The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Then the way opened before them. His father, after a second heart attack, wrote and told him that he must really consider getting a job and also open negotiations for a wife. He proposed to use (he said) some piston in the first instance, (he preferred French culture to English and thought his son’s passion unhealthy and indeed unpatriotic): the second contingency he left open, being a wise man. So it was that the Prince found himself a young diplomat en poste in his favourite capital; and the young lady received a formal letter which had first been submitted to her aged mother, asking whether he might declare his intentions towards Fawzia. The Arabic he chose was pure though somewhat florid. Afterwards he found that she had been much amused at being referred to as “the person in question” and for a while she signed her love letters with this sweet superscription. Yes, permission was given for them to meet, to speak. The die, as they say in bad novels, was cast.

  His good genius, too, must have overheard his prayers, for his choice of a meeting place for the critical encounters with his beloved could not have been more happily chosen. He would call for her, he said, towards the late afternoon and take her for a short drive along the river. She must bring a shawl as the evenings were sometimes chilly and he proposed to show her a sunset before delivering her safely back to her mother’s house in Kensington. Call he did, but in one of those smart horse-carriages, with a cockaded and billycocked driver in the Victorian style. There was a whole rank of these smart vehicles, drawn by beautifully groomed horses, which occupied a station near Buckingham Palace – a perfect draw for the sentimental tourists who loved to be photographed in them when visiting London. He was not too formally dressed – just enough for a London sunset. She had put on some finery and had obediently borrowed a shawl from her mother – shawls were old-fashioned articles of a past decade, so this was rather distasteful to her, but it was too early to be disobedient.

  She was charmed by his originality and rendered slightly tremulous by his presence. She had practised accepting his offer of marriage in a variety of voices but could not quite decide which to choose. She was going to leave it to fate to decide. For his part he was equally mixed-up but deep down he felt that, in some obscure way, the issue would be decided not by him, but paradoxically enough, by the painter Turner. He began to talk diffusively, discursively, about him, his secret life, the magnitude and simplicity of his vision which ran counter to that of his whole epoch. He quoted, with flashing indignation, the judgement of Constable. (“Paintings only fit to be spit upon.”) And she trembled with sympathetic pain and sadness. What pitiable blindness! But his eyes had turned colour again and she felt the deep stirring of her emotions, so deep in fact that she squeezed her thighs hard together in order to allay them. They jaunted out of the Park and took the river at Battersea Bridge from which they could already see the preliminary conflagration of a late spring sunset with all its sultry brutal saffron and carmine. “We shall be just in time,” he said. “Do you always do this?” she asked and he nodded with fervour. “Ever since my first Turner,” he said, “years ago now. It is different in each season.” He took her hand and pressed it. “It is so very personal,” he went on, “and nobody seems to know it. It is his store cupboard, so to speak.” Then he broke off to inveigh against the Tate for keeping the vast quantity of the artist’s paintings in a cellar and refusing to expose them. And then against Ruskin for exercising censorship. “Shame!” she cried. How broad it was, and how placidly it flowed, the Thames, under the massive and thickset old bridge. There was little traffic on it at this hour so that they were able to hear the rustle of river traffic, distant hootings, even voices. Spars moved upon the evening sky. All London lay around them in the expiring light. The note of the horse’s hooves deepened as they reached land once more, and quite shortly the driver turned sharply to the right, to follow the long sad walls of a factory upon whose river frontage they would later notice the florid legend Silver Belle Flour. On weekdays one could peer through the gates and see flour-whitened figures like snowmen going about their tasks with the air of participating in some medieval rite. But on Sunday all was quiet. Only the children of the poor played their eternal cricket and football upon grass trodden bald by their boots. It was a depressing corner, slummy and down at heel, and she wondered idly where they were going. But it was not far, their destination, for the little church of St. Mary the Virgin still flourished like Martha’s Vineyard in the midst of these gaunt deformities of factory and tenement. When they drew to a halt at the slender iron gates which opened upon a green lawn, she saw that there was a great sweep of skyline open to the west with no cumbersome buildings to break it down and arrest the mind. She looked keenly about her with her bird-like grace. “You will see with His eyes!” he cried suddenly, exultantly – and indeed on an almost theological note, so that she wondered for a moment whether there was not to be a touch of religious fanaticism underneath this exuberance. “Whose?” she asked, turning quite white, her pulse a-flutter. “His!” he said sternly and would vouchsafe no more.

  So the year 1777 came to meet them across the river water in the form of St. Mary the Virgin, with its four eloquent pillars holding up, caryatid-like, the deep-roofed porch. The spire, the clock, the green belfry – so spare yet so vivacious in execution – set off the whole with unemphatic charm. The whole thing seemed to them a paradisiacal model of what village church architecture should be, should stand for. The growling circumambient toils of London around them faded before the calm of these innocent precincts. The grass was crisp and bright before the church, and was studded with a few tall trees. But it was small in extent and ended in the stout sea-wall against which lay a couple of ships, marooned by the tide and lying on their sides with their spars almost in the garden. She did not dare to exclaim, “How beautiful!” for that might have seemed banal. Instead she murmured the Arabic word “Madness!”

  The angle of inclination to the place, too, was inspired and set it at a slight cant towards the curving western corners of the further river, where the dense forest lands gave it a shapely horizon full of screens through which the late sun filtered. The view, so light and airy, could have hardly been any different when the church was first opened to the parish of Battersea five years before Blake elected to marry his Kate there.

  Mr. Craggs, the verger, was waiting for them faithfully with the keys, as he always did, for the Prince took the precaution of phoning ahead when the weather promised a fine sunset. Despite the rules, Mr. Craggs had been suborned by the munificence of the Prince’s tip. “Never less than an ‘ole suffering,” he informed the awestruck clients of the The Raven, or those equally awestruck in The Jug and Bottle or The Old Swan, which practically abutted upon the little church. The Prince had once read in a novel by Thackeray that a sovereign was an “adequate recompense” for a special service rendered, and though the coin was no longer in ordinary use he had his bank send him a dozen every month. It worked wonders, he found. But apart from this he and Craggs had become fast friends, and now the verger was enslaved by the Princess; he helped her down ardently if somewhat creakily, for he was a martyr to lumbago. “Well I never, Master Ahmed,” he said, “what a nice young lass.” The Prince blushed proudly. But today Craggs happily could not stay, for he had a meeting of the Legion – or so he said. “I shall ‘ave to ‘op it I’m afraid.” But he had placed the old oak chair at the strategic place. “I know I can trust you to replace it, sir, and put the key in the ‘ole in the wall.” It was ancient ritual all this, and the Prince nodded. “Have a nice sunset, then,” said Craggs agreeably, winding his woollen scarf round his neck and placing a battered bowler hat on his head. The operation gave him a moment of polite and very tactful hesitation – time to enable the Prince to extract a whole suffering from his waistcoat and press it upon his friend? Craggs gave a false start of surprise as he always did, and then promised to drink Egypt’s health and the lady’s, before stumping off into the evening. It was so calm. They were alone. The cab withdrew to the pub to wait.r />
  “How kind he is,” she said. She had already climbed the two stairs to the deep balcony of the church front. “He has even put a chair out for you. I understand everything now. What a view!” She sat down in the clumsy oaken chair and gazed past the balconies of The Swan to where, on a level horizon and fretted by forest, an unframed Turner sunset burned itself slowly, ruinously away into a fuliginous dusk, touched here and there with life as if from a breath passing over a bed of embers.

  “No!” he said, with the same extreme bliss written on his face. “As yet you do not understand. Fawzia you are sitting in His chair, in Turner’s own chair which he bequeathed to the church! He sat just here to study the light effects, just where you are sitting, for God knows how many years.…” He all but choked with his ardour. To see her there, seated in the Master’s own chair – the cockpit, the vantage-point from which he had embarked upon the great intellectual adventure of becoming himself! His fingers touched the expensive engagement-ring in his pocket – he had had it specially made for her in Nubia. He placed it on her finger now and she submitted with bowed head, only giving a small sniff, perhaps a suppressed sob. And suddenly he felt triumphant. “Of course you will, won’t you?” he said, sure of his response; and like a rock-dove she replied. “Of course I will. Of course I will.”

  He sat himself down on the steps at her side, and thus they waited for darkness to fall, hand touching hand, speechless with joy. Even when it came time to replace the holy chair by the pulpit in the dark church and replace the keys in the ‘ole, they did not utter a sound for fear of shattering the gorgeous complicity of the moment. She felt as if the ring weighed a ton.

  So they clip-clopped home in lazy and loitering fashion, and she was glad of the shawl as they drew near Kensington and her mother. The entire contents of the casket labelled Human Happiness appeared to have been emptied upon their heads from a spring sky. He saw her to her house porch without a word and then, dismissing the cab, set out to walk across London to regain his flat. He felt like a comet, trailing the fire of the painter’s inspiration which chance had bestowed on them.

  From thenceforward, he reflected now, as the train ground its way towards the capital, everything had borne fruit, and their marriage had become the envy of less lucky friends. She had asked the young Farouk to give her away – her father was dead, she had no male relations, and she had the right to do so, for soon the stripling would be King. This the young man did with grace and style, surprising everyone by his gazelle-like adolescent beauty and his courtier’s address. How he had changed now, thought Prince Hassad, stubbing out his cigarette. The caterpillar-like sloth, the sudden rages and fits of weeping … What a fate! Yet when he began his reign it was like the début of a Nero, an auspicious entry upon the world of power, full of authority and idealism. He sighed as the new image replaced the old in his memory.

  Then followed the good years in London as a young attaché. The wind had set fair for them, London liked them. Their children were beautiful and clever, without problems.

  The magnetism held, and here his little wife showed brilliant insight for she adopted more than one role with him. When she was pregnant with their second child they ran away to France and played at being artists in a secluded mas near Avignon – two months of bliss. She let herself go, was dishevelled and out of breath as she bent over the cooking pots, while he reverently prepared her vegetables. Her breasts were full of milk from which he drew frequent swigs. They were both of them none too clean, too, like joyous peasants. Her hair smelt divinely of cooking, her body of spices and sweat. He adored her boeu fen daube; she admired his wood-cutting and fire-lighting, as well as his fashion of polishing glasses. He snuffled into her wild eatable housewife’s hair like a truffle hound on the scent. All this was very good for the gestation of their little son. In the years to come his love-making would profit from all their happy abandonment, their sensuality. “From your way of making love,” he said, “one can see that he will print up quite beautifully as a man, little Fouad.” They avoided all that was fashionable but they did visit Saint Tropez, a tiny hamlet of scarce a dozen cottages, where already the famous and inebriated Quin-Quin had opened her shop and offered to sell Fawzia a scent which was really vulgar, something from the bazaar. A scent which threw open its arms to you and said “Me-voici!” But the Prince was doubtful about its propriety if she wore it in London. “You would excite the whole Embassy unbearably,” he said.

  Of course there were mishaps as well and shoals to face, as in every marriage, but nothing can withstand devotion. During her third confinement he contracted a vexatious though slight venereal infection from a young lady-in-waiting fresh from Cairo and was very much cast down by the misadventure. But Fawzia took the whole thing in her stride and nursed him with a passionate devotion. She was glad to have an excuse to show the depth of her attachment to him; she almost thanked him for giving her the chance to show how irreplaceable she really was and how magnanimous. He was overwhelmed with wonder and joy. He suddenly realised what a real woman is capable of facing. It was a little frightening. He swallowed his humiliation and submitted to her tender care like a child, glorying in the feeling of security and forgiveness. (The lady-in-waiting was banished back to Cairo, however, in very short order.)

  Far from separating them, this little contretemps brought them closer together. He could afford to be weak with her for she scorned to take advantage of his weakness. “Goodness!” he said. “You are extraordinary!” He meant it.

  She smiled grimly, almost scientifically.

  “I love you,” she explained in her somewhat inconsequential fashion, “not because you are my husband but because you are such a man!” He echoed the word feebly though he did not contradict her. Long may she cherish the illusion, he told himself. She kissed his brow and he fell asleep filled with the density of this loving memory. The other children were told he had gout.