All this and much more passed through his mind as he sat holding the wrist of his dying mother – a flight of impressions like a brilliant surge of tropical fish across the dim aquarium of his student life. On the other side of the curtain of adolescence was a Paris full of bountiful surprises – a Paris where all the whores had started to take German lessons. The teachers of the German Institute were overwhelmed with requests for classes! A Paris where nobody shaved under the arms. At the Sphinx where he went rather sedately to play belotte and drink (with a timid air) an absinthe, which he hated, he had met a charming friend of his new wife, a negress of great beauty with a smile from here to there, and hands which roved into any pocket that presented itself. Livia found her “killing”, and derived such amusement from her Martinique French that he was forced to enjoy her as well. Curiously enough she did shave under the arms, though she said the girls in general did not because a swatch of hair excited the customer and was good for business. He was extremely frightened of these unexpected revelations of turpitude, but it was after all romantic and he was in the rapt middle of Proust, and France was after all … what exactly? He had never been in such an extraordinary ambiance before, a sort of ferment of freedom and treachery, of love and obscenity, of febrility and distress. A life which was so rich in possibilities reduced one to silence.
Nor for that matter had he ever been really in love before, whatever that might mean. The brilliant little taxis which flashed about the town like shooting stars were their favourite transport. Whenever they rushed off the macadam on to a cobbled thoroughfare the kisses of lovers in the back began to hobble and shake as if with an extra passionate emphasis conferred by the pavé. And quite apart from the greater beauties of this most beautiful of cities they were made freemasons of the company of its lovers, holding hands dutifully on the Pont des Arts, sitting heart joined to heart at the Closerie des Lilas or the rumbling Dôme. Floods of new books and ideas swamped them. He read relentlessly to keep abreast in quiet cafés and parks. It was the epoch of puzzling Gertrude Stein, Picasso, and the earlier convulsions of the American giants like Fitzgerald and Miller. He was sufficiently mature, however, to reflect that Europe was fast reaching the end of the genito-urinary phase in its literature – and he recognised the approaching impotence it signalled. Soon sex as a subject would be ventilated completely. “Even the act is dying”, he allowed Sutcliffe to note, “and will soon become as charmless as badminton. For a little while the cinema may conserve it as a token act – as involuntary as a sneeze or a hiccough: a token rape, while the indifferent victim gnaws an apple.” He added: “The future is more visible from France than anywhere because the French push everything to extremes. An audio-judeo-visual age is being born – the Mouton Rothschild epoch where the pre-eminence of Jewish thought is everywhere apparent, which explains the jealousy of the Germans.”
Standing at night on a quiet bridge with the whole of reflected heaven flowing beneath them, silent, rapt. “One day you will despise me,” she said, talking as if to herself.
One star was ticking over the lemon water. He said to himself: “Pity and she don’t match and never will.” And here he was – most inappropriate of men, a writer, watching from the abolished tower of his male self-esteem refunding his youth into these silences with this dangerous girl. “In two months’ time I am going away, perhaps for good,” he said, but he didn’t take it seriously, just as he didn’t really take the war seriously. Sutcliffe chided him from Geneva where he had landed a temporary job tutoring. “It’s all very well to sit up there in your private Pisgah,” he said, “but kindly note that Pisgah is the Hebrew word for an outdoor shithouse. It was here that old Moses quietly, while shifting the load of guilt, in the posture of Rodin’s Thinker, thunk. My last words on leaving the school were as follows: ‘The school will get no more half holidays unless secret practices cease and a new detachment is born, say a detachment of dragoons, firing off maroons.’” He went on after a pause, “But when I left, after my scandal, such is a frailty of the female organism that there was an outbreak of mumps, chiefly among the nuns.”
But in spite of the confusion of this period Blanford was thinking, he was looking around him and taking stock as well as taking notes in his little student’s calepin. Like: “The old seem to be praying for a war to carry off the young; the young are soliciting a plague to carry off the old. Fortune’s maggot, I nestle in the plenitude of my watchful indifference.”
She was his, and yet she was not really completely present. Reality, fine as a skin on milk, was called into question the whole time by this disturbance of focus aided by alcohol or tobacco or other unspecified drugs. Shaving himself in the bathroom mirror he realised that he had been pretending to be sane all his life. Now, even while kissing her he did not know which state of mind to assume. To overhear a thought thinking itself, to eavesdrop on a whisper of a truth formulating itself – this was his new state of mind. He began a book – the whole thing seemed to write itself. It was the purest automatic writing. It was a vignette of life in the country somewhere – a country which he himself had never seen. It was overwritten and shapeless so he destroyed it. Yet something important had happened to him – on the mystical plane, though that seems a rather pompous way of speaking about the intervention of “reality prime” into his scheme of things. (He tried saying “I love you” in several ways, in several keys, at several speeds, just to try and imagine what it was she heard when he did.) But what he realised was that from that moment onwards nothing he did was frivolous. It could be bad or good or even just inadequate or indifferent but it would be fraught with his own personal meaning, it would have his fingerprints on it. When he dared to say as much to Sutcliffe, his bondsman groaned aloud: “I see it all,” he declared, “another novel written by the automatic pilot,” and when Blanford looked at himself in the mirror he could see that in fact his expression was a trifle portentous – swollen, as if he had a gumboil. His self-esteem had boiled over.
Anyway, would there be time? They were pushed by the anxieties of the age to try and drink in everything before the war swallowed it up – that meant Edith Piaf looking like a cracked plate and singing like a cracked dove. “Mon coeur y bat!” That meant the new cinema – which had by now forfeited its chances of becoming more than a minor art by the invention of sound-track. It meant piles of saucers growing up under one’s drinks at the Dôme while voices spoke of Spengler and the thirteenth law of thermodynamics. … God! it was good to be alive, but it was an agony also, and he felt it all the more when the slow measured rhythm of England replaced the throbbing Paris rush. He managed a brief visit to Oxford to see friends and collect belongings, and found it strange and secretive and tongue-tied – “theological dons in their Common Rooms dancing round the filoque,” as Sutcliffe was to put it. For his part the great man had started to do yoga by the lake. “Come,” he said in magisterial fashion, “sharpen your intuitions in the cobra pose.”
Blanford did nothing of the kind. His thought-glands were too soaked in alcohol, his mouth tasted itself through a coat of fur. He was happy in a distressing sort of way, dwelling in the great shadow of happy fornication with this buccaneer, this bird of paradise. “I am young and handsome,” he told Sutcliffe, “and self-possessed as a cervical smear. I want to enjoy myself before age sets in and I suddenly go blue as cheese with a heart condition.…”
Publishers, he pretended to himself, were bursting their braces with desire to receive a new masterpiece, and here he was destroying everything he wrote as fast as he wrote it. In a friend’s studio here was a grand piano on which from time to time he would practise. He played Schubert for her until she wept, and then innocently fell asleep, chin on paws like a Persian cat, a catspaw. Self-pity engenders oxygen and she was very sad to be sad. He started to write the memoirs of The Superfluous Man, but found he lacked the art. A pelican, he was trying to drink a little blood from his own breast.
The tirra lirra of the public purse,
Th
e piggy bank whose use we learned from Nurse;
The affect cannot hoard its wild regrets
Except as dark repressions in cold sweats.
“I see you have a poetic turn?” said the patronising Sutcliffe. “I too dabble, and before leaving England I tried my hand at everything, even Sapphics which have never been done well since Campion. Listen!
“Deliciously sapped by the swish of thy swansdown chemise I perch on a porch in Belgravia pansexually pooped.”
It was full of false quantities and not at all a real Sapphic, but what was the point of arguing with Sutcliffe? It was clear that he was pained and lonely, and probably had toothache as well. He struck a chord, a sad diminished seventh, to wake the sleeper but she slept on.
If pianos could polish themselves
They would be turned to cats;
In mirrors of self-esteem efface their lust
Licking their likenesses to dust.
Suddenly Constance appeared in Paris and strangely enough with her the war became suddenly real – as if she herself had declared it. She was very much thinner and yet calmer, and she had had what she declared was a momentous series of meetings with Freud in Vienna. She had attended a conference of psychs at which he had presided and they had taken a fancy to each other. Other meetings followed and the result was that now she was a wholly submitted pupil of the old man whom she now vehemently declared to be the foremost thinker in Europe.
“Here! Wait a moment!” said Blanford, shocked by so uncompromising a hero-worship, and of course she laughed. It was obvious to her that he, in common with nearly all so-called intellectuals of that epoch, understood next to nothing of the modest provisional theses of the old professor. How to make it clear? She took him by the shoulders with an affectionately admonishing air and said: “From now on it has become impossible for anyone to write Hamlet again, do you see?” He did not see, did not wish to see much beyond the dancing points of her bright eyes and the grand flush of colour with which she announced that she was meeting Sam secretly that evening, and they were going to get married before the war broke out. “It will be a long sad stalemate of years perhaps,” she said. “They will never get through the Line and we will never have the force to go after them. Meanwhile, lots of bombing and short rations and stalemate.” It was of course the general view, hence the strange kind of stagnation in which they lived. But she had other fish to fry as well for she suddenly changed her expression from gladness to bitter gloom. “Where is Livia?” she asked with a kind of waspish sharpness. How should he know? Nobody could keep track of Livia’s movements; sometimes in desperation he left her little notes on the notice-board of the Café Dôme for she turned up there from time to time.
Constance paused for a long moment with her chin on her breast, thinking; then, as if coming to a decision, she said: “All right, well, I shall tell you then. In Vienna I saw a German newsreel of some great Nazi rally in Bavaria – there she was, plumb in the centre of things, dressed in a German uniform.”
The news was electrifying and numbing at the same time. What could it mean? “Are you sure?” he said weakly. Constance nodded and said: “Never surer. She was full in the camera for about ten seconds, singing and giving the salute. She looked out of her mind. I am terrified for her.”
Blanford did not know what to say, so acute was his shame. “She has never confided in me,” was all he could think of in the way of self-defence. But even at this late stage the full extent of the tragedy which was slowly being enacted in Germany failed to register – its impact skilfully dulled by false propaganda and censorship to which they were as yet unaccustomed. They walked a little together in the Luxembourg, mostly in silence, trying to shape some sort of true perspective for their future lives – but only vague prospects and qualified hopes stretched away from them into … what? But at least Constance was sure of her basic direction. She had joined the Red Cross on the medical side, and with her Swiss passport proposed to be of some use in the crisis to come. Sam had a fortnight before rejoining his unit in Britain. Tonight, after getting married, they would take the old train from the Gare de Lyon, and spend a brief honeymoon in Tu Duc. She asked: “Why don’t you two come for a few days? Hilary can’t, he is still in his Scottish seminary.” But he sensed that it would not have done. They parted with warmth, and on his side with a pang of vague and imprecise regret, as if he feared that their friendship might be qualified by his marriage. It was silly of course. The old certain stability of things had melted into something new – a sort of state of limbo. And in the midst of all this, glowing like a precious stone, was the memory of Provence and all it had held for them on this first rich encounter with it. The richness was overwhelming, and in his own dreams he returned again and again to the old house lying so secretively among the tall trees, in a silence orchestrated only by the wind and the ripple of river which passed through the garden.
As they parted she said in a sudden little flurry of agonised feeling: “Do you think I am doing the wrong thing? I wouldn’t like to hurt Sam.” He shook his head but he felt the shock of her words. The question meant that, in fact, she was doing the wrong thing, and that somewhere in her inner consciousness she knew it. But what made him feel ashamed was his own sudden feeling of elation as he recognised the fact. He felt it was horrible and quite unpardonable. He would seek absolution in thinking up some extravagant present for her in London.
Cremation is a clean and unemphatic way of disposing, not only of your dead, but also of your thoughts about death and any fears and misgivings they might engender. The rain melted down over everything, a soft blue rain which pearled down the windows of the old respectable Daimler they had hired for himself and Cade, the only two mourners. The coffin looked small and very light. It lobbed slightly as the hearse gathered way. He had been extravagant about the flowers because he knew she had loved flowers, yet an obstinate parallel thought crossed his mind as he wrote out the cheque, namely: “I never received a moment’s affection from either side of the blanket.” He felt aware of some sort of emotional attrition, of a withering away inside himself – a kind of poverty of affect which art and literature might only pretend to redress. Perhaps later, in middle life … yes, but would there be a middle life, with all this war business going on? To his surprise he bought a new car on an impulse and paid for driving-lessons. He retained Cade’s services for a year, but offered him an extended leave to revisit his family in the north. When all this was over he would drive down to Provence and wait there for history to declare itself. The crematorium was a gaunt-looking place, of an architecture so frivolous that it resembled an abandoned Casino in Southern Italy. The plume of smoke which rose from behind the main building flapped upwards into the rain and then flattened out across the fields of concrete which surrounded the place. The whole area was tastefully laid out with gardens full of daffodils and other Wordsworthian aids to memory. But there was quite a waiting list of bodies for cremation and they were a few moments early. They were set down to wait, and optionally pray if they wished, in a small ante-chapel which did duty as a waiting-room. The suburban church architecture of the chapel was of glacial coldness and infernal ugliness. The altar with its cheap cathedral-glass saints wallowing in the crepuscular gloom shed a dreadful Sunday School light upon them. On the wall in the corner there was what the cricketer in Blanford recognised as a score board such as every school buys for its cricket field. Instead of a score however there was the programme of the day neatly indicated in detachable lettering. Theirs was to be preceded by three other cremations – those of Mrs. Humble, Mrs. Godbone and Mrs. Lamb; then came Evelyn Blanford. They must wait their turn? Cade ostentatiously prayed and the chief mute sycophantically followed suit. He was a Dickensian caricature of fruitless respectability in his old and scruffy top hat and withered tail-coat. His cuffs were dirty and had been arranged rather impres-sionistically with the help of nail scissors. He was wheezy with asthma and false devoutness. Blanford closed his eyes and breathed deeply
through his gills, praying that this might soon be over. It was astonishing how deeply upset he found himself to be – he would not have suspected this wave of intense sorrow and loneliness.
The officiating clergyman was a robust and pink young man with a touch of bustle about him, as if he were anxious to get through the work of the day as soon as possible. But he was very detached and otherworldly as well, and one might have supposed him to be cremating some headhunters from darkest Borneo rather than respectable suburban matrons from fondest Folkestone. Blanford felt rather put out by his offhand manner and the hint of cockney in his speech which made Holy Writ read like an advertisement for Glaxo. But at last the session wound to its end and Blanford was suddenly aware that throughout the length of the service his mother had been slowly sinking into the ground before their eyes: the coffin slowly sinking down the trap into the operational part of the concern. The young man achieved perfect timing, for the last word of his peroration coincided with the muffled clap of the doors closing, after having launched the coffin onto the rails of a subterranean railway. They heard it whirring off down the chute. The machinery was a trifle squeaky. Then followed a long silence during which the mute turned to them and said, “Of course you’ll be wanting an urn, sir?” “Of course,” said Cade sternly. “Two urns!”
The man tiptoed off after saying: “I will meet you outside at the car.” The parson shook a pale pork-like hand and took his leave. They were free. Blanford was wild with relief and regret. And yet speechless as an anchorite.
They had not long to wait outside the chapel before the beadle-like mute stalked round the corner of the building, holding in his arms two grotesque bonbonnières a little larger than the traditional Easter egg, which he distributed with an air of conscientious commiseration. Cade almost snatched at his, and to Blanford’s surprise, actually beamed with pleasure, as if he were receiving a gift which brought the greatest joy. Then he caught the curious eye of his master upon him and scowled his way back into his normal taciturnity. Blanford felt a fool sitting in the back of the Daimler with an urn in his lap, and as soon as he could he placed it gingerly on the nearest mantelpiece. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.…
The Avignon Quintet Page 47