“I suppose so,” said Rob with a sigh. “The bandages, the whip, the handcuffs – I should have put more of that into the book, instead of leaving it for you. She let her dirty rooms out by the hour. I came there hunting for Pia, just as you came in your turn hunting for Livia and found her in bed with that little hunchback with the pistachio eyes.”
Blanford winced; he remembered the cracked bronchial laugh, gushing out amidst cigarette smoke and coughing. She had said of Livia: “Une fille qui drague les hommes et saut les gouines.” He had struck her across the face with his string gloves. He said to Sutcliffe sternly: “It is your duty to demonstrate how Livia was tailored down to the sad size of Pia.”
“Pia dolorosa,” said Sutcliffe. “It would be more than one book, then?”
“Well, squinting round the curves of futurity I saw something like a quincunx of novels set out in a good classical order. Five Q novels written in a highly elliptical quincunxial style invented for the occasion. Though only dependent on one another as echoes might be, they would not be laid end to end in serial order, like dominoes – but simply belong to the same blood group, five panels for which your creaky old Monsieur would provide simply a cluster of themes to be reworked in the others. Get busy, Robin!”
“And the relation of form to content?”
“The books would be roped together like climbers on a rockface, but they would all be independent. The relation of the caterpillar to the butterfly, the tadpole to the frog. An organic relation.”
Sutcliffe groaned and said: “The old danger is there – a work weighed down with theoretical considerations.”
“No. Never. Not on your life. Just a roman-gigogne.”
“The more desperate the writer the more truthful the music – or so I believed then. Now I don’t know. I wonder a great deal about wrongdoing in art, in a way I never did before.”
“My dear old Rob, crime gives a wonderful sheen to the skin. The sap rises, the sex blooms in secrecy like some tropical plant. Take an example from me.”
All that snowy day Blanford went on talking to his creation, trying to explain himself, to justify his feelings and his thoughts. He was trying to sum it all up – from the point of view of death.
“From the ambush of my disability I watched and noted, hungry for disbelief. I watched my Livia coming and going in the mirror. I watched her walking about Venice from my high balcony, and I saw the woman who was spying on her at my request – for rather a stiff price. Livia was always looking back over her shoulder to see if she was being followed – clever, slender, nervous, and very caryatid, she had won my heart by her effortless sensuality. What a marvellous death-mask that dark face would make – ascetic, heart-shaped and pale. The way the lips and hands trembled when she became passionate.
“My God, what a muddle – it was Constance I really loved. She could have been my second skin. What a strange phrase, ‘The rest of my life’. What does it mean? Surely that little rest – the steady diminishing of time – begins at birth? When you discovered you had married a homosexual what did you do, Robin?”
“The foolish fellow put a pistol to his brow.”
“Even a writer must be truthful to decay. You burst out laughing first – the predicament was so foolish.”
“But worse still, I really loved her, Pia,” said Sutcliffe. “It was an unlucky dishonour forced upon me. But have you lived with one? They burn up your oxygen, being maladapted and out of true. They remove the classical pity which love engenders. The sadness which amends. And their beauty is like a spear, Blanford.”
“Like a spear, my boy, like a spear.”
“In Regent Street, in a sordid pub, a woman I had never regarded as being in any way intuitive listened attentively to my moans and said, ‘Someone has wounded you very deeply and for utterly frivolous reasons. You should try to laugh and tell yourself that one is always punished for insincerity.’ Damn her eyes!”
“She was right. But she had never seen Livia at bay, with flashing eyes, lying for dear life – you see, she could not bear it really, her inversion. She wouldn’t admit it to anyone. With her back to the wall she fenced desperately. Tied to the wheel in the sinking vessel of her self-esteem – as who is not? – she foundered in my arms. I had had her closely watched for a little while when one day … my servant Cade had to return to England for his mother’s funeral and during his absence I moved into the Lutéce on a narrow street; there I sat at evening watching the dusk fall, and the lights spring up over the canals. The street was so narrow that the balconies opposite were almost touching ours, or so it seemed. Three floors up, Lord Galen sat reading the Financial Times, full of the sense of his oneliness. I joined him for a cocktail and there, standing on his balcony, I looked across the street and saw the light snap on in a dark room opposite. Two women were just waking from their siesta – yawning and stretching. One rose and came to the balcony to thrust the shutters wide. As she did so the mouse raised her face and her eyes met mine. It was my spy, naked, and behind her in the rumpled bed Livia was drowsing, her fingers on her sex, dreaming – as if fingering a violin one is about to play. Her eyes half-closed, she was presumably riffling through the portfolio of her phantasy life. She had evidently seduced my spy! It was all over in a second. The girl retired, and so did I. Furious and thunderstruck, I said nothing to the old banker, who was particularly worried about the state of copper that day – he had once looked after some of my mother’s modest investments for her and was never free from the delicious anal gnawing of money.”
Sutcliffe: “So you were crushed with fury, and went down to the bar; the porter gave you a fat envelope full of marvellous press cuttings, fulsome ones, interviews and pictures. I have always wanted to question you a little about them. For example, you are reported as saying ‘I have never sought fame and fortune in my work. I sought happiness.’ “
“Yes, I did say that. I thought that.”
“And happiness, have you found it?” Sutcliffe put on the adenoidal voice of an interviewer.
“You find it only when you stop looking, Rob.”
“And have you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Now that would be worth answering but I don’t for the life of me know how to.”
“I thought not. When you got back to the flat later you played on the little harmonium a whole grisly toccata.”
“Yes, the background music for a nervous breakdown. And I reflected on all the psychoanalytic twaddle about our oceanic sexual drives. And in my manly agony I cried out, ‘O God, my God, why didst Thou let me marry a Principal Boy?’ When Livia slept with me who was she really loving in her imagination, in her phantasy? Who was my rival, the dark lady of the sonnets? And how could I find out? She had carefully masked her batteries. Once set off by the hair-trigger of a simple kiss she turned her face to this veiled form and used me as the machine à plaisir.”
“And yet she was full of ideals, Livia.”
“All ideals are unattainable – that is what makes them worth having. You have to reach for the apple. If you wait until it falls you will be disappointed – you will realise that it is imaginary.”
“The apple of gravity, Newton’s wish?”
“Exactly. And besides, never forget how much in the dark we all were about our selves, our predilections, our ruling passions. It took a trip to Vienna with Constance to teach us just a very little.”
“It resolved nothing, it only unsettled you to know the truth about your sexual predispositions.”
“Perhaps; yet knowledge is a sort of exorcism. I am very grateful to Constance, who was the only one among us to read German and thus have direct access to what was being written in Vienna and Zurich; moreover despite the abandoned studies she was already a fine doctor. She explained Livia to me satisfactorily.”
“To what avail?”
“To no avail; of course it wasn’t enough, it never is, but it enabled me to sympathise with her, to understand many things, like
, for example, her deliberate grubbiness at times – the revolt against her femininity, the desire to insult the male. Then always restless, always wanting to be on the move. Several times a day she had to walk down to the village because she had forgotten to buy this or that. It used to puzzle me, it seemed almost deliberate, and of course it was. As Constance said, she was simply a man-at-arms on the look-out for a pick-up! Surely this was valuable, all this information? Eh?”
Sutcliffe deliberated for a moment, and Blanford lit a cigar, saying: “Soon there will be nobody to talk to except you. It is extremely sad – what shall I do for company? You bore me so! It will probably lead to madness.”
“We will write a book.”
“Of what will it treat?”
“Of the perennity of despair, intractability of language, impenetrability of art, insipidity of human love.”
“Livia and Constance, the two faces? Transposed heads!”
“The two faces. You see, Aubrey, the male invert loves his mother, the female hates hers implacably. That is why she won’t bear children, or if she does, makes changelings or witches. What we thought we found was that Livia really loved her sister Constance – that is why she set out to marry you, to cut Constance out. She could not bear to think of you coming together.”
“But Livia slept with many men.”
“Of course, but it was with brave contempt, to prove her own maleness, her masculine superiority. A talented Chartreuse. She would run with her bleeding male scalps and show them to her girl friends. This was a way of advertising her wares. ‘Look, this is all men are worth, so easily scalped!’“
“Alas, it was only too true.” Sutcliffe fingered the little tonsured part of his own huge cranium where recently the baldness had begun to show through. “After Pia I had to buy a hairpiece,” he admitted. “And specially after all this psychoanalytic gibberish. All I learned was that male lesbians are notoriously kind to dogs – but I am not a dog and don’t qualify. Another question – was Jesus a lesbian?”
“Cut it out,” said Blanford, “I can’t bear idle blasphemy.”
At this point Sutcliffe sang the little psychoanalytic song he had once made up to celebrate the great men of the science; it went
Joy, Young and Frenzy,
Frenzy, Groddeck and Joy.
He broke off and said suddenly: “Et le bonheur?”
“Exactly.”
“It cannot be impossible to find. It must be knocking about somewhere, just out of sight. Why don’t we write a big autobiography? Come on, punish everyone!”
“The last defence! All aboard for the last alibi!” “What does a man say when his wife leaves him? He cries out in an agony of fury: ‘Thrice-tritrurated gasometers!
Who will burn sugar to this tonsil-snipping tart?’”
“Or seek the consolations of art: the little choking yelp of Desdemona is pleasant to dwell upon.”
“Or he will become a widow and in desperation take up with some furry housemaid who will in due course be delivered of some rhubarb-coloured mite.”
“The Kismet for novelists with cook-housekeepers. But I have only Cade, and he can’t cook.…”
The snow went on falling out in the park with its resigned elms full of rooks’ nests. Blanford pondered heavily upon human nature and its uncapturable variety while Sutcliffe in his Oxford rooms turned and put a log on the fire. Toby was coming to lunch with a young girl undergraduate. Then he took up the phone once more and said, “The relationship between our books will be incestuous, then, I take it? They will be encysted in each other, not complementary. There would be room for everything, poem, autobiography, short story and so on.”
“Yes,” said his creator softly. “I suppose you have heard of that peculiar medical phenomenon called the teratoma? It is literally a bag full of unfinished spare parts – nails and hair and half-grown teeth – which is lodged like a benign growth somewhere in a human body. It is removed by surgery. It appears to be part of a twin which at some stage decided to stop growing.…”
“A short story lodged in a book?”
“Yes. Do you know at what point Pia began to love you? I bet you don’t. It was when you behaved so outrageously at Unesco and fell into the big drum.”
“You mean Shakespeare’s birthday? They should never have asked me.”
“You should never have gone. And then to arrive dead drunk and take your place on the rostrum among the greatest modern poets, all prepared to render homage to the Bard.
And with Toby in the audience cheering and waving a British flag. It was obscene.”
“Not entirely,” said Sutcliffe, slightly huffed, “it had its moment of truth. Besides, nobody could contravert my twelve commandments – the indispensable prerequisites for those who wish to make works of art. They were particularly impressive when shouted through a megaphone in a hoarse tormented tone. Why didn’t you use them?”
“I will one day when I write the ridiculous scene. You made Ungaretti faint. And then having recited the whole iniquitous catalogue of drivel you fell into the Elizabethan madrigal society’s big bassoon, festooned with wires and microphones.”
“Rather like Ophelia,” said Sutcliffe. “But I stand by my commandments whatever the French say. Let me repeat them to you lest you have forgotten or mislaid them.” He cleared his throat energetically and recited them for the benefit of Blanford, who wrote them down in shorthand on the pad at his elbow.
He left a long pause for admiration or applause and then said: “Alas, it ended badly, but it was none of my fault.”
There was another longish silence during which Sutcliffe blew his nose in a plaintive sort of way, feeling that he was disapproved of by his mate and pawn. Then he said: “Where will Tu be buried and when?”
“Tonight,” said Blanford coolly, with a reserve he was far from feeling. “In the chateau vault, by dispensation, and no ceremony, no flowers. Some lanterns, I suppose, perhaps some torches.”
“Will you go down to Tu Duc?”
“Later, when everything is settled and the château boarded up for the winter. I love the rain falling over Avignon with all its memories. There is a certain melancholy luxury in feeling that everyone has gone, one is completely alone. The place to experience this best of all is on deserted railway stations at night, empty airport lounges, all-night cafés in the town.”
Sutcliffe said: “And Livia, who in my own personal life and book turned into Sylvie and went mad? What about her in this context?”
“Livia disappeared, was last heard of on the road to Spain with the old negro pianist. My last news of her was some years ago now, from a girl who had known her; it was in one of those houses which cater to special inclinations – indeed the identical house where you lodged with the old crone. From time to time I passed by just in order to check, because once I had found Livia there, shaking with fatigue or drugs, trembling from head to foot. She said, in a bleary tearful way: “Unless someone takes care of me I am finished.” I realised then that I loved her and would never desert her; and all the while a voice inside me was raging and shouting ‘Fool!’“
“That was where I hunted for Pia.”
“We took her to the kitchen, tottering, and set her down on a stool, imploring her to eat something. The hag buttered some bread. Livia suddenly burst into tears and said, ‘J’ai failli t’aimer,’ and the tears ran down her long sweet nose into the plate. Still crying, she began to eat, looking so like a small child in her tearful hunger that I was overwhelmed. I sat there biting my lips and remembering so much that she had told me.
“One day in a dark cinema a woman placed her hand lightly upon her thigh and she felt her whole nature tilt like a galleon in a wind, to run seething through fresh seas. She did not move. She did not speak. She offered no response. Then she got up and walked out of the cinema without looking round. In the vestibule she felt so ill she had to lean her head against the cold tiled wall. A hand touched her sleeve and a voice said, ‘Come, let me help you.’ A
nd so it began. And as she diminished in my life I started to reinvent her on paper as accurately as I could. Once when she had gone and I was lonely I took another girl from the same establishment to a hotel – purely for the comfort of sleeping with someone who knew her and could talk about her, even though what she had to tell me was wounding. Cynically and with a strong twang to her French this poor creature told me about Livia’s exploits in great detail, adding as she did so: ‘She gives good value, that one. Among the girls who like it she is known as Moustache.’ My dear Rob, my beloved was known as Moustache to her ingles!”
“Perhaps you were wise to make Pia passive rather than active – it gave her a dimension Livia lacked, a pathos.”
“But Livia was magnetic, and much harder to paint. I was forever trying to push a bit of femininity back into the lady, like trying to fill a dolly with sawdust, trying to fill an eye with a drip, trying to fill a mind with a prayer. Then she would disappear for a few days, to be brought back by the police dead drunk or else be run to earth in a bar, guttering down, guttering out. You, know, her health was a worry, she was never very strong, and she persistently brutalised it. But her charm! She was irresistible, she smelt of perils and disenchantments. Men could not resist her, and she longed to be able to respond. Yes, she gave herself, but it was only a smear of a woman who responded to the kiss. Affectively she was anaesthetic, her soul was rubberised.”
“How funny,” said Sutcliffe. “I suppose you discovered the real truth once the wedding-ring was on her finger. It was just like that with Pia, I had all sorts of vague notions that even though she was wild and unstable she was redeemable – a little bit of settled ways and stylised married life … I should have known by then how to detect the quaire (feminine version of queer). After all she could neither swim nor dance, and in love she went all anaesthetic but kindly – her kisses were one-dimensional and softer than moths.”
The Avignon Quintet Page 31