Back on the canals he suddenly found that he no longer cared whether God existed or not – so fantastic was the sunset that it all but sponged away his consciousness. You could have proved anything from such a display – about God he meant. So incredibly and painstakingly worked out and executed. Imagine the Venetians subjected to this on every evening of their lives. … It was too much. Only a blessed colour-blindness could save them from becoming madmen or at least ecstatics. “Look!” he cried to the gondolier who was slithering him back to his hotel along the darkening canals, dipping like a bat. “Che Bello!” Pointing like a demented Ruskin to the western quarter where already the dying sun … (space for ten lines of description full of sound and fury) “Che Bello, you bloody mole.” The man stared dazedly along the parabola described by Sutcliffe’s cane, shrugged and grunted, finally admitting “É bello signore.” The great man registered impatience at this lack of spirit. “I knew it,” he said. “Colour-blind.”
He went up to his room at the Torquato Tasso to brush his teeth. There was a letter from his agent with a press cutting about his last book, faintly damning it in a supercilious way. He stalked to the bathroom again and with gravity dabbed out the bags under his eyes with Vanishing Cream. He was afraid of getting to look like Bloshford. As a matter of fact Oakshot had a steely bluish gaze, and hardly ever blinked, which made people uncomfortable at what they felt might be an implied reproach. People who blink too much are inevitably stupid, and Oakshot was not stupid. A little emotionally retarded perhaps from lack of sexual experience. Ever since he had climbed Everest with Tufton … At night one found sherpas in one’s sleeping-bag and could do nothing. They suffered so from cold. Oakshot lost his trigger finger to frost bite and had to give up lion safaris. To hell with him.
But it was still going on, the day; up at this level there was still a last splash of sunlight. He thrust open his shutters and stepped out on to his balcony. At the same moment the occupant of the room directly facing his over the narrow street, did the same. They came face to face, nose to nose, so close that they could have shaken hands with each other. The little street was gay with hanging washing of all shapes and colours. He stared at the girl and she stared back at him. They laughed and sketched out gestures of helplessness. His posture said: “What is to be done? Fate is stronger than either of us. Clearly we were doomed to meet, perhaps doomed never to part.”
“So it would seem,” said the young lady. And emboldened by this hopeful departure of fate he permitted himself to look reproachful and ask her why she had abandoned him to his fate in that paltry fashion, condemning him to a solitary and far too early dinner?
She looked somewhat constrained and after a long hesitation said: “I knew your wife,” and was suddenly silent. Sutcliffe felt out of breath with surprise. The girl added: “Not very well, but I knew her, and consequently I knew who you were, and thought that sooner or later the subject might come up and be distasteful to you. So I ran.”
“You knew my wife,” he said, almost as much to himself as to her. It had cast a strange kind of shadow over this incipient flirtation of minds. “I never met you, but I saw her in Avignon one summer, with her brother. I live quite near the place at Verfeuille.”
Sutcliffe sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette. The girl said: “I saw your picture in the paper once.” Instantly it was like a bruise which suddenly decided to ache again for no known reason. The girl facing him turned to hang up some small clothes she had washed, on the window-sill adjacent. “You need not have been unduly afraid,” he said gravely. “I would have welcomed a talk about her – from anybody who knew her.”
Actually this balcony meeting would be quite a good thing to happen to Oakshot; the girl would be different, a ragamuffin he had found in the stews. They spent all night in a gondola heading for the sea. Wrapped in a cloak, listening to the heart-breaking serenades of a Goldoni gondolier.
He would have to change Akkad’s name of course, perhaps he might call him Barnabas or Porphyrius? You could have him saying to Oakshot in despair what he once said to me – I mean to Sutcliffe: “You are the worst kind of man to whom to express these ideas because your interest in religion is purely aesthetic – that is the real sin against the Holy Ghost.” Oakshot puzzling over the grand strategy of the gnostic, the fateful grammar of dissent which … and of course Oakshot would consider all logical development of such ideas in the direction of suicide or refusal to propagate in cathar fashion as damnably unhealthy.
The girl had turned back towards him and her attitude had changed; she seemed confused now and sad, as if she felt guilty of an indiscretion or a gaffe. “When you knew Pia where was I?” he asked and she replied that he was in Paris and expected daily to appear in Avignon. That more or less situated the date – it was while the great nervous breakdown of Pia was cooking. His own behaviour at that epoch hadn’t helped either – drink and gipsy brothels and a dose of clap. He felt guilty not to have been more responsible at a time when she needed his help. The girl stared at him wistfully, almost commiseratingly, as though repenting for having broached the subject. Sutcliffe pondered. Then she said: “Would you care to come and have coffee with me? My father has gone to the opera and I am alone.” His heart leaped up when he beheld … He stood up and decreased his trousers with his fingers, saying: “I would of course love to, but only on condition that you don’t feel sorry for me, or vexed at yourself. Otherwise you will bore me and you haven’t done so yet.”
She nodded and gave him the number of her room. So lightly and albeit sadly (Pia’s frail shadow) he crossed the little square and found her hotel, the Lutece; curiosity prompting him to consult the register in order to discover her name. It was Banquo, and he wondered for a moment if she was not a member of the famous banking family of that name. Yes, her father must be the famous man he had heard of. “He describes himself as a famous ghost,” she said later when he asked her.
She was sitting in an old-fashioned cretonne-covered armchair, clad in a green silk kimono with dashing chrysanthemums stitched all over it. In the rosy light shining from the standard lamp in its scarlet velvet hood her throat and hands were gipsy brown. Her toes with their lacquered nails were now shod lightly in Athenian thonged sandals. Well, there she was, calmly composed and amused, and very much mistress of the situation and of herself. Her confidence had come back, together with a new sympathy and she appraised him with a serious and sweet arrogance which seemed to say: “Sir, for me man is a mere epiphenomenon.” It was clear to Sutcliffe that she was a darling, a heart-gripping creature, at once brilliant and disdainful and a little sad. And she was so brown, so musky. They would make brown love, musky love, full of the sapience and wisdom of disenchantment, full of the sadness of fortuitousness, wishing it might last for ever. Yes, safe in each other’s arms they would watch the rest of the contemptible world as if from a high observatory. Her warm and capable hands touched his. Somewhere in the romantic and water-wobbled city bells rang out, the tongues of memory, and the faint engraving of human voices scribbled the night with song. They both sat quite quiet, just breathing and looking at each other quietly, with the innocent eyes of the mind. It was the right moment to speak about Pia for what she knew was of the first importance both to the husband and the novelist Sutcliffe. There was one conversation in which Pia described how she suddenly woke up and realised that she loved this loutish tousled man. And by one of those extraordinary paradoxes in which life delights, the blow of realisation came just when he was at his most odious and had been behaving abominably. (In the morning he wrote down the whole scene just as the girl told it, on the back of a menu.)
With the inevitable distortion caused by too much art it would read something like this: “She had been planning to leave him for several weeks because of his scandalous behaviour, his insulting thoughtlessness, his vulgarity: when all of a sudden it was as if a bandage had been ripped from her eyes. Suddenly in this gross overfed disagreeable man she saw the artist, divined the fragility a
nd dignity of the enterprise which had driven him to destroy himself as a husband, lover, bank clerk, priest. Even as a man. She was impelled to walk out into the street in a state of pitiful bemusement, scuppers awash with a host of new and singular impressions. So this at last was love, she told herself; and just at the wrong time, and with the wrong man. She could have howled out loud like a dog with the vexation of it. She had done nothing to deserve this. She must never tell him. She walked up and down the dark pavements of Avignon until the number of men accosting her drove her back to the café where he had just been slapped by a waiter. A mass of spilled change jingled on the floor. His cane had been impounded and was raised against him by the barman. They were phoning the police while he sat there, white as a sheet, like some frightened stupid animal, like a wart-hog, refusing to leave the place without an apology. This could only go from bad to worse. “Come with me, quick.” And she jerked his sleeve, hoisted him ungainly up. He shambled into the street with her and was at once sick against a wall. A hoarse sob doubled him. He said: “I finish the book tomorrow.” She wept now as she hoisted him along, the silent tears of horror flowed down her pale cheeks. All was over with her. So this is what they meant by the phrase “till death us do part”.
Somewhere, thousands of miles away, Akkad was writing: “They refuse to accept the findings of direct intuition. They want what they call proof. What is that but a slavish belief in causality and determinism, which in our new age we regard as provisional and subject to scale.” And in another corner of Europe Freud was formulating the disposition of the artist as a hopeless narcissist, incapable of love, of investment. The old bastard, who saw so clearly the pathology of the artistic situation. “People who have violent emotions but no feelings are a danger to us all,” he said to Sutcliffe once. Ah but in that ideal world where everyone would be forced to do what they most wanted toan intolerable situation would be created!
At some point in time, much later on, with a new sympathy and kindness this girl closed her eyes and put her hands on his shoulders, smiling a little rueful smile of complicity. It was marvellous to feel liked, desirable. The great man felt quite tearful with gratitude when he thought of the beauty of this youthful person. He felt he ought in all honesty to inform her that he was heartwhole, and well armoured against her after all that he had learned in Vienna, first from Stekel (shaped like a pipette) and then those findings of the momentous old gent called Joy. What a fool he was to ask himself if it was quite fair to make love to her on these terms. He succumbed like a sleep-walker. How marvellous to love her and yet … once below the photic zone where the great fishes gawped, their eyes on stalks, like untrained neuroses: somewhere in that domain comes the clickety-click, the classical déclic, of the cash-register consciousness, of the obdurate thinking soul. He knew it only too well, but closing his eyes he bored into her with his mind, trying to lose himself. He had forgotten everything now, even Oakshot. He was flirting with the truth of things now; he knew that all meetings are predetermined even though (perhaps because) one hunts for the person one is anyway doomed to meet. Someone with whom one could make models of one’s anxieties and set them free to float, then catch and exorcise them.
Predators, within each other’s eyes lay a hundred mirror-marriages. She watched him out of the corner of her eye like an investment – the mot juste of Uncle Joy. What a marvellous prison, then, these self-declaring kisses, spent at random as soon as ripe, self-seeding like cypresses. He had done the mental trick that he had learned from his yoga teacher long ago. To elicit a sexual sympathy strong enough to seduce you start by copying the breath, breathing in chime with the girl, feeling your way into her rhythm. Closed eyes. Concentrate devoutly, piously. Then mentally polarise your sexual organs and enter her very softly going up and down rhythmically until she feels your sensual drive and accepts it. Touch her breasts softly, her flanks, her nipples until the gravy starts and she starts to breathe quickly, turns pale and opens her eyes. Talk to her softly, lovingly … In this whole transaction there was no vulgar forcing. The girl was paramount, her yes or no decided everything. But plead one could and with the power of thought and words one could excite and rough her up. O yes!
Sutcliffe was in luck; for this is precisely what the girl was doing to him. The result was that they met in a head-on collision of passions which rather scared them both. Ah this knowledgeable genius of a man, what didn’t he know?
Come, tax that pretty strength
And try the thing again
From pain to gather pleasure
From pleasure gather pain.
She was lovely beyond all others, this Jewish dervish, with her sense of space and history, her echo-box of racial memories, her gallant hypomania. How deeply the night seemed perfumed by her and the silences after her deep soft voice had fallen still. That voice, O barracuda-music to the Gentile heart. A pensive cocoon of a sleeping girl with a pleasant tilt to the East. Sabine was surely her name, Sabine Banquo. Ah love with such a girl was like eating a cannibal’s ear. She perfectly understood that man and woman were a single animal tragically divided by Plato; that it was a notion of the Muses. A deep friendship flared up between them between two and three-thirty in the morning – something irreplaceable and unrepeatable. And he was not even drunk. It was absolutely essential to behave as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Anyway this was not love; for that is irrational. This had all the pith of an equation. “You don’t want to ruin your lives?” said Sutcliffe, admonishing them both from the depths of his profound experience.
Then sleep came – we were entering the countries of sadness, deep below the photic zone with its huge gogglefish, where in the darkness the real task outlines itself like a sort of flare-path, namely how to make sense of oneself. You do not have to be an artist to recognise the imperative which is every man’s. Yes but how? In this domain right sex is capital, it flenses the feelings of all the poisonous artifices brought in by the think-box in the guise of clever ideas. It is a conversion of the revoking mind into irresponsible cloud-soft laughter and smiling passion. With what a sag of misery did the genius reflect on the matter of capturing this experience in words. … Writers, those prune-shaped hacks in hairpieces sitting down to make a few lame pages hobble out of their typewriters – what would they see in all this? Custom-built Jewesses with desultory undercarriages made over by the diving heart into the dark hovering bird presences of history?
He had no idea what time it was when her father came in, softly opening the door with a small asthmatic wheeze. It woke her and she pulled a cover over his head. The old man said: “Asleep?” in a discreet whisper. She replied: “Almost,” on a pleasant loving note.
There was late moonlight thrown back from the mirror. The old man was in full fig, with his opera cloak on, decorations blinking on his breast, and a flap-gibus in hand. He crossed the room softly, almost precariously, to place himself in front of the mirror which was full of white moonlight and the reflection from the watery streets of the city. It was not as if he were drunk, no, but rather as if he were afraid of stepping on a loose board and so making a noise. He stood there, happily but sheepishly, gazing at his own reflection and saying nothing. He stared and stared at himself as if hunting for the least defect in his appearance. Alone, he nevertheless seemed deeply and serenely aware of her sleepy presence. “How was the music?” she asked at last in French and he replied, with a deep sigh: “Mortelle, ma fille.” He leaned forward to touch the reflection of his right ear and then drew himself sharply upright, giving a reproving shake of his head. “I am staying on a few days,” he said. “I have to raise a loan for the City of London.”
Sutcliffe suddenly wanted to sneeze. He tried very hard to remember which musical comedy he had decided to be influenced by on the spur of the moment – or a Sacha Guitry play – and then pressed his nose between her warm breasts until the impulse left him. The man in the mirror said “It is not enough just to keep softly breathing in and out as the years pass. One sho
uld try to achieve something.”
“Yes, father,” she said obediently and yawned.
‘I wasn’t thinking of you,” said the old man.
He turned, as quietly as ever, and passed through the open door into the lighted corridor with a soft velvet goodnight. He closed it softly and she lay back with a contented sigh. Sutcliffe, replete with her caresses and disarmed by the old man’s extraordinary air – for he looked like Disraeli – snuggled back into his niche and sought the deeper reaches of sleep, while she lay awake, but happily so, at his side. What was she thinking of? He could not guess.
It was almost dawn when, because she could not sleep, she switched on the subdued light at her bedside and from the drawer of the night-table took a pack of cards. She spread them out, fanned them out in a prearranged pattern on the counterpane and began to ask them questions. Suddenly she stiffened and the timbre of her curiosity had the effect of awakening him. “Do you see what they say?” she asked, smiling. “That you killed someone very close to you, I think your wife.” Naturally he was by now wide-awake. What a marvellous thing to happen to Oakshot, and all the more beguiling as this lady gave herself out to be a rationalist, and then started to behave just like Newton on Sunday! “Deliberately or just by accident?” he asked, curious to judge the effect of this information on his hero.
“Deliberately.”
“Tell me more,” he said, aware that all this kind of fortune-telling was bogus. But to his surprise he found that she was outlining, with tolerable accuracy, the plot of the book in which he had actually managed to do away with Pia, albeit in a semi-accidental fashion. She was in fact “reading” a version of a book which had enabled him to exculpate himself from his feelings of deep aggression against Pia – his desire to murder her. He asked her if she had read the novel in question but she had not. Yet in her slow and thoughtful description it was all there: the whole Indian Ocean around the couple, the calm night sea, the tropical moon like some ghastly mango sailing in clouds. The lady in her evening gown; tippet sleeves and sequins, every other inch a memsahib. Which of the many versions, all disastrous?
The Avignon Quintet Page 20