The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Next time be more wily,” said the little man.

  “Or less susceptible to female charms.”

  “Quite.”

  He turned once more to his sordid register and went through a list of vacancies tracing them with a broken thumbnail.

  So the long cultural calvary continued for our hero until (after many humiliations) he rose to glory and affluence by his superior merits. Yet looking back on these episodes in later years he was not displeased with some of his handiwork. When the class, for example, asked him what the last words of Verlaine were he had replied: “Happiness is a little scented Pig.”

  But leaving Sutcliffe to his picaresque early adventures, the thoughts of Aubrey Blanford once more returned to those earliest memories of France, and of Provence. They were wonderfully pristine always – as if only yesterday:

  There they were, for example, lying in the pond among the open lilies with the cool lapping water up to their throats, breathing in the silences of the abandoned garden, which, like the house itself, was full of presences which would have been real ghosts if only they had been visible. Doors which opened and shut of their own accord, footsteps on the main staircase at midnight. Voices which whispered names so softly that it was always possible to attribute the noise to the rustle of ivy in the changing wind. With shifts of temperature – when the heat from the kitchen rose to the first floor – all the cupboards creaked and burst open as if to embrace one. In the dense foliage of the garden there was always a flickering of things just seen out of the corner of the eye. When one turned and looked directly there was nothing. And there was one loose tile on the footpath by the potager where every night at dusk one heard a footfall: someone passed and made it click.

  Sometimes if you opened the cellar door a black cat flowed out which answered to no name, no blandishment, no caress. It made its way softly through the hall, to disappear by a side door. An animal? Or the ghost of one? It was like a portfolio of sketches of suave postures – something to grace a fashion plate.

  A long time later Hilary said that he had once seen a girl in a white evening dress walking by the lily pond reading a letter; what struck him was that the blackbirds gave no sign of seeing a human being and were actually flying through her – or so it appeared. She passed into the trees and took the path to the house; he waited uneasily for her on the balcony but she never appeared. In the afternoons by the little coachhouse someone beat the dust out of an invisible carpet. All the silences of the place seemed dense with things just waiting to materialise. A sense of immanence. Constance loved this; at night she was always blowing out the light and sitting in the dark trying to “see”. But Livia could not stand it, and after a few days would find an excuse to set off on a camping-trip or spend a few days in neighbouring Avignon where Felix gave her his tiny spare room.

  And then the portrait gallery, the three heads! This long gallery was an extension to the house with broad windows running the whole length of it and lit with white panes of toplight; the trees sheltered it from the direct rays of the sun. Now it was empty, for the old lady had sold all her portraits long since – an unremarkable collection by all accounts – and kept only three smoky heads printed in the typical ancestor-style of safe academicians of the last century. And now almost obliterated by corruptions in the pigment. The names too were hardly readable, though one could make out the word Piers on the portrait of the pale young man with a frail and consumptive expression, and the word Sylvie below that of the dark intense girl, who might well have been his sister. The third picture had fared worse and it was literally not possible to tell whether the subject was a man or a woman – only that its colouring was blonde and not dark, its eyes as blue and lucid as Hilary’s. All three portraits were draped with black velvet, which created a singular impression on the beholder, who could not help wondering why. Was someone in mourning for them? Did it betoken some special religious gesture – a consecration? Who were they? We were unable to find out. On the back of one picture, written in yellow faded ink was the phrase, “Chateau de Bravedent”. To study them one had to draw back their velvet covers with a gold cord.

  Felix Chatto, no less intrigued than we, had spent a lot of time and energy trying to find out the meaning of this laconic inscription and the location, if possible, of such a chateau; in vain. “I swear there is no such place in Provence,” he added with a sigh, “though of course one day it might surface again as the lost medieval name for a place.” We were sitting downstairs then at the oaken kitchen table, having lunch. “And perhaps it is better that way – not to know, I mean, and to go on wondering about them. It would be difficult to invent a romantic enough story to suit that strange trio. And in my view you are wrong about the third person – it is really a woman, not a man. The fingernails are not painted.” But of course this proved nothing and he knew it. But then: why the dusty velvet coverings? Were they dead?

  Nevertheless the existence of the three and the name of the apparently non-existent chateau exercised a great influence over the musings of Blanford; they existed as obstinate symbols of something to which the key had been lost. He said to himself sadly, “If only I believed in the novel as a device I would incorporate their story in a book which had nothing to do with real life. Bravedent!”

  Livia turned her face to him; she had been sucking a coloured sweet they had bought at the village shop. With a swift motion of her tongue she passed it into his mouth and sealed it with a bitter-sweet kiss on the lips. He was lost, Blanford. He found such effortless happiness almost painful.

  It was only now, in this backwash of time, and from these heterogeneous documents that he could follow out the slow curve of this amor fati – this classic attachment to Livia. When he asked her what her mother was like, for example, it was Constance who replied to him: but at some other time, in another context, for Livia simply looked at him with those dark eyes gone like dead snails and licked her lips as if about to speak, but nothing came. Constance wrote in a letter: “I remember an old, old lady with a piercing blue eye, whose cheeks had subsided for want of teeth and whose ill-fitting false ones did not fulfil the role completely. She had been a poor actress before she married. Now she was mad with regret and forever dwelling on ancient pleasures which had fed that sick vanity. The world of diplomacy – a world of kindly lampreys – provided a delusive background for her needs. Underneath the surface excitements the demon of accidie had her by the hair. She had always been avid for the meretricious, and when her shallow beauty faded everything turned to hate – but chiefly against her children because of their own youthful beauty. Not for her the Great Inkling! Here she was, subsiding into ashes day by day, while we were flowering. Soon she felt herself swelling with pure malevolence, a loathing strong enough to carry, she hoped, even beyond the grave, to blight our lives, to maim our spirits! She complained that her breasts were flaccid because she had nursed us too long, and tried everything then available to plump them out, except surgery. Even that absurd ventouse which was supposed to make them firm by suction. We have had to wade though all this powerfully projected hate without quite understanding it – except now, retrospectively. Forgiving it is another thing. Look at Livia!”

  He was looking at Livia, at that face which for him spelt an invincible happiness; he was not so much wounded as astonished when the youthful Sam described her eyes like dead fish-eyes and her hair as dandruffy, adding that he could never care for a girl like that. The angle of vision is everything. The poetic vision is manufactured to meet desire. This experience was forming him, and would give him his first short story, which in the long run was what really mattered. But without her and the frightful jolt she gave him he might never have entered the immortality stakes with his first study of the circle she frequented in Paris where she was at this time a professing painter, prone to cubism. His inexperience shielded him from recognising the group of charming if effete personages for what they were – and they were careful not to enlighten him. She lived thus, in happy ambi
guity, within this kindly group of homosexual friends whose charm and sensibility were undeniable. As a little band of outlaws they had grouped themselves into postures of social consequence; it was a wise precaution for they were for the most part rather insipid people and they knew it. Their social commerce betrayed a certain fragile uncertainty … they felt somehow one-dimensional; almost opaque. They telephoned each other several times a day, as if to reassure themselves of each other’s existence. They issued bulletins about their health and the state of their art which were like certificates of identity.

  Later, when Constance was full (a little too full) of her knowledge, she expressed the cruel paradox of Livia’s case more clearly; indeed the total narcissism which is expressed in inversion derives from the sense of abandon by the mother. But crueller still, the sexual drive which alone satisfies it consists of a mock incest precisely with her abandoner. But such a proposition would only have made Livia swear – and the oaths she used turned ugly in her mouth, accompanied as they were by expressions as distasteful as those of a sick bird. A phrase came to mind from the black notebook, where he was trying to lay down a few guide-lines towards a sketch of her character. Looking at Constance with remorse, regret and hate, Livia thought, “There is nothing more enraging than the sight of someone who is unwaveringly, naturally and helplessly good.” After all, Constance had her own deceptions to live through, though she was at last able to swallow their absurdity and pretentiousness and write, “Love is the banana-peel that laughter-loving reality leaves on the pavements for men and women to skid on.” The thing was that she comprehended and pardoned her sister because she loved her, and for her sake she always hoped against hope that our relations would survive despite the drawbacks. Blanford could not remember just when he made a note in his diary which said, “I fear she lives on tittle-tattle and smoke; I have married a rattle and a snob.” But even that was not the worst of the matter; the central feeling of loss was to get denser and richer as bit by bit Livia grew more sure of herself, more careless about hiding matters.

  The mind has limits, the body limits; the equation is easily made, the limits quickly reached. It was all my fault, thought Blanford, leaning forward to poke the fire. It was a case of transposed heads. Constance and I were slow to recognise each other. In all this amateur bliss I one day overheard a telephone conversation with Thrush, the little Martinique lover, which made me prick up my ears. In a different voice, one that I had never heard before, she said: “I simply made up my mind to make him marry me.” Turning, she saw me at the door, and replaced the receiver. I said nothing and after a while her obvious anxiety died down – I suppose since I offered no comment on this remark. “It was just Thrush,” she said, “we are going to the Opera tonight.” She knew that I could never stand opera. But just for once I had taken the number of their tickets and had bought myself one in the Gods. I went that evening and easily located the stalls she had reserved; but the seats were occupied by other people whose faces I did not know.

  It is only the context which renders such things painful or pleasurable – all that was basically wrong was Blanford’s gruesome lack of experience. He knew that now. It was the pliant and lovely Livia’s destiny to initiate him – and of course those we initiate we mark for life. “Nature’s lay Idiot, I taught thee to f**k,” she could have exclaimed as Sutcliffe did on another such occasion; nor would the glancing echo of Donne have been out of keeping. No. But the period of ardour and illusion led on and on for more than a summer – could it perhaps have gone on for a lifetime? – until by an unlucky accident he came upon the letter she had forgotten to hide or destroy and in which everything was made clear. His heart sank with sorrow and disgust; it was not the reaction of a moralist – it was simply that he found the deception cruel and unnecessary. From it all he suddenly developed an exaggerated hate for the little group of neuters – les handi-cappés – and by extension for the Paris he had always found grotesque, but vividly alive and nourishing. How would he stand August now, swollen with the knowledge that he was being run in tandem with some black-hearted Parisienne? He started to write her letters, and to leave them everywhere in the flat. He had moved to a furnished room but still had the key of the flat and used his bookfilled study to work in. He was still raw from the pleasures of her beauty and the excellence of her love-making; there was a poem of that period in which he described her with felicity as “a constellation of fervours”. It was published in the Critic but he did not show it to her. Thrush, then, was the ringmaster? It was suddenly like being dropped on one’s head out of a tree, or diving into an empty swimming pool. With one hand he did some automatic writing in his black notebook. (“The new sexual model will incorporate death somehow as the central experience. The lovers will float to the surface belly upwards, dead from exhaustion.”) He wrote an indignant description of his discovery to Constance but did not post it. And years afterwards, in discussing this period of time, he felt glad that he had not, for Constance was busy with profounder matters, and still much hampered by her sexual inexperience. It was this same summer perhaps that she decided to marry Sam – which also called for long and elaborate reflections later on. But in one sense the shock was most salutary for Blanford; he was suddenly able to see all round himself; it was as if he had been living in a dense fog and suddenly it had lifted. It was a real initiation, a real awakening. He suddenly saw, for example, what the two lovers had done to Thrush’s husband. He was a pious and swarthy little man, pleasantly coon-coloured and with dense ringlets. It is doubtful that he actually was conscious of what was going on – the notion rested on the edge of his mind like an ominous premonition. He began to feel first an overwhelming lethargy – the affect had started to bleed; the two vampires knew their stuff all right!

  But first of all they made him rich and fashionable, a consultant for film stars and bankers, and that sort of animal. They lobbied him decorations of one sort or another, and made sure that he went to all the first nights and cocktail parties. It was about six years since he had last slept with Thrush, though they lived in tender amity; but he began to retire earlier and earlier, gripped by fatigue and the shadow of something like diabetes; until he took to having dinner with the children in the nursery and going straight to bed with them; he yawned more and more and looked vague. Retiring thus from the fray every evening he left the champs d’honneur free for the lovers and their doings. Once or twice they talked of finding him a substitute woman – a pretty repoussoir like Livia but he had no energy left for such a project. So thoroughly had they done the work of affect castration that he had gone all anaesthetic. As for Thrush, animatrice de petit espace that she was, she kept him soothed and tranquil in his striped pyjamas. In her he had an impresario who had guided him to wealth and social success – should a man ask more? But Blanford could see that this same gloomy fate of Zagreus was going to be his unless he watched out. What to do? As he wrote in one of his letters to Livia, “Of course marriage is an impossible state with all its ups and downs, lapses, temptations, renewals. But the only thing the tattered old contract sets out is that you accord the primacy of your affections to someone, this side idolatry. The cheat was that yours were not free to bestow. It is all that sours me.”

  He was left with a mountain of scribbled exercise books – an attempted exorcism. But it did little good. It was as futile as founding a society for the abolition of bad weather. Yet the loneliness taught him discipline. There is nothing more beautiful than Method.

  About Blanford; before writing the first words of a novel in his Q series he would close his eyes, breathe serenely through his nose, and think of the Pleiades. To him they symbolised the highest form of art – its quiddity of stillness and purity. Nothing could compare with them for noble rigour, for elegance. It was in order to cure this rather dangerous proclivity that he had invented that mass of conflicting and contradictory predispositions called Sutcliffe – a writer who recited the Lord’s Prayer, putting a Damn between every word, before address
ing his novel.

  Blanford took an overdose of sleeping pills and had horrible dreams in which he was forever helping two nymphs on with wings they rejected. He imagined them lying together in the sand – Livia’s face like an empty playground waiting for children, her large vague pale brow … The long middle finger which betokened bliss in secret.

  Nor was it any solace to think hard thoughts about Thrush; apart from this unhappy situation he found her delightful. But he told himself that she opened her mouth so wide that she resembled a hippo, folding her food into it. As a matter of fact, even when she laughed her eyes cried “Help!” He could dimly intuit the terrible jealous insecurity that ravaged the two quaires – the negative of his own, so to speak. Once in the rue St.-Honoré when he was waiting for a massive American businessman (they had the simple authority of trolleys, comforting), the dentist came up to him in a bar and got into conversation. They only knew each other by sight then, and Blanford felt a kind of clinging, pleading quality in the encounter – as if he were hoping to find some solution to his case in a talk with Blanford. But they were ill matched for an exchange of consolations. He told himself that Thrush had a vicious, thirsty little French face; but it wasn’t true and he knew it. He felt as if his brains had cooled and dripped into his socks. He could have written an ode called “A Castrate’s Tears beneath the Shears” – but the tone was wrong and he delegated this to Sutcliffe who would come along in good time with his own brand of snivel. And then, on top of it all, to be unfair to poor Paris which all of a sudden became loathsome to him. He noticed now the dirty hair, cheaply dyed, and never kept up from meanness – so many brassy blondes with black partings. And in August the refusal to shave armpits.… The town smelt like one large smoking armpit. Acrid as the lather of dancers. And then the selection of sexual provender – perversions worthy of wood-lice. Well, he had come there for infamy in the first place, so what the hell had he got to complain about? He would die, like Sutcliffe, in the arms of some lesbian drum-major, dreaming nostalgically of hot buttered toast between normal thigh and thigh. Indeed he would go further and become a Catholic and enact the funky deathbed scene – the spider on the ceiling and the shadow of a priest and a notary.… It wouldn’t do, said the voice of Constance, and he knew that it wouldn’t. Eheu!