The Avignon Quintet (54 page)

Yes, a different background. Sutcliffe might get born somewhere north of Loughborough, say, to decent Quaker parents. Millers of grain? He was a scholarship boy who had won an Exhibition to Oxford, and then, like so many others, had found himself thrown upon the slave market of pedagogy. He had edited a few cribs which were badly reviewed by a tiresome clanging professor – and thus lost the chance of a post as a translator. Poverty intervened, and since he had nothing special for which to starve, he accepted the first opening which presented itself. He found himself teaching French and music to schoolgirls at Hymendale, a clergy orphans’ establishment, where half the staff was ecclesiastical and half lay. Whence his downfall. For nuns called to dons, dons to nuns, deep to deep, dope to dope. … It was really not his fault.

Hymendale was a suburb of Bournemouth, that salubrious south coast resort, which even then was geared to the retirement requirements of professional men and colonial civil servants. Privet hedges, eyes peering from behind curtains, a draughty gentility; silent streets awoken only to the clip clop of the milkman’s little van. It was a fine place to develop inner resources – so he told himself grimly as he grimly did his daily walks, twice round the sewage plant and once there and back along the cliffs in the rain. Ah! the eternal rain! Eight hours a week spent with his sallow, skewer-shaped girls with lank hair and torpid intelligences.
Que cosa fare?
He saw himself even then as a rather tragic figure, trapped by fate in this religious treadmill. He played the role to himself for all it was worth, sometimes being overheard laughing aloud – a harsh sardonic bark directed at the greasy teeming sky. The pubs in the place shut early and were full of tobacco smoke, at once acrid and throat-drying. There was one reasonable bookshop, Commin’s, as well as a lending library, and of course two cinemas. He buried himself in books, thanking God that he could read enough French to amuse himself. We must imagine a rather large, short-sighted man clad in shapeless tweeds perforated with many a nameless cigarette and pipe hole. He had a stalking walk whose buoyancy suggested an inner exuberance which he was far from feeling. No; he was guilty of over-compensating.

Loneliness led to this passionate self-communing, which in turn led to somewhat eccentric behaviour – at least by the standards of such an establishment. For instance, on Sunday morning, when the class formed up in the quad to draggle to chapel in its desultory Indian file, Sutcliffe (who led the procession in gown and tippet) liked to imagine that he was engaged in other, more romantic activities. Thus one Sunday he would be leading his cricketers out into the field to win the Ashes back from Australia; he snuffled the wind, gazed at the light, sucked his finger boy scout fashion and held it up to determine the direction (before sending in his bowlers). He cleared his throat and made a number of finger signs to invisible umpires, directing the position of the screens … and so on. On other days he was the leader of an African tribe, clad in nothing but a tiger-skin, and waving a knobkerrie as he walked, chanting under his breath to the rhythm of inaudible drums. He was head of the young hunters and they were going out for lion – nothing less! On other occasions he enacted a priest leading victims of the Terror towards the guillotine. The clatter of the tumbril on the paving stones of Paris were practically audible to the listener. It goes without saying that this intense miming and the strange postures were looked upon by his superiors with misgivings. But they were simply the outward and visible signs of an intense inner life.

There was nobody he could talk to, so he had developed the habit of talking to himself – interminable low monologue of the inner mind. People saw only the outward expression suited to these thoughts which passed in him like shoals of fish. A popping eye, lips pursing, eyebrows going up and down. His nose twitched. Often (he blamed this on the diet of spotted dog and treacle tart) he had piles which divided into three categories, namely Itchers, Bleeders and plain Shouting piles. For his walks he used a shabby old golfing umbrella and vast boots with hooks and eyes. “I was formed by Doctor Arnold,” he was wont to tell himself, “whose wife much enjoyed his melancholy long-withdrawing roar.” When he was overcome by depression he sometimes went down into the town and for ten shillings and a Devonshire Tea gave Effie a furtive caress, which only increased his sense of despondency and alienation. Effie was a barmaid at The Feathers and a good enough little soul, very modest in her demands upon life. She was indeed sweet but O the cold apple tart between her pale, frog-like legs. He bought her presents because he felt guilty at leading her astray – she was really a good girl and not a whore. She had a marked tendency towards cystitis. But the town, the monotony, the rain and the people can drive you to do anything. One thing about her intrigued him – the way she cocked her little finger over a teacup with such an affectation of gentility.… She did the same in bed as if to confer some of the same sort of gentility upon the love act. He adored this. For some reason not known to science Sutcliffe had the habit of carrying two french letters in the turnups of his broadly cut trousers. They were very expensive these things, and he kept them only for Effie; after use, he washed them out and pegged them up to dry on the mantelpiece of his little room for an hour. They had the word
EVERSAFE
printed on them. Effie insisted on protection and was affectionately responsive to such little attentions. She liked this man who suffered so often from chilblains and who walked about on his toes with rather a mystified air. She would have dreamed of marrying him perhaps, but he was a gentleman and it would not have done. His duties entitled him to a little room with a fireplace, with a separate entrance onto the quadrangle – and he always dreamed of enticing some secret woman to visit him. But who? He had a small harmonium of the wheezy sort and a copy of the Forty-eight of Bach, which he played for his own amusement, but not too loud. For the rest he read opera-scores at night, eating an apple the while; occasionally he moved his eyebrows and let out a roar to correspond to a full orchestra unleashing top sound. Vaguely in the back of his mind a project was forming itself; to write a new life of Wagner.

Why not? Sometimes on his walks he saw a point of darkness move indistinctly upon the horizon repeatedly expunged and dimmed and recreated. A ship, forsooth! He waved his umbrella and cheered. All this monotony might be a good aliment for a poet but what if one had no gifts? Sometimes he got so lonely that he could have set his bed on fire.

Sister Rosa must have also suffered from it, perhaps more acutely, for she had come to England from some dusky clime. She was pretty, with a mischievous face, and an octoroon as to complexion. He caught her examining him in chapel, and she gave a dark rosy blush. He smiled at her and she smiled back in a way that suddenly made him feel that for her spring was not far behind. There had been some trouble that day with the Sixth; he had been summoned to the head and asked if he was really “doing” Mallarmé? “Just giving an account of the period,” he had replied. The Mother Superior raised a white finger and said, “Mr. Sutcliffe, I know I can count on you not to let anything too French or too suggestive pass. It is a great trust we have put in you in giving you the Sixth. Please guide them in the paths of blamelessness, even if it means
stealing through
the classics rather than doing them in detail.”

“Do you mean censoring them?”

“Well, yes, I suppose I do.”

“Very well,” said Sutcliffe grimly and withdrew. He had already planned a bowdlerised Mallarmé to meet the case.
“Le chien est triste. Hélàs! Il a lu tons les livres,”
he wrote on the blackboard in the classroom. It would have to do for today. Surely the English with their love of animals could not complain of
that?
But as he sniffed the air he felt that trouble lay ahead. The pieties of the place argued ill for free thinkers. He was thinking this over when.… But this needs a new paragraph.

Poor Sister Rosa, too, was bored to death. Her English was very bad, and it was in the hope of finding someone to speak to her in Congo Pidgin that she had appraised Sutcliffe whom she knew to be teaching French; almost inhaling him with her mind as she raised her neat little muzzle and tip-tilted nose. The inside of her lips were blackish purple, her teeth were small and regular, her smile delicious – or so thought the quivering Master of Arts. Boredom makes strange bedfellows, he could not help remarking, for he knew that all this frantic emotion was a little bit invented. When he closed his eyes he saw her naked on his shabby cot in the alcove, lying back with her eyes closed. Her dark skin tinted like rum, molasses, ginger … and so on.

For her part she found it vastly dispiriting to spend hours arranging waxed fruit on the High Altar of the chapel. Nevertheless it gave her access to Sutcliffe’s pew which was convenient. At the next service he found a flower on his hassock and a highly suggestive Catholic bookmarker tucked into his hymn-book. The ingenuity of women! Sutcliffe blushed all over with pleasure. It was the work of a second to scribble on the endpapers of the hymn-book the magic words, “How? When? Where?” in French. If he did not add “How much?” it was because he did not want to hurt her feelings by being
too
French. After all, she
was
a bloody nun. Now a short pause supervened, for what reason he could not tell – the designs of nature perhaps, or the feeling that she had gone too far, or something of an administrative order? Hard to tell. Anyway he left another message inviting closer co-operation and tried to fire her by singing very loudly when interpreting hymns whose words (“Nearer My God to Thee”, for example) could be taken in more than one way.

At last she yielded – though her handwriting was so inchoate that he had difficulty in making out the words “Tonight. Room 5”. Sutcliffe swelled up with desire and pride. That evening he played Bach remorselessly and with keen impatience. He had never been into the nunnery side of the establishment, and while he supposed that they shuffled to bed fairly early he thought it wise to let them get to sleep before starting his own invasion of the premises,
EVERSAFE
in hand, so to speak. To tell the truth the prospect rather quailed him – wandering about in the gloomy corridors of a nunnery. He waited until midnight before embarking.

He crossed the quad and entered the silent building which showed not a spark of light anywhere. He made brief use of his pocket torch and mounted to the first floor. The numbers were not only battered and almost effaced, they were not in serial order – or so it seemed. But at last he hit upon a room which he took to be numbered correctly, pressed the handle of the door and felt the warm air flow out into the corridor. He stepped into the blackness and stood for a moment to let his eyes accustom themselves to the dark. A figure in a bed stirred and he heard what he took to be a welcoming sigh. “Sister Rosa,” he breathed and switched on his little torch.

The Mother Superior gazed at him in terrified silence, with starting eyes; if she had had her teeth in they would have been chattering – but they lay and grinned in a tooth mug beside the bed. Sutcliffe let out an incoherent exclamation of utter panic. Her wig was on a stand by the bed and she wore a nightcap. He was about to turn and run for it when she turned on the light and exclaimed, “Mr. Sutcliffe, what are you doing here?”

It was difficult to explain. He spread his arms and pretended to be sleepwalking; then he awoke with a theatrical start and said, “Where am I?” It carried no conviction.

As time went on the story changed shape almost as often as it changed hands or tongues; some of this was due to Sutcliffe himself who had the ingrown novelist’s habit of embroidering on behalf of novels as yet to be. Thus in one version she produced a pearl-handled revolver and fired a shot through his coat-tails – in fact, he was not wearing a coat. In another equally implausible version she opened wide her arms and legs and cried, “At last you have come to claim me!” thus forcing upon him a distasteful and unholy conjunction of souls and bodies. It was the only way to keep his job. But what really happened? She cried, “Mr. Sutcliffe will you leave this room at once!” and this he did with some alacrity. In the morning he was summoned before the board of governors and dismissed with effect from lunchtime – hardly leaving him time to pack before catching the London train. He felt bad about having betrayed Rosa too, for on his way to the station he had a glimpse of her sitting upright between two granite-faced Carthusians in the little black bus of the school which could be converted into a hearse in times of need. Her cheeks were very flushed and her eyes cast down. Once back in London he returned to the seedy agency which had found him the job and described the circumstances of dismissal to the little Cockney manager whose catarrh and adenoids took turns at interfering with his articulation. He heard Sutcliffe out, shaking his head sadly. “Not very clever,” he said more than once. “You know what I should have done? Bicycled to the doctor’s and asked for a prescription against sleep-walking.” He spread his hands. “Then when the board called me up I would have a watertight excuse.” Sutcliffe whistled. “I never thought of that,” he said.

“Next time be more wily,” said the little man.

“Or less susceptible to female charms.”

“Quite.”

He turned once more to his sordid register and went through a list of vacancies tracing them with a broken thumbnail.

So the long cultural calvary continued for our hero until (after many humiliations) he rose to glory and affluence by his superior merits. Yet looking back on these episodes in later years he was not displeased with some of his handiwork. When the class, for example, asked him what the last words of Verlaine were he had replied: “Happiness is a little scented Pig.”