The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “That was not Livia. Her favourite nail varnish was called Sadist Red, and she operated with a violence and zeal of a piglet at dug. A real predator, she liked to wear the fur of wild animals. Lean tomboy of the sexthrust, it was she who impregnated me with her despairing, anodyne, phantasy sensuality.”

  “Why were you so annoyed about the ring? In my case I felt that Pia had taken an unfair advantage, and wanted to continue in her old style under cover of the status and the stability I offered her. I felt swizzed.”

  “In my case it was the ring itself – it had belonged to my mother. I had all the tortured and confused impulses of only children, sickly in youth and consequently spoiled. School was torture, other people were torture. She was my only girl, mama, and I remained a vieux garcon, a bachelor, until she died when I thought that my loneliness might be less unendurable with a woman about the house. Of course I had had this long love-affair with Constance in between; but she never wished to remarry. Anyway Livia had disappeared somewhere in Asia and in those days it took years before a presumption of death permitted one to dream of divorce. You deformed her a bit in Pia.”

  “But you are to blame, for making her passive instead of active. Pia, looking so lovely in her white night-dress, obligingly put herself into a state of abstraction to pump out her husband (tenderly, dutifully) but like a collector ‘blows’ a bird’s egg. For the rest, lying warm in bed she played with a masturbatory little curl, and I suppose dreamed about her fouetteuse, or her frotteuse. Why not? What is cheaper than dreaming? But infantile dreams which recover an early sex life are as feverish as the dreams of an anchorite. Great Amputator of Egg Bags, save us! The lady was a station de pompage merely.”

  “Childhood, with its gross sexual and psychological damage to the psyche – what a terrible thing to be forced to undergo. No really, Rob, one does not stand a chance!”

  “They believed in God. Jesus on pedals! How could they?”

  Blanford threw his cigar into the fire and thought with a sudden wave of nostalgic passion of Tu. She rose before his inner eye walking by the lake where they had once and for all staked a claim in each other’s minds and bodies; he heard her low voice reading from the book about Nietzsche, whom they had come there to seek.

  “What happens,” said Sutcliffe thoughtfully, “according to the wiseacres you consulted with so little profit – what happens to the penis is coronation followed by decapitation – the king bowing so low before the ladies that the crown falls off on to the red carpet. Isn’t that right?”

  Blanford agreed and amplified the statement with a voice full of distaste. “The head lends itself particularly well to the expression of bisexual conflicts, and can cunningly represent both male and female genitalia. Both girls were highly specialised in migraines of great intensity. There are vaginal haemorrhages which can be stopped by the cocaine pad to the inside of the nose. The guillotine, remember, was called La Vierge.”

  “A fig for all this folklore,” cried Sutcliffe. “All will end in munch and you know it. The black flag of pure cannibalism will be unfurled. If narcissists (artists) cannot love, what right have they to kick up such a row?”

  “You’re right.”

  “Si on est Dieu pourquoi cochonner?”

  “You’re dead right, as they say. What a useful phrase.”

  Blanford could hear his creation tearing open a bag of potato chips and starting to champ them as he reflected furiously upon these all too alembicated ideas. Blanford thought of his childhood. “An only child is doomed to nostalgia and uncertainty. Nobody will ever guess what it cost me against all my fears and despairs, to teach myself the profession of letters. Solo, solitude, solace … everything beginning with Sol the father, Sol the Son and Sol the Holy Ghost. She lingered for many years, did my mother, bedridden, suffering from an ill-identified malady which purported to be a heart condition. I think now that it was some grave glandular disturbance – the thymus perhaps. It gave her languor, it gave her a skin like a magnolia; her breasts remained firm and her teeth good to the very end. We lived, she and I, without a father in number twenty-seven Ruskin Road, South Norwood – a gloomy house called The Larches, with arch statuary on the lawn and a fountain which had rusted and would not play. We shared everything, even sleeping – as one might share careers of common silence. Yet I hear her sighs in my dreams now. What a torture it was to pack up my little tuck-box, count my money and set off to school, having assembled my books and kissed mama goodbye. Sterling, the old butler, drove me shakily down to the country – my school was near Arundel – in the ancient Morris. He was a randy old Cockney and he used to say: ‘Next week, d’you know what, Master Aubrey? Why, I’m going on a right bender – don’t tell your mother because she thinks I’m respectable. In a way she’s right, I am. But not on my holidays. I’ve got a couple of birds right over the pocket in Brixton, and I’m simply thirsting for a bit of knuckle, Master Aubrey, really thirsting.’

  “My father had been a scientific don in a minor university; the photographs depicted a large, discordant-looking man with black lace-up boots. I stared and stared at the vague memory-bank of his face but it radiated nothing. ‘Come, hand me my pins, my net and my killing bottle, and leave me in peace.’ He said that to my mother once who found it inconsiderate. It upset her. The house was full of badly stuffed geese and wildfowl, and in his study was a cabinet containing shelves and shelves of brilliant butterflies all mounted expertly on slabs of cork. I would have to do without all this until the end of term when Christmas came round. Again! The smart toy of the crib, and sex awoken in some little old mistletoe-man with a red peak, at night, in the snow, driving his tinkling harim of reindeer across the snowy roofs.

  “Sometimes at night, walking across London, to see scores of silent frozen girls offering their bodies for sale under the blobs of yellow gaslight. Hurrying home to mother with castdown eyes, dying of smothered desires and the all too real fear of syphilis. So my whole life took its direction from there – my mother had rendered me a lamb, ripe for the slaughter; Livia supplied the shears. Cause and effect, my lad, that is why I had to encourage you to have a richer and more robust childhood. Your people were millers, say, from the north country, with a firm fortune and coming of authentic peasant stock. I saw your prototype once, dining beside me in Avignon and I jotted down in my notebook. ‘She is rather frail, but he huge with an egg-shaped cranium and a face which had funny and rather unworldly expressions on it. They smelt of industrious love-making and yawned all through dinner.’“

  “Thank you. Was I at school with you?” “We were both at different schools together.” Sutcliffe answered a ring at the doorbell and then came back to the phone to say briefly: “Toby has arrived. For my part I told everybody that I lived in Ireland in a fairy’s armpit. They gave the impression of believing me, I never had trouble like you. Your laughter was a private strategy, mine was whole-hearted.”

  “I am not so sure,” said Blanford thoughtfully, “though it is true that I was loved by a mummy without margins. Result: I wrote tonsured poems in the style of Morris. But I soon came to my senses. The result was not vastly different – we both ran into Livia, but in my case I presented a very simple target, and the motive of course was my unrecognised love for Tu. By the time your turn came you were less vulnerable because of your tough youth and were able to surmount the catastrophe with commendable humour. You at least were able to stand on the Bridge of Sighs and, waving your stick, exclaim aloud: ‘Help me, Pia, help me! I am going down by the stern like Laurel and Hardy!’ I could never have done that. I was after something else – a cumulus of thought subsumed in one bold metaphor. I had realised something concrete, namely that small art creates a throb, big art a wholesome vertigo. I tried to teach you this in your dealings with the people around you, so that your writing might have pith and irony. But since human consciousness distorts in the act of observing, you and I, seen by a third person, are perverted images of one another. We exchange highly diversified memoranda
about the state of our attachment, just like real lovers entering that state which probably never existed. Poets exchanging cowrie shells, not real coin. Unless the images sting you awake. Robin, before you obediently killed yourself, you scribbled in the margins of your unfinished manuscript poem – the Tu Quoque – the words, ‘Of course like Tiresias I have breasts which see all, and a forked tail in the shape of a lightning conductor. And yes, hooves.’“

  Sutcliffe roared with laughter and crunched away at his chips, while in the background Blanford could hear the bearish sounds of Toby clearing his throat and the voice of a girl. He could not imagine her face as he had not yet invented her. That would come, he supposed. O God! Writers! Sutcliffe said: “Toby has been making up an imaginary obituary for you for The Times – you know he makes a little cash from working in the graveyard bringing obits up to date. Here’s a passage which will please you: ‘It is said that when rich he twice refused the thistle.’ “

  “But the money gave me books and travel and secrecy. And anyway one can’t do better than one’s best. What more would you like to hear from me if I bring you back to life?”

  “About Tu; about Livia; about Hilary the brother and Sam. About the lake, and about Tu Duc and the Avignon of those early days. About us, the real ones.”

  “Then let me ask you one question,” said Blanford sternly. “Just how real do you feel to yourself, Robin Sutcliffe?”

  “I have never stopped to think,” said his only friend after a pause. “Have you?”

  “And you want to know about your own youth? Of course I endowed you with mine, for we are about the same age.”

  “But different milieux nourished us.”

  “Yes, but the age was the same, and an age is a state of mind. The twenties – that was purely a state of mind.”

  “Tell me the details, it will help me to act.”

  “Very well.”

  Blanford closed his eyes and let his memory draw him back to the very beginning of the story.

  “It was to be their last term at Oxford and Hilary had invited them both to journey with him to Provence for the long vac. Neither he nor Sam had then met his two sisters, Constance and Livia. Indeed, they knew nothing of them at all. But recently, with the death of an old aunt, young Constance had inherited the little chateau of Tu Duc in the southern Vaucluse, not far from Avignon. The Duchess of Tu, then, was the obvious nickname for her. The children had spent many holidays there once upon a time in their extreme youth; but in her old age the aunt became first eccentric, and then mentally unstable; she turned recluse, locked herself up, and allowed the whole place to fall into ruins around her. The rain and the wind settled down to finish what negligence had begun; the weight of winter snow cracked the black tiles of the roofs and entered the rooms, with their strange scrolled bull’s-eye windows. In the rambling, disorderly park, old trees had fallen everywhere, blocking the paths, crushing the summer-house under their weight. The once-tended green plots were now a mass of molehills, while everywhere hares skirmished. They were to live largely on jugged hare that summer!

  “Hilary, to do him justice, did not minimise the hardships they might have to face; but the prospect of southern sunlight and good wine was enough to offset any qualms they might have had. And then there was another capital factor – they had both youth and good health. Constance would meet them in Lyon, while Livia would come on later to join them, in her own time. Hilary mentioned Livia’s name and frowned affectionately as he did so – as if he found the fact of her existence somehow troubling. His deep family affection for her had a sort of qualified, formalised air, as if he did not wholeheartedly understand her as did Constance. His way of talking gave one the notion that Livia was the wild and unpredictable one, while Constance was the stable and utterly dependable one. This proved to be more or less the case later when they got to know the truth about them – whatever that might mean. But Livia now spent all her time in Germany.

  “It was this promise of a wild and somewhat primitive holiday which explained all the heavy camping impedimenta they found stacked up against their arrival in Lyon – they had sent it on in advance. Massive camp-beds and sun-helmets, sleeping-bags, mosquito nets – perfectly ridiculous items which had been invented for safaris in lion-country or for scaling the Indian Himalayas. But none of them knew old Provence at first hand, so perhaps these precautions were excusable.

  “Today the world which fathered them is a remote and forgotten one; it was a world wallowing in the wake of one war, trying to gather itself together before plunging irrevocably into a second. Their youth had enabled them to escape the trenches – in 1918 they were still just under military age, though Sam nearly managed to join up by a subterfuge; but he was found out and sent back to school; whence, to Oxford where the three, though so different, became inseparable. Hilary was the ringmaster of the little group, for he had more experience than either of the others, and he always led the dance. As a boy he was blond and tall and had ice-blue eyes like a Teuton. Sam was tow-haired and rather massive in his awkward gentle way. I was … how was I, Aubrey Blanford? Let me see.

  “A bit of a slowcoach, I suppose. Sam boxed and Hilary rowed, while all three of us hacked a bit and when possible rode to hounds in a post-Surtees manner.

  “I was the least mercuric, the most sedentary of the three, and my poor eyesight made me an indifferent athlete, though I fenced well and even got my blue for it. The post-Wildean twilight of Oxford was no longer a place to cool the mind – the stresses and strains of the war years still weighed on us by proxy, for many of the men who had seen blood and action in 1918 had come back to university to finish studies interrupted by the war. A disturbed and wild crew they were, like foreign barbarians.

  “Yes, it is difficult to describe that world, now so forgotten; its values and habits seem to have retreated into the remotest recesses of time. Do you remember it – a world in awkward transition? The new thing was violent and brash, the old had ankylosed. All that the war had not killed outright lived on in a kind of limbo. Intellectually, let us say, Anatole France and Shaw were at the height of their fame; Proust despite his prizes had not yet won the general public. Henry James versus Wells.

  “Was I born old? I never seem to have had a proper youth – mine began at Oxford when I met Hilary. If he was by far the most sophisticated of the three of us it was due to chance. His father had been a diplomat and the children had always travelled with him to his various posts. This stiff old gentleman was something of a stickler for ancient forms, and wherever they went they had tutors and learned the language of the place. Thus Hilary and his sisters became good linguists and thoroughly at home in places which were, to me, semi-mythical – Middle Europe, for example, or the Balkans: Rumania, Russia, Greece, Arabia.… It is true that Sam and I spoke laborious French and Italian, with a smidgen of German. But in the case of Hilary he ‘possessed’ three languages in the French sense of the word, and smattered in four others. All this he turned to good account and took excellent degrees at Oxford. His objective then was archaeology, his hero Evans, and his heart he had set upon exploring the labyrinth at Gortymna which remains unmapped to this day because of its great extent.

  “And Sam? I have a picture of him in the back of my mind, lying in the deep grass at the edge of a green cricket-field crunching an apple and chuckling over Wodehouse or Dornford Yates. You must remember that we were overgrown schoolboys then to whom even dull, but raucous London was an excitement, a dream. While Paris was Babylon. Sam’s ambitions were simple – all he wanted to do was to climb Everest single-handed, and on his return rescue a beautiful blonde maiden from a tower where she had been imprisoned by an enchanter, and marry her. Later on he would like to set off on his travels with her disguised as his page and join the Knights of the Round Table. You will see the disastrous effects of Malory on a guileless mind. In my case, I wanted to be a historian – at that time I had really no inclination towards this hollow servitude to ink and paper. I pictured myself d
oing a definitive book on some aspect of medieval history and winning an Exhibition to Wadham, or something of that nature. As you see the bright one was Hilary, with what he called his ‘Minoan tilt’ – for his plans and projects opened windows on the world of Europe. Am I right?”

  “I suppose so, but it’s a bit pedestrian your exposé – it proves that the dull historian is not quite dead in my poor Aubrey. I would have gone about it differently myself.”

  “Tell me how.”

  “I should have enumerated other things like school ties, huge woollen scarves, Oxford bags, college blazers, Brough Superiors à la T. E. Lawrence, racing cars with strapped-down bonnets, Lagonda, Bentley, Amilcar.… The flappers had come and gone but the vamp was present in force with her cloche hat and cigarette holder.”

  “I had forgotten all that.”

  “It is the small things which build the picture.”

  “London.”

  “Yes, and the places we frequented in London most of which have disappeared – wiped out one supposes by the bombings?”

  “Like the Café de Paris?”

  “Yes, and Ciro’s and The Blue Peter, The Criterion Bar, Quaglino’s, Stone’s Chop House, Mannering’s Grill, Paton’s, The Swan.…”

  “Good, Robin, and then the night-clubs like The Old Bag O’ Nails, The Blue Lantern, The Black Hole, and Kiki’s Place.… We simply never slept.”

  “The music of shows like Funny Face (‘Who stole my Heart away?’) Charlot, and the divine Hutch smoothing down the big grand piano and singing in his stern unemphatic way ‘Life is just a bowl of cherries’.”

  “Just before dawn Lyons’ Corner House, everyone with yellow exhausted faces, whores, undergraduates, all-night watchmen and workers setting off on early jobs. The first newspapers appearing on the icy street. Walking back in the pale nervous rinsed-out dawn, the whole way back across London – over Westminster Bridge and into the baleful suburbs of the capital; perhaps with the memory of some whore in mind, and the ever present worry of a dose. Marry or burn, my boy, marry or burn.”