It stands high up on the westward slopes of the Alpilles and from the highest orchards you can see not only misty Avignon in the plains below, but snatches of Aries and Tarascon as well. The winding roads lead steadily upwards towards it with a graceful inevitability, passing through rich olive holdings, the grey-silver leaves ashiver at the least caress of the mistral. The plots around the old house are so rich in springs, and the soil so correspondingly rich and loamy, that the ancients planted oak and plane and chestnut to make a verdant green shade around the house and protect it from sun and wind alike. Colonies of nightingales sing there by day and night to the tune of splashing water, while the hum of the cicada, deafening in August, provided a steady drizzle, as if of strings, as a background. Of the twin lions guarding the gates of the lodge one had lost a paw and the other half of the ceremonial sword he once held so proudly, point downward; as for the massive wrought-iron gates themselves, they had been carried away and melted down as a contribution to the war effort of fourteen-eighteen. The weeds have long since turned the gravel driveway to a mossy causeway where the wheels of a car tend to skid slightly in wet weather. On this unexpected carpet of silence one turns and twines for what seems an age before the house comes into view, perched slightly at an angle in order to take the best of the sun aspects and set a stout shoulder to the northern quarter from where the butting mistral blows.
The windows, so tall and narrow, wear deep stone eyebrows, while the high donjon, a prodigiously strong square tower, dating from the twelfth century, centres the whole mass, giving a minatory touch of fortress to what is now a comfortable dwelling merging into a farmhouse with all its clumsy dependencies – barns and stables, wine-magazines and olive-presses. The noise of cattle and poultry rules here, and the prismatic dust hangs in sunbeams. None of this will ever change. The whole of this heavy mass with its grilled windows encloses the grand central courtyard to which one gains access via a deeply vaulted passage-way – an easily defensible feature; this in turn leads to the vital heart of the place, the great wellhead with its carved crucifix and its benches. At each corner of the court rises a quaint and crusty little tourelle from which the besieged could keep up a raking fire along the thick walls.
The main portal consists of a set of massive iron-clamped doors whose rusty teeth fold in upon each other – or once did, for nobody in living memory has ever seen them closed. Now they always stood open and the whole courtyard had the placid look of a place given over to peaceful husbandry. Chickens and ducks have taken possession of it, they wander about gossiping; a venerable goat, untethered, meditates in one corner. From the stables come the stamp of horses and the roars and sighs of cattle, or perhaps the mewing of quail in their wicker cages. An army of pigeons skirmishes impertinently about in all this with the noise of wet linen flapping in the wind. Their own headquarters is the squat bell tower, now transformed into a dove-cot, with the Roman hour-glass fixed to it.
Everything gravitates towards or away from this central court with its well – though its presiding goddess is not, as so often here, a Roman nymph, but merely an old blindfold horse which is started up each morning like a clock and then left to its own devices. Slowly and painstakingly it covers the trodden circle of its duty, and slowly through the hours the cold well-water is dispersed along a chain of stone troughs.
There were in fact several wells – one indeed in the main barn–which cater nowadays for both cattle and men by courtesy of a brisk electric motor. But the slow overflow from the ancient well, splashing into its basin, is channelled away, and conducted to the salad garden to irrigate the plants there. It is through this little garden with its kitchen herbs that one can reach the more extensive formal gardens of the chateau – for so long fallen into disrepair. They decline southward and westward and are well sheltered from the sudden inclemencies of the Provençal weather. It is difficult to imagine how they must have looked in their heyday. Ever since I knew them they have remained overgrown and unweeded, full of the romantic melancholy of desuetude. Rob used to say, “Very bad for my poetry this; it makes it all crumbly.” None of us shared his feelings when we walked here, either by dawn or by moonlight. No; these gardens abounded in balustraded terraces and ornate stone benches perched at strategic points. Here and there you could happen upon a marble nymph or two in a debased and old-fashioned style, though now made really charming because overgrown by ivy or rambler roses. Here were many sheltered corners which one watched covetously for the first violets or the tender spring flowers; while along their length the beehives stood in rows.
Once all this was a profitable and lovely demesne and in the time of Piers’ parents its yield represented a very great fortune. But when they died the two children did not know how to make it work and the whole enterprise became moribund from lack of effective management. It was not their fault – they had both pursued their studies in Paris and London, and for them Verfeuille represented simply a divine haven for summer holidays, nothing more. The decline was gradual but sure. Its great army of retainers began to drift slowly away to more lucrative work; war intervened, then the vine plague, phylloxera, and then a malignant drought one summer. Much of the land was sold off, and some mortgaged; the wood was sacrificed in a bad year, bringing in very little. A succession of small shortsighted follies sapped the economy of the great farm and nibbled away at its yield.
Nevertheless the estate, despite all these limitations, remained a very large one, and perhaps more beautiful because of the neglect, though no farmer would have said so. The country was marvellous, for it lay upon the flanks of the Alpilles and extended outwards from the foothills of the range pointing towards the level region where the Rhône valley widens and begins to merge into the valley of the Durance.
On the higher slopes of the land are straggling groups of self-seeded almond trees – what puffs of delicate smoke-white, smoke-pink they emit in February when they so briefly flower, turning the whole mountain-side into an oriental wash-drawing. Lower down reign the more formal olive-terraces – a silver-grey sheen the year long, for this seraphic tree sheds and renews its leaves all the time. Then as the hills dwindle away into the plain come the wide vineyards and wheat fields and vegetable holdings (once stocked for the greedy Paris market). But the plantations of fruit trees still bear, falling away in one corner to reveal the distant flats of the tedious Camargue with its lime-green ribbon of shallow sea. In my memory it will always be Christmas here, the Noel of 19—, the year that changed the direction and leaning of my life. Nothing had ever happened to me before – or that is how I felt about the events of that year. I had encountered the inhabitants of Verfeuille a year or two previously, but it was some time before, to my amazement and indeed chagrin (nobody likes to be pushed out of his depth), a classical love set in, and with it the long debate about the rights and wrongs of it. One should I suppose feel like smiling when one thinks of the painful solemnity with which we watched this marvellous ogre advance upon us, club in hand. Sutcliffe pities us, or so he says in his book, because we cut such childish figures, were taken so much by surprise. Had we never (he asks) considered the possibilities of a common passion which might sweep us far out to sea? I wonder. I recall Piers’ pale serious face as he said one day: “Well then, it must be love.” Rob would have laughed out loud I suppose at the tone which was that of a doctor making a diagnosis – as if one might say “Well then, it must be cancer.”
(I notice the shift of verb tenses in these hasty notes – they throw my memories in and out of focus, as time itself and reality melts in and out of focus when you dream.)
In those days Piers took his seigneurial obligations rather seriously and felt it very much his duty to be present for St. Barbara’s day, the fourth of December – for the old Provençal Christmas begins with the planting of wheat or lentil seed in little bowls which were then set upon the broad window-sills to ripen. Their growth, and other little indications, would give one firm information about the state of the weather during the comi
ng four seasons. At that time I think Piers nourished some ambitions about restoring the property to its old affluence; but if so, they soon declined steadily, undramatically, as did the number of servants. A bare dozen were now left – a few too old for serious labour, and a great many children who were as yet too young to be pressed into anything more exacting than the olive-picking of late November. The relationship had become a much closer one because of this depletion – poverty and lack of numbers had created the bondages of a smaller family.
But there were other factors this year, troubling ones. For Piers had as yet not announced his intention of leaving the chateau the following summer to follow a career. His nomination had only just been ratified by the Diplomatic Board in Paris, and he was as yet uncertain of his first posting. How momentous for him that it should later turn out to be Cairo! Nevertheless he was full of sadness, the thought of leaving the family home was a dire wrench. It threw into relief the stagnating fortunes of the place, the decayed husbandry of the land, the lack of financial viability. Verfeuille was bleeding to death and here he was deserting it …
Paradoxically, though, a profession would enable him to keep the place going, even if it slowly fell apart. At least this way the property itself would continue to belong to him and to his sister, even though encumbered with debts. He had realised by now that he was no farmer and that in this context the condition of the place was irreversible without heavy expenditure and an increase of staff. It had gone too far. But naturally such a decision, as well as its causes, are very hard to explain or justify to family retainers whose doglike devotion and trust were completely unreasoning. He was aware of the anxiety his announcement would cause. But it had to be so, for he proposed to appoint one of the older servants as steward of the estate in the hope that he might hold his ground at home while he himself was absent on duty abroad. He had gone ahead then, while Sylvie and I had elected to stay on in Avignon, and then pick up horses at the half-way house and ride the last few miles to the chateau. Our saddle bags were full of presents, coloured sweets for the children, confetti, crystallised fruit, and little bottles of cognac and liqueurs. Also we had brought a huge family of little santons of painted terracotta for the crèche. No Provençal Christmas is complete without these little figures which populate and deck out the family crèche which itself does the duty of our northern Yule-tide Tree. Originally the cast, so to speak, was a small one, restricted to the Holy Family and two or three other personages who figured directly in the legend, like the kings and so forth; but under the influence of the hardy Provençal sense of poetry the whole thing had flowered rhapsodically and we had found in the shops about forty santons, all different. Their verisimilitude might have been suspect but they brought the story up to date with characters out of stock like the village policeman, a poacher, a Camargue cowboy, and the like. All this gear was carefully wrapped against breakages and stowed in our capacious saddle bags before we attacked the slow winding ascent to the chateau. The horses were fresh and faced the path in lively fashion. But a misty period had set in and the journey needed a little caution also, for neither of us had done this ride for several years and anyway never in winter; we had all but forgotten the devious and winding bridle paths and fire brakes which crossed and recrossed the main road as it rose into the hills. From time to time all visibility was reduced to nil, and then Sylvie, who was in a particularly mischievous mood, pushed her horse into a canter, to be swallowed at once in the mist. It was not a procedure to be recommended and the second time she did it I plunged after her and punished her with an embrace that left her breathless; feeling her cold lips and nose against my face, seeking me out. Such was its magnetism that we became fused into this posture, unwilling to detach ourselves from each other. I tried to at last – for I could feel the mist condensing into droplets on the collar of my old tweed coat; but she whispered “Stay” and it was only too easy to obey her. We were not far off our landfall now, in a forest of tall trees which dripped moisture all around. Among those muttered endearments I recorded one or two phrases which underlined her own astonishment at our situation, as well as a doubt which was the twin of my own, and also Piers’. Ah! Later Sutcliffe was to make cruel fun of us three in his book. “They are so happy. They admire themselves. They have invested a wedding cake in each other. A slice under each pillow, O desirable treat. An unholy trinity of romantics, a love sandwich with the perplexed and thick-thewed Bruce making the filling.” I was glad that he was later so badly punished by my sister Pia – an ignoble emotion, but these passages were wounding. “I have stolen you from Piers, and he has stolen me from you? What can it mean?” I told her there was no loss to be reckoned out. “Not with lost property – the lost-and-found department had caught up with us three.” These sounded like inspired confidences to us: Rob would have thought us mawkish and refused to believe in the reality of our case, our emotions. I was glad that I did not know at the time, it was only years afterwards that the book made its appearance. By that time he was himself going through a bad period and had little sympathy, it seems, to spare for someone else.
He even invented a diary for Piers to keep, describing him opening it each night to make a forlorn entry “by the grave light of two tall-stemmed candles”, if you please. And this is the sort of thing he wrote to attach as a literary pendant to our situation. “It was very late in the day to realise, but at last I did. It was imperative to send them away together, my sister and Bruce: or face losing both. For the lovers had moved into such a deep phase that they had become almost alarmed for themselves as well as for me. We were held in a kind of fixity of purpose, the three of us like the rings of Saturn. One can only love like this, to utter distraction, when one is young, altogether too young. A breath of real experience would cloud the mirror. They felt unable to extricate themselves from each other, from the triune bond. In them flowed a sort of tidal sadness – the equinox of a first and last attachment; the advancing and receding waters closed over their heads. And being swept away like this they found themselves drifting towards the falls.” All this was entirely imaginary; I have never been in Venice, but as he knew it well, he used a novelist’s licence to transplant us there. Our intensity was of another order, less literary. Yet “Even the physical envelope, lips eyes bodies seemed to have become somehow mental contrivances only; the three inseparables seemed to themselves all mingled up, like a plate of spaghetti. But Venice did the trick, Venice exorcised the act. So the three of them were able to walk silently arm in arm among the marble griffins and the swerving canals, or sit silently playing cards on the green tables at Florian’s. A strange trio, the brother and sister so lean and dark, like lizards, and their blond captive with his thickset form and rather simple peasant expression. The girl would obviously look a thorough shrew at forty with her long canny Mediterranean nose; the brother was slightly touched with romantic mountebank.” So that is how he saw us when it came to give us the definitive form of print. I have never recovered from my astonishment!
And he has the effrontery to add: “Real love is silent, or so they say. But never was the green Venetian silence of the trio so energetic, never did words whispered at night burn so deeply down, guttering like candles in the sconces of memory.”
None of this was as yet part of the present kiss, the present cold small nose; she had undone my shirt and placed her icy fingers over my heart. But the horses were restless now, for they had been very patient under the boredom of this long embrace and were longing for the warm stables which they knew must lie ahead, somewhere beyond the mist. Their hooves clicked, and the cold air turned their breath to pencils of spume. What could they care about the meeting of three separate solitudes? Meanwhile the imaginary romantic diarist had written, according to the novelist: “They actually dared to love, then, even though they knew that the end of all love was detachment or rancour or even horror; that it ended in despair, or even suic … But I dare not write the word.” This at least was a prophetic piece of invention on his part;
but it is the only thing that touches the fringes of the truth. The so-called “infernal” happiness which he attempts to describe is altogether too theatrical to belong to us. We were babes in the wood, innocents abroad.
The horses drew away, delighted by the vague outlines of everything and aching for another canter; we set off down a ride and at that moment, deep in the mist, we heard the shrill but musical voices of children, chattering and chirping. It was so uncanny that, mindful of the folktales of the country, we wondered if we were approaching a band of mist-fairies in the obscurity of the tenebrous forest. “Nonsense,” I said robustly in the voice I use to reassure patients with terminal illnesses that they will live for ever. “Nonsense. It’s a school excursion.” But as we advanced the sound seemed to recede from us so that we quickened our pace in the hope of catching it up. And with the swaying of the horses and the meanderings of the paths the voices themselves seemed to change direction, coming now from this side, and now from that. And despite my hardened rationalist scepticism I confess that for a moment I hesitated and wondered about the provenance of those shrill voices. But on we went, picking our way and listening.
Then, rolling back like a curtain, the mist shifted aside and we came upon another path, at right angles to our own, down which poured a line of flesh-and-blood children of all ages, skipping and chattering, with their arms full of greenery. They were laden with crèche-making materials they had gathered – mosses, ferns, lichens, laurel and long polished branches of holly and mistletoe. The holly they carried like sceptres – the small-berried holly, the one they call still li poumeto de Sant-Jan in Provençal, or “the little apples of St. John”. With a cry of pleasure Sylvie now recognised the children of the chateau, and she dismounted to kiss and hug them all and to ask if her brother had arrived safely. They cheered when they knew that we were bringing the rest of the material for the crèche. It was also a surprise to realise how close the house was: the mist had been playing tricks of visibility on us, though we were comforted to find our direction-finding so good.
The Avignon Quintet Page 5