They had found a hunchback maid who came from the village every day; she had worked long as a serveuse in a brothel, so they learned afterwards. The experience had given her insight into the ways of men – she read a bedroom when she entered it, as one reads a book. She interpreted the whole scene like a sleuth, the disordered pillows and blankets, all had something to tell her. She often smiled to herself. One day Blanford, passing the door, saw her pick up a pillow and inhale it deeply. Then she shook her head and smiled. Turning she saw him and said in her hoarse way, “Mademoiselle Livia!” Yes, but it was the bed of Hilary that she was making. Things do not strike you at the time; ages later Livia bit his hand with her white teeth and he suddenly remembered the incident. And with it the kind of strained attention with which Hilary heard him say at the end of that summer: “Hilary, what would you say if I asked Livia to marry me one day?” The hard blue eyes narrowed, and then flared into rather factitious congratulatory warmth; he squeezed his friend’s shoulder, however, until it hurt, but he actually said nothing. Later when they were having lunch he said, out of the blue, “I think you should make sure, Aubrey.” And Blanford knew at once that he was thinking of Livia. It takes years to evaluate such tiny glimpses into the multiple meanings of any single human action. As Sutcliffe one day said to him in one of his notebooks: “Right girl, old boy, but wrong sex. Hard luck!” At another moment in another notebook the poor old novelist had jotted down the remark; “My mother’s sterile affect was cocked like a trigger to fire me into the arms of Livia, or of one of her tribe.” Then another thing, another glimpse – for Livia had now spent several days, or groups of days, lodging in the box-room of the consulate – with its clumsy cupboard in which Felix had found a place for a small wardrobe. When Blanford, at the end of the summer, said to Felix, “I am going to propose to Livia when we leave here,” he received a strange wondering look from the youth – which he rather condescendingly interpreted as jealousy. Several thousand light years afterwards when Blanford was recording the strange manoeuvres of his double Sutcliffe, he met Felix by accident on a rainy platform in Paris, as he was just setting off for the south; and now Felix told him what that lost and forlorn glance portended. He did not repeat the scathing estimate of her character by Quatrefages, who at that time spent one afternoon a week devilling at the Consulate, keeping the petty-cash box in order. This report on her was quite gratuitous and spontaneous on the part of the little clerk and somewhat shook Felix by its terseness. Yet … he himself had strayed into his guest’s room while the maid was cleaning it and had seen, hanging up in the shabby cupboard, some articles of male wear which aroused his curiosity. And there was no doubt that late in the evening she often disappeared in the direction of the gipsy encampment. Why not? She was young and adventurous and may well have felt the need of a male disguise. Indeed Felix said as much, on a note of mild indignation, to the little clerk; but the latter shook his head and said laconically: “I know. I myself frequent the gitanes.” And this too was true. Mind you (as Blanford told himself) it did not matter – he would not, for anything in the world, have renounced an experience which had literally scorched him awake, precipitated him from raw youth into adulthood. In a sense this was the worst part of it; somewhere, in some dim corner of himself, he must have perversely enjoyed the kind of suffering she was to inflict on him. When he said as much to Felix, the latter warmly praised his loyalty and generosity, which naturally disgusted our hero. “O God, Felix,” he said in anguish, “it’s not that. I’m trapped. I can do no other. I am fuming with impotent rage.”
But he was not the only one to be grateful to the girl; Felix was hardly less so, for Livia, by joining him more than once on his night walk, had performed a miracle – she had made him fall in love with this small and dismal city. Venite adoremus said the chipped gold sign above the chapel of the Grey Penitents, almost as if the church had divined his mood, his abandonment to his love for this mysterious and eccentric girl. She sat so docilely hand in hand with him in the silent pews, listening to the thresh and swash of the paddles revolving. She said, whispering, “Go on and pray, if you wish. I have never been able to.” But his shyness constrained him and he felt himself blush in the darkness. Nor would he have changed his position for anything, for the feel of her rough little hand in his was bliss. How marvellous, how romantic it all seemed, and how beautiful she was, this Livia who talked about painting and seemed to know everything about the history of the place which had for him been up to now an echoing prison. As for the gipsy side of her character – why, she had been the most brilliant student of the Slade School in the years when the influence of Augustus John was at its height; all students worth anything ached to become Carmen. One night when she disappeared he ran into her by chance in the eastern sector of the town, and she was walking arm in arm with a gipsy girl; behind the couple, as if offering protection or surveillance, came a couple of lean gipsies leading a mule. They were shabby as pariahs, and had a brilliant scavenging gleam in the eye – as if they had just done a successful robbery. Livia dressed in tattered pants and was bare of foot – another passion of hers was to walk about barefoot. That summer she cut her foot on a piece of tin and the wound turned septic; this immobilised her for a while and she accepted the ministrations of Felix with brusque good grace. In the evenings the gipsy girl hung about the consulate quarter, but she always made off when Felix appeared.
Only with Quatrefages nothing worked; Livia and he simply hated each other, and hardly bothered to hide the fact. Later they came to an interesting compromise, for the little clerk blackmailed her into co-operating with him in one of the numerous enterprises of Lord Galen – one which also concerned the gipsies.
What had happened was this: the gipsies had taken up a second headquarters in the corner of the town known as Les Balances, where a number of disreputable and tumbledown houses offered them precarious shelter. Prompted by a hint from Quatrefages, they had removed the heavy stone flags of the floors and started to dig down beneath these shacks, to arrive at a layer of civilisation much anterior to the Papal period of the town. Amphoras, grave headstones, armour, domestic remains, tessellated pavements, they had made one of the richer archaeological finds of the period; and all this material was surreptitiously placed in sacks and sent up to Galen’s chateau by mule. Livia, details of whose doings among the gipsies had come to the ears of Quatrefages, was content to lend her good offices to these ventures rather than have him tell anyone about her own tenebrous adventures; and indeed was responsible for securing one or two of the larger pieces which might have been salted away by the band who were vaguely aware that someone was making a larger profit than they were from these finds.
But for Felix the real felicity of that first summer was not merely the marvellous evenings spent at Tu Duc, it was to walk half the night with this dark girl with her haughty face and bare feet; her thin body was erect as a wand, and she seemed to feel absolutely no fear in the darkest corners of the town – some of which made the flesh of poor Felix creep; like the terrifying rue Londe for example with its one gas lamp set askew in a wall so mossy and so dribbling with damp that it exuded a death-chill. Here the shadowy doorways were set in such a way as to afford perfect cover for a footpad. Obviously she felt nothing of all this, for she did not cease her quiet conversation as they travelled down it – perforce in Indian file to avoid the contact of their shoulders with the rotting walls. One thing she had determined to find – a famous Avignon shawl such as her mother had had as a young girl. Alas, these fine kashmirs were no longer made in the old town.
But it was Livia who made him sit and listen to the wakening birds in little squares like that of Le Bon Pasteur, or the Square des Corps Saints with its ragged plashing fountain; or Saint Didier, set slightly at an angle to the rest of the universe, but not the less evocative. And with these night rambles the whole harmony of the Mediterranean south swept over him, filling his consciousness with gorgeous impressions of star-sprinkled nights in the old t
own – the six of them seated under a tree in front of some old bistro like The Bird, drinking the milky anisette called pastis and waiting for the moon to rise over the munched-looking battlements of the city. Once Livia managed to procure them horses from the gipsies and they rode across to the Pont du Gard, to picnic and camp the night on the steep hillsides, overlooking the jade-green Gardon as it swirled its way to the sea. Sometimes, too, Blanford invited himself into town for a consular walk with them both, much to the chagrin of Felix, who looked quite crestfallen when his friend appeared on the scene. But Blanford was as much subject to the magnetism of Livia as Felix was – he simply could not resist forcing himself upon them, though he inwardly cursed his lack of tact. Yet it was Livia who seemed glad, and who indeed seemed to favour him quite unequivocally over Felix. The crestfallen consul was forced to witness, with exquisite pangs of jealousy, the two of them walking tenderly arm in arm, while he followed wistfully after them in his college blazer, uttering fearful imprecations under his breath. Nobody took any of this with high seriousness – it was simply youth, it was simply the spirit of an intoxicating summer felicity among the olives and cherries of Aramon, of Foulkes, of Montfavet or Sorgues. Often, looking back on this halcyon period, Blanford had the sudden vision of them all, standing upon the iron bridge at the Fountain of Vaucluse, gazing down into the trout-curdled water and listening to the roar of the spring as it burst from the mountain’s throat and swept down past them, thick with loitering fish.
But if ever in the years to come Blanford might feel the need to account for the enigma of this fierce attachment to Livia there was one scene which quite certainly he knew would rise in his memory to explain everything. Once when Felix was away for a few days Livia gave him a rendezvous at the little Museum in the centre of the town – at four-thirty in the morning; punctually a sleepy Blanford turned up to find the barefooted girl waiting for him at the dark portals of the place with a swarthy gipsy. Dawn was just breaking. The gipsy had a massive pistol-key in his hand which fitted the lock; the tall doors swung back with a hushing noise and ushered them into the red cobbled courtyard; and as they did so they heard the inhuman shrieks which came from the interior garden with its tall dewy plane trees. It was the crying of peacocks on the lawn. They passed through tall glass doors to reach this interior courtyard which exhaled a strange sort of peace in that early light of day. The taciturn gipsy took his leave, having confided his key to the girl. Together they loitered through the galleries with their massive water paintings of the Italian school – lakes and viaducts and avenues depicting imaginary landscapes during the four seasons of the year. Portraits of great ladies and forgotten dignitaries stared urgently at them in the gloom. Then they came to the Graeco-Roman section and after it to a small glass-roofed room with manuscripts and documents galore.
Livia, who seemed to know the place by heart, opened the cases one by one and showed the bemused Blanford medieval documents which mentioned the marriage of Petrarch’s sweetheart, and hard by, some pages of handwriting torn from the letters of the Marquis de Sade. It was strange in that silent dawn to hold the white paper in his fingers and read some lines etched in a now rusted ink. He had forgotten that both the libertine and the Muse were called Sade, and were from the same family.… Now Livia was at his side, then in his arms; she closed the precious cases and led him back to the cool lawn where they sat side by side on a bench trying to feed the peacocks with scraps of stale sandwich which he had had the forethought to bring with him. “Soon I shall be going back to Germany,” the girl said, “and you won’t see me until the next long vac – unless you come with me; but I know you can’t as yet. Such wonderful things are going to happen there, Aubrey; it’s bursting with hope, the whole country. A new philosophy is being built which will give the new Germany the creative leadership of Europe once more.” It sounded rather puzzling, but Blanford was politically quite ignorant. He had heard vague rumours of unrest and revisionism in Germany – a reaction against the Versailles treaty. But the whole subject was a bore, and he presumed that some new government would bury all these extravagances once and for all. Besides, a new war was unthinkable and specially for such trivial reasons.… This is why Livia intrigued him with her romantic talk. So, more to humour her – for he adored the flushed cheeks and the joined hands which showed her enthusiasm – than from real interest he said: “What was the old world, then?” Livia shook a lock of hair impatiently out of her eyes and said: “It died in 1832, with the death of Goethe; the old world of humanism and liberalism and faith. He exemplified it; and its epitaph was pronounced by Napoleon after he met Goethe; it was an unwilling tribute to the world which the French Revolution was then destroying. ‘Voilà un homme,’ said Boney, himself a child of the Directory, and the harbinger of the Leninised Jewish coolie-culture of today. With the death of Goethe the new world was born, and under the aegis of Judeo-Christian materialism it transformed itself into the great labour camp that it is. In every field – art, politics, economics – the Jew came to the forefront and dominated the scene. Only Germany wants to replace this ethos with a new one, an Aryan one, which will offer renewed scope for the old values as exemplified by Goethe’s world; for he was the last universal man of the Renaissance. Why should we not go back to that?” Blanford did not see quite how; but her sweet enthusiasm was so warming, and the tang of her kiss so unmanning that he found himself nodding agreement. Livia’s new world sounded like the Hesperides – as a matter of fact any new world which had a Livia in it elicited his instant support. He said: “I love you, Livia dear. Tell me more about it, it sounds just what we need to escape from all this fervent dullness.” And Livia went on outlining this marvellous intellectual adventure with heart-breaking idealism and naivety. When he mentioned Constance she cried: “I can’t bear her devotion to all the Jewish brokers of psychoanalysis, to the Rabbinate of Vienna. It’s dead, that whole thing. Its barren mechanism betrays its origins in logical positivism.” Blanford was far out of his depth here – he knew very little about these factors and personalities. Livia went on in torrential fashion: “Long before these barren Jewish evaluations of the human psyche, the Ancient Greeks evolved their own, more fruitful, more poetical and just as reasonable. For instance, before that bunch of thugs who ruled Olympus there were others like Uranus who ruled the earth and was castrated by Chronos. Those severed genitals were thrown still frothing and writhing into the sea, and the foam they generated gave birth to Aphrodite. Which world do you prefer? Which seems the more fruitful?” Blanford could only repeat, whispering in that small stag’s ear the stupid words, “I love you and I agree.”
She touched his face – the haptic sense – and the poor fellow was mesmerised; he was in love, and so full of glory and distress that he could have accepted anything without query provided Livia was part of it.
Here on this moist fresh grass they lay, with their arms under each other’s heads, staring up into the clear warm sky with its rising sunlight and light musical clouds – herald of another perfect day. It would soon be time to slip quietly away, locking the doors behind them, and make their sleepy way back to Tu Duc through the olive groves turning to silver in the breeze. The kisses of her hard little mouth with its thin lips, sometimes cut in expressions of smiling contempt or reserve, held a world of promises for him. She had promised to spend her last few nights in his room. “I shall be back in Paris again in three months if you want me,” she added, and Blanford began actively, resolutely, planning ways and means to accept this marvellous invitation. Gazing into the camera lucida of the eye’s screen he saw a vastly enlarged version of Livia, one which filled the whole sky, hovering over them both like some ancient Greek goddess. It seemed a fearful thing to have to share this marvellous creature with the others – but there was nothing to be done for the terms of reference dictated that they should do almost everything together. As their departure began to shape itself into a fact – at first the summer seemed endless and their return to the north a figment –
it became imperative to go on as many excursions as possible, to see as much of the country as possible before the fatal day dawned. Constance was staying on in Provence to try and fix up Tu Duc a little against future habitation; Sam and Hilary and Blanford were to affront their final examinations before selecting a profession. The centre of gravity was slowly shifting. At dawn, unable to sleep, and heading for the lily pond for a dip Blanford came upon the two sisters naked upon the flagged path, walking with sleepy silence towards the same objective in the dusky bloom of daybreak. Slim and tall, with their upright carriage and hieratic style they looked like a couple of young Graces who had slipped out of the pantheon and into the workaday world of men, seeking an adventure. Blanford turned aside and waited until he heard the ripple of water; then he too joined them, sliding soundlessly into the pool like a trout. So the three sat quietly breathing among the lotus flowers, waiting for the sun to rise among the trees.
It was like a dream – the wet stone heads of the sisters, like statues come to life; the dense packages of silence moving about the garden suddenly drilled by a short burst of bird-song. “Perils and absences sharpen desire,” says the ancient Greek poet. In all the richness of this perfect summer Blanford felt the pang of the partings to come – vertigo of a desire which must for the time being rest unrequited. Her wet hair made her look shaven; her pretty ears stood out pointed from her head, like gnomes at prayer. From the sunny balcony where breakfast waited they could see the swifts stooping and darting; how beautifully the birds combined with gravity to give life to this wilderness of garden which Constance had sworn never to have tidied and formalised. It was full of treasures like old fruit trees still bearing, strawberry patches, and a bare dry section of holm-oak – a stand of elderly trees – which had a truffle bed beneath.
The Avignon Quintet Page 40