The Avignon Quintet (79 page)

If he had been guilty of imitating the rather pretentious formulations of Blanford he might have told himself that the reality of war (death) if it came would render back once more all the precious precariousness of life which had become stale with too much safe living. It was not a question of swimmers into cleanness leaping
à la
Brooke, but simply a breath of fresh air in a twice-breathed suffocating age. If it came he would join up at once. He would welcome all the restrictions which went with the uniform. He would glory in the savage discipline, for too much freedom gives you vertigo – you are looking out into nothingness all of a sudden. Nothingness – your own portrait! Much later he would realise that this feeling was echoed by the whole of the Nazi Youth!

Apart from that, he had started a course of physical culture with some vague notion of fitting himself for the fray. He read a cheap pamphlet on yoga and realised that he was walking in the wrong way, his breathing rhythms were at odds with his steps. This made him walk in a self-conscious, rather stilted fashion as he remembered the instructions of his pamphlet. “Ordinary people breathe eighteen times a minute but in the best yoga practice you can get down to less than ten and that will do. But three a minute is really good!” Three a minute? He found himself counting the paving stones and holding in his breath, only to express it in a swish when the strain became too much. Surely this was not right.

But at dawn even he found relief in his weariness, hurrying home along the empty streets now drained even of the moonlight. Time was still there, a slowly discharging wound which the daylight would stanch. But first a little rest. He too climbed into bed and slept, but not before passing in review the sleep of the others which he could picture so clearly. Blanford all tousled, with his head under the pillow, Sam snoring, Constance invisible. Somewhere quite nearby the Prince lay, with a small piece of muslin over his face to defend him against moths – he dwelt in mortal terror of being eaten up by a moth, like an old tapestry. He had wrapped his one false tooth in silver paper, to avoid swallowing it in his sleep. It lay beside him with his beautiful ivory-covered Holy Book. Up there in Balmoral Max snoozed in a sort of cupboard which smelt of dead mice. The poor little secretary preferred a hammock in the garden. Lord Galen lay in his great bed all serene. He wore a night-shirt with frilled white cuffs which he got from Mannering’s. It had his monogram on the breast. He slept with his mouth open and from time to time squirmed out a great snore which might be phonetically transcribed as “Gronk-phew”; Felix remembered the Prince saying, “He is such a good man that he is prone to be
spoofed.”
And now war was coming.

Once it was Bread and Circuses,

Now it is all Dread and Carcases.

Where had he read that?

Yes, Blanford slept, but in his excitement he woke early while the others were still asleep, and tiptoed to the kitchen to make himself coffee. This he took back to bed where, lying luxuriously half asleep, he sent his roving mind as Felix had done, to visit his friends in their several sleeps and to try, by projection, to realise them more fully. Did he know what they felt or was he simply privileged to imagine – the writer’s illness? He hardly knew. Yet it was so clear to him that the girl who slept in the afterglow of Sam’s embraces was already ahead of them all in a certain domain whose real existence they hardly as yet realised. As for Sam, still drunk on the huge honeycomb of these first kisses, there seemed little beyond death and separation to consider, to evaluate. He had suddenly started to realise that he was now dying, quite softly dying. Mind you it would take time, but it was quite irrevocable. Most people hid their faces and refused to look this moment of realisation in the eyes. He slept on triumphantly in a cone of silence. The realisation itself was a victory, and it had nothing to do with the war. It would have come anyway, simply because of the contact with Constance, she had grown him up, though he would have been hard put to it to describe just how and why.

Even the notion of death offered a sort of hidden glee, it had been mastered! This whole absurd and mysterious business had been sparked off by a simple conversation in which the girl had said, “It will seem to you quite mad but from early on in my adolescence I seemed to have set myself a sort of task. I was trying to want only what happened, and to part with things without regret. It made me sort of on equal terms with death – I realised that it did not exist. I felt I had begun to participate in the inevitable. I knew then what bliss was. I started to live in a marvellous parenthesis. I also knew that it wasn’t right to know so much so young.…” The effect of these words on Sam was indescribable. He was struck dumb. It was as if he understood exactly what she meant, but that the words had by-passed his reason. Later, much later, she would be able to add to this in a letter to Blanford by saying: “An overwhelming thirst for goodness is a dangerous thing and should be discouraged. I hunted not an ethos but the curve of a perfect licence charged with truth – however disconcerting pure truth might be! I was an alchemist without knowing it. Idiot!”

There they were, sleeping all, quite unaware that their dreams were models and outlets for their future acts. He had fallen asleep again, Blanford, and this time it took Sam an effort to wake him. “No time to lose,” said Sam, “these last few days are precious. To horse!”

In some old book of aphorisms he had been surprised by the observation: “A superlative death costs nothing. The lesser ones are the more expensive.” Was it Montaigne? He could not remember.

NINE

The Spree

T
HE PRINCE
’
S LITTLE SPREE PROMISED TO BE OF SUCH
royal magnitude that the excited Quatrefages, when he got wind of the details from the inhabitants of their brothel – their common brothel, so to speak – at once borrowed a bicycle and scorched (the metaphor is an exact one, for it was at noon) out to Tu Duc with news of it. It must somehow be seen, he said, despite protocol considerations; even if only from afar. He himself was, of course, actually invited, but out of considerations of delicacy the Prince had decided to omit their names from his list of matchless crooks – perhaps just as well. But … he had rented the whole Pont du Gard, and with it the whole of the ancient Auberge des Aubergines which abutted thereon. He was already busy transforming the place to suit his notions of how a spree should work.

The Auberge was a strange, rambling old place, admirably suited to this kind of initiative, with its collection of Swiss chalets hugging the cliffs of the Gardon, buried in plane-shade, leaning practically over the green water. Though it was not a residential hotel it had a series of large interconnecting upper rooms which in summer managed to accommodate tourist groups or clubs devoted to archaeology or Roman history who selected the monument as a point of rendezvous, and sometimes camped out in the neighbouring green glades along the river. The cuisine was what had made it famous, and this was, of course, an important part of the spree. But it was not all, for the Prince, who was a man of the world, knew his France well. He knew that in this spirited Republic any citizen may call upon the
préfet
of any region to floodlight a notable monument at a purely nominal cost, simply to grace his dinner. When he himself had been young and madly in love with his Princess Fawzia he had offered her dinner here, served on the bridge itself by his liveried waiters; just the two of them, quite alone. He always remembered this early part of his married life with emotion. And now the great golden span of the Roman aqueduct was going to hover above their revels, its honey-gold arches fading into the velvet sky of Provence. His heart leaped in his breast when he thought of it. He became absolutely concave with joy. No detail must be left to chance.

Quatrefages had participated in some of the discussions as a friend and helper, and was able to attest to the Prince’s thoroughness. He retailed these scenes with amusing irony, even imitating the Prince’s accent to perfection. When he had asked,
“Et le gibier?”
the Prince had given him a reply straight from the heart of Cairo.
“Ne t’en fais pas, Bouboule.”
which came from some old musical comedy which time had encrusted in the Cairo soul. His henchmen were already out on their errands. Even the
gibier
, the game, was coming to the party from several different corners of the land, mostly Marseille and Toulouse. The Prince had announced that he liked the girls to be
plantureuses, bien en chair
, which explained the huge collection of cartoons after Rubens which finally arrived at the Pont du Gard. Whenever had one seen so fine a collection of sleepy sugar-dolls in all their finery, and their war-paint, a-jingle with doubtful jewelry and glinting with
toc
– the very perfection of the Arabian imagination? It was clear that the old Prince had been stirred by inherited memories of the Khedival entertainments of Cairo a century ago.

Quatrefages was so engrossed in his exposition that he did not hear the sound of the approaching car in which Felix sat bold upright in a straw hat looking like a rabbit, and tremulous with indecision. He was still not fully confident of this steel animal. Now everything had to be repeated for his benefit, and he listened with a slight pang of envy, simply because it sounded such a picturesque notion to give a party there, in the heart of the country. Preparations were already advanced; period furniture from all over Avignon, rented at ruinous prices, was being bundled into lorries and trundled out to the Auberge. In actual fact, they would only be about a hundred strong. “But the fifty girls are all
en or massif.”
said Quatrefages, involuntarily licking his lips. “Marseille has outdone itself to provide sumptuous dollies.”

“But where do we come in?” said Constance, who was also beginning to feel that they ran the risk of missing a treat, purely by being regarded as too virtuous to participate in it. “Indeed?” said Blanford. Quatrefages chuckled and said, “The roads after eight o’clock will be closed to motor-traffic by the gendarmerie at the request of His Highness. Obviously you won’t be able to get in. But I have an idea. You can watch it all from the top of the Pont du Gard – the ballroom windows open on that side and you can see in. I know because once when I was spying on a girl who I thought was doing me down I came there and sat on the top with glasses. She was dining with a man I suspected. I saw them both quite clearly. If you take those little opera glasses you have, you will also see everything from the top.”

“Yes, but to get to the top …?”

He gave an impatient shrug of the head and took out a fountain pen. On the local newspaper he swiftly outlined a sketch map of the country immediately surrounding the aqueduct – a drawing which stirred their memories at once for they had walked here. “Do I need to go on?” he asked. “Here is the sunken road near Vers. You climb that slope following the broken arches and the masonry. Then suddenly you turn a corner and …”

Yes, you walked out into the sky, and the great crown of the aqueduct with its deep water trench lay beneath you. You walked out, in fact, upon the top of it as if upon a bridge.

“I see,” said Blanford thoughtfully. “Yes, it would be possible.”

“Of course it would be possible,” said the impatient clerk, irritated by these slow English lucubrations, this slow chewing of the cud. “You would have a ringside seat.”

“When is it to be?”

“Tomorrow. You will
never
regret it!” His solemnity was amusing.

He went on with his exposé of the details and they could see that indeed this was to be no mean entertainment, but one worthy of such a splendid setting and … so, well, gallant a company. Yes, they really must go! If nothing else it would take their minds off the perpetual nibbling of thoughts and doubts about the war and about the impending separations. How well such an event would have rounded off a normal summer holiday, how well it would have suited the time too, situated on the cusp of the harvest, with the closing festivals of wine and bullfighting to look forward to! Never mind. Go they must.

So they set off from the house after dinner the next day, by a low and rather famished moon – late in her exaltation and fast in her setting; a deep autumnal haze lay over the land which hereabouts looked so Tuscan in its rounded forms and paint-brush cypresses, its hamlets and villages all to human scale, its rivers small but sturdy and full of trout. Soon the greenery would give place to the more dusty uplands of the garrigue, all stone and shale, and for much of the time regions both parched and waterless. They followed the instruction of Quatrefages carefully so as to avoid the traffic restrictions of the gendarmerie. When they reached Remoulins, for example, they did not cross the bridge – they saw lights and gendarmes on the further side. They turned right, as if for Uzès, and rolled along deserted roads which fringed the river bank, swerving from side to side to follow broad sweeps of the Gardon. The Pont du Gard was already lit up for the feast, its great bronze form lying in the sky like a stranded whale. Underneath it, on a flat mossy glade among the rocks, the Prince had caused a brilliant marquee to be run up, where he sat on one of his pantomime chairs to receive his guests. They were disgorged by their cars among the groves of willow and walked the thrilling fifty yards or so freckled by the light of reflectors, advancing dramatically towards the theatrical hovering aqueduct above.