It was unthinkable that it should have been anything but an accident, he told me, more than once. The little policeman, who looked so undistinguished in civilian clothes, did not intrude his speculations upon us. “We must see,” he said quietly. “Tomorrow we should have the results of the autopsy, and the body will be returned to the morgue, to the chapelle ardente, where his relatives may visit him if they wish.” My soul shrank back however at the thought, which was unworthy of a medical man like myself–I know it. Bechet plunged into the details of the funeral which he had rememorised from the will. The details rendered him somewhat plaintive, for Piers was to be taken to the family caveau after dark, by the light of torches, there to be placed among his ancestors. But no service of any kind was to be read. “It’s awkward,” said Bechet, “I don’t know what the Abbé will have to say. He will think that Piers was an atheist.” Tholon sighed and I gathered from the volume that he harboured anticlerical sentiments. “It’s vexing,” said the old lawyer scattering ash over his rumpled suit, and on the end of his spotted bow tie. “In a way it was worse,” I said thoughtfully, “for he belonged to a sect of gnostics who live in Egypt – and they are certainly not Christians but dissenters. Hence the provision in his will, I suppose.” Tholon began to look impatient now and asked me if I would care to see the room in which my friend had died. It was being held under police seal for the moment, but perhaps the contents might give me an idea to help explain the affair. I was reluctant, but felt I could hardly refuse. Despite Bechet’s obvious distaste (he was like all Mediterraneans superstitious about the death of friends) he allowed his courtesy to rule him and agreed to accompany us on the short walk across the square to the hotel. I had decided to get the thing over and done with.
It was deep night now with a rising moon. The gold lantern with its legend “Hotel des Princes” swung softly in the light breeze. It was an old hotel and smelt ruinously of dust and blocked drains. We climbed to the first floor and Tholon undid some tapes stuck with sealing wax on one of the doors. The room was a pleasant size but very musty. The inspector crossed it before even turning on the light and opened a door leading out on to a small balcony; then he returned and switched on the electric light within. The bird-spattered balcony gave out on to a corner of dilapidated garden whose withered and ancient trees had long since given up bearing fruit. No doubt Piers sat out here obstinately in the icy evenings of winter to watch the light softly fading over Avignon, watching the city softly tilting into the uncaring twilight like a sailing boat turning its cheek to the wind. From here, across the network of brown clay roofs, everything slid downwards into the massive green river, which itself propelled its currents downwards to Arles with its desolate necropolis, the Alyscamps. His mind, like mine now, would have crossed the river towards the sea and then veered northward once more …
There was not a corner of this magnetic country that the three of us had not explored together, sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, or else in a dilapidated pony cart piled high with camping equipment. Often in summer as we sat down round a fire of olive-trimmings in some field near Remoulins or Aramon a moon like a blood-orange would wander into the sky and hang above the river, waiting for our return. Avignon, so small, stuffy and parochial, was in my blood. I shivered and stepped back into the room where the two men stood in sympathetic silence, waiting for me to take it into consideration and perhaps to offer some useful observations on it. But there seemed little enough to be said.
“The body has been removed, but nothing else has been touched except the glasses and the bottle of sedative from which we took our fingerprints.” On the nether wall was the so-called death-map compiled by my friend. I saw Bechet studying it in a somewhat nervous way and stepped to his side to explain it as best I could. “All the names were the names of friends who had died. He seemed to attach particular importance to the fact, and used to say that each separate death had taught him something new about death, and that he was going to resume this knowledge in a philosophic essay about dying. It was connected in an obscure way with the beliefs of this sect of gnostics to which he belonged.” It sounded pretty lame and stupid as an explanation but it had the merits of filling in an area of darkness. Bechet tutted with anxiety and readjusted his pince-nez. “Well. Well. Well,” he said disconsolately, for death was a subject he could not stand – his whole life, constructed of a tissue of routine boredoms, had been designed to shelter him from the realisation that he was gradually approaching death. Tholon was made of different stuff, being much younger. He studied the big yellow chart with gravity. “I have noted all the names,” he said, and one could sense that a formidable dossier was on the way to being assembled.
“So they are all dead?” said Bechet with distaste.
“Yes.”
“OUTREMER”
“But why the singular shape of the map which looks like a sort of snake?”
“It is a snake – for this little sect death in an individual assumes the shape of a constellation, the Serpent. The snake symbolises process, even time itself.”
Bechet almost groaned at these obscurities. He looked quite alarmed, and I realised that it was time to spare him. So much of this must have sounded rubbish to him. “At any rate that is what he explained to me,” I said hastily while the lawyer rubbed his long ultra’s nose and sighed.
“Perhaps,” said Tholon, scenting my awkwardness, “you would care to spend a little while alone in the room? It is difficult to concentrate when one is with people. But alone and quiet you might notice something of interest. What do you say?” I hesitated. I knew that the good fellow wanted to leave me alone to say a prayer for the soul of my friend. I said I would like to stay if it did not upset anyone. To tell the truth I was anxious to see the back of them and eager to examine the bookshelf and the notebooks of my friend. There may have been a manuscript worth saving from the rapacious curiosity of the police. Tholon at once handed over the keys and the waxed tapes which I must affix. “Just lock up,” he said, “and I will come round tomorrow and pick up the keys from your hotel.” I thanked him. Bechet seemed eager and relieved to quit the place. But he said: “Just one thing I’d like to have an opinion about. In the will he speaks of his horror at the chance of being buried alive, and asks to have a vein severed. Would you be prepared to do that?” I said that there would hardly be any need for the safeguard in view of the autopsy, and he agreed at once, relieved.
They both went. I heard their voices and footsteps descend in diminishing echoes down the stairs; then the uneasy blurred silence of the city fell upon this tomb-like room with its disinherited objects. From time to time the susurrus of traffic might be broken by a clattering stammering outburst of a church-bell, but that was all. So this is where Piers had spent the last hours of his life! I sat down on the foot of the bed and put my hand to the turned-back sheet. It was lukewarm. The room smelt very faintly of joss as well as of drains. I pulled back the bedclothes and was not surprised to find the scarlet bedsocks he always wore to match his vivid Egyptian babouches. A dozen pairs of socks he had bought to accompany a dozen pairs of slippers – enough for a lifetime, as he exultantly said. “When you find your colour stick to it.”
Most of the books I knew; they bore his bookplate and came from the chateau library. The notebooks were empty, so that I presumed Sylvie to be in possession of any manuscripts of vital importance. Or else the police had already swept them up. There were a few business letters in the bedside table drawers. Bills. Tradesmen’s advertisements posted on to him by the Bag Room of the Quai d’Orsay.
The bathroom was in a fearful mess that was all too customary: a crumpled face towel on the floor by the bidet bore lipstick marks – a dark crimson-like tone which reminded me of something, a memory I could not place for the moment.
I went back into the other room and counted the cigar-butts in the big ashtray, calculating that the room had not been cleaned and set to rights for at least a week. There was also a toothmug here, presumably w
ithout fingerprints, as I could see it had been dusted over with the traditional talc. It smelt very faintly of alcohol – mouthwash, dentifrice, gin or Luminash? Impossible to say. Then I remembered something and returned to the ashtray in order to pick out two or three little cigarette ends from the darker pile of butts; they were slender and had gilt tips marked with the same dark crimson lipstick. Well, Piers did not smoke these, and his sister did not smoke at all. I pondered the matter for I knew somebody who smoked precisely this sort of theatrical gilt-tipped cigarette – loading them with dried grains of hashish after puncturing them with a pin along their length: then sealing the punctures with a spittle-daubed finger. Sabine did! My heart leaped up with pleasure to think that she might have visited Piers before the end, even that she might still be in Avignon. For the colour of the lipstick of her preference had always been, as Sylvie said, the second cousin of arterial blood. I made a mental note to ring up the old chateau where old Banquo presumably lived. Perhaps by now he was dead? But bankers never die. And yet I had a feeling that Sabine had most probably disappeared as she always did: she could never stay long in one place, a few days at most. Then she would be gone like a wind, following the gipsies into Hungary, or joining the slow caravans which traverse the wave-worn desert highways of the spice routes. I had not run across her for years, this enigmatic woman. Perhaps we should meet again here, in the context of Piers’ disappearance?
I stood before the death-map, adopting something like the stance that Piers himself always took, hands behind his back, head cocked reflectively on one side. I tried to think my way into this recent mind. There were no dates on his map, just simply the bare recorded fact, the name of a human being who had, in the act of dying, turned himself into a point-event. But when one saw the whole thing spread out in this way, in a schematic fashion, one came closer to realising what had been in Piers’ mind as on each occasion he quietly added another name to the fallen. Everyone must have a personal calendar of death compiled after this fashion. A war memorial, for example, never achieves this kind of coherence, for it gives too generalised a picture of death. Its universality is stressed and that is all. But in this case each separate single death had discharged itself with a throb of grief on to the heart of Piers, and the succession of falling sadnesses, like the grains of sand in an hour-glass, had gradually weighed upon his heart and his memory: until he realised that he was receiving an education for his own death. The realisation of one’s own death is the point at which one becomes adult – he was never tired of repeating this proposition of Akkad’s. Yes, that was the inner meaning of the map before which, for so many years and months, he had walked up and down, pondering; each name became a whole constellation of memories. From them he hoped to extract the essential philosophic meaning which would, so to speak, enlighten his own coming death and enable him to write of it with insight and truth. It was an ambitious undertaking but one upon which he had set his heart.
Over the years he has sent me small fragments of autobiographical introduction – which was to be entitled “A Waterbiography” because he was astrologically a fish sign as was I. One little fragment I carried in my wallet, written out in his own fluent and lyrical handwriting. It went: “If I must try to describe Piers de Nogaret without benefit of mirrors I must begin by saying that his favourite word was precarious: whatever he wrote and thought gravitated towards or away from that word, his pole-star. In spirit and intention he was not a sensualist but an ardent Epicurean. Everything, both the best and the worst, came to him because of his sister in the first instance – for he tried to avoid loving her without avail. This was his greatest single experience, and yet he always felt that it conferred a limitation on his growth – until, that is, he visited Egypt and became a gnostic disciple of the thinker Akkad. The only other love in his life was for a man who loved him with a dispassionate singleness of intent – and who also loved his sister. The three of them could hardly tell themselves apart, became a sort of congeries of loving emotions, all mutually complementary. None of this was achieved without a tremendous struggle against their sense of rightness, logic, even appropriateness. They won, but it severed them from the world, and yet they lived a quasi-worldly life for years, which had little reality outside the company of each other. A happy trinity of lovers. Or so he makes bold to claim.”
There was little else in the room to alert a detective, but I lingered on a while, luxuriating in the sense of familiarity conferred on me by these friendly possessions. I knew that I would not come back here and that sooner or later the seals would be taken off and all these items find their way back into some barn or lumber-room at Verfeuille, losing all coherence and identity. His death had invested them with a dramatic significance which they did not merit. There were some notes in the back of a copy of Swift, and I recognised the handwriting of Rob Sutcliffe. “Short story about N who to escape his sister foolishly forced himself to fall in love with a Berlin actress, very romantic, who follows him across Europe in her husband’s car, dressed as a chauffeur. Shot at him in Zagreb but the weapon missed fire; he felled her with an umbrella. He had come to study the Caballa with an old Jewish sage whose name he had first heard from a psychiatrist in Zurich. She tried to pay him, pulling out a wad of notes as thick as a sandwich. He fell in love with the gesture and took her to his hotel, only to sneak off at dawn, steal the car and head north.”
The tone and the matter were typical of Rob, and half the books in the chateau contained similar brief plots for stories or novels – a practice which annoyed Toby very much for Sutcliffe appeared in the end to make no use of them. They simply came to him as spontaneously as a limerick might. But afterwards he lost interest in the idea and bothered no more with it. I looked to see whether his name was on the death-map. Yes, there it was, Robert Sutcliffe. How soon would it be before some scholar applied for permission to sift through the mass of documents he had left behind in the muniments room at Verfeuille? His fame was still growing.
It was late when I got back to the hotel, but the bar was still open and I was glad of a stiff whisky before going up to my room. I lay in bed for a while in darkness, thinking; slowly the numbness was wearing off, I was beginning to realise that I would never see my friend again.
The next morning early Bechet phoned the hotel, and with hardly disguised triumph told me his good news. We had a following wind now, for the papers had come back as well as the authorisation to proceed with the funeral. Moreover the police had waived their suspicions, thanks to the préfet’s intervention, and were prepared to accept the hypothesis of an accident in default of any firmer evidence. The will was in order. Only the provisions for the funeral were irksome, for the coffin was to be followed by nobody. Bechet wearisomely enumerated these stipulations in his singsong accent, and showed concern when I said that I proposed to violate them. I could not, would not, let Piers go to his grave without one friend from this life beside him, ready to see him over the threshold into the next. Duty and inclination were hand in hand, and I expressed the matter with some force. Bechet pondered and then gave in. As a matter of fact he had already had an altercation with the Abbé who was furious because he had hoped to conduct a service for Piers, and Bechet had warned him that it would be forbidden. “At any rate,” he said, “the old man is determined to come, service or no service. I can’t forbid him that, nor you. I will drive you over myself. If I could fix everything for tonight would you agree? I think the sooner it is over the better for all concerned. I will try for tonight and ring you back this afternoon about five. I would like to finish with the matter.” I agreed, glad to feel that Piers’ case was escaping from the stagnant reaches of French bureaucracy. He added: “By the way, another provision: no flowers. At least we can accept that one, can’t we?” I knew the reason for this also: because they were ikons for the living soul which the gnostics did not believe in. The only appropriate and permissible flower would have been sea-lavender, then, which is a sort of fossil rather than a plant. Needless to say I
did not disconcert Bechet by repeating all this strange lore.
“Sylvie can’t come of course?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
“All the better in a way.”
“I agree.”
He rang off and I prepared myself to wait for the formalities to be completed. By now the remains of Piers must be reposing at the morgue. I suppose that I should have mustered the courage to visit him there, but I could not bring myself to do it. It was a contemptible lack of courage really – and in a doctor with a wide acquaintance with surgery – to funk it. But I did. I did.
Yet the thought of getting the funeral over was itself a relief, and I spent the morning wandering round the bookshops and recalling the past. There was no longer a soul in the place who recognised me, or if there was I did not meet one. I was back for an early lunch, still perplexed by the silence of Toby who by all calculations should by now have reached the town from Oxford. But in case the night was going to be a late one I took the wise precaution of closing my shutters and taking a siesta, for the deep fatigue of the last two days had told heavily on me.
In my dreams I found my way back to the old chateau, to the Verfeuille of the distant past, that strange catalyst of a stranger love; back to the life of the past with its extra-real flavour. Verfeuille sheltered us, and within its walls happiness became an imperative. Now circumstances had scattered the pieces, an invisible hand had overturned the chess-board. But sleep is merciful. In my dream nothing had changed as yet. I turned the leaves as one turns back a vine to catch glimpses of the old house between the branches. How could we have taken it all so much for granted?
The Avignon Quintet Page 4