But here was a new problem – his walk had gained a strange swaying amplitude which was unwonted; coming down the stairs he had sudden flashes of vision which made him feel that he was falling backwards into a prism of yellow light. Dismayed, and a trifle alarmed – he was perfectly sober, only his legs flirted with gravitational fields beyond his knowledge – he hung himself on the bar again, in order to gain time. Though he asked for nothing he found another bloody hemlock standing before him and in his shy confusion drank it. Faces were pivoting in the mirrors, other girls seemed eager to share their favours with him. He clutched the wad of notes at his bum and allowed an attack of meanness to overwhelm him. By breathing deeply and evenly he steadied the optic nerves and then steered his way majestically into the night, tenderly unhooking the ivy-soft arms and fingers which sought to stay him, and keeping tight hold of his diary-notebooks.
At the Dôme there was a crowd gathered in the inner dining-room around a radio from which poured stream upon stream of terrifying rhetoric in a voice which by now the whole world had come to know only too well. The barmaid – a rather handsome little second-hand widow in a good state of repair – had provided this curiosity for them, though she knew that almost none of her customers understood German. It was simply the spectacle that riveted them, the phenomenon of that grating snarling voice; the sense they might well guess. And then the roaring applause. He thought of Livia. But what was he doing here? What had prompted him to enter another bar? The answer was a thirst, a raging thirst. He realised the folly of drinking so much Pernod, and called now for a pint of champagne. It hardly mended the situation, except that the coolness was invigorating. But now he was really drunk and his subsequent wanderings gathered impreciseness as time wore on. He lost his briefcase and his umbrella. Thank goodness he had had the sense to leave his passport back in the flat with other and more valuable papers.… He nearly fell over the Pont Neuf, enjoyed the conversation and esteem of several hairy clochards, and was finally knocked down by a taxi in the Place Vendôme, whose driver, appalled by what he had done, had the humanity and despatch of his profession, and loading him into the back raced hotfoot to the American Hospital in Neuilly where his confusions were worse confounded by drugs intended to secure him some sleep while they investigated his bones.
He informed the doctor seriously: “The whole of humanity seems simultaneously present in every breath I draw. The weight of my responsibility is crushing. A merciful ignorance defends me from becoming too despondent.” He was told to shut up and sleep, and was reassured that while no bones were broken he had been much “concussed”, which accounted for some of the bells ringing in his head.
Deus absconditus, the shaggy God of all drunkards’ slumbers, now invaded him, and in his mind’s mind he found himself wandering the ever green lanes of a southern landscape, hand in hand with the sort of Livia he had dared to imagine – one he was never to see in reality; or else seated at the stained old table in the garden covering page after page of his notebooks in a hand which he vaguely recognised as that of Sutcliffe. Time stretched away on either side of the point-event of each drawn breath, back into the subfusc suburban past, forwards into a veiled future, but somehow as yet void of significance. The writer, l’homme en marge, writing the Memoirs of a Marginal Man. On the title-page he had written, in this large flamboyant and rather hysterical hand: “All serial reality is by this writing called into question.” The radio went on and on in his head, roaring and foaming. An ape fingering a safety catch – Europe was holding its breath. He bent his aching head lower and wrote on, “I have no biography; a true artist, I go through life like a character in one of my own books.” To this S added, “My first experience of an audience was when, as a fattish youth, I played Adipose Rex in the school play. Since then I have often dreamed of living in a deserted school (life?) full of empty rooms, open doors and clean blackboards; yes, life waiting for the scholars of breathing. Comrade, continue that poem in invisible ink, ask yourself why the Dalai Lama has no Oedipus Complex.” “Silly, because he has no parents.…”
The sirens wailed once or twice briefly like supercats en chasse. These were practice calls only but they wrung the heart. Marriage to her would be like drinking wine from a paper cup. What he had really needed was the smell of warm sirloin, smell of cooking in fair hair which had bent over the stove, the scent of celery in the armpits. Already he seemed to have lived a dozen lifetimes with her, all in the same cottage. For years afterwards they would remain, the claw-marks on the door where every night the dog scratched to be let in, the scratches she had made with her key around the lock. Suddenly the voice of Sutcliffe admonished him: “Aubrey, you have a mind like a fatty chop. Be silent or be completely fascinating. Never bore.” The poor fellow could not have felt in any better humour than his bondsman yet he persisted in being flippant – though at times his voice was quite squeaky from fatigue. He quoted:
Our old telluric artichoke,
We sucked her leaves but nothing woke;
The cactus of the primal scene
Had mogrified her sweet demean.
Blanford, always slow to retort yet determined to get some of his own back, sat up and said: “Rob, you haven’t the talent to rub a bit of polish off the primal apple; you are simply an old football full of pus.”
Somewhere in the course of his military training at Oxford he had come across the expression “omega grey”, and had been told that it was the scientific designation of the deepest grey before complete blackness; now as his troubled sleep swirled about him, changing form and colour and resonance, it seemed to him that the whole of the outer world beyond the window of the white ward was painted in this colour – the almost black of death. Omega grey – the phrase echoed on in his mind, though whether he was asleep or awake he could not guess. This drug-bemused reality was filtered through a mesh of discrete sensations, containing fragments of the recent past juxtaposed or telescoped upon fearful contexts. He saw the body of his mother transformed by a neo-Cubist painter into a series of porpoise-faced nudes. Her teeth were all but opaque, her gums fashioned in gelatine.
Swollen to enormous size she floated over the Thames to defend it against enemy aircraft; moreover she was all grey, camouflage grey, omega grey, the last colour before the dark night of the soul settled over them like a new ice age. There would hardly be time enough to achieve that state of beatitude and equilibrium which for him was already associated (wrongly) with the creative act. What was he doing here in this molten bed, fuddling while Rome burned? He should have been telling his beads and praying aloud.
He pressed his palms on his eyelids and sent showers of sparks flying across his eyeballs. Yes, it was there, the state he vaguely hankered to achieve! It already lay somewhere inside him in a completely unrealised form – or rather he knew it was there without being able to locate it. It was like hunting through the house for one’s spectacles when they were on the top of one’s head, perched on one’s crown. A vomit of words, linked by pure association, floated below his visions like the subtitles to an incomprehensible film written by a lunatic. (The drunkard’s word list is sometimes the sage’s also.) A vision of Livia with her finger to her lips.
The weather is breaking up, my puss,
The cards are down in autumn stars
In his dream he told her: “The maddening thing is that what is to find cannot be looked for. You are trying desperately to acquire what you already possess but do not recognise. Meditation brings on a state of perilous heed – it is not mere daydreaming. All this would be risible if it were not so serious a matter.” To which she replied sweetly, shaking that fine cervine head: “At any moment tell yourself that things are much better than they have any right to be.” What sophistry! In the streets he saw the faces passing, omega-grey glances upon pavements of omega grey. Yes, there was nothing that did not lead somewhere – yet everything also had a built-in trap that at any moment could become an obstacle.
Suddenly the scene changed to a bas
ement in Vienna – he knew it to be Vienna without knowing how he could know; for he had never been there.
A swarm of violins started up somewhere and through half-closed eyes he saw the fiddlers performing their hieratic arabesque – girls combing out their long hair. Bearded candles in the darkness gave them not rose or carmine, but the uniform pork tint of omega grey. A slowly folding line of music from some fugue wrapped them all in a melancholy tenebrousness. There were a dozen or so people there, but he only recognised the faces of Sutcliffe and Pia. There was something startling about their attention and he suddenly realised that they were listening, not to the music which welled from the radio, but to the distant crepitations of musketry and machine-gun fire, punctuated from time to time in the furthest corner of space by the soft thud of a mortar. There was trouble almost every night, they told him, and they were forced to live by a self-imposed curfew, more or less. It had, however, not been going on long, but the persecution of the Jews was beginning.
Then, abruptly, as if the scene had been “cut” like a film sequence, they found themselves walking timorously among deserted squares and startled public statuary, with a light spring snowfall blurring everything and obliterating skylines. They were heading for a quarter of the town which was predominantly inhabited by the intellectual élite of medicine and the arts. Here were the practice rooms where right round the clock one heard pianos playing scales and snatches of classical music, heard sopranos giving tongue, heard the gruff commentary of tubas practising. The nationalists had been busy wrecking this quarter during the earlier part of the evening and had been driven off by police, or else had had their attention diverted by other prey in other quarters where the inhabitants were easier to bait or intimidate. They had, however, left a legacy in the form of two large bonfires burning away – mounds of medical books doused with petrol. All the windows were open and the flats from which these articles had been seized and hurled into the street appeared now to be empty. All the lights burned on, furiously on, as if outraged, but there was no human form to be seen. Then Pia saw the old-fashioned sofa half in and half out of the window on the third floor, and she gave a wild sad cry. These were the old consulting-rooms which the penurious medical crew could hire specially cheaply, for they were subsidised by the university. The sofa! She had recognised one of the old consulting-rooms which an impecunious Freud had shared with Bleuler when they were making their first halting steps towards a theory of the unconscious. It was the same old leather-covered monster of a committee-room sofa upon which the master had (it seemed a century ago now) invited her to recline. On it, writhing to and fro like someone in a high fever, she had embarked on that strange adventure which as yet seemed to be never ending; one promise succeeded another, one remission followed another relapse. Now this fond critical instrument of torture hung there like a maimed crocodile.
In the wild cry of recognition with which Pia greeted this spectacle was mixed all the anguish and reverence she felt for this shabby symbol posed so outrageously upon the window-sill – like a woman too fat to get out or in now, irretrievably stuck, waiting for the fire brigade to rescue her. As a matter of fact they could be heard approaching some streets away, though their customary moaning signals were mixed with the sinister mesh-like sound of caterpillar-tracks upon concrete. A light tank prowled across their line of vision a couple of street corners away. They had been joined by a small group of medical students who were in a high pitch of excitement – they all looked as if they had been drinking.
Now a man had appeared at the window from which the sofa protruded – a sort of janitor it would seem, from his green apron. He had been going round turning off lights and closing open doors. He paused irresolutely for a moment before the sofa, obviously wondering what to do about it. It protruded so far that it was impractical to drag it back, though he seemed at first tempted to try. It was hanging by its back legs above the burning street. The students began to gesticulate and shout in a desultory fashion, though without any clear idea of what might be done to ameliorate the present situation, the smashed lamp standards, the burning books. Suddenly the concierge at the window came to decision. With a heave he disengaged the back legs of the ugly old crocodile and catapulted the whole thing into the street, where it fell upon one of the burning piles of books. The sirens had come much closer. “Quick!” cried Pia, quite beside herself with anxiety, for the sofa had begun to smoulder at the edges. “Quick!” People gazed at each other wondering what she could mean, but she herself had darted forward and caught the old crock by the shoulders, pulling it with a frantic, almost superhuman force, until it was clear of the flames. “We must save it,” she said. “Rob, for Christ’s sake …” Bemused and puzzled as he was he broke into a clumsy run and, without for an instant understanding what their objective might be, helped her tug it clear. Other students now, equally in the dark, came to their aid, and acting like lunatics they picked it up and set off at a trot for the nearest shelter. The whole performance was totally spontaneous and unplanned. It had been sparked by the intensity of her cry and the concentrated passion of her actions – she looked like someone in a trance. Obviously this tattered object was of the utmost value and importance to her. Obligingly the crowd helped her save it and drag it to the relative safety of an air-shelter with a wall where they placed it under a tree. They were all panting and yet somehow exultant. From the other end of the square now burst the police and the fire-engines, dramatic and noise-bearing as a whole opera. It was time to shrink back into the shadows and disappear. They left the old sofa sitting there in the light snowfall.
Events had moved so fast and so dramatically that they themselves were quite out of breath with astonishment at what they had done. “What will you do with it?” cried Sutcliffe now, aware that they could hardly house it in their little hotel, and she thought fiercely for a moment, her pale face bowed. They were already walking fast, almost running, towards their hotel, trying to select untroubled streets where they would not meet patrols. Friends were waiting for them at the hotel – among them the Slav girl – and they ordered coffee in the tiny shabby lounge where they would, as was customary, hear an account of the day’s happenings both in the capital and in the world – the outer world which loomed over their daily minds like a storm cloud. “Whatever happens we must keep it,” said Pia decisively, in the middle of a conversation about something else; and he knew she meant this stupid old sofa for which he himself felt nothing. Had she gone mad? He asked her, but she was already explaining what they had done to her friend whose face lit up with a triumphant and generous approval. The two women, he thought, were as superstitious as savages. What would they plan next?
The outcome was even more unexpected than he had any reason to suppose. Medical students, friends of the Slav, now arrived upon the scene, and they warmly approved of this absolutely medieval gesture. (They would be selling indulgences next!) They were young and impetuous and determined to rescue the totem. The only problem was to decide what should be done with it. There were several lines of thought. One wished to give it houseroom in his flat, another thought it should be carted to the Faculty and placed in the hall – but of course the medical authorities, who had hardly heard of Freud, would have had a fit at the very suggestion. Suddenly Pia pronounced upon the matter with so much vehemence that everyone knew that she would not be gainsaid. “It is mine,” she said, “and I intend to keep it. I shall send it to my brother in Avignon. I have quite decided.” There was no more to say; all that was left was to decide upon the details of transport – how the devil could one send a sofa? Obviously by rail. Yes, but what about transport to the station? Here one of the students, who worked part-time with an undertaker, suggested that he borrow the hearse to transport the holy relic. “Yes! Yes!” she cried and clapped her hands exultantly. “That is what we must do. I shall telephone to him tonight.”
So it was that, at five in the morning, Mr. Sutcliffe found himself seated with an air of ludicrous amazement in a large b
lack hearse, in front of what to the average passer-by must have seemed something like a very large corpse wrapped up in a brown-paper parcel. They had indeed enveloped the charred old article in several layers of brown paper, the better to label it, and to their surprise there seemed to be no problem about sending it. It would await arrival in Avignon.
Blanford had followed all this hazily, through the heavy meshes of his dream, and he conveyed his approval of the whole initiative through the usual channels – the pulse-beat of the blood. But he had decided that Constance must have the relic, not Piaj; and as he carried more weight in everything to do with real reality, he knew that he could override the present decision, and persuade a carter to take charge of the sofa and ferry it up, not to Verfeuille but to Tu Duc. He said as much and to his surprise Sutcliffe did not demur – it was a measure of his indifference to the relic. He had come to hate the whole science of psychowhatsit, which promised the moon and came unstuck at every corner.
“Very well, maître,” he said ironically, “if you say so. How is Paris treating you?”
“A pleasing priapism rules the waves,” said his incoherent and maundering alter ego or summum bonum. “The croissants are brown as mahogany. I saw her at dusk, reading in a public garden, and I longed to approach her and ask where she had been. She had disappeared for nearly a week. But I dared not. I sat on an adjacent bench and told myself that it was not her, it was just someone who resembled her. She was reading one of my unwritten novels – with pious intensity. Beside her lay a bag with a half-eaten croissant in it. She was sunk in profound thought, I could see that, and would certainly be sulky if approached. I closed my eyes and waited. When at last she got up to go I saw that indeed it was not her but someone who resembled her. The discarded paper bag lay where she had abandoned it. I scattered the croissant for the birds and went home by the lake in order not to give her the illusion of spying on her. But of course when I got back there was, as usual, nobody at the flat.”
The Avignon Quintet Page 49