“Please.”
“I must know the truth.”
She opened her eyes at last and turned towards us smiling – a trifle tearfully to be sure but with a basic composure that was reassuring. It always amazed me that whenever I reappeared after a long absence she suddenly shed her sickness. It was like watching a diver slowly surfacing. After a moment she lay down again and turned her face to the wall saying, but this time in a confidently rational tone, “Part of the confusion is in myself, you know, but mostly in all three of us at once. It is horrible to be a battleground of three selves.” I knew only too well what she meant, though I said nothing, simply keeping my fingers on the precious timepiece of her pulse.
She lay sighing, and then after a while it came back, the sensation that by some enigmatic act of willpower I drew her slowly back towards reality once more. It was still a factor of control over her (which did not always work) that I would have liked to rationalise, to use like a real healer. I tried to explain it to myself by saying that with me she gradually began to forget that she was mad. In ascribing a rational value to everything she said, however confused, I provoked her into trying to provide one for herself. I pretended that it all had a meaning, and of course in another sense it did have one, if only one could have deciphered it. It was indeed literally drowned in meaning, like a flooded boat.
There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear – if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one’s hold also on one’s own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage to hold on to our reason. With the spectacle of madness before one’s eyes one feels the odds shorten. The eclipse of reason seems such an easy affair, the grasp on sanity so provisional and insecure. While I was feeling the weight of these preoccupations she was saying: “Everything seems to have come to an end now, but has it? Three little nigger boys … then there were two. I am afraid of you. Bruce what shall we do?” The question was asked on such a rational note that I took the plunge and asked: “You were with him? How did it happen? Did he do it himself?” She gave a small sigh, and closed her eyes once more; she was fading back into sedation again, that marvellous defence against the importunities of the world; I felt a fool for having adventured such important questions at such a time. Jourdain had the grace not to look quizzically at me. He shrugged. A tiny snore escaped her lips, and the doctor drew me softly out of that submarine bedroom into the study.
I waited there for a long while, suspended as if in a solution of silence, watching her and listening to her gradually deepening breathing as she edged her way towards the dismemberment of a drugged sleep. Jourdain was very patiently waiting too; he was an endearing man and the slight cast in one eye gave him always a sad juridical air, a tiny touch of melancholy which invaded his frequent smiles and inflected them with sadness. He sported dark suits even in summer, when they must have been stifling to wear, and white wing-collars with ties almost broad enough to be stocks. He whispered that he would come back for me at dinner-time and then quietly tiptoed away. I sat beside her for a while longer and then followed his lead. But in the outer room I started to gather up all the litter of papers and notebooks which were lying about on the carpet. It was typical of the sort of jumble of paper that Piers accumulated around him – everything unfinished, down to the last aphorism! One might have thought that a mad magpie had been at work among this heap of old concert programmes, maps of cities, rare pamphlets, notebooks and letters. I did what I could to sort and tidy, but it was not easy. Among the letters, some still in their envelopes, there were a number from me, and a number from Sylvie to me which I had sent on to him – so much did I feel that we were one person and obliged to share each other’s lives, both inner and outer.
Then there were some from Piers to her, all written on the notepaper he affected which bore the legend Outremer. (I had noticed on her finger Piers’ seal ring with the same rebus. He had always ironically referred to himself as “the last of the Templars”, and the word expressed not only the family tie, for he was indeed a de Nogaret, but also the Templar pride in the overseas commitment of the order. For such a romantic going to the Middle Orient was a thrilling experience – of a quasi-historical kind. He felt he was returning to the roots of the great betrayal, the roots of all anti-Christian dissent. Piers was a worshipper of the Templar God. He believed in the usurper of the throne, the Prince of Darkness.)
I pondered all these contingencies as I sat in the green armchair, sifting the papers and dreaming. “In the face of such evil, creative despair is the only honourable posture,” he said once and was annoyed when I smiled at his serious expression. I turned the pages of a diary in which he jotted down the visits he had received during the days preceding his death. Had he given his sister the seal ring which she now wore, the Outremer ring? I shook a copy of A Rebours and more letters fell out on to the carpet. One was a note to me from Piers giving an account of one of his sister’s relapses. “When these periods come on, Bruce, she hears my voice everywhere, in the woods, in the hot-water pipes, in the drone of a mosquito, crying out always ‘Sylvie, where are you?’ Followed by a sudden ominous wail ‘I have killed my sister.’ She is terrified at such times. What can I do?”
Such periods corresponded neither to the phases of the moon nor to her own physical rhythms. They seemed perfectly arbitrary and unpredictable. If we came to see her at such a time she would recognise only one of us, Piers. And here was a long rambling letter which she had written to me, but dedicated to her brother. “Dearest, you have been away so long. Soon it will be my birthday and I can scent the eachness of numbers, they mate with such reluctance. I know you cannot come as yet but I pretend. Today I waited all day for you, clothed from head to foot in a marvellous seamless euphoria. The throbbing of the almond-blossom has been almost unbearable, I cried myself asleep, back into reality again. Now the fruit is forming and I know I love you. Bruce dear, this is Man Friday’s sole in the sand, I have it in the carpet now. Even Jourdain says he sees it, so I know that I am not romancing. Piers was a Friday child remember? My dearest, they say that now you are back from India, and yet no word. Why? You will certainly have your reasons, and everything will be explained when you come. Forgive me if I am impatient.
“I am impatient to hear about India – O how was India; how calm was India? Starving and God-drunk and tattered with dry excrement? I feel I know. Every drawn breath an infanticide, every smile an enigmatic option on inner loneliness. When I was there long ago I felt the moon of my fragile non-being was at full. The smell of the magnolia remembers me supremely. A deep sadness seemed very worth while. But locked up in the first-class waiting-room of my mind I have come to repine. Yesterday they let me pretend and I went down to our Montfavet church to say hullo to the people on the wall. Nowadays at night I seem to hear Piers walking about in the other room, but he is never there when I run to see. This place, this mockery of a place, is full of a special sadness. Jourdain feels it too. He is still here, still talking of retiring, fastidious as a leper; I taste his smoke after he has gone. The taste of iodine too.”
I tested each phrase on my inner ear, my inner mind, as I thought of her sitting in the fifth side-chapel of the Montfavet church under the three oil-painted witnesses, so gauche, so awkward. On the wall at her back there was a plaque commemorating the death of a forgotten priest. If I closed my eyes even now I could read it off.
ICI REPOSE
PLACIDE BRUNO VALAYER
Evêque de Verdun
Mort en Avignon
en 1850
I was so far plunged in reverie that I forgot the sleeper next door, and when at last Jourdain came tapping on the glass for me I wondered who it might be. I was half asleep I suppose, fagged out after the long journey. However I sprang up and followed the doctor to his own bachelor suite at the other corner of the main buildings
. They echoed his lifelong passion for painting, and I noticed several new additions to his collection of oils.
In order to emphasise his civil capacity, so to speak, he had put on an old and cherished English blazer — to underline I suppose that his stay as a student in Edinburgh has been a most enjoyable period in his existence. The wines were thoughtful and tenderly chambered. The food was slight but choice. And for a good while we said nothing, which is the prerogative of old friends, but sat sipping our cognac and smiling at each other. “I was about to ask you if there was any reasonable explanation,” he said at last with an exasperated laugh, “and I see that you are just about to put the same question to me.” He was right, I had been on the point of asking him what the devil had got into Piers. As he was fully informed of our plans of retirement and so on I could speak to him quite freely. I had always suspected him of being in love with Sylvie, but he was a man of great pudicity; when it was once a case of doing a mild psychotherapy on her he passed her over to someone else, in order, I thought, not to prejudice his doctor’s control: or was it because he did not wish to feel the jealousy caused by his probings? “Let me tell you what is what for the present,” he said at last as we sat down to the meal. He drew a long breath. “Piers came here on retirement nearly a year ago, and set up shop in the hotel in order to be near Sylvie as he waited for you to arrive. Everything was in order for the execution of your plan, he spoke about it twice to me with enthusiasm. Sylvie herself celebrated the whole thing by several splendid remissions – you would never have thought she had been ill at all. Piers was beside himself with joy, and she spent nearly every day with him, either walking about the town or sitting in his rooms helping him sort papers or playing cards with him – you know his passion for cards. For the last week before this … well, extraordinary act … he had been in bed with a slight cold, nothing really to worry about. You will see when you look at his diary that quite a lot of people dropped in to see him, but it does seem that the very last was Sylvie. The nurse used to collect her in the evenings around seven and bring her back here to her rooms. Mind you, it was quite appropriate that the last person to see him alive was his sister. What is odd is that she was almost in a state of collapse when the nurse arrived, so the inference is that he had already done it or had told her that he was going to do it. But at any rate she knew. From then on such facts as she produced must be held suspect, for she went right round the bend. The nurse produced one interesting point – she said that she (Sylvie) was in a fearful state because she thought herself guilty of killing Piers, for she poured out his sleeping draught for him that night and thinks that she made a mistake. The empty bottle was beside the bed, where inevitably those flat-footed police found it, and insisted on an autopsy to settle the matter. Did he poison himself, or did she accidentally do so? That is the question.” “An accident sounds more plausible. I’m reassured.” “Exactly. He gave absolutely no indication of a desire to commit suicide. I was too late to prevent the police having him carved up, but I did get on to the préfet who assured me that unless there is very special evidence to the contrary the thing will be treated as an accident. Which solves the question of burial. I have also contacted that strange uncle of his, the Abbé of Foulques, who has agreed to lend a moral support should the police become tedious. You know he had permission to be buried in the family vault at Verfeuille? We should get all the formalities settled by tomorrow evening. Well, that is all I can tell you for the moment.” He placed his fingers on the table and reflected deeply. “It may have been Sylvie,” he said, “in which case we can absolve her of any ill intent; it could only have been an accident. Yes, it must be so.”
I was strangely comforted by this exposé of the situation which had at first seemed to be so full of ambiguities. At least now the whole matter was plain, and when the police came back with the obvious result things could take their normal course, the funeral could take place. As Jourdain talked, however, I saw in my mind’s eye the long casual autopsy slit which stretches from below the breast bone to the mons pubis.
“And Toby?” asked Jourdain with a sudden testy note in his voice, “where the devil is he?” It was a question I could not answer for the moment. “We have all cabled him in Oxford. But perhaps he hasn’t yet gone up, or is away on a walking tour in Germany as he so often is … I don’t know.” Jourdain nodded; and then with an exclamation he stood up, recalling something he had forgotten. “I completely forgot. I borrowed the police photos for you to see. They show the room exactly as it was when the police photographer was called in by the inspector and the médecin-légiste. Of course in part it is due to the fact that it took place at the Princes Hotel – what the devil induced Piers to stay there instead of somewhere like the Bristol? Funds? It’s virtually a maison de passe. Perhaps he had special secret vices we don’t know about? Anyway, whatever happens at the Princes is automatically suspect for the police. Hence these awkward questions, photographs and so on. Of course he was an amateur of quat – hashish – which delighted the cops. But there was precious little else of interest.”
As he was speaking he was undoing a heavy black briefcase which had been lying against the sofa; from it he extracted an official envelope which held a number of photographic prints, as yet hardly dry. The glossy surface stuck to one’s fingers as one peeled them. They were extremely beautiful, these still-lifes of Piers’ disorderly room. Jourdain spread them out on a green card-table and drew up two chairs, at the same time producing a large magnifying glass through which one could study the detail of the room with its strange inhabitant, who lay in bed, in the very posture in which he had been found. I felt a shortening of the breath as I contemplated them. Jourdain was talking on softly, anxious to give as complete an account as he could of this strange affair. “There were several sets of prints on the empty bottle here, on the bedside table. One of them Sylvie’s, which is interesting. As you know he took quite large doses of Luminash, as a sort of sedative as well as a sleeping draught. Presumably this is what they’ll find in the organs.”
Piers lay on his side with his knees drawn up – in almost a sketch of the foetal position; he had thrown back the sheet and the covers and appeared to be about to get up from his bed. His head was turned round towards the camera, presumably in the direction of the door, and he was smiling as if in delighted and surprised recognition, at someone who had just entered the room. It was clearly a smile of welcome. The flashlight threw into relief his pleasant patrician face and the brilliance of his bright blue eyes, which had a sapphire-like luminosity. He wore one of his old white nightshirts with the little monogram on the breast. It was like a frozen shot in a film, and it was difficult to interpret what he might have been about to do; instead of rising perhaps he was just sinking back luxuriously, and smiling goodbye as somebody left the room?
Yet one outstretched hand with its firm fencer’s wrist was stretched out towards the bedside table as if to switch off a light, take up a book or a cigarette. I passed the magnifying glass across the field to examine the detail with more precision. A novel lay beside the bed. His wrist-watch and his ebony cigarette holder lay in the silver ashtray on the bed-table. In a second and larger ashtray lay a mountain of cigarette and cigar ends. I recognised the stubs of the cheroots he smoked. For the rest the room was in a state of chaos; everywhere were tea-cups, jars of jam, flowers, packets of joss, picture-magazines and mountains of books and papers. “The room looks as if it had never been cleaned,” I said, and Jourdain shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the Princes,” he said as if that explained everything.
To tell the truth the appearance of his room was, for such an untidy man, relatively normal. Cupboards hung open revealing his wardrobe. Though he had always been a little bit of a dandy his choice of apparel was scanty, but choice, with a distinct leaning towards clothes made for him in London. A couple of medium-sized trunks were enough to house personal possessions of this kind; but the books were a different matter – Piers could not live without books,
and plenty of them. This explained the sagging home-made bookshelves knocked together from pieces of crate. And there was the oil painting he liked so much, of the three of us. Sylvie in the dappled sunlight under the planes, sitting in a yellow hammock, her lap full of flowers. On either side of her we stand, Piers holding her straw hat in his hand, as if he had just retrieved it from the grass. I stand leaning against the tree, lighting a cigarette. The sky has the peculiar peeled look which is conferred by the mistral only, cloudless, hard as enamel. I went through the prints with a feeling of weakness, with a lump in my throat. Yes, there was nothing unexpected here. The only other decoration would be the famous death-map which he had been compiling of late and which had a bearing on his intention of writing a memoir on the subject of his own approaching death. But more of this later. My hand is tired tonight. I must get some order into my thoughts. Something troubled me in all this. What was it?
Jourdain dropped me at my hotel that evening after dinner, and grunted as he saw through the glass doors of the patio the shapes of two men who sat waiting for me. They sat with such an air of involuntary boredom, smoking patiently, that I almost divined who they were before he spoke. “That’s old Bechet the notary, and Tholon the police inspector. They probably want to take you to see the room and ask you for any notions you might have.”
I turned and bade him goodnight. “Keep in touch,” he said as he let in the clutch, and I said I would. I opened the glass cage and stepped into the patio with its undusted potted palms and introduced myself to the two men – or at least to one of them; for Bechet I had already met some years before with Piers. We exchanged shocked commiseration at the news of his death, genuine enough in his case because he had dearly loved the family. He puffed and blew in his fussy way, and used his hands to say what his tongue could not.
The Avignon Quintet Page 3