The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Cade dressed him with method, moving him back and forth like some ungainly lobster; Blanford stayed with his eyes closed inhaling the grubby smell of tobacco and boot polish which his batman gave off when he worked. He chewed quids of tobacco, did Cade, and spat black and viscid. “Got the crutches back, shod with rubber,” he said, but Blanford replied: “I won’t need them tonight at any rate. I’ll take the roll chair and the sedan.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Cade.

  Within the hour he was suitably washed and dressed for his dinner engagement; Cade helped him into his light wheel chair and thence into the lift which deposed him two floors down almost into the arms of Guido and Franzo the linkboys. It was a pleasant fancy of his to travel by this old sedan chair with its brass polished lamps, swung on the shoulders of the two linkboys. The distances were short, and it saved his energy for better things. He abandoned his wheel chair and limped the few yards to the chair, greeting the boys as he did so. Quartila’s was not far off, but he directed them by a slightly circuitous route in order to enjoy the movement and noise of the canals, now settling fast into their night routine.

  The old Duchess of Tu still went on sitting in the once fashionable inner room of the place whose walls were lined with opalescent satin and where the lights, tamed by oval mirrors, were kind to her wrinkles and her fine white hair. A famous beauty in her day, she still had young hands, the celebrated swan-neck and eyes of sapphire blue which quizzed a world grown stale and old with an unrelenting candour, and without vainglory. Once they had been famous, those extraordinary arched brows, the expression at once pious and mischievous, devout and impudent. She was waiting for Blanford now as she smoked her slender gilt-tipped cigarettes in a little jade holder and sipped absently at the typescript and notes which lay before her. She smiled as she did so – perhaps a little sadly. She had been his friend and reader for a lifetime, remaining always astonished by the quality of his work and disappointed by its shortcomings. “I finished this morning, Aubrey,” she called to him as he came limping over the floor towards her – having abandoned his sedan outside in the street. And as he kissed her hand and sank into his place she added, “I have ordered a well-earned champagne.” He thanked her and fell silent, holding her hand. He had decided not to talk about the manuscript unless she did. He had not come to dine with an old friend in order to cross-examine her. But she said: “Did you get my telegram about Rob – he was awfully like Sam, I had to laugh. But to go so near the truth …?”

  Relieved, the writer said: “In the case of Rob, it was literally him or me. We couldn’t both commit suicide. Composite he may be but a large part is not Sam, it’s me.”

  She paused and thought about her husband for a long moment with narrowed eyes. Then she quoted:

  Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies.

  These are the pearls that were my father’s eyes.

  And without giving him a chance to catch up with her train of thought she added: “What laughter must have echoed in heaven when Sutcliffe went to the altar. It still rings in my ears.”

  “It did in his, as it still does in mine. In the Tu Quoque he re-enacts all the great roles of the race with himself in the part, starting with the role of Jesus – the famous film script he wrote which caused so many suicides that they had to stop turning it. You remember – how could you? I haven’t written it yet. When the door of the tomb was rolled back they found that the body was gone, but on the stone floor were patches of bloody hair and chewed bones which suggested that the disciples had had a midnight feast in the dorm. Or dogs perhaps?

  Men or dogs.

  Gods or Men,

  Take your choice

  A girl comes through the wood singing:

  ‘Of which wood of woods was the True Cross made?

  Tell me, tell me, my pretty maid.’

  ‘I’m going a milking, Sir,’ she said.

  ‘Be he alive or be he dead

  I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’ “

  They sipped quietly at their champagne and watched the coming and going of other guests; soft and decorous was the place, while from the invisible canals came the soft discreet lapping of water and the distant chaffering of the market place. “It’s strange,” he said, thinking of her husband – his friend Sam – that we hardly ever spoke much about him until I told you my plans for this book.” She had never quite managed to disguise the transitory expression of hurt which crossed her face at the mention of his name. “You were going to try and bring him back to life – that’s why.” She made some purely mechanical gesture to recover her poise. “The kiss of life so to speak.” All of a sudden he felt that he had failed her – for his Rob Sutcliffe was not Sam to the very life. “My writer inhabited a different, a humbler world. He could never have played the kind of trick which Sam was famous for; I mean, like putting on a Guard’s tie and a bowler in order to make the sentries at Buckingham Palace present arms when he passed. Rob would not have thought of that.”

  “No. Nor Sam thought about Jesus.”

  “It was essential for Rob the writer to measure his stature, or the lack of it, against the big models.”

  “But Jesus,” she mused, smiling at him.

  “The first version of Hamlet,” said Blanford with some small asperity. “Nailed to the mother cross he was a good symbol for the inversion which ruined his life and Pia’s, as well as Livia’s and my own. Don’t look hurt.”

  “Livia was my sister, I rather loved her,” said the old Duchess softly. “Whatever she did to you: and it wasn’t right or good, I know that.”

  “I am sorry,” said Blanford warmly, and meant it, as he thought of his wife (Livia), that “lay figure” as it might be laughingly called. He lit his pipe and said: “In my panic I got all my symbolism mixed up – everything to do with our personal consummatum est as you might say; the pretty little non lieu.”

  “You were hard on her rather,” she said with a faraway hint of tears in her voice. “Not really,” said Blanford, thinking of the sufferings of Sutcliffe. (“The smokeless cartridge of the nun’s kiss.”)

  “It was better when you got on to Hamlet,” she said. “Really it was, Aubrey. I don’t know why Livia played you that dirty trick.”

  “In Hamlet,” he said soberly, “it was not only an Oedipus situation, but something more complicated; he discovered that his Ophelia and Laertes were lovers. To be or not to be really meant ‘Should this marriage go on or not?’ Ophelia had already told him that Laertes must be the master-mistress of his passion. It was the pressure of this guilty knowledge (‘I’ll fit you’) that bore down on him, and then, through him, on her and made them see that there was no way out of the problem except madness. Which is never any solution.”

  “Never.”

  “Never.”

  Their waiters came now and provided the bill of fare; they chose with care and discrimination from it, arguing and bantering as old friends will. Then the wine steward brought forward his wines but they elected to stay where they were with a fine French champagne, and the compliment touched him coming from her. It was a little gesture which proved that she thought that, in spite of deficiencies, his book had come off. A sudden elation filled his sails. “It was not only Livia, poor Livia,” he said, “it was also my mother’s death which came right with it, alongside it.”

  “But Livvy got all the blame.”

  “Yes,” he said, “It’s true. She had discovered that to be adored by men she only had to simulate sharing in the man’s whole-hearted adoration of himself. Tick, Tock, to cut a long Tory short she laughed in her lillywhite sleeve and said to herself in the mirror: ‘People with weak bladders should not climb up high ladders.’“

  The Duchess smiled sadly and shook her head as he went on, quoting from his own book. “The sponge-rubber heart, the pre-stressed concrete soul, the glass-fibre emotion … No, my dear, books are finished.”

  To his surprise she shook her head vehemently and denied it, saying, “No, the book
will not lose its place or its preciousness for it is a privileged communication between two spirits and the link it forges is vital to the culture of the heart and mind, and hence to man. The contact is between two lonely and desperate souls united by an embrace. No mob-throb here! My complaint was only on behalf of Livia; I thought she could have been comprehended more.”

  Blanford quoted, mimicking the very accents of Stekel: “ ‘The homosexual neurosis is a flight back to one’s own sex induced by a sadistic predisposition towards the opposite sex.’ After Vienna I really comprehended the lot, but none of my new knowledge served any purpose,” he told himself, and then went on aloud, “I studied Livia with all the anxiety of a man in love, and I finally managed to arrive at an interpretation of her which met the facts. That marble beauty and silence, that reserve. I had been puzzled by the role of the wedding ring in all this – for Livia was honest and truthful as girls go. It was old Uncle Fred who set up the skittles differently for me by his animadversions upon the male lesbian type who, like the male counterpart will often welcome the wedding ring which disguises her private proclivities, and at the same time gives access of approach to unsuspecting wives and adolescents of undetermined sex. That was Livia’s line. And by it of course the man is overthrown. It is precisely this sort of girl who becomes a man-eater for pure window-dressing. But even in sex her aim is to overthrow the hated male.” He broke off with a short and bitter laugh. “In the powder rooms of the world’s great hotels when male lesbians meet they show each other their wedding rings and burst out laughing.”

  “O come, my dear,” said the Duchess compassionately, and put a hand on his sleeve to calm him down. “Poor Livia. I am glad you cut out the blue pages from the book, about the caresses of the mantid. After all she is dead now.” He took the blue pages from her and read them again slowly: “The dry marsupial’s pocket of that unused vagina might have made him awake to the enormous and beautiful clitoris. Painful to penetrate, but expert in many ways, yet shamming her orgasms very often, perhaps thinking of someone else whose memory had worn thin? He didn’t know. (Sutcliffe.) But then the ring – was that finance or status or what. … They told him in Vienna. Male lesbians like to conquer married women and the ring excites them for they are at the same time cheating the man and aping him, replacing him.”

  He gathered the whole mass of papers together and drank the last of his champagne. “Une belle descente de lit was Livia to me.” One day he had woken up to the fact that she was servicing a whole county of unsatisfied wives. No, he had not been hard on her. It had not been fair to entrain him in this adventure which led nowhere except to mutual despair. Because love did come at last, and as always rather too late to change the course of events. “The green ink, the lucky charms …”

  The Duchess nodded a little with fatigue.

  “I realise that you are right,” he said at last, “and that is why I cut those passages out of the text; my arraignment of Livia drew its force from the unconscious springs of inversion in myself – my mother fixation, my woman-what-have-I-to-do-with-thee? complex; in all these bitter animadversions I was really standing on the high cliffs of my mother’s death, on the plinth of the monument of words which I have set up to her memory. I understood this when Livia died – but thanks to Uncle Freddy (Freud) who taught me about this great landslide in the affairs of men. A huge chunk bitten out of the heart, a cliff subsiding into the sea after an earthquake. I knew it all, of course, without recognising it. Its impact was retroactive. I saw myself once more (forever) standing on the cold grey asphalt of the crematorium. In the nearby airfield the wind socks hovered in the western wind which doth the small rain down shall rain etc. I am standing there stiffly, head on one side. listening to my cardiac murmur; the faint gurgle of mitral stenosis – I am inventing this, hoping to punish myself with an illness. The pulse which was set going in the belly of the whale is not as yet at rest; death had simply detatched it from the mother pulse, the mentor, the tutor. Now all it could feel was the swishing of the primordial waters as they closed over my silent mother. The real self starter in this homely old country bus of the body is the shared orgasm-hence the importance of the love artefact. I saw myself walking about in ever diminishing perspective like some consecrated pig with a tiny mistress like a pinch of snuff. The amazing thing was that (as Pia said in her letters) love had come, real love, that passeth all understanding. She had experienced a successful passion before Rob – it was marvellous for the complexion. It gave her whole skin a gloss like new paint. The skin itself was derived from the marble pallor of Livia who always wore the shy silenced look of a wasted childhood – of someone who had never had a birthday party, nor any shadow to cast before her parents. Yes, you are right, when she died it became necessary to invent her just as if she had never existed. That was when the big ennui set it.”

  “Ennui?” said the Duchess on a sighing fall.

  “It’s when you find yourself saying: ‘If I can get through the next ten minutes I won’t do it.’ Feverishly you concentrate on a book of political cartoons.”

  The smoke of their cigarettes curled lazily skyward; they stared into each other’s eyes, devoured by private memories.

  “Once Livia and I spoke about suicide in low voices so as not to wake the sleeper in the curtained bed,” said the Duchess slowly, as if trying to settle something in her own mind. “About the mysterious veil of amnesia (about seven years old?) which rubs out memories, making them hard to recover in full focus. Well, I compared it to a comparable veil which seems to supervene before death arrives; perhaps to cradle one by its insulating power against the foreknowledge of departure. Everyone dies blissfully, calmly, humbly and hopefully. At the end a sweet amnesia dulls the effects of pain or drugs. There comes a secret lapsing, a not-caring to go on living. Now we often get a simulacrum of this state while we are fully in life, living it fully. One becomes death-prone, accident prone, swollen with the luxury of the idea, careless, exposed. The primordial attachment to breathing is compromised. Nor do you need any special excuse to go out though of course people blame love or money just as duellers choose their weapons. No, simply catch ’flu and make no effort to fight it; founder with all hands in a smiling silence. Sérénité… Pérennité… Mortalité…”

  “That is the moment Akkad watched for,” he said. She opened her handbag and took out a letter with an Egyptian stamp on it; it was not difficult to recognise the beautiful precise handwriting on it as Akkad’s. It was addressed to her at the country estate. The envelope had been slit with a paper-knife. He knew what was written on the single page of note-paper inside. One day he would presumably receive such a letter himself, delivered by a flesh-and-blood postman. He suddenly remembered a remark of Akkad quoted by Sutcliffe – was it in the book or not? He had forgotten.

  Akkad had said: “You can’t explain symbols beyond a certain depth; after that you have to live by them in order to understand them. They sidetrack the conceptual field and become part of the blood beat. In this domain one can really say ‘I know’ without the onus of proof, and in default of reason.”

  Back in the flat Cade lit a candle, put his spectacles on his nose, and opened the Bible which he read each night, his lips slowly moving over the words and forming them as he read. He would if necessary wait up like this all night for his master. When he heard the feet of the linkboys he would take the lift down and open the front door. Apart from the Bible there lay a half-darned sock of Blanford’s and a few pages of heavily corrected typescript which he had saved from the wastepaper basket, and would tomorrow take round and sell to a collector for a good sum. It was an excised part of the new book. It read: “As for Toby, who thought that alchemy and astrology were the remains of an ancient, vanished neurology, the problem of the Templars seemed no problem at all. They had gone too far, clear beyond the Orphics, beyond the double sex, the gnostic two, Tiresias and all that bedlam. They lost their balance and plunged into this new and terrifying darkness where they could realise
all flesh as excrement only, decay as the only truth, death as the great Motive of the usurping godhead. Cannibalism and cabeiric orgies overcame their reason. So they came to the eatable foetus of the gnostic cults – the horror of sows gobbling their own litters for which the wine sacrament was so imperfect a surrogate. Eating and defecating at once they remained blind and earthbound – were carried into the chthonic darkness of unreason. And with them the destiny of man in Europe.”

  Cade folded the paper and stowed it in his pocket; then he turned back to the story of Job in the silence of the Venetian night.

  It was late when Blanford paid the bill and said goodnight to the Duchess; wearily the waiters hovered round him. They had come to respect this distinguished elderly Englishman who came so often to spend the whole evening talking in whispers to an empty alcove – for it was some time since the name Duchess had appeared on the death-map of the stars. The yawning linkboys would be sitting about in the dark street waiting for a signal to bring the bathchair in and roll him out to the sedan. In it perhaps he might find a letter with an Egyptian postmark. Or it might be at this moment lying on the table with all the other correspondence, in front of Cade who read on and on into the momentous night.

  ENVOI

  So D.

  begat Blanford