill this old gentleman with delight. I realise now why, they were both from Avignon, which was also our landfall and from where we hoped to find a carriage to take us to Tubain, if Felix was not at the rendezvous with his spluttering little consular car.