So we sat and watched little scenes from the life of the Midi enacted before our eyes – a delight because they confirmed the unchanging character of the place and its inhabitants. Some workmen were trying to mend the defective machinery of the old Jaquemart without success. At last the little waist-high couple of figurines gave a spasmodic jerk or two and advanced a little in order to strike midday twice – as a pure concession to the workmen it seemed, who were using extremely bad language, and didn’t appear to know how the thing worked. It was a pity. The Jaquemart was one of the prettiest features of the square when they did work – the little man trotting out punctually, to hammer out the hours with his tiny mallet. But from time to time they stuck, and this was at least the third time we had witnessed an attempt to put the machinery to rights, and this time the whole project seemed to be beyond the workmen, for in a while, after a lot of desultory messing about, they started to climb down the tower. They were half way down when, as if in derision, the little figures jerked into their curving trajectory and without prompting struck midday (or midnight). The men shook goodnatured fists at them and shouted expletives.
It was reassuring in its amiable futility, this operation. Clearly the task was beyond them, and a specialist would have to be summoned to deal with the problem. We walked back to the hotel in silence, strangely reassured by this trivial scene, by this cold but benign snatch of sunlight, by the taste of good wine. I rang up Montfavet and spoke to Jourdain. He was quite delighted to hear of Toby’s arrival – as I knew he would be. “She has been speaking about him quite a lot, and complaining that her rooms smell of his tobacco. Let him smoke a pipe tonight as a mark of identification. No; there is no marked change for the time being. What else have I to tell you? Yes, the morgue people have sent me round a plaster cast of Piers’ face, taken by the médecin-légiste, or someone assigned by him. I will hand it over to you when you come.”
Things were beginning to sort themselves out – or was that just an illusion born of the friendly presence of Toby and the fact that Piers’ funeral had become an accomplished fact, was over? At any rate I felt much calmer as I spent the morning with Toby walking round the town, visiting the bookshops and he more immediate historical antiquities. He always felt the need to reverify his city, to make sure that it was still there, still insisting on its poetic role in the world which had by now so far outstripped it. We walked and talked regardless of the hours; then returned to our rooms for a short rest before the affairs of the evening. At dusk we jogged up to Montfavet in a fiacre, Toby obediently smoking his foul shag in a bull-nosed pipe and speculating on what the future might have in store for us.
Well, she was dressed in rather a haphazard fashion – in a long, old-fashioned hobble skirt and a number of brilliant scarves of different colours and materials. Eccentric, if you like. But she gave her evident disorientation a sort of tropical brilliance, like a bird of paradise.
It was depressing, it hurt, because it was such a close parody of good reason. The capricious evolutions of a child, say. Yet it was not. She seemed to be expecting us or at any rate me – perhaps Jourdain had told her something? At any rate she wore a red velvet carnival cagoule through the slits of which her eyes looked at us, unblinking or perhaps glittering with malice. Who can say? “There you are!” she cried, and went on: “There is no need to speculate on my identity,” giving a little gesture which was somehow a forlorn caricature of an imperious one. She was like an amateur actor in a difficult play. Standing up now she said: “After all, it is all mine to do with it whatever I wish, no?” Toby lumbered up to her like a bear saying: “Of course it is,” and took this velvet animal in his arms. “I recognise you,” she said, “because of the smell of your tobacco. And you, too, Bruce.” This was a great encouragement. But it did not change the constraint we felt, I suppose because neither of us quite believed it. Then she surprised and encouraged us by quoting a phrase of her brother’s. “Here comes Toby, with shoes like boats, and a handshake as hot as a busby.” This at least showed that she knew who he was. Laughter. We were both delighted, and Toby, in search of patterns of reminiscence which might, like grooves, familiarise her back into phase, went over to the piano and began to pick out tunes with one finger. This had a surprisingly calming effect: she laughed and clapped her hands, and sitting down at the card table dealt herself a hand of solitaire. The evocation of Verfeuille in winter was perfect. Toby had just returned wet through from a walk in the rain. He sits on one side of the fireplace, literally steaming. On the other side Rob Sutcliffe. Both smoke infernal pipes. Piers lies asleep on the sofa – too much wine at lunch and a late night. The rain swishes down in the park, teems on the window panes, brims the gurgling gutters. Piers sleeps; the two giants argue with acrimony about the Templars. I whittle a stick. The gun-dogs snore and tremble. It is one of those long afternoons where imprisonment by the weather becomes delightful. She deals herself a hand of solitaire. Propped in front of her is a notebook of Rob’s from which she occasionally reads out aloud, though nobody pays any attention to the words. “Identity is the frail suggestion of coherence with which we have clad ourselves. It is both illusory and quite real, and most necessary for happiness, if indeed happiness is necessary.” Toby, in the act of blowing his nose, cries “Bad Nietzsche!” over his shoulder. This was the scene which we were now busy re-enacting except that Piers was gone and Rob was gone. It was a frail thread to hang on to, but it held. With bowed head and concentrated air she played on, listening to the dislocated one-finger noises of Toby on the Pleyel. “Do you remember Akkad? He used to say to us: ‘Hurry. Hurry. The minutes are leaking from the clocks and as yet we have only brushed the Great Cryptics.’ Well, Bruce dear, I tried to hurry like he said, but I missed my footing somehow. Anyway it was always appproaching me, what Piers called ‘the old fern-fingered neurasthenia’ and now Jourdain thinks he understands a little but he doesn’t. It’s the merest presumption of medicine.” I knew that only too well. In a while she got up and walked about as if she were trying to rehearse for a play. She had unmasked herself now and her eyes were full of mischief. She poured out an imaginary drink, added soda, and took it over to Toby who thanked her and drank an imaginary mouthful before setting it down on the piano. Then she lighted a real cigarette, but almost at once threw it into the grate. There was a fire laid there, and the gesture drew my attention to the fact – also I seemed to recognise some fragments of manuscript in Piers’ hand. “Are you burning Piers’ papers?” I said, and she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, hand on her heart. As if recovering full possession of herself she fell on her knees before the grate and, bursting into tears, began taking out the crumpled papers and smoothing them in her lap. “Why did I do that?” she cried. “When there was nothing to hide, nothing at all to hide?”
No, there was nothing to hide. I took the crumpled papers from her and sat down to sort them while she returned seriously to her game. They were by several hands and not all by Piers as I had surmised. Sutcliffe’s large florid feminine hand was very conspicuous, as was the brilliant inks he used. His loose-leaf notebooks were always exploding and letting their contents tumble about in hopeless disorder.
Meeting on the threshing floor to wrestle with death and with love like Digenis
A railway strike produced strange things like this mountain of motionless roses laid up in a siding
Intuition has no memory, it jumps off the spool, it eludes thought memory and also causality
another tiring dream of grave allegorical figures, of sleep, cathedrals sitting in blue water on canals with wet shoes at night
a letter to Pia written in my sleep by braille
out of this tremendous chaos, Pia, I am trying to build my new and perhaps my last book. The studio floor is littered with fragments of this great puzzle
when the age gets swept out to sea and dispersed by the tides what remains will be the result of the purest accident; one-fifth of Anc Greek Drama one-tenth of Elizabethan is all we have left so w
hy worry?
Infants are smooth and lack all swank They only have themselves to thank.
Language is all very fine and we cannot do without it but it is at the same time the worst invention of man, corrupting silence, tearing petals off the whole mind. The longer I live the more ashamed I get.
Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass.
The mechanism of causality is mighty and mathematically quite inexorable even for mental phenomena.
I sat there among these fragments of the great puzzle of Rob’s unfinished novel whose dismembered fragments littered the muniments room, and heard Toby picking and picking out his one-fingered tune, merciless as a woodpecker. “Sylvie.” She raised her dark head and gazed at me abstractedly, her eyes still full of playing cards and their magic. “Did Piers tell you …?” It was stupid of me to broach the subject at this moment, and Toby gave a grimace of displeasure. But she behaved as if she had not heard. But a moment later she said: “He had considered every possible issue before deciding that he must stick to the rules. His heart was set on it.”
“On what, Sylvie?”
She produced a sad little smile and I could see that she had slipped, so to speak, off the time-track again and into the solipsism of childhood. I put the papers on the table and she read off a phrase from one of them in a low voice: “Me he will devour in the next life whose flesh I eat in this.” I wondered where Piers had found that quotation for his commonplace book; also a verse by a forgotten Elizabethan:
And so it grew and grew
And bore and bore
Until at length it
Grew a gallows that did bear our son.
It must have struck his mind as a reference to her child, Sylvie’s child. She shook the hair out of her eyes and said: “Remember the song the Templars sang?” I shook my head, but truthfully, for I did not know what she meant. In a small ghostly voice she sang “Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of Saint Clements.” A well-enough known nursery song, though I had never heard that it was originated by the Templars. She was very earnest now, and very solemn in her dreamy way, and as the words of the song flowed out she began to enact the scene of the nursery game which we had all played when we were little. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head, chop, chop, chop, chop …” With joined fingers she executed a long line of children – guillotine fashion. Then she stopped dead, entranced, gazing at nothing or perhaps only the projection of her private thoughts on the white wall. Then she said: “Everything that happened began at Macabru, you know that. Piers knew it. Macabru changed everything.”
I waited painfully for something further to emerge from this unsatisfactory meeting, but nothing more came; and soon the nurse came with her medicines and the little trolley with the frugal dinner of the patient. Jourdain, too, came and reminded us that we were his guests that evening. He was delighted to see Toby again. But Sylvie was now withdrawn, silent, in the Trappe of her private mind. “In the perspex cube of an unshakable autism.” I stroked her hair and said goodbye, but she did not even look up.
In Jourdain’s study, on his desk, lay the smart black velvet casket with the death-mask. It was at once like and unlike Piers – as though time had played tricks on the image like it plays on memories, distorting them. I think these thoughts might have passed through the doctor’s mind as well for he said: “There always seems to be a shrinkage after death, which has puzzled me repeatedly. The image withers up. I have even tried weighing several people after death to see if this is imaginary or real. Does the personality actually weigh something? Because when it is emptied out a vast disorganisation starts, and the first sign of it is a kind of diminishing. But this is an illusion, the weight does not change.” He was right, for the face of Piers looked shrunk, famished, reduced. Jourdain closed the casket with a snap and said: “Well, there it is. It’s yours.” I thanked him for having thought about the matter. No doubt one day, in the fulness of time, when we had got over the pangs, the first gnawing pangs of his death, it would be pleasant to have him there, in a favourite corner of the room, on a writing desk, in sunlight. I thought for a long moment about the equivocal and enigmatic quality of love and a phrase from a novel by Rob came to mind – Piers had copied it out. “In our age too much freedom has destroyed the fragile cobweb which gave the great human attachments their form and substance – their truth. Health rages in us like a toothache, but fine styles in living, as in writing, have been overtaken by loutishness.”
And what of Macabru?
Two
Macabru
THE FOUR RIDERS, ONE OF THEM A WOMAN, WHO SET off that noon from the Canopic Gate were as young as their mettlesome longlegged horses. The party was guided by a decrepit one-eyed Arab on a somewhat capricious white camel. They were heading for an oasis called Macabru which lay some way to the east of Alexandria. Yes, we were all four somewhat new to the place, and as yet very much under the spell of its skies and its vistas of many-coloured desert – here and there soothed out so like curls freshly combed: here and there so like fresh snow, bearing the perfect imprints of animals’ paws and of birds’ claws. As a matter of fact Sylvie had only recently arrived to stay with her brother at the French Legation, while I was putting up our friend Toby who was on his way back from Palestine to Oxford after a spell of disappointment with his Bible studies. “The more I learn about Our Saviour the less I like him. I am not going to take that sort of Holy Orders anyway.” This was his most recent theme; but in fact already his addiction to drink had marked him down as rather a questionable candidate for the priesthood. When tipsy he was capable of saying anything to anyone, and if it happened to be one of his examiners? At any rate he was one of the four riders – the most amateurish I would suppose, sitting his horse gracelessly, with splayed bottom and toes turned out. He was a very large young man, his face burnt beetroot by the sun, his ears sticking out steeply – which gave him the air of trying to overhear what was being said a mile away. Thick spectacles broke up his features into reflecting planes. His sandy hair stuck out or fell down in his eyes when it needed cutting. He smelt of Lifebuoy soap and exuded a clumsy but effervescent goodwill which was contagious. Only in this case he protested a bit feeling that he had been let in for a long and exhausting ride to little purpose. It is difficult to see why, for in his disappointment with Our Saviour he had turned his sympathetic attention to the heresies of various sects which had departed from the strict canons of Christian theological dogma – so that in some ways he was much better informed about the activities of Akkad than we were.
In the case of Piers who rode a little ahead with his beautiful sister, the question was different – he had fallen under the spell of this strange man. The views of Akkad – for Piers had encountered him quite often at parties in the city during his first few months en poste – seemed to him something like a revelation. “I seem to understand everything he says, and I feel I am hearing something absolutely truthful for the first time – so it’s all quite original for me, quite pristine. For the first time, Bruce, I can believe in something, a proposition about myself and the world which holds water. It satisfies me, it’s like falling in love.” This is the point at which Toby would groan, but Sylvie would turn her face to mine and kiss me softly. “O to hell with you,” said Piers spurring his horse.
In those days there were no real suburbs – the desert began almost at the gates of Alexandria and with it of course the damp enervating heat which soaked and bathed one, until one could feel the sweat trickling through one’s clothes into one’s very saddle. Our breathing was laboured. There were small villages giving (so many were the mirages) the illusion of being fictions; their reflections rose in the air or settled into the ground. Purely fictitious lakes with minarets surrounded them, turning them into violet islands. Finally one got to disbelieving one’s own eyesight, and in waiting for the truth to emerge – the sordid truth, for the villages were all decayed and fly-blown, and now in the noon
day sun for the most part deserted.
In one the Arab guide beckoned us to follow him, with a sort of cheeky grin, as if to promise us an agreeable diversion. There was a naked old man chained to a block of wood set deep in the ground. He seemed dead, but the Arab turned him over with his foot as one turns a strange beatle over. No, he was alive, but mad. He mopped and mowed, smiled and salaamed and mumbled. He was as thin as an insect, but was brimming over with an insane gaiety – the blissful amnesia that all excessive suffering brings. We heard his story. He had been chained here as a punishment for some crime by the local pasha. But time passed, the nature of his crime was forgotten by the village, even the old pasha himself died, and the criminal went slowly mad with the heat and the thirst. But his madness took the form of a tremendous and exalted happiness. He submitted to everything happily. He was in a state of perfect bliss, whatever happened. Perhaps it was due to this that he survived, for the villagers brought him food and water, first out of sympathy and lastly because they felt that he was really a saint. The truth broke upon them.
Now he was cherished and fed, and people came to visit him as if he were an oracle. He had indeed become a saint, and would when he died give the village a yearly festival. Only they had no authority to free him, that would take a great deal of effort and documentation, and there was hardly anyone in the village capable of examining the legal situation or undertaking the necessary paperwork. Meanwhile he was euphoric. He kissed Piers’ toe and went on muttering. The sandheap in which he lay was full of ants, and there seemed no shade for the poor man. But packets of food lay about, and having had a hearty laugh at his compatriot’s plight the Arab guide suddenly turned pious, made him a deep obeisance and then went to fill a pitcher of sweet water for him. One felt helpless and thoroughly disgusted. Normally one bought out one’s horror and embarrassment when face to face with such a spectacle (a beggar covered in sores, say) but in this case what good was money, what good our etiolated town-sympathy? It was hard to know how to curb one’s fury, too, against the guide for having thought up this pleasing little spectacle for us. Suddenly Egypt hit us all like a hammer.
The Avignon Quintet Page 9