The Avignon Quintet (85 page)

He groaned a small groan from time to time in his sleep, and automatically she folded him in her arms without waking up herself.

Two floors below, a long-visaged and weary Blanford was completing the destruction of his loose-leaf notebook which seemed to him now insufferably priggish and threadbare with all its wide-ranging sonorities. “A throw of the dice must decide whether the mates magnetise or not, whether they click and whether their product is a clear-eyed love or a mess – a mess transferable to their children.” He sighed and watched it burn among the other slips, for he was using the fireplace for his
auto-da-fé
. Later they would scold him and force him to clean up his room. He had said as little as he could about Livia, it was too painful to discuss; as for news of her, speculations about her, and so on, he left all that disdainfully to Felix Chatto.

“Europe’s behaviour was appropriate for those who drank symbolic Sunday blood and munched the anatomy of their Saviour.” So thought Blanford’s Old Man of the Sea – about the C. of E. It was pungent stuff – was he himself as pessimistic as all that? He thought and smoked and thought again; and decided that he was, and that he had done well to cleanse his bosom of such perilous stuff.

Unhealthy couple full of sin

Witness the mess that we are in!

Then, further on, another note which was destined to have a longer life among his speculations. “If real people could cohabit with the creatures of their imagination – say, in a novel – then what sort of children would be the fruit of their union: changelings?” He laughed helplessly in Sutcliffe’s voice and took a turn upon the terrace. The night was fine, like blue silk, and the stars were on parade in force, twinkling away like mad upon the operatic blue dark.

He got into bed and sought his restless slumber, head buried under his pillow, which smelt of newly ironed linen which had been hung out in the rain. The rain! He was not awake at four o’clock – the dawn was just hinting – to hear the swish of a light shower on the trees and on the stones of the verandah outside his room. The summer heats, rising from the brown parched drumskin of the earth, had given rise to a customary instability of temperature – little summer fevers which suddenly produced large ragged sections of free-flying cloud, so low that you could almost touch them. They were quite isolated, surrounded by summer blue, and they bore small showers or sometimes even hail which slashed at the vines and drummed on the grassy ground.

Bang! The report was so loud that the lovers started up; so did Hilary and Felix Chatto who was on a camp-bed in the kitchen. “What the devil!” exclaimed Sam. Could they be shelling the city? And who? Bang! This time they were awake enough to orient themselves towards the sound; it appeared to come from the densely wooded knoll above Tu Duc where they had once been to hunt for truffles in a holm-oak glade. But who could have got a gun up that steep hill, and for what reason?
Certes
, the whole town of Avignon lay down below it, across the river, with Villeneuve at one side turning the sulky cheeks of her castle towards the left. It had sounded like a light mortar, but there were no answering shots fired and no sound of aircraft, so, puzzled and disturbed, they started to make coffee and question. “We must go up and have a look,” said Hilary in an alarmed voice. The wet grey dawn was breaking through the forest. “Of course,” said Sam: so they gulped their coffee, and during this time two more shots were fired by the invisible artillery. They hastened, bolted their drink and food, and started the short but steep climb towards the summit of the overhanging hill. It took a quarter of an hour, but when at last they emerged upon the green platform it was to find that the weapon was only an old
paragrèle
, or cloud-cannon, which was firing shells full of salt crystals into the black stationary clouds above them. There were two old men alone to charge and fire this small mortar with its cartridges – the charges hissed upwards into the clouds which were swollen like purses with rain; yet after half an hour the trick worked and a light rain fell like smoke upon the slopes. One of the old peasants uncorked a bottle of
eau de vie
and passed round a sip after the success of their last shot. A watery sun struggled out and turned their faces to grey and then to yellow. They toasted each other with an Eviva, and then one of the old men remarked in an offhand manner, “They have gone into Poland!
L’après-midi, c’est la guerre.”

The cloud had burst at long last.

TWO

The Nazi

T
HE LANDS OWNED BY THE VON ESSLINS MARCHED WITH
the sealine in a desolate corner of Friesland, but without ever actually opening out upon it. Thus they shared the high winds and foul weather without in any way sharing in its picturesqueness, its refreshing breathlessness of spray and grey cloudscape. It was brackish land, poor land, encircled by shallow ranges of low hill which gave a deceptive profile to them, hinting at their penuriousness and the pains which they must inflict upon those who tilled them. Hills bent like pensive brows; thick yellowish loam, poor in limestone, which clogged under the plough, being too clayborne for rich crops. Winter came almost as a relief here, the land sinking back into its secret silence among the frozen dykes and ponds where the ice-cocked speargrass suggested armies of swordsmen. The trees dripped noisily in the night thaws, letting fall their icicles.

It had been theirs since the early seventeenth century when the first Von Esslin – also an Egon – had entered the profession of arms and won himself some dignities and a small fortune from a lucky marriage. The large, ugly feudal manse had in some way inherited two incongruous towers and a small moat, now in use as a duckpond. It was uncomfortable and impossible to heat. Moreover, as for most military families hovering on the margins of being considered nobility of the sword, finance was a perpetual trouble. The land offered them an income from two gravel pits and a seam of very fine white clay which they sold to potters in Czechoslovakia. The old General’s pension was quite substantial, while Egon himself found his staff pay just about adequate for the life he led, which did not allow him to indulge himself in gambling debts, horse-flesh or actresses like many of his brother officers of the same caste but with greater means. He did not regret the fact, for he was of a serious, almost pious bent, as befits a Catholic whose origins on his mother’s side had been Bavarian. But as a family they were stylised now as being of the Junker breed, and they had acquired some of the massive obduracy and obscurantism of that class – retaining, however, a special weakness, a seasonal weakness, one might say, for the music that took them each year in the direction of Vienna, a capital they had always loved and where they had always kept an apartment with lovely views out upon the famous woods. But Gartner, the family house in the hamlet of that name, was a grim place, a difficult place to love, and now that his mother spent nearly the whole year there Von Esslin himself had begun to feel the strain: he was rather ashamed of the fact that he felt almost glad when the army called him away to his duties and gave him an excuse to live elsewhere.

These were some of the half-formulated thoughts and sensations that passed through the soldier’s mind as the squat staff car lunged north and east along the dunes where the sea sighed among its summer calms and the sand lilies showed their pretty summer flowers; he had, by making some specious excuses, achieved an unheard-of luxury – twenty-four hours of leave – at a time when everything, every stitch of armour, every man, was grouped upon the borders of Poland. With so much impending he wanted to bid his mother goodbye – for who knew where the decisions of the Führer might send them? The telephone had been under blackout for some days now, except for army messages, but he had managed to signal her by asking a colleague in a northern unit to detach a motor cycle despatch rider to warn her. So she would be there, waiting for him as always at the end of the long green salon, her fingers upon a book, smiling. It was her invariable pose when it came to one of his visits – it tried to suggest that all was well, life was calm, and everything to do with the property taken care of. The Polish maid who never spoke would open the door to him and curtsy silently with that shy, downcast smile on her swarthy face. Well, but … they had much to discuss. Things were moving so fast that everyone felt out of his depth; they had been outstripped by the speed of events. Peace was not yet mortally stricken – but it was like a patient unconscious on a table, bleeding to death.

The summer had been exceptionally hot; warm rain in August, if you please! Everything was steaming; and now the real harvest weather had come, stilly blue with appropriate sunlight. (Ideal for a campaign in the Polish marches.) Von Esslin frowned and touched the edges of his short moustache as he watched the house come into view at the end of a long winding road lined with gracious lindens. This was his home – he repeated the phrase in his mind, but it evoked no pang of pleasure, simply the dutiful anxiety and affection which he had kept for his mother. They were very close in a way, and yet a mortal shyness ruled over their behaviour; to hear the tone in which they talked you might imagine them to be mere acquaintances, so without animation and lustre was it. It had grown, the shyness, since they were left more together, following upon the death of his twin sister Constanza, and of his father, the General. The old man had worshipped Constanza, and he never really recovered from her death; he had pined away like an old mastiff, filling the salons with photographs of her as a young woman before the slow wasting M.S. – sclerosis – had declared itself. How beautiful she had been; Egon himself had been stricken down with despair at so cruel a fate. They never discussed it, or seldom, and then gruffly.

It was different when they were separated, for then he permitted his warmth of feeling to evoke his childish attachment for her; in letters she became Katzen-Mutter, and as he wrote the words he felt the picture of her rise in his heart as a benign cat-mother, always with a great Siamese rippling at her side. They were still there, the cats; they were a passion with her.

The staff car drew up at last before the culvert covering the moat, and then gingerly crossed the plank bridge to arrive at the tall oak door behind which the Polish maid stood already waiting for his ring. She heard the driver open the door and heel-click, and then the voice of the Major General telling him to take his dressing-case inside and to be prepared to move off on the morrow at first light. This brief, barking exchange was succeeded by the jangle of the bellrope. The Polish maid opened and muttered something guttural as always; she bowed her head and sank into a half-curtsy. Von Esslin grunted something which bore a vague resemblance to a greeting and walked past her to place his cap upon the marble table and turn aside to where already the girl had opened the door into the green salon where his mother rose to greet him with a little cry of pleasure. “I did not quite believe it,” she said, with her brief scentless embrace. “But how wonderful.” He stepped back a pace to take her hands and kiss them with a suggestion of affectionate homage. “I haven’t very long,” he said, and then cleared his throat harshly as he added, “We are on the edge of war.” She nodded swiftly, a bird-like nod. “But how brown you have got,” she said. “It makes your scar look whiter than ever.” He smiled, the joke was an old one. Once a horse had run away with him into a wood and he had cut his cheeks open by riding into a coil of barbed wire which for some unknown reason had been tied upon a tree. The wounds were clean and he did not think to have them dressed or stitched – the result being the neatest simulacrum of duelling scars you might imagine. Despite his explanations his mess refused to believe that he had not in secret indulged in the old samurai-style duelling match which had been for many a year banned in the army, but which from time to time tempted young officers to practise it in secret. The more he denied this, the less he was believed. Was he not a Prussian? Such cases were rare but they did occur, just as from time to time someone had to be court-martialled for fighting a duel. The scars remained, grew whiter as his skin browned in summer. He was rather proud of the implication in a childish way; and at the same time ashamed. They were like stigmata to which one was not entitled but which could not at the same time be expunged. They laughed together at the absurdity.

“Come and sit beside me,” she said, “and tell me what is happening. Here we know nothing, the wireless is broken.”

He obeyed her and sat himself down on the sofa, sighing as he did so. “Things move so fast,” he said, “that I risk being out of date. That is why I must be at my post tomorrow. The Führer is making lightning decisions.”