The Avignon Quintet (94 page)

“I shall never forgive myself,” said the Prince in a low, hissing voice. “The whole thing is my fault.”

A smatter of Arabic voices now took up the tale, cajoling, excusing, explaining, or so it seemed. The sun seemed to be playing upon my very eyeballs. The pain was one continuous even throb now, with its own anaesthesia – when it reached a certain degree of intensity one fainted away for a moment.

Now the shuffle of car wheels and the grinding of gears; we were heading back for the wire. Somebody suggested whisky and water but Drexel said, “Not with such bleeding please.”

“I shall never forgive myself,” said the Prince.

A sympathetic group of voices hovered like an overturned beehive at the wire. We were treated with kindness and despatch. The officer was disposed to crow over our mishaps, but the Prince bit his head off with a crisp, “That’s enough. Can’t you see we have two casualties? Where is the dressing station?”

Dust and whirring sand, and flies settling on blood in swarms. A needle, a drink of cold water, sleep.

I was not to know till later that Sam was dead.

Nor that the guns responsible for the accidental assault on us had been our own – Cypriot mule-borne mortars at target drill.

In the month-long agony of lying half insensible from shock – both the shock of my friend’s death, and the post-operational shock from all the spinal excavations I had had to undergo in the “cleaning-up” process – much else had happened. Cade had appeared from nowhere, to my dismay and consternation. Thanks to the Prince he had succeeded in getting himself transferred to the Egyptian mission and appointed to me as a batman. It was intended as a kindly gesture on the part of my hosts. How could they have divined the depression and horror I felt to wake and find, sitting at the end of the bed, the yellow weasel of my mother’s last days – her manservant and reader of the Bible, Cade? He sat there in expressionless silence, with an air of profound disapproval of everything – Egypt, the war, the Prince, my disposition— everything. It took less than nothing to start him off whining about the army, the Germans, the war, the peace, the weather. He wore his puritan life like a dead crow round his neck. Every day I was tempted to sack him, and yet … He was useful to me. He had once been a male nurse in an asylum and he knew how to wash and change me, and how to massage my splintered limbs. Also my eyes seemed to have been affected by my other tribulations, and I allowed him to read to me – the new correspondence which flowed out of Geneva: the letters of Constance, who by now was fully abreast of events, in possession of the truth. “So Constance doth make cowards of us all,” I heard Sam’s voice in my ear as Cade read her brave letters, so full of a contained hysteria, so free from bravura. “I am puzzled, for it has keeled me over: yet in a way it was to be expected. Aubrey, send me every scrap of detail, however horrible. I want to experience as deeply as possible this terrible yet perhaps most valuable experience. Did he speak of me, did he miss me? Why should he? He loved me, and was as free as a butterfly, his wings turned sunward. Here in the sleet and snow it all seems unreal – down there by the Nile. By the way, I thought for a long time your Sutcliffe was imaginary, but I find he is all too real. What could you have meant by that? I am treating his wife – standing in for a colleague on leave of absence. What a
ménage!
He asked to see me, I complied. He brought up the question of Freud’s sofa without my prompting him and I knew he was ‘your’ Sutcliffe. I told him it had arrived safely. We are friends now, close friends. He is a weird man. Strangely enough, the sort of man a woman could love. An old wart-hog with dandruff – so he says of himself. It has meant a lot just now, with Sam, having someone like this to talk to. Aubrey, please recover, please tell me all.”

Cade folded the letter with distaste and looked at the wallpaper with a mulish expression devoid of emotion. I was tempted to sigh. “If foreigners did not exist the English would not know who to patronise,” I said angrily, and I asked him to take a letter back to Constance. He seated himself at the desk with the portable typewriter before him, waiting, his pharaisical hatred of everything flowing out from him into the room in waves, in concentric circles. Horizontal, I drew a long breath and hesitated peevishly, for Constance had now made a coward of me: I simply could not tell her the truth. I would certainly report that he had died instantaneously with a bullet through the head. After all, what did she really want to hear? “His spine was shivered, his organs splattered with thorns of shrapnel, the works of his watch shot into his wrist? Nothing could stop the flow of blood, our blood. The car cushions were daubed, the canvas sheets on which we lay were smoking with flies. Rib-cage stove, thorax broken and bruised, ankles snapped like celery…” It was disgusting. Moreover, what was the point? Worst, it was selfish. It was not part of her loving, it was a medical therapy to test her professional composure. No, I could not tell her the truth.

Every day now the contrite Prince came to sit by my bed, for the most part with the Princess; but usually they separated these visitations. She came in the afternoon to have tea with me, he just before lunch to discuss any work problems which might have arisen in the morning, for we kept up the pretence that I was still in his employ, neither side wishing to let the relationship lapse.

For the rest, it was Cade who waited upon me now, who dressed and fed me; why did I tolerate this man whom I found so detestable? His insolence – examining the fillings in his back teeth with the aid of my shaving mirror, doing his hair endlessly in the bathroom with my combs and brushes! Sometimes he did not answer when I spoke but just looked at me, his head on one side, with a benign contempt. But when I raised my voice his assurance wilted and he became a slave again, cringing though still loitering. Was it because he had witnessed the death of my mother? Or because it was to her that he had read the Bible every night? Nowadays he kept up the same practice, spectacles on the end of his nose. His lips moved as he read.… He sat now before the machine, his head bowed, waiting. I simply could not bring myself to write to Constance through such an emissary. “That will be all, Cade,” I said, much to his surprise. “I am beginning to ache. I’ll record a letter later.” He looked at me keenly for a moment and then got up, shrugged, and removed the typewriter. They had loaned me a little magnetic recorder, and this meant I could have my recording typed out in the Red Cross offices and so keep it from the prying eyes of Cade. “You can go now,” I told him. “I am going to sleep for an hour.”

The unhappy conventions of grave sickness – I had not known them before; you become a burden to those who nurse you. The dressings and the drugs and the tiptoe people only emphasise what you would be only too glad to forget – your utter helplessness. The world closes in, one affronts it from a lowly horizontal position; those who help you you come to hate. For me at this stage the future had vanished as inexorably as the past – even if the war lasted a century it would not modify my condition. And how ignominious to be put out of action by one’s own side! Drexel came in sometimes in the afternoon to talk to me, and showed me the pictures he had taken on that fatal afternoon. The Bridge of Sighs, so-called, in the far distance, with Sam and me in the foreground turning to wave – within a minute of being blown up! I was glad of his presence, for he could examine and talk about my wound; Cade had simply held up a doubled fist and said, “You got an ’ole this size in your spine, sir.” Drexel for the first ten days assisted at night with the dressings and bindings. “You will have to be re-strung like an old piano, I am afraid; thank goodness we have a first-class orthopaedic unit with the Indian Div. But you will need at least two more ops which I don’t think can be performed here – so delicate; unless the Prince has some foreign talent up his sleeve. Ask him.” But the Prince had nobody except competent local doctors – Egyptians of his class were used to being treated in Zurich or Berlin for any malady graver than a common cold. I entered the dark tunnel of this illness with a tremendous depression, for my whole life seemed to have been compromised by it. Sometimes in the shuttered afternoons with the white ripples of the Nile reflected on the ceiling of the tower-room into which I had been moved for convenience, I awoke in the blaze of fever to see my valet’s face bend over me to take thermometer readings to log my progress. Then there came as well exhausted days of remission and coherence where I found I could speak and craved company. The Prince’s children came and played in my room sometimes: I tried to get them to pass me the holster on the mantelpiece which contained a service revolver – part of my Egyptian army kit. But they refused, and must perhaps have told someone, for when next Drexel came I noticed that he broke it and tilted out the cartridges. Neither of us said anything. “Different sorts of fever,” he said once, quietly. “My own is a girl with dark hair and black eyes.” I did not know it then, but the reference was to Sylvaine, the dark sister-
ogre
with whom we had travelled up the Nile. The information came from Affad, who also dropped in regularly with papers and presents of chocolates. “It’s a strange love trio,” he said, “quite worthy of Ancient Egypt. They have great plans of retiring from the world after the war and locking themselves up in their Provençal chateau.”

After the war! “Have you seen the news?” I asked him, and he replied, “Yes, I know.” How could anyone dream of an afterwar state? He lit a cigarette and quoted some Chinese sage: “In this life they are only dreaming they are awake.” Yes, it was true – we lived like parvenus, like vulgar provincials in the city of God. And now to be helpless in a foreign land, far from love and its familiarities, strapped down to an ironing-board with a pound of lead on each foot and the plaster sticking to the hairs of the skin in an agony of heat … I had been assured that it would not be for long though. I closed my eyes and saw Constance walking by the grey lake, a whole landscape of iron-black trees quivering under snow. I would have given anything to be walking beside her. “I took them to the oasis of Macabru – you should have come. There is a little sect of gnostics who meet there at this time of the year; they carry on ancient rites and beliefs. They admitted us, and we took a good deal of hashish and had visions.” He laughed softly. I asked him, “How would you define gnosticism?” but he only shook his head doubtfully and did not answer.

The coming of Theodora changed everything. She was the new nurse from the Greek Hospital in Alexandria who had been drafted to Cairo. The Prince without telling a soul had engaged her to live in and look after me. One morning she was simply there. She stood in the doorway divesting herself of her shawl and eyeing me a little sideways with her yellow goat’s eyes, as if she were listening to some invisible pulse-beat. She said good morning with complete assurance in French and Greek – her accent sounded very plebeian in both languages. Then she rolled up her sleeves and came towards me slowly, stealthily, as one boxer approaches another to deliver a blow. At this moment Cade came in, and turning to him she gave him a long yellow look and then pointed at the door, saying,
“Moi massage le Monsieur. Sortez.”
The manservant slunk out of the room without a backward glance.

“Ego eimai Theodora,”
she said in Greek, tapping upon her own breastbone with long capable fingers.
“Je suis votre infirmière Theodora.”
And with that she started to massage my ankles and toes which felt as if they had been buried in the ground for a century. She turned me deftly this way and that with the voluptuous air of a small girl playing with her doll; and finally when she made her way towards my midriff it was dolls indeed; I felt a whole surge of new life awake in my loins, new oxygen enter my lungs. The massive vascularity of the big blood vessels was invoked by her strong fingers in their apt progress.
“Et comment ça va là?”
she asked at last, taking up my faltering tulip in strong fingers and kneading it as if for the oven. “Did they not check if it worked?” She was both outraged, and at the same time delighted by what she had accomplished, for brave tulip was the size of a Montgolfière and still growing.
“Assez,”
I cried, but my voice must have given me away; the truth was it was delicious. And bending down over me she brought me to a climax so thunderous that I thought I had burst all my stitches. Never had I experienced such an immense slow orgasm – its ripples ran like the tributaries of the Nile throughout the whole nervous system. With this bold stroke she restored me to life and I knew that I could only get well. It was so intense that I started to cry, and bending down tenderly she licked my tears away, dabbing my eyes with a handkerchief.
“Enfin!”
she cried triumphantly,
“C’est ça. Tout va bien.”
And then added in Greek,
“Sikoni monos tou,”
which later I learned meant “It stands up without prompting.” Indeed so it was to be, for every day she took tulip for an outing, and every day I waxed in vigour with all this delightful target-practice.

Later, as I grew stronger, she straddled me with her long lean legs and repeated the miracle even more slowly, sharing in the pleasure herself this time. It was rape, the infantile dream of being tied down and raped forcibly by someone who smelt like your mother and had the eyes of a goat. Tall, lanky Theodora was, like her great namesake, a gem. With her I rose from the dead.

FOUR