The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  And you know, Felix, I am an old friend and love him dearly, so I am not just being malicious about the matter. He is a disaster!”

  Felix was delighted by the sincerity and familiarity of the old Prince’s conversation; it somehow set the seal upon his own new maturity, for he himself had changed very much since the outbreak of war. First of all he had secured a vastly superior posting to Geneva – ironically enough he had moved heaven and earth to get himself called up for the Air Force, but with no result. The Foreign Office had “frozen” him in his new duties which were not too arduous and only mildly confidential. Best of all, Lord Galen had been so impressed by the eminence of his new rank that he had offered him a rather handsome allowance upon which he could not only live in good style but also run a small car, which greatly aided the image carried by his rank. The change in him was rapid and very much for the better; he became quite at home in the more famous auberges of the town, and indeed in the more respectable night clubs. He even managed to conquer his innate timidity enough to invite the occasional dance-hostess back to his flat for the night. He had grown taller and very much more handsome and assured the Prince that he would be happy one day to accept a Cairo posting if it could be arranged. “Of course it could. The Minister is my friend,” cried the little man with vehemence. “He would do anything for me. It’s thanks to the Mount of Olives, as we call him, that I am here really, in the teeth of those old Arab Bureau slyboots. I will start work on it as soon as I wind up here and in Paris and go back to Egypt. We will speak more of this matter – this is not the place.”

  Everything, for the Prince, had a place and an appropriate time; it was amazing how he kept things so sorted out in the filing cabinet of his memory. Most people in his position would by now have succumbed to the role of “delegating” to an assistant. It was this quality which made Constance sure that he would devote some of his private time entirely to herself – there was a whole sea of conversational matter between them which had not yet been taken into account. She quietly stood back and waited for him to complete the first social evolutions on his agenda. Sure enough after a week during which he had sent a bunch of red roses to her flat every morning, he proposed lunch and a drive round the lake in the afternoon.

  It was a brilliantly sunny day despite a fresh wind off the distant snows – for already the traditional autumn decor of Switzerland was beginning to assert itself; the Prince, compensating for his short legs by a prop in the form of a cushion, was at the wheel of the office limousine. They set off in a sort of bemused silence due to a sudden attack of shyness which took them both by surprise. “How strange,” he said at last in a puzzled voice, “I feel that I don’t know where to begin.… Isn’t it strange? Help me, Constance, will you?” She smiled, and shaking her hair out of her eyes said, “I know. What a strange sense of inhibition! Dear Prince Hassad, forgive me. Let us begin with him, with Sam.” He recognised at once that she was correct in her assessment of their mutual reluctance to talk of the death which nagged them. He began to talk now, quietly but with emphasis, about the fatal picnic party and the Bridge of Sighs, and he could feel her physical tension, the timbre of her anxiety, as yet hardly even translated into physical form, though her fingers trembled slightly as she lit a cigarette, and she turned away from him rather abruptly to gaze out of the car window at the fleeting lake scenes they were passing. Once launched, however, he spared no detail, for all the world as if he were anxious himself to unload the full burden of his guilt, to expurgate the whole incident for which he knew himself to be responsible. Indeed he was paradoxically a little hurt when she said sharply, “There is no real question of guilt. I think we should drop that notion, it leads nowhere. The same thing could have happened in Piccadilly with a runaway taxi, you know that as well as I do. Only …”

  “Only?” he echoed, gazing at her.

  “The thing has filled me with impatience and anger and the sensation of uselessness. I have been seriously thinking of going back to the U.K., shelving all my commitments here and finding something useful to do there. After all, there something real is happening, they are being starved and bombed. They are in the thick of it, while here we are skulking on the outskirts of reality. The Swiss get on my nerves, they are so dull and gluttonous.”

  “I know what you feel,” he said thoughtfully, “but I think you should not act in too great haste. You are doing valuable work here; and if you did move I can think of more useful places for you to occupy. No, I don’t agree.” He shook his head somewhat sternly. It made her smile affectionately and putting her hand fleetingly on his arm she said, “You sound reproachful.”

  “No, but for someone so clever not to recognise that you are only acting out of a sense of guilt. You want to be punished, that is what, so you seek action, fear, discomfort.”

  He was right, of course, and she knew it. “I am just run down,” she said. “I’m tired of the insane, I need a change. But a radical one.” They drove on in silence for a while. Then she went on: “I’ve got so jumpy, and that is a bad sign in my line of business. Yesterday a dying patient threw his slops at the nursing sisters – they are nuns in my ward – and screamed, ‘You don’t love me at all. You love Jesus, you hypocrites! I want to be loved for myself! Take your hands off me, you bloody masks!’ To my surprise I burst into tears – a poor advertisement for a doctor.”

  “Well, you will need a change; how would you feel about a visit to Tu Duc? I have to visit Avignon quite soon; I saw the German Mission yesterday and they have agreed to get Berlin’s authority to have Red Cross representation in the unoccupied zone – though I don’t think it is going to remain unoccupied long. What do you say – a trip into enemy country, so to speak? It’s a rather unSwiss remark, I am afraid.”

  “Back to Avignon?” she mused, for the idea seemed quite chimerical, unrealisable; the rail system was dislocated and the frontier closed, this much she knew from the steady flow of visitors which passed through Geneva, as often as not to call upon friends and relations taking treatment in various clinics. The city has been from time immemorial a vast sanatorium as well as a political cross-roads. Its present neutrality was nothing new; a spycraft and international banking were still flourishing, and the buzz of loans and mergers was always in the air. The Prince found all this delightful, suggestive, invigorating.

  “In fact,” he said, “when the post is approved I will offer you first refusal of it. It might suit you for a year to work there for us, and come back to Geneva every other week. To keep on your flat and continue your present job in a less exacting sense. What would you say?”

  What could she say? The prospect was such an unexpected one that she could hardly visualise it to herself, much less take a decision involving it. When they had left Provence they had envisaged saying goodbye to it for years, perhaps forever. In the case of Sam it had become indeed a case of forever; she closed her eyes and conjured up the battered old balcony upon which they had spent so much of their summer, the woods dripping now with the first winter mists and heavy dawn-frosts. The melancholy road winding down past Tubain towards the silent town with its assemblage of belfries and towers, its cruising walls still hairy with stork’s nests, its gypsy-infiltrated bastions.

  “I don’t know. I must think.”

  “Of course you must,” he said, “and the post has not yet begun to exist, so you have time ahead of you to consider it.”

  “I shall do so,” she said, and with that the car which had stolen back into the grey town, took an abrupt turn and entered the drive of the Egyptian Legation. On the steps under the portico a young man was alerted and came towards them. He was a tall and extremely handsome personage. The Prince tooted softly at him and said, “Ah there he is at last! This is Mr. Affad, my conscience, my guide, my banker, my confessor – anything you wish. I know you will like him.” He was indeed an extraordinarily attractive man with his quiet and well-bred air, his attentive serviability. He opened the door of the car and offered her his capable brown
hand, saying as he did so, “I am by now a friend of Aubrey, a firm friend, so I have no hesitation in asking you to please accept me too as a friend. I have heard a great deal about you, and have been hoping to meet you. There! I have said my piece.” She asked if he was with the Prince and he replied that he was. “I am supposed to be his business adviser and to keep him out of mischief, and I try to. But it’s not always possible.”

  It was nearly tea-time and the Prince led the way to the garden where in a glassed-in verandah full of hot-house blooms there stood an elaborate tea-table prepared for such as wished with cakes of every sort. A servant also appeared with water for the tea-pot and they seated themselves comfortably around the metal garden table to have a cup of China tea. Affad seemed about to embark on a remark involving some of the Prince’s business when he caught himself up and lapsed into silence; noticing this the Prince said, “It’s all right, Affad, you can talk in front of her; she is a close friend.” Affad looked pleasingly confused and replied, “You read my mind wrong. I was about to start talking shop, but it was not for security reasons I braked: it seemed to be impolite to talk shop before a third party – that’s all.” The Prince wagged his head impatiently and said, “Hoighty-toighty, what a pother! She won’t mind if we speak freely, eh my dear? I thought not.”

  He turned to Affad and said, “Well.”

  The banker produced a small red notebook from his pocket and turned the pages. “Very well,” he said, “first the journey to Sweden and to Paris is fixed. Communications are so haphazard that it may take longer than you think. I have had a long talk with the astrologer Moricand. It is true that he was invited to visit Hitler but he could not get through the lines with all the fighting, so he returned here to wait.”

  The Prince was absentmindedly feeling in his own pockets for a memorandum book with the manifest intention of jotting down some notes, but he came upon some snaps of his children and began to study them carefully, with a pleasure that was almost unction. He listened to his adviser with only half an ear, so to speak. “Astrologer!” he said vaguely. “What next?” The children stood staring into the camera with their doe-like regard. “How beautiful they are, little children,” mused the Prince. “Each carries its destiny in its little soul – a destiny which slowly unrolls like a prayer-mat.” He was suddenly overcome by guilt and came to himself with a start. He put the photos away with despatch and turned back to Affad who was saying, “You know, he lives by predictions, like a sort of Tiberius; there is great competition among soothsayers to capture his ear. We may turn this weakness to our own profit later on. I am glad you brought your Templar head on the off-chance. It’s the kind of thing … we shall see. But what seems imminent is Russia; the whole machine has wheeled round in that direction. I suppose with Greece defeated and the English pinned back in Egypt by Rommel the little man feels free to move: no flank problems.”

  “I have so many irons in the fires,” sighed the Prince to Constance. “I must also arrange a trip to Vichy. The Jewish community of Egypt is offering vast sums to ransom their own kith and kin in France and I must find someone who has the ear of Laval. That is why Avignon, you see; then also the British have unearthed some new intelligence which informs us that the Nazis believe that the Templar treasure still exists somewhere in the Provençal area of France, indeed that Lord Galen’s team had actually pinpointed the place but were forced to decamp before they could dig it up. Two members of the staff who stayed on have been arrested already, and one has died under torture. Ironically enough a secretary who was dumb, and could not speak to them! They thought he was just being obstinate and tortured the poor chap until he died. What a world, what vermin!” He stood up and said, “Well, I have things to settle before I leave.” Tenderly, reluctantly, he took his leave of her, promising that he would contact her directly he got back, perhaps in ten days or so. “Affad will drive you home. He is going to stay on a while here, and has messages for Aubrey’s friends.”

  “I can tell you where to find them,” she said, “with a fair degree of certainty; they foregather almost every evening about this time at a rather disreputable old pub. I can show you where it is if you are going to run me back to my flat, which is quite near.”

  “With pleasure,” he said, and the three of them crossed the rotunda and descended the marble stairs into the drive where the old limousine waited for them. The Prince did not make heavy weather of his goodbyes, for he did not think he would be long away. Time proved him to be mistaken but this was not to be foreseen now, as they parted company among the green lawns and gravel stretches of the Egyptian Legation. Affad drove very slowly and carefully, talking to Constance in a low voice about ephemeral, indeed frivolous, matters until they reached her flat, after they had passed the bar and he had duly taken note of its address. He was really an extraordinarily attractive man, or at least she found him to be so; but as she did not approve of this feeling she frowned upon it and upon him and informed herself sententiously, “Charm is no real substitute for character. There!” Nevertheless she stayed chatting to him in the car for a moment, telling herself that she must be nice to the friends of the Prince. But she found herself admiring his brown hands as they rested on the wheel of the car, and the easy negligence of his dress; for his part he found her very beautiful but slightly mannish – he mentally tried divesting her of all that beautiful hair and crediting her with a moustache. It was a trick he often used when he wanted to “see” into the character of someone, to change their sex mentally. Often it was quite a revelation. But in this case the moustache didn’t really fit, and even as a boy she made a very pretty Narcissus. He gave up at last and said, smiling, “The Prince says you are now an analyst. I suppose you treat our dreams as bottled wishes.” She laughed and replied, “More or less.”

  And on that note, with a laugh and a warm handshake, they agreed to part, though he asked if he might ring up and keep her informed of the Prince’s movements. “Of course,” she said and wrote down her number. The car drew away, and turning the corner, came to a stop outside the old Bar de la Navigation, where Sutcliffe who had just missed an easy shot was using very bad language. Seeing the car he cried to his friend, “There’s the black car, Toby. Look out. There’s an armed man just crossed the road. He’s coming in here.” That performance was so lifelike that Toby almost bolted to the lavatory to hide. It took a moment to reassure him, though Affad did not look at all like a gunman; but when he said that he had just come with messages from Blanford everyone raised their heads and expressed great interest. Affad obtained a drink from the gloomy bar-tender and joined them round the billiard table, to talk while they played on. It was his first introduction to the little group of which he was soon to become an inseparable part.

  SEVEN

  Orientations

  THE HARSH WHITE LIGHT OVER THE GREEN BILLIARD table outlined the massive forms of the two stout men, making a contrast with the more slender silhouette of Constance, who had agreed to form a trio with them. It was a restful way of spending the twilight – nobody had spoken for a full ten minutes. Seated in an armchair by the cue-rack sat the negligent and elegant form of Affad, who was watching intently and drawing from time to time upon a cigar. The balls clicked contentedly as they rumbled about the green cloth. Sutcliffe paused to take a swig of his beer and said, for the fourth time that evening, “I’m blowed if I know what has been eating you; why, I mean, you have come to this decision, which seems futile, romantic, dramatic … I mean to say?” He chalked his cue petulantly, as if to alleviate his perplexity and annoyance.

  Constance showed signs now of creating a “break”, so that she did not answer directly; she pursued her advantage until a missed stroke halted her progress. “I have told you why, but you won’t grasp it. I want to do something more active. What good is a poor psychiatrist when the whole world has gone out of its mind?”

  Toby failed to exploit a lucky shot now and whispered a very abrasive epithet to himself. “It’s just maidenly vapours,”
he said disagreeably. “Believe what you please,” she snapped, “but at any rate I am going into France to see for myself if such a posting wouldn’t be just what I need at the moment. I know what you are thinking – that all this is a backlash from Sam’s death; but that Only catalysed things! My dissatisfaction with medicine has been going on a long time, and it’s not connected only with that, it has also to do with being a woman. Yes, damn it, being a woman.”

  “How is that?” said Affad curiously, for she had sounded quite specially intense. “What has being a woman got to do with the matter – and specially this journey?” Constance chalked her cue with robust determination and said, “A woman doctor is no good. The masculine shaman is too strong for her, she will never be taken really seriously even though she is twice as good as any man. When the door opens and the doctor is announced the appearance of a woman doctor creates anti-climax. The patient’s heart sinks when he sees he has to deal with a woman when he needed to see her husband. Woman can cure, all right, but only the man, her husband, can heal. It is all rubbish of course but the patient’s soul feels this, his infantile soul feels it; for when illness comes one becomes a child again, helpless, passive. What can a woman do? O yes, she has learned a trick or two from her husband about chemicals; but she can’t convey the massive authority and warmth and paternalism of the man-doctor.” Toby shook his head firmly and said, “I think you are exaggerating, Constance.” The girl pursed her lips as she played on, letting her theme elaborate itself in her mind.