The Avignon Quintet (52 page)

“With Livia, alone, swimming in one of the numerous rock pools of the Pont du Gard while the others climbed to the top of the great aqueduct, I discovered another person – not less touching and appealing than her sister, but made of harder and more consistent material. It was very attractive, this down-to-earthness, and even later when I kissed her the lips that met mine seemed deliberately cool and questing and self-possessed. But her fingers were always cold – now I would tend to associate the fact with guilt over treachery; not then. Livia was a dream, impossible to regret, even today.”

Sutcliffe cleared his throat and said: “Pia had little of Livia’s forthrightness, nor her deep voice. Her own voice was melodious contralto, a fitting instrument on which to play the passive score you wrote for her – and with which I myself don’t really agree. I cannot really imagine a Livia in tears. She was always seen walking alone or sitting alone in the middle of the night in deserted cafés, just sitting, staring into her coffee. Her lips were thin when pursed – you forgot to say that; and her eyes had a bitter glimmer. I like that. You fused her uncomfortably with her sister to make Pia, or rather I did, but I was following the hints left by you in the black notebook or the green. Livia had a special little look of smiling contempt when she saw a kitchen; but Constance’s face lit up with joy – as if a musician had suddenly come upon a concert-grand in perfect tune.”

“I think the trouble is that you are thinking one-dimensionally all the time, like an old-fashioned novelist. You do not seem to be able to envisage a series of books through which the same characters move for all the world as if to illustrate the notion of reincarnation. After all, men and women are polyphonic beings. They know they had previous lives, but they are not sure what they were; all they feel is the weight of their karma, the poetry of previous existences registered in the penumbra of past time.”

“How sick I am of the time notions.”

“So am I, but the obsession is the age’s. We have at any rate come to terms with it, we know that calendar time is a convenience and not a truth. Time is all one sheet – and just as the germs of an illness, say tuberculosis, are there inside one, ready and waiting to be called out by circumstance, so from a temporal point of view are the maggots already in the flesh waiting patiently for the temporal circumstance of death to set them free. Pia into Livia, Livia into Pia, what does it matter? – somewhere in that recess of time they are conscious of each other, of their origins.”

“You could go further back still, then?”

“Exactly.”

“What are we, then, if not simultaneous artists, ‘perishing symmetrically’, to borrow the phrase of Madame de Staël?”

“But Livia – even Livia could cry, though you wouldn’t believe it. The first time we made love as children was among the rhododendrons at the Pont du Gard, when she was starting to wean me away from my admiration for Tu. Even then she was the expert, the ringmaster, the instigator – and I followed her suit in a sort of daze. It took me dozens of love affairs afterwards to recognise when a lover is sleeping with an imagined phantasy shape, or even with herself. Now I would not be so easily deluded. But then? Yet afterwards she went and laid her head against a tree and gave a small dry sob. It seemed quite private, and was most striking – for even in an exhibition of weakness her self-possession shone through. Before I could place a loving arm over her shoulders the spasm was over and done with. Nor would I have recognised at the time what was an obvious act of contrition – for after all she loved Tu, and hated to do her down. Indeed she loved her all too much to surrender her to me. I only saw all this years afterwards. And reflecting on it, and the possible pity of it, I wondered whether perhaps she had not done me a service in imprisoning me – in preventing me from contracting a love for Tu which could prove premature, ephemeral? If I wasn’t experienced enough for Livia surely I was even less so for Tu? Perhaps it is as well to learn to drive on an old, or at least used, car before investing in an expensive new one? I don’t really know. But I think it was salutary to have the experience of Livia at that time – though the displacement was at once responsible for other changes, notably in the attitude of Tu herself. I asked her once if she had been in love with me at that early time and she wrote back, ‘Yes, I suppose, though I did not know what the word meant then. I was suffering from a sort of undiagnosed pain which was connected with your existence. It took time to master it. It was a case of third-degree burns. But look, I am still alive, happy and breathing.’

“Later, much later, in the flush of her new Viennese science Tu was able to pronounce upon her sister with greater self-confidence – though of course it changed nothing. ‘You must treat her with great compassion, for she belongs to the great army of walking wounded in the battle of life. Our mother deserted us, and died far away in another country, never showing the slightest interest in our well-being or even safety during the war. We have a right to a grievance, and a sense of insecurity. Livia was forced to grow a masculine carapace in order to defend herself against life. It is a great nervous strain to keep on subsidising the man in herself. Perhaps she realises it. At any rate nothing can be changed now – she is fixed, like a badly set fracture. It would have to be broken and re-set, and in terms of the human personality this would not be possible. Indeed it would be dangerous to try, specially by analysis. You might overturn her reason.’

“And of course, when I reflected upon Tu herself, I wondered why she did not manifest the same characteristics of a disturbing environmental inheritance. And finally, this is the point at which her new baby science of Freudianism fell apart. If two people share the same environment and circumstances, why would one fall ill and the other not? It is one of the major puzzles and annoyances – for who can doubt the basic accuracy of the diagnosis? I reflected for a long time on the matter without reaching any real conclusion; but the facts were plain, in that Tu was a woman and had the fearlessness of a woman fully conscious of herself. In some strange way she had overcome the hatred for her mother’s shade which had had such a crippling effect upon Livia.

“But all this comes long after that sunlit slide under the bridges of Lyon, gathering momentum as the river thickened out and began its headlong descent through a limestone country of such prolix variety that there was not a moment when something new did not catch and fire our attention – it was not only the rosy baked little towns with their castles and battlements which excited one. They were like punctuation marks in a noble poem – a Pindaric Ode, say. It was the consciousness that we were passing out of the north into the Mediterranean; the rich mulberries which had made the silk of Lyon world famous were soon to give place to the more austere decoration of olives, shivering and turning silver in the mistral which followed us down river; a wind of such pure force that if one opened one’s mouth it was instantly filled with wind. We were moving from a cuisine based on cream and butter to one more meagre, more austere, based on olive oil and the other fruits of the Athenian tree. We were moving towards the sea – blue bodies of swimmers in the gulf, blue waves drumming the coves and
calenques
of Cassis. We were moving from liqueurs towards the ubiquitous anisette of the south.

“One after another the Rhône bestowed upon us its historic sites and little drunken towns, snuggled among vines, bathed in the insouciance of drowsy days and drowsy silences broken only by the snip-snop of the secateurs among the vines – the holy circumcision which ends the elegaic summers of Provence. The very names were a spur to what imagination and instruction we had – between us we assembled a few shreds of knowledge based on old guide books. Yes, Vienne succeeded desolate Mornas whose very name seemed to echo the sadness of old wars and ruined husbandry; then Vienne with its funny spur – but no trace of the classical splendour recorded in the histories. It must have been the Bournemouth of the ancient world – diplomats retired there from service; the most celebrated among them was Pontius Pilate who spent his quiet retirement there after leaving the Middle East with all its tedious and vexatious problems and stupid agitators. We saluted him in a glass of rosy wine. The river ran through a number of locks and barrages, each with its watchful guardian in his glassed-in perch who took our details before expelling us out of the lock-gates at an altered level, to speed on once more southward.

“As Vienne disappeared round one of the broad curves of the river Hilary looked back at it thoughtfully and said, ‘It was there that the Templars were officially abolished.’ He spoke as if the event were of momentous significance, but at that time I did not know very much about the Templars – just the broad details of the ancient scandal perpetrated by a King of France and executed by the hooded monsters of the Inquisition. Hilary stood there, gazing back along the water, lost in thought. But now Constance was awake and had succeeded in charming the old Félibre – the Avignon poet; fired by her beauty, and delighted that she knew some French, he proceeded to recite to us, his face creased up like a fine soft handkerchief. It was the first time I had heard Provençal spoken – there seemed to be moss packed between every syllable. Its soft lilt made one think of Gaelic; it echoed the meanderings of the great river with its sudden little tributaries and the occasional mysterious islands of sedge and weeping willow which came up at us out of the distant hazy blue and vine-green. From time to time the lean wolf-like man at the prow practised a trill or a series of sky-shattering head notes, looking round him after each paroxysm, as if for admiration. It was some little time before we were suddenly aware that we were in the presence of a master-alcoholic, an amateur of
pastis
. What matter? He was in tremendous form.

“At one our hampers were unstrapped on the deck and the two French passengers were happy to join us; Hilary had made the purchases in the town before our departure, and with the skill that comes of experience. Never had the delicacies of the French table tasted like this, before or since, washed down as they were with the simple sunlight of a great wine. Never had fresh bread tasted like this. So this was Provence! Cloudless sky, tall planes with their freckled outer skin glimmering like trout in a stream – reflected in the flowing green current. Then weeping willows, like great character actors entangled in their own foliage, and later as we climbed down, lock by lock, towards Valence, the smell of dust, honeysuckle, convolvulus. Objects occupied a place all to themselves; one little donkey – the only donkey in the whole universe, the essence of all donkeys – trotted along a path with its panniers full, raising a plume of dense dust. At Tournon our poet launched into a history of wine – while on the opposite bank glowed like jewels the vines from which came the senior wines like Côte Rôti, St Joseph and so on. We tasted some, we trinked, we came back aboard in fighting form, ready almost to take part in the opera, snatches from which our fellow-passenger continued to sing. The sun burned like a brazier. The skipper’s wife opened an umbrella – the mistral had offered us a respite – and settled to her knitting. Round the massive curves of the Rhône we soared, doing almost twenty knots I judged with the current at our backs. At Condrieu an old bent man in a sea captain’s hat waved a paper flag at us, evidently recognising one of our number. We all waved back.

“That evening we came up with Valence as dusk fell – our skipper appeared to hate hurrying and we had lost a great deal of time at Tournon. We tramped dazedly ashore, full of the fatigue of sunlight and wine, and found ourselves a grubby billet in a small hotel – Valence was disappointing in spite of its Napoleonic associations, and we turned in very early as the skipper had warned us that the voyage would be resumed very early the next morning.

“But in the cool pearly light of dawn, when we made our way back to the ship we found that the skipper, amidst violent expletives, was trying to counter a mysterious form of engine-trouble which prevented the motors from firing. And here to everyone’s astonishment Sam came into his own and after a short and intense examination of their intestines, proffered a diagnosis and a remedy which, being acted upon, set the whole matter to rights in a twinkling. So once more we were sailing down the Rhône spattering the sky with snatches of Verdi, half bemused by the rich verses of Mistral. But we had lost time, we had lost quite a bit of time, and it was late evening before we suddenly rounded a curve of the great river and were treated to a spectacle made more remarkable by a suddenly visible full moon rising in rhetorical splendour over the ramparts of Avignon. High above the city perched the Rocher de Doms – the hanging gardens of this deserted Babylon. It was as if fate had chosen to delay us in order to repay us with its inspiring entry into the city which was later to come to mean so much to us – we did not know any of this then. Now, as I think back, I try to disinter that first impression – the marvellous silhouette of the town magnetically lit by moonlight pouring over it from the direction of the Alpilles. It is still the best way to see it – by water and from afar; and with the historic broken bridge pointing its finger across the river. And the little shrine to St. Nicholas with its bright lamps of benediction for seafaring folk. We had been gliding for nearly an hour among silent islands and deserted channels, watching the bare spars of the Cevennes rise on the night sky. And now suddenly this severe magic. It took much more experience of the town to come to the astonishing conclusion that it was only beautiful in profile – the actual Palaces of the Popes are hideous packing-cases of an uncouth ugliness. Nothing here was built for charm or beauty – everything was sacrificed to the safety of the treasures which these buildings housed. But you must walk about the town to find this out. It is a cathedral to Mammon. It was here our Judeo-Christian culture finally wiped out the rich paganism of the Mediterranean! Here the great god Pan was sent to the gas-chambers of the Popes. Yet seen from a long way off the profile and the promise of the town – they are heartbreaking in their sweetness of line; and by the light of the moon marmoreal in their splendour.