The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  He had spent a no less gloomy moment at the bedside of the recumbent Blanford whose friendship he now treasured almost as much as that of the Prince. “It was my fault for letting her see passages from the bloody novel; it made her understand how crucial your beliefs were to your life … you hadn’t told her, had you? O God, I am so sorry. But from her point of view you are simply ill, so to speak; you are suffering from a dangerous form of religious mania which she must be dying to cure in order to keep you!” Affad wrung his hands as he listened. He implored his friend to spare him any further analysis. The “bloody” novel lay before Blanford on the bed. He touched it wistfully from time to time with an air of deep regret. “Sebastian, please forgive me!” he said.

  Affad rose. He stood for a while looking down upon the troubled face of his recumbent friend with affection and sympathy. “Aubrey!” he said aloud and fell silent. Just the word, like a note in music. He did not add a goodbye for it would have seemed out of place – for he was not going anywhere in the profoundest sense. But he did add: “Please write to me when you feel like it; I am not sure when I shall come back, but my intention of the moment is to return in three or four months.”

  “I know you will come back. I have begun to see a little way into the pattern, the apparent confusion is beginning to make sense. I realise now that I came to Egypt because I was ill, I was afraid of the man on my back. I did a Sinbad in the hope of ridding myself of Sutcliffe – you will have noticed my various attempts to dispense with him, to make him commit suicide for example, using the bridge as a symbol. I had to have my spine shot into holes before I realised that the only way to deal with the Socratic Voice is to concretise it, let it live, manifest itself. Then it becomes a harmless ghost, it passes off in a fever, it writes the classic phrase for you. It can do everything but love. That you must do for yourself.”

  “O God!” said Affad dismally. “Again!”

  “I had formed him just as one forms a renal calculus – or a teratoma, or the shadowy figure of one’s twin which must be thrown by the ever-present witness of birth, the placenta. To hell with all this verbiage! The creature is alive, he is coming to lunch, he will even get an O.B.E. in a while for his services to the Crown. O God, Sebastian, I wish you were staying; I have learned so much from you!”

  Still his friend said nothing but simply stood looking down at him affectionately. Blanford had become very thin and pale and drawn-looking; the spinal operations had taken their toll of his health, but so far they had been successful, and the surgeons believed that the next and most critical would be the last. After that it was up to the musculature to recover its tone once more, and for the patient to begin to dream of sitting up, and then walking once more. It seemed such a dream from this vantage point in time. He himself hardly dared contemplate the thought for fear of an ultimate disappointment. He poured out some mineral water from the bottle at his bedside and drank down a draught, but not without pledging his companion ironically in the harmless brew. Alcohol for the nonce was forbidden or he would have proposed a drink in token of farewell. But it was better thus.

  So Affad had taken his leave in a thoughtful and sorrowful silence. And the same afternoon while the nurse was bathing and dressing Blanford, Constance looked in for a brief, unexpected visit – the new Constance, so to speak. For she was pale with sleeplessness and professional stress and her talk was languid and of an unusual vagueness. She did not mention her lover, nor did he, for his own distress and confusion were further deepened by the obstinate knowledge that he himself loved her and regretted the harm caused by his selfishness and self-importance. They sat for a while in silence, her hand lying upon his arm, full of an unstressed affection, and perhaps a tiny bit pleading, as if for sympathy. They were not at the end of their surprises, it would seem. It was the death of Livia, now.

  To her immense surprise the information had come as a profound shock to Felix Chatto, of all people – he had been almost physically knocked over by it. All his new social assurance and devil-may-care airs had deserted him. The easy splendour of the man of the world – it had vanished, to leave in its place a frightened undergraduate. It was indeed a profound puzzle to the boy himself – yes, while Livia was alive he had lavished an adolescent attachment upon her; but he had never had any faith in his own feelings, he just enjoyed making his friend Aubrey suffer – as apparently had she. Now with the knowledge that Constance brought him he had made the discovery that, after all, he must have loved her – for he loved her still, retroactively, retrospectively – he was sick with the thought of her disappearance, even though he had hardly spared her a thought in all these long mysterious months during which she had vanished and her continuing existence could only be supposed! (I am sick, thought Constance, of sitting at bedsides and prescribing sedatives!) But this paradoxical behaviour touched and interested her, as much as it seemed to surprise the boy himself. He was, for example, avid for every scrap of information concerning the death of Livia; he wanted to know in great detail how she had been found, how the body had been cut down and disposed of, even such minor points as the slit vein in the thigh – Constance had humoured the old superstition about being buried alive by accident in which her sister had believed, and made sure with a femoral incision! She remembered her own insistence upon every scrap of detail in the case of Sam’s death – how she had implored Blanford to tell her everything down to the smallest fact, pain her though it might. It was a way of mastering pain to absorb it like this – she now recognised that Felix Chatto was doing the same thing.

  It was curious also that the references to Smirgel, the German informer who had enjoyed a somewhat enigmatic if not mysterious relationship with Livia, touched a chord in the memory of Felix – for he recalled that when they were all together in Provence before the war Livia’s disappearances often seemed attributable to the existence of a German scholar who had been entrusted with the task of restoring some of the more famous paintings in the town collection. He was rather older than Livia and seemed a harmless, scholarly personage. Was it Smirgel? And did their attachment date from then? She must ask Affad to find out; then all of a sudden she felt the wild pang of her lover’s absence like a knifethrust in the loins.

  “It must have been him, Smirgel!” she cried with undue emphasis, to stifle the pain of the memory. “He told me he was restoring two famous ones. One was Clement’s Cockayne.”

  Where had this memory surfaced from? She did not know. Felix said: “Someone was filling her head with stuff about Goethe and Kleist and Novalis with which she would bore the devil out of poor Aubrey who was reciting Keats in his sleep. Somehow I must get over this soon, I can’t let her spoil my life by accident like this.” So love had its ignominious side also?

  Constance walked back to the clinic in a quiet despair at ever restoring the world around her to some sort of coherence. She told herself: “There’s a barrier that goes down between you – the process starts at first sight, Shakespeare was perfectly right, like Petrarch, like Marlowe. Click! Of a sudden you are thinking each other’s thoughts. Every other mental predisposition seems meaningless, trivial, vulgar.… There is nothing more to understand, it would seem!” Clouds had formed and swung low over the lake preparing for one of those electrical thunderstorms which punctuate life in mountain scenery. She was still living out the supreme collision of that first embrace, now so far back in time that it seemed prehistoric. Yet it was there, ever-present on the surface of her thought. She had changed very much. In the margin of a book she had borrowed from Sutcliffe she had found the scribbled words: “The same people are also others without realising it.” The wind had risen and the waters of the lake were marked with dark prints of paws. The sky had swelled, as ominous as the nervous breakdown she could feel approaching her across the water. She tried once or twice to weep but it did not work; her mind was as dry as a bone. Then it started raining and she ran the last hundred yards to the ferry with her handbag held above her head.

  Schwarz her do
ctor associate sat like a graven image at his desk reading the News of the World raptly. After long days spent with the insane he found these excursions into reality, as he called them, most refreshing; in this long catalogue of crime and folly, of mishaps and maladies, he felt that the real world was asserting itself, marking out its boundaries. It saw precarious, full of penalties – for one slip of the tongue or the mind and one became food for the doctor or the psychiatrist, a tenant of this quiet hotel set among lawns and orchards beside the lake. Here among the worm-casts of old theologies they knew for certain that science had abdicated, that the law of entropy ruled. Reality which was once so very “real” now only manifested a “tendency to exist”! All truth had become provisional and subject to scale. Truth was only true “on the whole”. Someone, perhaps Schwarz himself, had scribbled upon the blackboard above her desk the verse:

  Though dice thrown twice

  May remain the same dice

  Yet chancy their fall

  For hazard is all!

  But when he looked up from his paper and caught sight of his colleague’s distraught expression he felt a thrill of sympathetic alarm, for he knew his Constance well and knew the limits of her strength. It was a moment of great stress, of great danger, he could feel it. He folded his paper and drew a deep breath, deciding as he did so to make a lightning decision. He would not indulge the advancing illness by suggestions of rest and careful sedation – he would risk exhausting her further but pushing her onward into a case which might occupy her mind and temper her distress. He said, hardly giving himself time to think the matter out, “Look, Constance, I have come to a decision about Mnemidis, but I want to talk it over with you before acting. I have decided that we should surrender him to the authorities and freely admit that we can do nothing with him. He is too sane or too mad. It’s idle to talk of treatment. Besides, I am afraid of him, which is bad in a therapist! I was listening to the transcriptions again last night. It’s no good. He is acting all the time, even to himself!”

  Constance was already on her feet with her cheeks flushed. “You can’t!” she cried with a vehemence that did his heart good to hear. “He is the most interesting case we have ever had. What a waste to let him rot away in the high security prison for twenty years, without trying to at least document the paranoia. It would be a shame – what on earth are you thinking about?”

  “My skin, frankly. He is dangerously sane and altogether too articulate for our safety. I’m lost, Constance. Listen for yourself – everything he says is true and yet it’s all false. It all comes to the boil, slowly and then … bang! – a crime. From another point of view it’s a waste of time, of our time, for there are cases we can help. Don’t you see?”

  “No, I don’t! And if you won’t continue with him I shall take your place. I’m not afraid of him. Besides, you have the old ‘Malabar’ at hand if anything goes wrong, gets out of hand. I implore you to reconsider the matter; let me take a hand for a bit with him. He has not discussed the actual murders yet, has he?”

  ‘Not in detail; he is busy trying to justify himself at the moment – and with what ability, it’s hair-raising! I am supposed to see him today. I was going to tell him about my decision and pack him off back to prison to complete his sentence.”

  “Shame!” she said, and taking his hand in her own firm grip went on, “Let me take over the session from you. Besides, I need something to get my teeth into, something to keep my time fully engaged! Mnemidis the impersonator would be just it. Please let me!”

  Schwarz made a show of hesitation and indecision. But as a matter of fact he was seriously wondering whether the decision was in fact a wise one; various factors in the case made him wonder whether the arrival of a woman doctor on the scene would not aggravate matters. He hovered between all these contingencies with an exquisite sense of vertigo. By doing this in order to restore the balance he felt was at risk in Constance he might … “O Jesus!” he said, and he was not a pious man, although a Jew, “O Jesus, help!”

  In hospital parlance the “Malabar” was just a strong-arm man who was always on hand to deal with dangerous or refractory patients. There were several in the employ of the clinic, but Pierre was their favourite – a giant negro from Martinique who combined overwhelming physical force with a warm gentleness, a ruthlessness of affection that had even the most difficult patients at his mercy in no time. “Pierre is bringing him – indeed, there they are! If you feel you can, then perhaps you should, Constance! But I have misgivings. Look at them.”

  The guard and the patient advanced through the forest side by side at an easy pace. Mnemidis was of a slight build but with very long arms and a strange domed head which gave him a somewhat professorial look – belied by his curious and sordid record. He glanced furtively sideways and upwards at the negro face of his keeper; they could not hear what he was saying but his expression was ingratiating. The negro did not walk, he sailed serenely onwards with eyes half closed – almost, you might have said, a sleep-walker. But he had one hand twisted lightly into the cuff of Mnemidis’ coat and with this invisible leverage he was actually propelling him gently in the direction of the psychiatrists’ lodge with its array of confessionals. They watched for a moment; then Constance was at the door. “I shall take him today,” she said with a new decision, “and give you a rest.” But Schwarz called after her: “Maximum security, don’t forget, please!” He had not forgotten the episode with the metal paper knife which could have cost him at the least a wound, at the most his life.

  But Constance was an experienced practitioner of the black arts, and as she slid into her seat at the bare desk she tested the soft bell which might summon a waiting “Malabar” to her aid, and also checked the hidden Judas through which Schwarz, if he so wished, might cast an occasional glance into the theatre of operations. A recording apparatus existed though its functioning was often doubtful because of the fixed microphone. A patient lying on the couch was fairly recorded, but if he became agitated and moved about as so often they did, or even simply sat up – as Mnemidis was just about to do – why, the recording was scrambled.

  She composed her hands upon the desk before her and waited for the door to open and for Pierre to usher in his charge, which he now did with a kind of dusky dignity which showed kindness and insight – for there is nothing more humiliating than to be shoved around when one is ill and knows it. But then Mnemidis might have phrased it otherwise for he spoke of it as “feeling real”, and contrasted it with less heightened states which he called “feeling normally unreal”. Quite a card, this man who sidled into the room looking about him as if recognising invisible onlookers who would certainly be amused by his predicament. “And where is Dr Schwarz?” he demanded at once on an insolent note and waited for Constance to explain the substitution. But it would have been an error to do this from a sitting position while he stood over her, and to redress the situation in her favour she said with quiet authority, “You can lie down, please. And put your handbag on the table where we can see it.” He did not like this at all and flashed alarmed glances everywhere, but she waited there impassive, staring at him, until slowly he started to consider obeying her. It was important that the female handbag (in cheap crocodile skin) should be deposited between them, for it contained his power, his malefic genius. It was probably quite empty, but for him it was a kind of bomb, at once defensive and aggressive. So long as he put it down somewhere he was disarmed. Well, he put it down, and she sighed with relief.

  He lay there for a while, smiling and pouting at old memories, while she watched him thoughtfully and reproached herself for the fact that underneath everything – if sincerity counted for anything – she was disposed towards this audience because she half hoped to hear the name of another Alexandrian: her lover, Affad! Even though she knew that they could never have met or had anything to do with each other! Mnemidis had hardly seen the place since his acting gift took him all round the world. “Where to begin?” he repeated wistfully, under his breath.
Then after a long pause he drew a deep breath and began: “The thing is this: how could things have been otherwise? What could I do? Have you ever thought about the predicament of being God for example – suppose one were? You couldn’t act otherwise. In my case – ah! listen carefully. In my case I was born without aptitudes or inclinations, and with little enough brains or beauty. I was just there, my mind as smooth as an egg, but with no direction, apparently good for nothing, and so society must suffer me. … O God, the emptiness, it leads directly to a state of alienation, one feels the fact of being a sort of cosmic mishap! The intense boredom is crushing. In my case it led however to a state of grace. By an accident I discovered a sortie. An opening. I found that without being actually great you can slip past the sentries into greatness, without waking the sacred geese …”

  A spasm of violent nausea seized him and he turned up his eyes into his head in a frightening grimace which seemed almost epileptoid. It died down slowly, leaving him pale and weary-looking.

  “Well?” she said, in order to keep contact.

  “Well!” he echoed. “One night at a party, suddenly and quite involuntarily I uttered a false laugh, in a vague desire to amuse. The cracked hysterical laugh of a servant girl. It had such an instant success that I was as if stamped for life as an impersonator. I became in demand at parties where I would laugh until I had everyone shrieking with mirth, or trembling with anxiety for sometimes it went on too long, I could not break it off.” He put his bands to his throat as if exploring old bruises.