The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Realising his role as confidant, his therapy, Sutcliffe plied her with questions, made her spit the whole poisoned lot of it out into his lap. They talked on and on in the darkness and in the intervals between the sound of their voices they heard the whewing of gulls or the bray of a ferry-siren mixed into the simmering noise of rain on the windows. The topic of their conversation, their common distress, united them in a harmonious web of shared emotions; but the slow spirals of alcohol in the blood led them further and further towards incoherence, and at last into the fastnesses of sleep. His snores replaced his sobs, and gained in splendour as he slept, his head on her companionable shoulder. It was dawn when she woke with a start – the night had folded itself away like a screen. On tiptoe so as not to wake her confidant she betook herself to the kitchen and set going a copious breakfast which she knew she would need as much as he; though it was early she made haste, for she had work to do across the lake. Sutcliffe slept on, quaking into a snore from time to time, his frame wobbling jelly-like and then settling again into its mould. He too had work that morning and would be glad of the hot shower and the plate of bacon and eggs when he awoke. Nor were the promptings of reality unhelpful, for the telephone rang and cut through his sleep like scissors. Constance answered it briefly and turned to her guest who was beginning to stretch and yawn his way back to life. “It is Schwarz,” she said with relief, “he is back on duty again and I can return to my own cases at last. Is there anything that you would like me to tell him when we consult later on this morning? Or to tell her for that matter?”

  Sutcliffe pondered heavily. “I was once promised that she could go for walks round the lake in the afternoons; what has happened to that idea?” Constance shook her head. “I did not hear of it. Perhaps she showed a disinclination to meet you? I will find out.” He lumbered to the lavatory, having selected an old copy of The Times to read there, leaving her to clear the place and lay their breakfast table which she did with despatch and care, for the extent of their alcoholic abuses had rather alarmed her in a medical sense. The murdered bottle of vodka lay there, showing its teeth, so to speak. Had they really put away so much? Noises from the lavatory answered her question. She tapped on the door to ask if he was all right. “Yes, thank you,” he said. “I was just lost in the liana of my lucubrations as I unwound the Times leader. Rigorous, cleansing prose. After this I shall totter to my office, as pretty as a virgin with horns. Ah, my head!”

  But the weather had cleared and a fragile sunlight enhanced the lake mist with its gleams. They embraced warmly as they separated. “O thank you, my dear,” she cried impulsively and he spread wide his arms in a gesture of resignation. “Fifty-fifty,” he replied.

  It was no more than the truth. “And do remember that if you wish to send Aubrey a message I can have it sent over the Red Cross teleprinter.” Sutcliffe chuckled again and nodded his head vigorously. “I certainly shall,” he said with a smile. “But above all, Connie, please keep in touch with me now and help me if you see any way.”

  “Of course.”

  The little office smelt of Turkish cigarettes rather than French, and he knew at once that his partner Ryder had been in that morning; it was equally obvious from the litter of press cuttings and half-typed pages which adorned the desk next to his own. That week there had been an awful lot of technical articles to translate from Swiss and German periodicals. Laboriously, in a frenzy of tedium so to speak, they were wading about in search of the scrambler device which rendered the codes of the German “enigma machine” so impenetrable to their own Intelligence. Thousands and thousands of articles had been combed, and thousands awaited them. Ryder and he were building up a “scrambler file” which would contain almost all that was known on this abstruse topic. Ryder – astonishing for a regular officer – was a brilliant German scholar and had been delegated to this pedestrian task, which he performed with discipline and good humour. A small peppery young man with a toothbrush moustache, he was always on time; he drank and smoked most moderately and lost his temper infrequently. Sutcliffe hated him, because he always felt that Ryder’s professionalism showed his own behaviour up for the lackadaisical sort of article it was. Sometimes when Ryder criticised a passage in a translation he would feel that he was steadily turning blue with rage. He gritted his teeth and felt the muscles at his temples squirm with irritation.

  But he had to accept these strictures for what they were – observations from someone with superior knowledge; and bow to circumstance, for Ryder was head of the section, and their translations went in under his name and signature. Sutcliffe was only a clerk. How hateful it was to be a subordinate!

  He slumped down at his desk and felt his gorge rise as he turned over with one finger a clump of cuttings from the German press. He was about to address himself to his file when Ryder himself walked into the office, beaming and holding two champagne glasses in his right hand and a bottle wrapped in a wet cloth in his left. His springy bantam’s walk was made more pronounced today by his obvious good humour. “Today,” he said, “is a day for a celebration. So I brought the necessary. A drink is in order. H.E. yesterday sent us a strong commendation, and is putting me in for a gong.” Sutcliffe groaned with disgust. He was about to say, “Is that all?” when his companion went on: “But that is not the reason. Last night I got through to London and I gather that at last they have started to get the hang of the damned scramble device on the model – the only one – we’ve squeezed out of Jerry so far.” That was indeed great news and worth celebrating, for it implied being delivered from any more articles of scientific purport in the near future, and the thought made Sutcliffe happy. But … much as he would have liked to toast Ryder’s “gong” his overwhelming hangover with its waves of deafness and nausea made the prospect something of a dilemma. Nevertheless, he did not wish to seem churlish. “Just a little,” he cried feebly, but his companion, full of goodwill, filled him a brimming glass and pressed it upon him saying, “Come along my lad. Here’s to us!” Ironically, too, the wine was a yeared Bollinger of almost carnal subtlety and while Sutcliffe’s stomach quailed his palate hungered for the treat. He closed his eyes and with a sort of lustful despair, like a man diving off a cliff, he thrust his nose into the beaker and took aboard a vast draught of the precious stuff. How good it tasted, yes, but as it whorled its way down into his stomach it set up all the foreseen reactions, at first slowly, then in more explicit spasms. Retire to the lavatory he must, and in haste; to his intense fury he was disgracefully sick. It seemed somehow symbolic of the whole mess they were in – the mess the world was in: the mess in the heart of reality itself. “First free drink I get on Hitler and look what happens!” And with the news so bad, the future so dark, it was not possible to hope that there might be another. Ryder said, not without admiration, “Some hangover, I must say!”

  Sutcliffe groaned and resumed his place at his desk, pale as rice. “It’s the Grand Climacteric,” he said, “I knew I would reach it one day.” And in answer to Ryder’s question as to what that might be he replied with dignity, “The Grand Climacteric is the moment at which the problem of when to die takes precedence over that of how to live.” The lavatory mirror had deeply reproached and dispirited him – his eyes appeared to be poached in liver extract. Nor was the burden much lightened when Dr. Schwarz telephoned and told him with unction that the afternoon walks for his wife had been sanctioned on condition that they took place when he was not about; he must not see her lest she feel that she was followed or in any way persecuted. “Persecuted!” he lunged out the word contemptuously at the good doctor, who for his part added, “She will be accompanied by her friend – the negro one – who has agreed to come and fetch her between three and four in the afternoon.” He hoped that this would meet with Sutcliffe’s approval.

  So began the afternoon ritual which from now on would dominate his life in the afternoons; the pale blonde girl and the slender vivid negress (so often clad in violet, magenta, orange) walking slowly arm in arm along th
e shores of the grey lake. Behind them at a great distance came Sutcliffe in dark glasses and hat, coat-collar turned up in a furtive manner. He did it in order to see her; he could not resist the urge to do so, for she still ached him and dominated his restless imagination. The illness, uncoiling as slowly as a python, poisoned his self-possession by its remissions and labyrinthine metamorphoses. He followed the two of them as one might follow a funeral, muttering to himself, sometimes suddenly striking out to left or right with his cane, as if to strike off the heads of imaginary flowers, for none grew on the bitter grey concrete reaches of the Grand Corniche.

  From time to time the dark girl might pause, point at something, and speak, often with laughter and buoyant gestures; she had a ringing sane laugh and a big mouth like an open umbrella. Her pale companion never smiled, however, for she had been shocked into silence. Yet sometimes she echoed a word here or there in a small and precise tone, puzzled by its unfamiliarity. Her whole manner suggested that she had regressed in panic to the age of ten.

  Far, far behind them walked the solitary bondsman of this unholy trinity, nursing in his mind murderous thoughts about destiny and the treatment of Dr. Schwarz. “You know damned well,” he might tell the absent doctor in his mind, “you know damned well, Schwarz, that the subconscious is fished out – there’s hardly a sprat left. So you are driven back to base, my lad, with the old fashioned mind-fuck machine of an electro-convulsion-therapy jag. Any poet will tell you that the basic illness is the ego which, when it swells, engenders stress, dislocating reality. Then the unbeknownst steps in with its gnomes and Doppelgängers; but once you realise this simple fact your positivism falls from you like a cloak. The penny drops, the jeton engages, and you have the Dalai Lama himself on the wire; what comes out now is poetry – that highly aberrant act of nature! It lies the other side of a crisis of identity, stresspoint, flashpoint, turnstile. Once in these calm waters one reads new meaning into things.” So, lumbering along in his operatic disguise, he might stop to stare hard at the back of his wife as he resumed his monologue. “Thus and only thus does one become a great lover, shedding the scar-tissue of old dried up love-poems; despite my chain-smoked eyes and lamprey’s smirk I have become at last the One I really was all along. A lover made for the intensive care ward of some great asylum on the lake, where Connie in her white smock with her bunch of keys moves gravely among the toys they give to lunatics in a vain attempt to curry favour with them. Schwarz, when you step outside Christianity and look back at it through the bars your blood runs cold!”

  The girls ahead of him paused at a stall which was selling fresh beignets de pommes, apple-fritters, and bought one each; suddenly Sutcliffe felt violently hungry from all this pious cerebration. He could not wait for them to continue their walk so that he might himself approach the stall in sneaking fashion. He watched them wolfishly as they bit into their hot fritters, happily licking the icing sugar from lips and fingers. The simple gesture had transformed them into schoolgirls enjoying an afternoon off. The pale one almost smiled, as if the sweetness of the sugar dust brought back vague and long-vanished memories. Once more they resumed their quiet stroll while Sutcliffe’s stomach contracted with desire and the saliva rose in his mouth. It was an agony to wait for them to take themselves off to a reasonable distance, leaving him free to hurry to the stall and snap out an order for a couple of these delectable comestibles. He watched their retreating backs against the grey mountains, himself standing still, holding a fritter in each hand, his eyes full of tears. Guilt overwhelmed him. He ate ravenously, astonished at his own febrile lust. Vanished scenes came to mind – of when she lay in his arms with her eyes closed, sleeping like Ophelia among the lilies; even then her mind was fraying and he had an obstinate notion that if he managed to make her pregnant it might condense her wits. But she behaved as if she did not understand what his desire might mean. She obeyed him like an animal but without emotion, according him every sexual liberty but without a hint of participation. Their kisses expired in air, and no child came of them. He wrapped his coat more closely around him now and resumed his prowling monologue with the absent Schwarz – the eminent Black, which symbolises death to the psyche of the Christians. Death, the old specialist in unhappiness, always there, unhurriedly waiting for the phone to ring. The while over grey Geneva the soft pornic clocks choked out their chimes: at night old teeth ached in the fragile mouthscape of the indented coast. “What precautions can one take against the suicide of a patient?” Schwarz had asked humbly; he spread his hands to suggest the vastness of utter impossibility. “None.” The Christian mind is a wonderland of smut, so thought the unhappy writer as he lumbered along. Why was it so hard to imagine a reality without qualities, and an illusory soul? The whole of Europe was dying of blood-poisoning because of this inability. As indeed they both had been, long before she abdicated and renounced the safety-nets of logic and reason. It was all very well to be clever – how bitterly he regretted all those self-consciously ironic propositions he had advanced in his conversations with her, stupidly imagining that she might through them admire the brilliance of his intellect. As when he remarked that the whole paradox of love for him lay in the fact that one wanted something permanent but which did not last too long. He had been well repaid for his lack of sincerity in his loving! The white-coated doctors had gathered around them in clusters, their voices softer than moths.

  Thus had opened the Vienna period with Freud and Jung – the sweet-and-sour pork of psychoanalysis, so to speak. Taking apart the clumsy old folkweave Unconscious with all its terrors and aborted ardours. He got the hang of it fairly quickly and was dazed by the suggestions it opened up; in those enthusiastic early times nobody knew that these marvellous vistas ended in a cul de sac. If there was a dropped stitch in the folkweave there was nothing that could be done – unless of course by suicide which unravelled the whole cloth. Nevertheless he had learned much from this stay. It had been a test, and a stern one. Drink and cream cakes had done for him. Someone, perhaps Freud himself, had assured him that strong characters are nearly always constructed around some grave central weakness, a central flaw. We live in a state of over-compensation for this flaw; our tears of pain solidify into jewels of insight. “The sickness of the oyster is the pearl.” But after a drink or two had cooled him he realised always that if happiness had not come his way it must have been because he had never really prepared himself to receive it. Now, after such a long period of misadventure, he realised in what sense Western Man had got his priorities wrong; the target was not between the thighs, but between the eyes – the pineal gland of the white vision.

  Other memories surged in upon him as he watched the two receding figures of the women ahead of him. Soon they would reach the end of the Corniche and it would be the signal for him to turn aside and scuttle into the side streets, safe from recognition. Trash the negress was very animated today, but he was not near enough to hear that robust laughter; happily, for it would have put him in a rage, by reminding him of how she had provoked a scene of violence in a Sapphic club in underground Vienna, and all because he had followed them, wistfully hoping to detatch her companion, to reclaim her, so to speak. In his rage he had shaken his fist at Trash and promised to beat her up; he had received a box on the ear which made his head sing. The door was slammed in his face, and the Judas clicked shut, leaving him alone in the draughty street, now smelling of night and approaching snow. He turned aside into a cafe and drank his wits into a curdle of incoherent shames and loathings. Trash was not a woman, she worked on batteries, so he told himself. On the coat-hanger in the cafe entrance he had noticed a walking stick hanging on a peg. It gave him an idea. He would burst in upon them and administer the necessary punishment to the negress who had thrust herself between his sick wife and himself. When he went wandering back with the stolen weapon he found to his surprise that the door was ajar. He entered somewhat unsteadily but with the gleam of battle in his eye and slowly negotiated a corridor lined with heavy damascene
d curtains which smelt suffocatingly of dust and the piss of cats. He had hardly got inside this high-ceilinged saloon when the lights went out with a snap and he realised he had fallen into an ambush; for from all sides naked figures leapt through the curtains and started to belabour him with sticks and umbrellas. His hat was pulped, his tie torn off at a single wrench; he was beaten to his knees and forced to defend himself wildly with his stick, and though he got in a smart cut or two he was soon disarmed and overwhelmed by the invisible girls – for he smelt they were women, for all that he could not see them. It was lucky that they did not break anything apart from his spectacles which were expensive ones. He drew himself together as best he could from this rain of blows and thumps. He retreated slowly, ignominiously, on all fours in the direction of the passage which led to the front door, and once outside they were content to let him go in peace. He scrambled out into the street covered in bruises and sweating with humiliation. He stood for a while swearing at the sky but refreshing himself with the prickle of light snow on his face …

  Ah! But now the women had turned to begin the return journey; it was his cue to make himself scarce, and this he did with alacrity, hopping across the main road and into the anonymity of the side street, making his way slowly back to his office, where he might stay until six before joining his donnish friend at the flat, or heading directly for the homely old Bar, so ill-lit and gloomy and full of sombre furniture. It was the appropriate cocoon for the two bachelors. Here he ordered a drink and sat down with the Geneva newspaper which was so clumsily compiled and written that it seemed to him to be the work of an analphabetic moron from the nearby snows. Even the war news which was enough to strike a chill of despair into any citizen’s heart somehow emerged from its smudgy paragraphs as without significance; it was partly due to the French written by Swiss – like porridge poured into a guitar.