The Avignon Quintet (98 page)

After all, why not a book full of spare parts of other books, of characters left over from other lives, all circulating in each other’s bloodstreams – yet all fresh, nothing second-hand, twice chewed, twice breathed. Such a book might ask you if life is worth breathing, if death is worth looming.… Be ye members of one another. I hear a voice say, ‘What disease did the poor fellow get?’ ‘Death!’ ‘Death? Why didn’t he say so? Death is nothing if one takes it in time.’”

She was thinking: “To be instructively wounded is the most one can ask of love. What innocents we were! Now I see it all so clearly. Some marriages just smoulder along, others chime by couples, but in ours we were blissed out. What luck! But how hard to pick oneself up after such a knockdown blow. What now? I shall live alone like Aubrey, sleep alone, on my right side, pointing north-south; yes, quite alone.”

He thought: “To commingle and intersperse contingent realities – that’s the game! After all, how few are the options open to us – few varieties of human shape, mental dispositions, scales of behaviour: hardly more numerous than the available Christian names used by the race. How many coats of reality does it take to get a nice clean surface to the apprehension? We are all fragments of one another; everyone has a little bit of everything in his make-up. From the absolute point of view – Aristotle’s Fifth Substance, say – all persons are the same person and all situations are identical or vastly similar. The universe must be dying of boredom. Yet obstinately I dream of such a book, full of not completely discrete characters, of ancestors and descendants all mixed up – could such people walk in and out of each other’s lives without damaging the quiddity of each other? Hum. And the whole book arranged in diminished fifths from the point of view of orchestration. A big switchy book, all points and sidings. A Golgotha of a book. I must talk to Aubrey about it.” He bowed his head while an imaginary audience applauded lengthily.

She thought: “To wake up one day with a vision of Absolute Good! What would it be like?”

Sutcliffe, who sucked a pipe in order to supply a substitute against smoking cigarettes, threw it down and lit yet another Celtique, snapping his fingers defiantly at his own reflection in the gloomy café mirror.

The drink was beginning to tell on them; she felt quite unsteady and all-overish. “We must eat something,” he said and bade the taciturn waiter produce his dismal menu. He read it through, groaning:
“Plat du jour
, baked beans on toast. Let’s have that.”

She was too weak to resist for they must eat something or be completely dismasted by the alcohol. Besides, it prolonged the evening, for she had not yet decided whether her courage would permit her to resume residence in her flat which was hard by, or whether she would need to go back to the clinic across the lake. This at least set a time limit upon the decision, for the last ferry left at eleven at night. Her heart was beating much faster and from time to time she felt flushed and a trifle incoherent. The food was produced and they fell upon it with zeal. “What a swiz life is,” said the big man between mouthfuls, “I saw an advertisement for a smart secretary for my office, and I answered it only to find that the girl in question – O dear! Masses of dirty hair attached to a broomstick. So I sent her to Toby’s department where they are all colour blind.” She was not listening. She was thinking: “How intensely one dreams of the past.” She said aloud, “I keep dreaming of the last summer we had in Provence – it is so vivid. Small things come out so clearly. Sometimes very trivial things about Hilary my brother and Aubrey. Do you know, when Aubrey became absolutely insufferable with his preaching about how superior to us the French were we set up an ambush for him. The one subject which he always brought up at the end of one of those futile arguments about Art or Sex was the richness of the French language. It had many more pejorative epithets than English, he would assert loftily. It got on our nerves so much that we rehearsed a little act and whenever he brought this up we used to chant in unison, with terrible facial grimaces, the half dozen or so which he always cited. It doesn’t sound funny but if you saw the grimaces and his own crestfallen blush …”

“What were they?”

“Cuistre! Mufle! Goinfre! Rustre! Jobard! Goujat! Fourbe! Gniaf!”

“Good. I didn’t think his French was up to much.”

“At any rate we cured him that summer.”

“Good.”

But she sighed and said, “I wonder what he is doing now, all alone in that palace with the Nile flowing on his ceiling.”

“I can tell you,” said Sutcliffe, “but it’s only a novelist’s guess. He is listening with ever-increasing irritation to the nasal whine of Cade, his servant, who is massaging him reproachfully. Cade has found out about the goings-on with the Greek nurse and he is saying, in his lugubrious Cockney accent, ‘For my part, sir, I never go with a girl without wearing a conundrum.’”

“I must try and get home,” she said, “but I need help after all these drinks.” They negotiated the gloom of the place with its vast dusty clumps of furniture and arrived in the street only to find that it was raining – an autumn drizzle for which neither was prepared. “The quickest is my flat,” she said, glad that the issue had been decided for her by an extraneous factor. “It’s just around the corner.” They scurried with as much despatch as their condition permitted and reached the house in somewhat unsteady shape. Here she had a struggle to find her key, but find it she did and they took the lift up to the second floor. The place was very dusty and had clearly not been inhabited for a while; there was washing-up about and through an open door one saw an unmade bed. But the little studio room over the lake was pleasant and the sofas were comfortable, which invited Sutcliffe to relax while she went in search of further drink. There was only vodka left in the drink cupboard and this, she realised, was going to be fatal to him; but it was obvious that he had already decided to fall where he stood – he had shaken off his clumsy shoes and was examining the big toe of his left foot which protruded from a torn sock. “I like these Swiss suburban flats,” he said, “they are homey. There is always a
membre fantôme
on the hallstand and a Valéry open in the loo. They are inhabited by psychoanalysts and abortionists.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all.”

“I see you don’t believe in science.”

“I do, though; but in the poetry of science.”

“And happiness?”

“Has nothing to do with the matter. You cannot create this obscure and marvellous field of energy –
le bonheur
– by advocacy or the whip, by force or by guile, but only by pleading. Poetry begins there, and prayer also; they lead you to a thought, and science comes out of that thought. But the pedigree is long.” He broke off and erupted in a string of hiccoughs which rather alarmed him. Then he went on: “The sixpence in the plum pudding must be taken on trust. We must believe. It is really there. It is the holy Inkling.”

“You are babbling,” she said reproachfully, and he shook his head sadly over her, saying, “You have received a tremendous shock with Sam’s death.” And at this, quite involuntarily, they both burst out crying simultaneously, joining hands. It was such a relief to discover that she could produce so human a reaction at last; he cried like an old horse, she cried like a humble adolescent, awkwardly and noisily. And while she cried she thought: “The arrival of death on the scene brings an enormous sense of the sweetness of things – the richness of impermanence which one has always avoided, feared. ‘The dying fall’ is true for all of us: clowns, heroes, lovers, cads, fools, freaks, kings, commoners, the sane, the mad, or the silent.”

She laid her distraught drunken head on his shoulder while he, unmanned by emotion and exhausted by his potations, stroked it with his coarse palms and repeated helplessly, “There, my dear, there.” And all the while she was thinking: “The long studied suppuration of confessional analysis! The fatigue and intricacy! The weeping wall of the Jewish spybrain hovering around schemes of investment; picking the scabs off wounds and wondering why they bleed. Scar-tissue of un-assuaged desires!” Then she burst out: “He wrote me such a foolish letter with nothing in it but schoolboy jokes and just one good sincere passage. Wait, I’ll get it. I left it in the loo.”

She had wanted to tear it up and flush it away but instead had put it beside the bath where the steam had gummed half its leaves together. Now she picked up the flimsy mass and peeling it like an onion found a sheet. She read out: “ ‘Connie, death is nothing and that is the truth. Pain of course one fears a bit, but amnesia comes with it. Our great weakness, the place where we all cave in, and can’t take it, is love.’”

“But the letter,” said Sutcliffe, “it’s all glued together.” She replied: “I know it by heart. But it came too late. That is why I am so terribly upset. In it he told me that whatever happened I must keep the child, for we both practically knew for certain that I was pregnant; at that time I told him that I would certainly not hold him up by having one, in case when he came back he no longer felt keen on me.”

She knocked on her forehead with her knuckles. “I was being noble. I did not wish to risk that he might stay with me against his will because of a child begotten in haste and by accident during the war. After all, I thought, when our love reestablishes itself there will be time enough to have another one.

So I made away with it. I made away with it. And hardly had I done so than the news of his death came, and of course the child became infinitely precious – if only I had kept it!”

He realised now the full extent of her distress and guilt. She stood in the centre of the room with hanging head and relived that cold afternoon in the little apartment of the old doctor – lying spreadeagled in a dentist’s chair hoisted against a white pane of glass where the clouds from the lake surface reflected themselves. Lying with her legs apart while the old man talked rapidly, confidentially. Pain and anaesthesia melted and blended. Then the mountains of wadding to stay the bleeding. The old man came with a slop-pail in which the foetus lay, the fruit of their love, like a little greenish tree-frog, with perfectly formed fingernails and toes. It was still alive but tremendously exhausted. It lay like a half-dead swimmer washed up on a forlorn coast.

Realising his role as confidant, his therapy, Sutcliffe plied her with questions, made her spit the whole poisoned lot of it out into his lap. They talked on and on in the darkness and in the intervals between the sound of their voices they heard the whewing of gulls or the bray of a ferry-siren mixed into the simmering noise of rain on the windows. The topic of their conversation, their common distress, united them in a harmonious web of shared emotions; but the slow spirals of alcohol in the blood led them further and further towards incoherence, and at last into the fastnesses of sleep. His snores replaced his sobs, and gained in splendour as he slept, his head on her companionable shoulder. It was dawn when she woke with a start – the night had folded itself away like a screen. On tiptoe so as not to wake her confidant she betook herself to the kitchen and set going a copious breakfast which she knew she would need as much as he; though it was early she made haste, for she had work to do across the lake. Sutcliffe slept on, quaking into a snore from time to time, his frame wobbling jelly-like and then settling again into its mould. He too had work that morning and would be glad of the hot shower and the plate of bacon and eggs when he awoke. Nor were the promptings of reality unhelpful, for the telephone rang and cut through his sleep like scissors. Constance answered it briefly and turned to her guest who was beginning to stretch and yawn his way back to life. “It is Schwarz,” she said with relief, “he is back on duty again and I can return to my own cases at last. Is there anything that you would like me to tell him when we consult later on this morning? Or to tell her for that matter?”

Sutcliffe pondered heavily. “I was once promised that she could go for walks round the lake in the afternoons; what has happened to that idea?” Constance shook her head. “I did not hear of it. Perhaps she showed a disinclination to meet you? I will find out.” He lumbered to the lavatory, having selected an old copy of
The Times
to read there, leaving her to clear the place and lay their breakfast table which she did with despatch and care, for the extent of their alcoholic abuses had rather alarmed her in a medical sense. The murdered bottle of vodka lay there, showing its teeth, so to speak. Had they really put away so much? Noises from the lavatory answered her question. She tapped on the door to ask if he was all right. “Yes, thank you,” he said. “I was just lost in the liana of my lucubrations as I unwound the
Times
leader. Rigorous, cleansing prose. After this I shall totter to my office, as pretty as a virgin with horns. Ah, my head!”

But the weather had cleared and a fragile sunlight enhanced the lake mist with its gleams. They embraced warmly as they separated. “O thank you, my dear,” she cried impulsively and he spread wide his arms in a gesture of resignation. “Fifty-fifty,” he replied.

It was no more than the truth. “And do remember that if you wish to send Aubrey a message I can have it sent over the Red Cross teleprinter.” Sutcliffe chuckled again and nodded his head vigorously. “I certainly shall,” he said with a smile. “But above all, Connie, please keep in touch with me now and help me if you see any way.”

“Of course.”

The little office smelt of Turkish cigarettes rather than French, and he knew at once that his partner Ryder had been in that morning; it was equally obvious from the litter of press cuttings and half-typed pages which adorned the desk next to his own. That week there had been an awful lot of technical articles to translate from Swiss and German periodicals. Laboriously, in a frenzy of tedium so to speak, they were wading about in search of the scrambler device which rendered the codes of the German “enigma machine” so impenetrable to their own Intelligence. Thousands and thousands of articles had been combed, and thousands awaited them. Ryder and he were building up a “scrambler file” which would contain almost all that was known on this abstruse topic. Ryder – astonishing for a regular officer – was a brilliant German scholar and had been delegated to this pedestrian task, which he performed with discipline and good humour. A small peppery young man with a toothbrush moustache, he was always on time; he drank and smoked most moderately and lost his temper infrequently. Sutcliffe hated him, because he always felt that Ryder’s professionalism showed his own behaviour up for the lackadaisical sort of article it was. Sometimes when Ryder criticised a passage in a translation he would feel that he was steadily turning blue with rage. He gritted his teeth and felt the muscles at his temples squirm with irritation.