The Avignon Quintet (53 page)

“We had arrived. With a roar we started reversing engines now in order to brake our descent and enable us to moor firm to the shore in that racing river. The boat drummed and throbbed. A small group of gentlemen, all suitably decorated, were waiting for our fellow-passenger on the quay – his name, by the way, he said, was Brunel. They seemed if anything somewhat subdued – they had an air of affectionate sadness as they waited for their friend. Then, as the distance shortened, one of them, a tall and distinguished-looking man in a topcoat, and sporting a beard (much later I was to recognise the poet Peyre from photographs), stepped forward to the gang plank and in a low voice uttered the words: ‘He is dead.’

“A mysterious scene to me then – yet I scented that there was something momentous about it, though I could not tell what. Much later I read a modern history of the Félibre, the poets who have been the lifeblood of the region’s literature, and discovered the names of that little sad group waiting under the ramparts of the city for Brunel. Their welcoming embraces were long and loving – one felt in them a sort of valedictory quality, perhaps for their dead fellow.

“But behind them in the shadows lurked Felix Chatto with the clumsy old car which would ferry us over the river to the tumbledown mansion which Constance had inherited. Felix, too, had just come down from Oxford and despite his passionate desire to become a banker had succumbed to family pressure and entered the consular service. His uncle, the great Lord Galen, owned a vast property quite near Tubain, while Felix himself was the recently appointed acting consul in Avignon. The two of them were to prove extremely valuable to us in many ways during the period – nearly the whole summer – it took to settle Tu Duc into some semblance of a habitation. No, I exaggerate. The old place was still very sound structurally, though showing signs of neglect which rendered it barely habitable. Water, for example: the pump on the artesian well lacked an essential spare part which (Sam again) had to be more or less reinvented. In the far depths of the grounds was a lily pool full of carp; the tall flukes of the artesian formed a most decorative shape on the evening sky – but though there was plenty of wind, and though the sails turned loyally, no water flowed into the tower, and thence into the kitchen of the old house. We were forced for a few days to resort to buckets drawn from the lily pond, which incidentally afforded us delicious icy swims when these activities made us too hot. The keys fitted the doors, yes, but very approximately: Felix had brought them with him. And it took a while to discover that there was not a lock on the house which had not been put on upside down, and which consequently had to be opened anti-clockwise. Later on we got so used to this factor that one always tried the anti-clockwise turn first in dealing with locks in Provence.

“The first few nights we slept on the terrace by the light of the moon – and began by setting the kitchen to rights in order to cook our meals. A little pony-trap secured our lines of communication with Tubain where we found enough shops to satisfy our modest needs. Here again the resourceful Sam shamed us all by actually doing some respectable cooking with Constance. The tall shadowy rooms were full of heavy, spiritless furniture, dust-impregnated, and we had to move all this old stuff into the patio to beat the dust out of it and polish it up. The wood floors creaked agreeably but were full of fleas, and called for paraffin-rag treatment. The wallpaper was shredding. On the steep terraces large green lizards, insatiably curious, came out to watch us at work; they were obviously used to being fed and seemed perfectly tame. The cupboards in the bedrooms were full of linen, white with dust, while the big central dining table with its scarlet cloth still had plates and glasses on it – as if a formal party had been suddenly interrupted and the whole company carried off by the devil. In effect the old lady had been taken ill very suddenly, and fortunately for her, during the visit of a friend who was able to find a doctor. She had been taken to a clinic in Avignon, never to return.

“ ‘How atavistic the sense of possession is,’ said Constance. ‘I am mad about this house merely because it is mine. Yet it’s hideous. I would never have dreamed of buying it. And anyway, I don’t believe in possessions. I am ashamed of loving it so much already.’

“We lay in the pond with the cool water up to our necks, chatting among the lilies. She wore her straw hat tilted back. Her hair was wet. Every evening it was like this as long as the moonlight held. Hilary and Sam played chess on the terrace with a little pocket set – Hilary was watching the dinner. We had discovered the local anisette – the
pastis
of the region; surely the most singular of drinks for it coats the palate and utterly alters the taste of a good wine and good food.

“There were owls in the tower, there were swerving, twittering bats in the trees, but as long as the heat of the long grass sent up insects into the evening sky the swallows and martins worked close overhead, swerving in and out like darts, to take the spiring insects in open beaks with a startling judgment and accuracy. One could hear their little beaks click from time to time as they snapped at an insect. And then of course the steady drench, the steady drizzle of cicadas in the great planes and chestnuts of the park. All succumbing and sliding into the silence of the full moon which only the dogs celebrated, together with an occasional nightjar and the plaintive little Athenian owl called the Skops. Coming from the cold north we were continually amazed by the beauty and richness of this land. There was only one old man who worked on the property and he lived far away in the valley; but after the first week he brought up a venerable blind horse and set it to turning about a water wheel, fixed to one of the shallower wells. Mathieu, he was called, and he was very deaf.”

Poor Blanford! His reveries had carried him so far afield in the past that he did not notice that the telephone had gone dead. He curtly replaced the receiver, having rung for Cade to clear up the tea things. Then he moved with the stiff precariousness of a doll to the library which they had shared over the years; he had housed his own books here during his travels – Tu had set aside two large bookcases for him to which only he had the key. It was a very long time since he had taken to binding up her letters, unwilling to part with such a testimony of friendship and love so central to his inner life, his development. By now there were a number of slim volumes with brilliant Venetian leather bindings, stamped and tooled with emblems suitable to such an intimate correspondence; the little books were housed in pretty slipcases of expensive leather. He unlocked the bookcase and took out one or two to ruffle in that silent room. She would be, he felt, almost his only reading now that she had “gone”. He could grimly follow the vicissitudes of his career through her letters from the first success to the time of the Q novels. Tu had been his oldest and most ardent friend; reading some kindly, ironic passages, he recovered the very timbre of that ever-living voice.

And his own replies? They too were there in her part of the library – an extensive collection of books and manuscripts for he had not been her only friend among the artists. One way and another Constance had known some of the great men of the day. A small pang of jealousy stirred in him with the thought. But it had never occurred to her to bind up his letters, they were in ordinary office folders, as if awaiting a final sorting. Nor were her own somewhat disorderly bookcases locked. He reached down a folder and, opening it, came upon a recent letter addressed to her from the city – sometime last year, it must have been. He had the bad habit of seldom dating his letters. He poked up the fire and sat down with the folder on his knee, trying to read the letter freshly, as if he were Tu, and as if it had just arrived.

“Once again I am here alone in Avignon, walking the deserted streets, full of reminiscences of our many visits, full of thoughts of Tu Duc and yourself. Yes, here I am again in the place where, according to cards set out by my horrible valet Cade, I am due to die by my own hand, sometime during my fifty-ninth year. That still gives me a year or two of clock time; but what Cade speaks of has surely been going on for a long time?

“How shall I explain it to you? For the writer at any rate everything that one might call creatively wrought, brought off, completed aesthetically, comes to you, his reader and his Muse, from the other side of a curtain. From the other side of a hypothetical suicide – ask Sutcliffe! Indeed this is the work of art’s point of departure. It need not happen in the flesh to the performer. But it is indispensable to art, if there be any art in the commodity he fathers. Bang!

“Constance, the poet does not choose. The poet does not think of renown, for even the voices which carry the furthest are only the echoes of an anterior, half-forgotten past. The poetic reality of which I speak, and which Sutcliffe might have deployed in his unwritten books, is rather like the schoolchild’s definition of a fishing-net as ‘a lot of holes tied together with string’. Just as impalpable, yet just as true of our work. Art is only to remind.

“I think, if Cade is right, I shall have enough time to send this project down the slips; afterwards Sutcliffe can flesh it out and fill in the details. Come, let us buy some time for our clocks – a nice juicy slice of time. I must add in all honesty that Sutcliffe is somewhat scared of the idea. When I outlined it he said: ‘But Aubrey, this could lead anywhere.’ I said: ‘Of course. I have freed us both.’ The notion of an absolute freedom in the non-deterministic sense alarmed him. As usual he became flippant, to give himself time to reflect. Then he said, ‘What would you give me if I wrote a book to prove that the great Blanford is simply the fiction of one of his fictions? Eh?’ You know the answer as well as I do, but I could not resist saying it out loud. ‘The top prize, Robin Sutcliffe, immortality in the here and now. How would that suit you?’ This left him very thoughtful in a somewhat rueful way. He is lazy, he doesn’t want to co-operate one little bit. He lacks my driving ambition.

“No, Constance my dear, ours shall be a classical quincunx – a Q; perhaps a
Tu Quoque
will echo throughout it. We will try to refresh poetry and move it more towards the centre of ordinary life.

“Then later, when the blow falls, and I disappear from the scene, it will have to do duty, such as it is, for my
star y-pointed pyramid
. Ever your devoted A.”

*
See Appendix for full text of 12 Commandments.

TWO

Humble Beginnings

B
LANFORD NAVIGATED FRETFULLY ABOUT THE HOUSE
, talking to himself a little with Constance in mind – there seemed so much still to say to her. His fingers crept along the shelf of her Latin and Greek poets towards the volumes which contained their correspondence. “I know that poets make more boom and slither, but novelists can create personae you loathe or adore.” He riffled the coloured pages and then read aloud: “Your notion of Sutcliffe intrigues me. Some detail please. I hope he won’t become a provincial Heathcliff.”

He had replied, “You ask about Sutcliffe? I cannot tell you for how many years he lay silent, living a larval life in the cocoon of my old black notebook. I did not know what to do with him – though I kept jotting away as directed. It was essential that he should differ greatly from me – so that I could stand off and look at him with a friendly objectivity. He represented my quiddity I suppose – the part which, thanks to you, has converted a black pessimism about life into a belief in cosmic absurdity. He was the me who is sane to the point of outrage. Often I kissed you with his mouth just to see how it felt. He never thanked me.”

He sat down with the volume on his knee and stared into the fire once more – into its coiling shapes he read snakes and ladders of fire, a crusader burning on a pyre, a scorpion, a crucifixion.