The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Blanford re-read these words with a pang which translated itself into an actual touch of angina as he sat in his bath chair, high over the lagoons, and let his melancholy eyes wander along the delectable contours of dying Venice – the orchestra of divine buildings hallowed by the opalescent water-dusk. Soon he would have done with the book, done with the masks under which he had so successfully disguised his weaknesses and disappointments and misadventures. His cat slept with one paw still on the white ping-pong ball, eloquent and slim as the devil himself. He had chosen for his epigraph the well-known quotation from Shagbag: “The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman”. He felt ill and yet elated by the nostalgia of this farewell. Bruce’s Journal was to continue thus:

  “The last few weeks at the chateau were long and burdensome to live through, so impregnated were they with the sense of our impending departure; mind you, we worked hard, and even sang while we worked at the olives, but it was a pretence for we were all of us heavy hearted. It was cold, and some days we were greeted by heavy cloud and skirls of young snow falling straight out of heaven, only to melt as it touched the grass. In the short brush there was often rime. Soon the colder December weather and the snowfalls on the high garrigues would drive the hungry wild boars down towards the lowlands where they could be hunted. With the first frosts thirst would set in, and game birds could be lured by simple tricks like leaving a mirror in an open field to suggest a pool of water. The short-sighted woodcock always came down to inspect it, whirring into the shooter’s range. Hares left their snug ‘forms’ in the cold grass. Ah, Verfeuille! It was hard to imagine any other sort of life, so fully had we lived this one among the green hills and soft limestone river-valleys. We did not know who the inheritors would be; but we knew that the long promised financial calamities had fallen upon the place in the wake of Piers’ death and partly because of it. Only a huge fortune could save the place. Mortgages had come home to roost, contracts now had to be met. It was obvious that by Christmas the whole place would be boarded up, given over to the field-mice, its life extinguished. Moreover those of us who were left would also be dispersed. Toby, for example, had decided to take his now finished and indexed masterpiece to Oxford to touch up the delegates of the press and arrange for its publication. With all the privileged matter he had found among the Verfeuille papers his book planned to overturn many accepted theories about the sin of the Templars. It was now clear that the original de Nogaret had become a Templar himself in order to penetrate the order and destroy it more completely from within. The role of Judas suited him admirably, and like Judas he went mad and at last hung himself. All this new evidence caused quite a throb in scholastic circles – for in order to drive Babcock mad with apprehension Toby had leaked some of his material to learned journals. Now his triumph over pedantry was to be complete. But he himself had decided to leave.

  “On his last day we walked over to the Pont du Gard and sat in an icy wind on the honey-coloured stone which we thought that we might never see again, so definitive did this ending of the Verfeuille story seem to us. It was almost a relief to be done with the lame affectionate conversations and to climb at last on to the windy platform of Avignon to await the train. But inevitably we had one last drink at the café by the hideous and funny Monument des Morts with its cheap tin lions we had come to love so much. Winter had unstitched the planes and the leaves rained down in drifts scattering and skirling around our ankles. Yet it was warm for the season, autumn had been delayed. Toby blew his nose a good deal to hide his emotion. We promised each other that we would meet again very soon, and our warmth was effusive and genuine – but how heavy our hearts were! Then the long slowcoach of a train wound out across the darkness and I thought with a sudden jealous pang of Paris, and all the rich anonymity of a big city in contrast to this little town which lost all reality in winter; where the inhabitants stayed lost in their summer memories, listening to the iron mistral as it climbed the battlements, shivering their shutters as it passed.

  “As for me, Bruce, I know that I cannot leave Avignon as yet – indeed if ever. I have taken a couple of rooms in the Princes Hotel, directly above those in which Piers … They are cheap. Here I propose to ‘tread water’ this winter – to use the rather disapproving phrase of Rob Sutcliffe. Already, when Toby’s train had borne him away I felt a strange sort of dis-orientation setting in. I walked back to the hotel on foot deliberately, precariously almost, listening to my own footfalls with deep attention. In my nameless furnished room with its ghastly wallpaper I sat listening to the silence and drinking small whiskies out of my toothmug. A vast paralysis had seized everything; I was caught like a fly in a chunk of amber. To shake off this feeling of unreality I turned to sorting my clothes and papers, and to entertaining these last details in the little diary.

  “The rest is soon told. Before the chateau was closed and boarded up I had the contents of the muniments room transferred lock, stock and barrel to the local museum – including the heavy and copious files and notebooks left by Sutcliffe. Among them are several unpublished books and stories and essays, as well as all the letters of Pia. One day they will presumably be sorted out and see the light of day. Meanwhile his publishers have commissioned a biography of him from Aubrey Blanford, a novelist for whom he had scant respect, but who will be coming down after Christmas to examine all this material at first hand. Of course Rob Sutcliffe would have been horrified – but I do not see what I, ignorant as I am could do to avert this fate. I suppose publishers know what they are doing. I do not feel this is any part of my business. Rob knew that one day he would have to face the undertakers of the literary trade. Anyway there is no such thing as absolute truth, and inevitably he will become a half-creation of the novelist. Who will ever know him as we did? Nobody.

  “The sleepers in the Nogaret vault are to remain there; but the place is to be bricked in definitively, and a high wall constructed around it before the chateau is handed over to the new owners – whoever they will be.

  “Finally there is Sylvie – my one remaining link with this ancient town and indeed with reality itself, or the small part of it which we can share. I have lived a whole privileged life of concern for her beauty and of that I cannot complain. I cannot imagine how things could have fallen out differently, or made more sense. We have come full circle, she and I.” If I close my eyes I can see the dark Sylvie that Bruce must continue to visit every day till death us do bloody part etc. She sits at her green baize card table wearing tinted glasses to disguise the lines of fatigue under her eyes. Even though a woman be mad, some traces of concern for her own looks remain. Here she plays hand after hand of solitaire, her forehead smooth and unruffled. She whispers to herself and smiles very often. She is aware of his presence though she does not always recognise him – she calls him Piers sometimes. “But my silent presence seems to be comforting and sometimes dropping her cards she will sit and hold my hand for an hour or more, quiet and happy as a plant. When I leave her I usually go to the station on my way home and wait for the last train to come in from Paris. There is never anyone on it I know – how should there be. Often it is empty. Then I walk about the town at night with a sort of strenuous numbness, looking keenly about me, as if for a friend.”

  Blanford went to the bathroom on a sudden impulse and took off his glasses to examine his face in the mirror. A trifle sardonically – or perhaps the impression was caused by the fact of a small strabismus, a half-squint – the sort of thing which would force one to become a sort of self-deprecating type of humorist. He regarded himself and then winked sadly at his reflection.

  “Strenuous numbness,” he said aloud, finding the phrase a trifle mannered. He went back to the balcony moving with his swayback hesitation caused by the paralysis which always afflicted him after a day of sitting and writing with the light drawing board across his knees; soon Cade would come and massage him before he set off with the two linkboys to the cave where the Duchess awaited or would be awaiting him. She had already sent him a teleg
ram signed by Sutcliffe which showed that she had read the manuscript to the very end, for the text read: “Refuse to be rushed off the planet in this clumsy and ignominous fashion. Kindly arrange to have me die by less theatrical means. Rob.” Perhaps the Duchess had not grasped the little twist about the saut mystique? He would see.

  It is still a moot point whether Socrates, in fact, existed as something more than a character in a novel by Plato. And what of me, he thought? Am I possibly an invention of someone like old D – the devil at large? He hummed an air he had made up to accompany the riders who left the Canopic Gate etc. It had not found its way into the text. It was a plaintive little homemade air they sang in the desert.

  ALL

  Long long ago in time

  Far faraway in space

  When health and wealth

  And slimth and stealth

  Were données of the case

  PIERS

  There dwelt a man de Nogaret

  TOBY

  So overbred

  So overfed

  PIERS

  Who threw his life away.

  It might have been fun perhaps to print it with the music. He would reflect on the matter. He played abstractedly with the little cat Satan, as he waited for the valet. He supposed he was simply another vainglorious fool of a writer with insufficient courage to tell the whole truth about life. Always gilding the nipple, sugaring the pill. But after all what was the truth about these importunate, nagging people of his, trying so hard to get born and achieve the fugitive identity of a penurious art; he thought long and sadly of his dark wife Livia. Crumbs of her had been used for Sabine (the looks and the slashing style) and for Pia, and even a certain disposition of the eyebrows (when she was lying) which was one of the features he “saw” every time he put down the name of Sylvie. “How real is reality?” Blanford asked his cat which gazed back at him unwinkingly, unseeingly – like Livia saying: “Of course 1 love you, silly.” By a singular paradox (perhaps inherent in all writing?) the passages that he knew would be regarded as over-theatrical or unreal (“people don’t behave like that”) would be the truth, and the rest which rang somehow true, the purest fabrication. He wondered if in the next book about these people he could not cut down a layer or two to reveal the invisible larval forms, the root forms which had given him these projections? Like an archaeologist cutting down through successive cultures until he reached the neolithic stage of his people, their embryonic selves? He had half decided to let Sutcliffe finish and print his Tu Quoque if it could be found among his papers. “Poor Bruce,” he said aloud picturing the boy wandering the windy streets of Avignon in the rain, waiting for him to arrive on the night train one day.

  In a passage in one of the unpublished notebooks of Sutcliffe he had written: “How can Bruce, a so-called doctor, not be aware that he and Piers between them brought about Sylvie’s collapse, the downfall of her reason? The division of objectives in loving is something woman finds impossible to face; it threatens the fragile sense of her identity, the unity of her vision of things seen through the unique lens of human love. Once this sense of uniqueness is put in doubt or dispersed the self breaks up (itself the most fragile of illusions) and all the subsidiary larval selves, demons and angels, come to the surface to splinter and confuse the central ego.”

  Perhaps he should have included that? He felt so close to these people, he saw them everywhere; yesterday he had lunched at Sardou’s right behind Sutcliffe – at any rate it was the back of his head. At the end of the meal a hunchback woman came in to speak to him; she was very striking and resembled Sabine – except for the disability. This version of Sutcliffe picked his teeth with a silver toothpick of great beauty and wore a green baize apron with metal buttons – was he a hall-porter from the Majestic Hotel? He looked such a savant from behind.

  Where was Cade? Night was falling and the plaintive rivercraft crossed and recrossed among new shadows. The real Sutcliffe, so to speak, who had loaned a physical wardrobe and a few light touches to the book Sutcliffe, had indeed committed suicide but only after a great nervous upheaval. For some reason he had not wanted to deprive Rob of his reason before despatching him. “I wonder why?” he asked the cat. “Perhaps I didn’t want to steal thunder from Sylvie?” He riffled among his notebooks and recovered the passage on the Bridge of Sighs, and the nervous breakdown which prefaced the final act – so theatrical, so Byronic: yet this is precisely what Sam (the original of Sutcliffe) had achieved in reality – that word again, it has a dying fall …

  “He was filled now with a delicious vertigo, the winged consciousness of freedom which heralds general paralysis – liberty without precariousness or guilt. The kiss of euphoria. Death was no longer even an event. He existed adjacently to it, could reach out and practically touch it, it was so real. Hurrah. He heard his mind turning smoothly like a motor; it gave him powerful traction. Yes, he would go to India for a year. Learn Sanscrit, write out a cheque for a million, apologise to God. To laugh aloud suddenly and for no reason in a crowded restaurant was delectable. He found he was being naughty, mischievously eating matches or tearing up paper napkins; but he was soon coaxed to behave more correctly. When reproved he would stand up and offer a very stiff arm for a handshake. Sometimes he was forced to hide his smiles in his sleeve. His eyes seemed to have pupils of different sizes. At the café he calls for a paper and proposes to read it aloud but all that results is a deep humming noise. Nothing really outstanding; a little compulsive talk and laughter. And in the evenings in his shabby pension some silence, moodiness, followed by catatonic stupor.”

  Poor Sam, poor Sutcliffe, which version …? So many of these states were interchangeable, particularly if you took drugs. (Sometimes under the influence of the drug he found the taste of mineral water altered so much that he had the illusion that he was drinking warm flannel. Next morning, however, a burnt mouth … But he was an honourable morphinomane as Brutus was an honourable man; his back was still a mass of shrapnel from a low burst. They had not dared remove most of it. So he was the man with the iron spine, dwelling in the shadow of multiple sclerosis which was held at bay by the stubby fingers of Cade.)

  Where the devil was Cade?

  Blanford rolled his way to the balcony and stuck his head over it, calling out as he did so: “Rob! I say, Rob Sutcliffe!” A few faces in the street below turned up a vague white expanse whose curiosity soon evaporated. “You see?” he said to the cat, “Rob doesn’t really exist.” In every rainbow there is a gap which one must leap in order to slide down to the pot of gold on the other side.

  He heard the whirr of the lift rising to his floor. This would be Cade coming to set him to rights – his Fletcher. The door of the flat was open, it only needed a push. Cade had been his batman during the war and had stayed on afterwards – from sheer lack of imagination. What a cross he was to bear with his insane hatred of foreigners and their ways. The pale soapy face with its skull almost shaven, though with a water-waved spit-curl over his forehead. He was sanctimonious, superior, disapproving. He had no sex, never frequented bars or brothels; did not drink, did not smoke. And spoke so very carefully in his low Cockney whine that you feared he would sprain something by making the mental effort. When he was abroad, among “them foreigners” he always wore a peculiar expression – a slyly superior look; and his nostrils were narrowed as if he could smell the carrion. Blanford always wondered in an amazed way why he went on keeping Cade in all his loutish ungraciousness.

  The valet came into the room and without a word started to clear up with a wooden methodical air. He made the bed, tidied the bathroom, and gathered up the notebooks and placed them in a cupboard. If Blanford addressed a remark to him he did not reply but simply went on with his work with the air of someone fulfilling his destiny, an insect of utter rectitude. He had been extremely cowardly in action, and hardly less objectionable in civil life. But he was a good masseur and grudgingly did what was asked of him in the ordinary affairs of everyday life. Yet …
r />   “Cade, I am dining with the Duchess of Tu tonight,” said Blanford rippling the irresistible ping-pong ball along the terrace. Cade without a word laid out a clean suit and went on with his mysterious operations inside the flat. The flowers were dead and would have to be replaced. The whisky decanter replenished. When he had finally completed his work he sidled out on to the terrace with his cunning ingratiating face set in a half-smile. His finger-nails were bitten down to the quick. But he put a hand upon Blanford’s forehead and reflected gravely. No word was said.

  They breathed quietly and evenly – Cade like some heavy mastiff. “No fever,” he said at last, and Blanford added, “And no cramps last night, thank God.” For a long time they stayed like this, master and bondsman, unspeaking. Then Cade said, on a note of command, “Go limp, then.” And Blanford allowed himself to flop. Cade picked him up by the armpits and with surprisingly agile movements like a lizard, wangled him into the bedroom and laid him down on the bed. He was to be massaged, bathed and then dressed – Blanford always thought: “Just like a lovely big dollie, with a D.S.O. and Bar, and a spine full of shrapnel fragments, and a male nurse for a mama.”