The Avignon Quintet (56 page)

But first of all they made him rich and fashionable, a consultant for film stars and bankers, and that sort of animal. They lobbied him decorations of one sort or another, and made sure that he went to all the first nights and cocktail parties. It was about six years since he had last slept with Thrush, though they lived in tender amity; but he began to retire earlier and earlier, gripped by fatigue and the shadow of something like diabetes; until he took to having dinner with the children in the nursery and going straight to bed with them; he yawned more and more and looked vague. Retiring thus from the fray every evening he left the
champs d’honneur
free for the lovers and their doings. Once or twice they talked of finding him a substitute woman – a pretty
repoussoir
like Livia but he had no energy left for such a project. So thoroughly had they done the work of affect castration that he had gone all anaesthetic. As for Thrush,
animatrice de petit espace
that she was, she kept him soothed and tranquil in his striped pyjamas. In her he had an impresario who had guided him to wealth and social success – should a man ask more? But Blanford could see that this same gloomy fate of Zagreus was going to be his unless he watched out. What to do? As he wrote in one of his letters to Livia, “Of course marriage is an impossible state with all its ups and downs, lapses, temptations, renewals. But the only thing the tattered old contract sets out is that you accord the primacy of your affections to someone, this side idolatry. The cheat was that yours were not free to bestow. It is all that sours me.”

He was left with a mountain of scribbled exercise books – an attempted exorcism. But it did little good. It was as futile as founding a society for the abolition of bad weather. Yet the loneliness taught him discipline. There is nothing more beautiful than Method.

About Blanford; before writing the first words of a novel in his Q series he would close his eyes, breathe serenely through his nose, and think of the Pleiades. To him they symbolised the highest form of art – its quiddity of stillness and purity. Nothing could compare with them for noble rigour, for elegance. It was in order to cure this rather dangerous proclivity that he had invented that mass of conflicting and contradictory predispositions called Sutcliffe – a writer who recited the Lord’s Prayer, putting a Damn between every word, before addressing
his
novel.

Blanford took an overdose of sleeping pills and had horrible dreams in which he was forever helping two nymphs on with wings they rejected. He imagined them lying together in the sand – Livia’s face like an empty playground waiting for children, her large vague pale brow … The long middle finger which betokened bliss in secret.

Nor was it any solace to think hard thoughts about Thrush; apart from this unhappy situation he found her delightful. But he told himself that she opened her mouth so wide that she resembled a hippo, folding her food into it. As a matter of fact, even when she laughed her eyes cried “Help!” He could dimly intuit the terrible jealous insecurity that ravaged the two quaires – the negative of his own, so to speak. Once in the rue St.-Honoré when he was waiting for a massive American businessman (they had the simple authority of trolleys, comforting), the dentist came up to him in a bar and got into conversation. They only knew each other by sight then, and Blanford felt a kind of clinging, pleading quality in the encounter – as if he were hoping to find some solution to his case in a talk with Blanford. But they were ill matched for an exchange of consolations. He told himself that Thrush had a vicious, thirsty little French face; but it wasn’t true and he knew it. He felt as if his brains had cooled and dripped into his socks. He could have written an ode called “A Castrate’s Tears beneath the Shears” – but the tone was wrong and he delegated this to Sutcliffe who would come along in good time with his own brand of snivel. And then, on top of it all, to be unfair to poor Paris which all of a sudden became loathsome to him. He noticed now the dirty hair, cheaply dyed, and never kept up from meanness – so many brassy blondes with black partings. And in August the refusal to shave armpits.… The town smelt like one large smoking armpit. Acrid as the lather of dancers. And then the selection of sexual provender – perversions worthy of wood-lice. Well, he had come there for infamy in the first place, so what the hell had he got to complain about? He would die, like Sutcliffe, in the arms of some lesbian drum-major, dreaming nostalgically of hot buttered toast between normal thigh and thigh. Indeed he would go further and become a Catholic and enact the funky deathbed scene – the spider on the ceiling and the shadow of a priest and a notary.… It wouldn’t do, said the voice of Constance, and he knew that it wouldn’t. Eheu!

Under the shock of this misadventure Blanford suddenly found that he could read people’s minds, and a sudden shyness assailed him; he found now that he lowered his eyes when faced with newcomers – the better to listen to the sound of their voices. It was the voice he was reading so unerringly. People thought that he had become unusually shy of a sudden. (In some lower-middle-class bedroom Sutcliffe heard his tinny wife say,
“Chéri, as tu apporté ton Cadeau Universel?”
And he replied,
“Oui chérie, le-voilà.”

THREE

The Consul Awake

T
HE PRO-CONSUL WAS RULED BY THE DEMON OF INSOMNIA
, the royal illness; lying with his eyes fast shut in his little cage of a villa with its creaky bed, old chest of drawers and flawed mirror – lying there suspended in his own anxiety as if in a cloudy solution of some acid – he saw the sombre thoughts passing in flights across the screens of his consciousness. The hours weighed like centuries on his heart. Memories rose up from different periods of his life, crowding the foreground of his mind, contending for attention. They had no shape, no order, but they were vivid and exhausting – at once silky and prickly as thistles. Each night provided an anthology of sensations betokening only hopelessness and helplessness; this handsome and quite cultivated young man who dreamed of nothing so much as a post in the Bank of England (the excellence of his degrees justified such a hope) had been unwittingly sold into slavery by a mother who adored him with all the passion that centres about only children. How had this all come about? He knew only too well. “For you it’s
diplomacy,”
said his uncle, Lord Galen, one day, conducting the full orchestra of his self-esteem. His opinion was never asked and he was too weak to resist the little corsair who had become his mother’s lover after the death of Felix’s father. The boy had been weak and irresolute enough, the man was even more so. So here he found himself in a minor consular post in Avignon – a pro-consul of the career, if you please, but paid a mere pittance for his services. Yes, here he was, half dead with boredom and self-disdain. The Office had not even had the decency to declare the post an honorary one – which would perhaps have forced Galen to make him an allowance. He was paid like a solicitor’s clerk. He was only allowed a part-time consular clerk to keep his petty cash and type the few despatches he ever wrote. There was nothing to report and if there were any British subjects in Avignon they had never shown their faces. The villa was buried deep in dust-gathering oleanders and poinsettias. If only his mother could see him now – a Crown Servant! He gave a croak of sardonic laughter and turned on his side. Yet she must be proud of him. A flood of unformulated wishes and hopes, suddenly floating into view, directed his memory to a picture which made him always catch his breath in pain, as if he had run a thorn under his fingernail. He opened his eyes and saw her sitting withered up in her wheelchair. Looking at the dusty electric bulb hanging naked from the ceiling he went over his history for the thousandth time. His father had died when he was very small; years later his mother had conducted a long and decorous affair with his brother, the dashing Galen (extremely discreet, extremely ambiguous) until the increasing paralysis confined her to this steel trolley, pushed by a gloved attendant dressed in a billycock hat and a long grey dustcoat. Felix could hear the munching of its slim tyres on the gravels of gardens in Felixstowe, Harrogate, Bournemouth. When her illness grew too severe she had been too proud to continue her affair with Galen – she could not bear to see herself as a drag on him or on his career. He accepted this decision with guilty relief, though he vowed that she would want for nothing. He kept in touch through her doctors, though he did not write directly any more – he had always had a superstitious hatred of ink and paper. He had been taught that things written down can turn against one in the courts, that was the root of the feeling. But even had he written she could not have answered for she could no longer hold a pen; and as for speech, her own was slurred and indistinct. Her jaw hung down sideways, there were problems with saliva. Deeply shocked by her own condition, the dark eyes blazed with a sort of agonised astonishment. Her attendant was called Wade. In his billycock hat he wore the feather of a cock-pheasant. He was now far closer to her than either her son or her lover. She was impatient for only one thing now – to die and get it over with.… Wade read the Bible to her for two hours every night.

Felix groaned and rolled over in bed, turning his face to the ghastly wallpaper with its raucous coaching print. He breathed deeply and tried to hurl himself into sleep as if from a high cliff – but in vain, for other shallower thoughts swarmed about him as the fleas swarmed in his bed, despite the Keating’s Powder. This time it was exasperating memories of the official pinpricks he had incurred in trying to obtain a new Union Jack to fly from the mast which had been so insecurely fixed to the first-floor balcony of the villa. During the usual Pentecost celebrations, which were closed by a triumphal gallop-past of the Carmargue
gardiens
, some fool had discharged a gun in the air –
un feu de joie
– and the charge had spattered the sacred flag with smallshot, so that now it looked like a relic left over from Fontenoy. Felix simply could not fly such a tattered object any longer and, having described the circumstances, invited London to replace it. But nothing doing. An immense and most acrimonious correspondence had developed around this imperial symbol; the Office insisted that the culprit should be found and sued for his sins, and lastly forced to replace the object; failing that, said the Office of Works (Embassy Furnishings Dept.), the flag might have to be paid for out of Felix’s own pocket – a suggestion which drove him mad with rage. Back and forth went these acid letters on headed paper. London was adamant. The culprit must be found. Felix smiled grimly as he recalled the leather-jawed horseman whose racing steed had struck a bouquet of sparks from the cobbles as it went. The man indeed who had so narrowly missed him, for he had been standing on the balcony at the time to watch the procession. A foot to the right and there would have been a consular vacancy which the Crown Agents would have been happy to advertise in
The Times
. He had even felt the wind of the discharge, and smelt the cordite of a badly dosed home-made charge. And the flag?

And the flag! Should he, he wondered, try to get it ‘invisibly mended”? There was a new shop in the town which promised such an amenity. But an absurd sense of shame held him back. Would it not seem queer for a shabby consul to sneak about the town with a tattered Union Jack, trying to get it repaired on the cheap? Yes. On the other hand if he flew it as it was just to spite the Office there was a risk that some consular nark from Marseille might see it and report adversely on him. He sighed and turned again, turning his back on these futile exchanges, so to speak. And so then Galen had quietly replaced his father, had taken command of everything, school-fees, death-duties, house-rents, etc. In fact he had actually become his father, and as such infallible. He pronounced shortly and crisply on everything now; his will was done, rather like the Almighty’s. The overwhelmed and frightened child could do nothing but obey. Galen had, as a matter of fact, demanded worship, but all Felix could supply was a silent obedience to the little man with the plentiful gold teeth which winked and danced in the firelight as he outlined the splendid life which the Foreign Service held in store for the boy.

So here was Felix listening to the sullen twang of the mistral as it poured across the town, dragging at shutter fastenings and making his flagless flagpole vibrate like a jew’s harp. The consular shield below it had also taken a few pellets but the damage was not extensive. It merely looked as if some hungry British subject had taken a desperate bite out of it in self-defence. “Whatever you do, Mr. Chatto,” the Foreign Secretary had admonished him before handing him his letters of credence and appointment, “never let yourself become cynical while you are in Crown Service. There will be many vexations, I know; you will need all your self-control but try and rise above them. Sincerely.” Well, if he had been in a laughing mood he might have managed a feeble cackle. Indeed his shoulders moved in a simulated spasm but in fact his face still wore the pale, dazed expression of a sinus case which aspirin could not relieve. He could smell the dust being blown in from the garden – dust and mimosa. In the spaces between assaults the wind died away to nothing and left a blank in the air into which seeped fragments of ordinary sound like the bells of St. Agricole. The theatre would be emptying into the square by now and despite the foul wind the café’s would awake for a spectral moment; it was too chill to do more than hug the counters and bars and drink
“le grog”
. It was early yet, all too early. Like sufferers from sinus and migraine he was used to seeing the dark nights unroll before him in a ribbon of desolation.