Under the shock of this misadventure Blanford suddenly found that he could read people’s minds, and a sudden shyness assailed him; he found now that he lowered his eyes when faced with newcomers – the better to listen to the sound of their voices. It was the voice he was reading so unerringly. People thought that he had become unusually shy of a sudden. (In some lower-middle-class bedroom Sutcliffe heard his tinny wife say, “Chéri, as tu apporté ton Cadeau Universel?” And he replied, “Oui chérie, le-voilà.”
THREE
The Consul Awake
THE PRO-CONSUL WAS RULED BY THE DEMON OF INSOMNIA, the royal illness; lying with his eyes fast shut in his little cage of a villa with its creaky bed, old chest of drawers and flawed mirror – lying there suspended in his own anxiety as if in a cloudy solution of some acid – he saw the sombre thoughts passing in flights across the screens of his consciousness. The hours weighed like centuries on his heart. Memories rose up from different periods of his life, crowding the foreground of his mind, contending for attention. They had no shape, no order, but they were vivid and exhausting – at once silky and prickly as thistles. Each night provided an anthology of sensations betokening only hopelessness and helplessness; this handsome and quite cultivated young man who dreamed of nothing so much as a post in the Bank of England (the excellence of his degrees justified such a hope) had been unwittingly sold into slavery by a mother who adored him with all the passion that centres about only children. How had this all come about? He knew only too well. “For you it’s diplomacy,” said his uncle, Lord Galen, one day, conducting the full orchestra of his self-esteem. His opinion was never asked and he was too weak to resist the little corsair who had become his mother’s lover after the death of Felix’s father. The boy had been weak and irresolute enough, the man was even more so. So here he found himself in a minor consular post in Avignon – a pro-consul of the career, if you please, but paid a mere pittance for his services. Yes, here he was, half dead with boredom and self-disdain. The Office had not even had the decency to declare the post an honorary one – which would perhaps have forced Galen to make him an allowance. He was paid like a solicitor’s clerk. He was only allowed a part-time consular clerk to keep his petty cash and type the few despatches he ever wrote. There was nothing to report and if there were any British subjects in Avignon they had never shown their faces. The villa was buried deep in dust-gathering oleanders and poinsettias. If only his mother could see him now – a Crown Servant! He gave a croak of sardonic laughter and turned on his side. Yet she must be proud of him. A flood of unformulated wishes and hopes, suddenly floating into view, directed his memory to a picture which made him always catch his breath in pain, as if he had run a thorn under his fingernail. He opened his eyes and saw her sitting withered up in her wheelchair. Looking at the dusty electric bulb hanging naked from the ceiling he went over his history for the thousandth time. His father had died when he was very small; years later his mother had conducted a long and decorous affair with his brother, the dashing Galen (extremely discreet, extremely ambiguous) until the increasing paralysis confined her to this steel trolley, pushed by a gloved attendant dressed in a billycock hat and a long grey dustcoat. Felix could hear the munching of its slim tyres on the gravels of gardens in Felixstowe, Harrogate, Bournemouth. When her illness grew too severe she had been too proud to continue her affair with Galen – she could not bear to see herself as a drag on him or on his career. He accepted this decision with guilty relief, though he vowed that she would want for nothing. He kept in touch through her doctors, though he did not write directly any more – he had always had a superstitious hatred of ink and paper. He had been taught that things written down can turn against one in the courts, that was the root of the feeling. But even had he written she could not have answered for she could no longer hold a pen; and as for speech, her own was slurred and indistinct. Her jaw hung down sideways, there were problems with saliva. Deeply shocked by her own condition, the dark eyes blazed with a sort of agonised astonishment. Her attendant was called Wade. In his billycock hat he wore the feather of a cock-pheasant. He was now far closer to her than either her son or her lover. She was impatient for only one thing now – to die and get it over with.… Wade read the Bible to her for two hours every night.
Felix groaned and rolled over in bed, turning his face to the ghastly wallpaper with its raucous coaching print. He breathed deeply and tried to hurl himself into sleep as if from a high cliff – but in vain, for other shallower thoughts swarmed about him as the fleas swarmed in his bed, despite the Keating’s Powder. This time it was exasperating memories of the official pinpricks he had incurred in trying to obtain a new Union Jack to fly from the mast which had been so insecurely fixed to the first-floor balcony of the villa. During the usual Pentecost celebrations, which were closed by a triumphal gallop-past of the Carmargue gardiens, some fool had discharged a gun in the air – un feu de joie – and the charge had spattered the sacred flag with smallshot, so that now it looked like a relic left over from Fontenoy. Felix simply could not fly such a tattered object any longer and, having described the circumstances, invited London to replace it. But nothing doing. An immense and most acrimonious correspondence had developed around this imperial symbol; the Office insisted that the culprit should be found and sued for his sins, and lastly forced to replace the object; failing that, said the Office of Works (Embassy Furnishings Dept.), the flag might have to be paid for out of Felix’s own pocket – a suggestion which drove him mad with rage. Back and forth went these acid letters on headed paper. London was adamant. The culprit must be found. Felix smiled grimly as he recalled the leather-jawed horseman whose racing steed had struck a bouquet of sparks from the cobbles as it went. The man indeed who had so narrowly missed him, for he had been standing on the balcony at the time to watch the procession. A foot to the right and there would have been a consular vacancy which the Crown Agents would have been happy to advertise in The Times. He had even felt the wind of the discharge, and smelt the cordite of a badly dosed home-made charge. And the flag?
And the flag! Should he, he wondered, try to get it ‘invisibly mended”? There was a new shop in the town which promised such an amenity. But an absurd sense of shame held him back. Would it not seem queer for a shabby consul to sneak about the town with a tattered Union Jack, trying to get it repaired on the cheap? Yes. On the other hand if he flew it as it was just to spite the Office there was a risk that some consular nark from Marseille might see it and report adversely on him. He sighed and turned again, turning his back on these futile exchanges, so to speak. And so then Galen had quietly replaced his father, had taken command of everything, school-fees, death-duties, house-rents, etc. In fact he had actually become his father, and as such infallible. He pronounced shortly and crisply on everything now; his will was done, rather like the Almighty’s. The overwhelmed and frightened child could do nothing but obey. Galen had, as a matter of fact, demanded worship, but all Felix could supply was a silent obedience to the little man with the plentiful gold teeth which winked and danced in the firelight as he outlined the splendid life which the Foreign Service held in store for the boy.
So here was Felix listening to the sullen twang of the mistral as it poured across the town, dragging at shutter fastenings and making his flagless flagpole vibrate like a jew’s harp. The consular shield below it had also taken a few pellets but the damage was not extensive. It merely looked as if some hungry British subject had taken a desperate bite out of it in self-defence. “Whatever you do, Mr. Chatto,” the Foreign Secretary had admonished him before handing him his letters of credence and appointment, “never let yourself become cynical while you are in Crown Service. There will be many vexations, I know; you will need all your self-control but try and rise above them. Sincerely.” Well, if he had been in a laughing mood he might have managed a feeble cackle. Indeed his shoulders moved in a simulated spasm but in fact his face still wore the pale, dazed expression of a sinus case which aspirin could no
t relieve. He could smell the dust being blown in from the garden – dust and mimosa. In the spaces between assaults the wind died away to nothing and left a blank in the air into which seeped fragments of ordinary sound like the bells of St. Agricole. The theatre would be emptying into the square by now and despite the foul wind the café’s would awake for a spectral moment; it was too chill to do more than hug the counters and bars and drink “le grog”. It was early yet, all too early. Like sufferers from sinus and migraine he was used to seeing the dark nights unroll before him in a ribbon of desolation.
But his real calvary began well after midnight when he rose, made himself a pot of vervain tisane and slowly dressed, pausing for long intervals to gaze into the bathroom mirror or stand in bemused silence before the cupboard mirror gazing at his own reflection in it, watching himself dress slowly, knot his old school tie, draw on his shabby college blazer with the blazoned pocket. Who was this familiar shadow? He felt completely disembodied as he looked, as he confronted his own anxious, unfamiliar face. He drew on his black felt hat, stuffed his wallet into his breast pocket; then he stayed in the sitting room gazing at the print hanging over the chimney – a pastoral scene of goats and cypresses. With one half of his mind he heard the throbbing of the wind and registered its diminution with something like satisfaction. Perhaps in another twenty minutes it might sink away into one of its sudden calms. He would pause awhile before setting off on one of his all-too-frequent night walks round the town which he had come to regard as the most melancholy in the whole world. Its eminence, its history, its monuments – the whole thing drove him wild with boredom; mentally he let out shriek after shriek of hysteria, though of course his lips did not move and his consular face remained impassive, as befitted a Crown Servant.
Yes, the wind was subsiding slowly; a clock chimed somewhere and there was the long slow moan of a barge from the river like some haunted cow. He licked his finger and traced the dust upon the mantelpiece. The little hunchback maid who came in for an hour of dusting every morning was fighting in vain against the ill-fitting shutters. As for food, Felix arranged his own light meals, or crossed the square to the little penurious café called Chez Jules where they made sandwiches or an occasional hot dish filled with chili and pimento. He threw open the door of the office and stood for a while gazing down at his own imagined ghost – he saw himself writing a despatch about the flag. What furniture, what entrancing ugliness! He enumerated it all as he sipped his tea and stirred a loose tile with the toe of his suede shoe. There was a mouse-hole in the wall which he had stopped with a pellet of paper manufactured from a particularly exasperating and stupid despatch from head office. It had assuaged his feelings and had apparently discouraged the mouse – though God knows what such a poor creature might expect to find here to eat. Books? He was welcome to the consular library. Felix had a small suitcase of private books under his bed, mostly poetry. But now he was looking at the shallow office bookcase with its reference books which were apparently all that a consul ever needed in order to remain efficient. The F.O. List with its supplements made quite good reading. It soothed him to discover the whereabouts of long-lost London colleagues. When he wanted to gloat he looked up some fearful bore like Pater and read (his lips moved as he did so) the small paragraph which recited all his early posts, sinking in gradual diminuendo towards the fatal posting. Consular Agent, Aden. He could hardly forbear to let out a cheer, so much had he disliked Pater while he was being “run in” in the London office. Then there was Sopwith too – another victory of good sense. He had been posted to Rangoon. On the whole then, Avignon might not seem so bad. But he had no money to get to Nice or Paris, and Galen would never have lent him the large slow Hispano which coasted everywhere with its goggled negro chauffeur – trailing long plumes of white dust across the vernal olive groves. What else was there for a decent self-respecting mouse to feed on? Consular Duties in six volumes? A volume of consular stamps and some faded ink-rollers which thumped out a splayed crown if properly inked. Wagner’s Basic International Law – a huge and incomprehensible compilation. The British Subject Abroad, a guide for Residents. Skeat’s English Usage. The Consular Register. The Shorter Oxford. All this to keep his despatches in good trim. There were also a few grammars and detective stories. The whole thing was pretty shabby and anyone having a look around would realise (he told himself) that Chatto was very poor, and that Lord Galen was either quite oblivious of the fact or wanted to keep him so. As for pro-consuls in posts as remote as these, they were hardly paid at all, and certainly never got accorded consular frais, expense accounts, which they might disburse in the pursuit of pleasure. Moreover Felix had no private income, so that his mind was always pinched by the thought of overspending. Even when people found him agreeable and invited him out to functions he was apt to decline for fear that he would never be able to invite them back. Nothing gives one that hunted look like poverty; and there is no poverty like having to swallow the backwash of extravagantly rich relations, who cannot help patronising you, however much they may try not to. And on such an exiguous budget, in a remote place, everything became a terror – the necessary doctor’s visit, an operation, a false tooth, broken spectacles, a winter overcoat. All these possibilities gnawed at his mind, depleting his self-confidence, poisoning the springs of his happiness.
Well then, night after night, as he lay in the coarse sheets, he went over these factors in a trance of sleepless misery; his history seemed to stretch like an unbroken ribbon of distress and anxiety right back to the father’s death and his sad schooldays. (His reports always said something like “Could do better if day-dreamed less”.) His only refuge had been books; and now he was beginning to take a faked interest in Catholicism because it made one friends and took up time. He felt that unless he could find himself fully occupied the weight of his present boredom and anguish might unseat his reason and lead him towards what was then known as “a brain fever”. He whispered, “Oh God, not that,” under his breath when the thought came into his mind. Someone to talk to, for the love of God! When he received a note from Blanford telling him of the summer to be spent near Avignon, tears came into his eyes and he gave an involuntary dry sob of pure relief.
In these long night-silences he felt rather like the town itself – all past and no recognisable present. Did Galen know about them coming down – he did not know if Blanford was an acquaintance of the old man. How could one tell? Galen never even bothered to signal his frequent absences and returns – he spent several months a year in the tumbledown chateau which he was too mean, Felix supposed, to restore.
He moved about all over Europe following the threads of the cobweb he had spun with his fortune, playing the game of banking and politics. Everywhere he was accompanied by Max, his negro valet-chauffeur, who in certain lights looked dark violet; and the dumb (literally) male secretary whom Galen had deliberately chosen for himself, saying with a laugh that he knew how to give orders and get them obeyed. A secretary did not need a voice, a nod would suffice.
It should be noted also that where Galen went Wombat went too, seated on a mouldering green velvet cushion with a monogrammed crown printed on it as befitted the animal’s pedigree, for Wombat was the imperial cat of this strange, rather sad, motherless household. Max, who loved the thing, carried it everywhere most ceremoniously, as if he were a chamberlain carrying the royal chamberpot of a King. Wombat was half blind and dying of asthma, and if offered the slightest attention or civility like an outstretched hand or a friendly sound, would react unamiably by opening its throat to hiss, and rearing up in anger. When Galen had had a drink or two in the evening he used often to wax sentimental and inform Max that the cat was his only friend; everyone else loved him for his money. With Wombat it was real love. But when he reached out his hand the animal spread its throat and reared like a cobra opening its hood as it hissed – thus avoiding the old man’s caress.
No, he had little enough thought for Felix, though every Christmas he received a penny Chr
istmas card of the Woolworth type featuring holly and a robin. It was always signed by Galen but the envelope was made out in the secretary’s awkward hand. In summer, then, it was dust and wind and noise, and Keating’s Powder and ceremonial processions of scruffy nuns and priests; in winter it was frost and ice and the river swollen to three times its mean summer levels. Le cafard, in fact, in its most exaggerated form.
The Avignon Quintet Page 37