The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Connie, you know just how deeply guilty I have always felt about her – about my cowardice in escaping from Vienna without her, and leaving her to the mercies of the Nazis – to almost certain death. There was no excuse, and I never tried to excuse this terrible failure of nerve. But I lived, as you know, bowed under the guilt of this act all through the war – even sometimes perversely hoping that she might never return to judge me – though I knew it was not in her nature to judge! But it was there, the guilt. And then at other times I thought of her possible return as a joyful event: it would give me a chance to make it all up to her, to repay her for all her sufferings … How skilfully we can untangle the delusions of others! Yet when it comes to one’s own one is powerless not to believe in them, not to swallow our self-manufactured fictions!

  “Of course I was impatient with myself. I tried to treat the situation in a masterful fashion; I took up the phone and implored the doctor to put me in touch with Lil, direct touch. He deplored the idea but agreed and gave me a time of day which would be suitable. But I was unprepared for the dry clicking of her voice with its shy pauses, its lapses of memory. It was like talking to a very old and half-mad baboon.” (Here the terse narrative was caught up with a dry sob. After a long pause the grave measured voice of the old doctor resumed the thread of his story.)

  “I was gradually coming to a new point of realisation about her; it was dawning on me that her return to me in this new form was something to be dreaded rather than wished for. For so many years the thought of her had acted upon me like a sharp reproach; but now she threatened to become something altogether more fierce still – a living, breathing reproach to the man who had been responsible for her distress, her imprisonment! I suddenly realised that I simply could not face such a dénouement. I was completely unable to swallow such an idea. Moreover this sudden violent revulsion was completely unforeseen. It surprised me as much as it shook me. What was to be done, then? To deny her once more? To repeat my original act of cowardice, apparently because she was in poor physical shape? Such a thing would be unthinkable, unpardonable! Then what alternatives were there? None. The only choice before me was either to submit or else to vanish from the scene. The solution printed itself on my mind with a simple finality which was incontrovertible! I could find not a shadow of doubt with which to counter its cold and absolute truth!” Schwarz paused for breath and one could hear the scratch of a match as he lit up a cigar and puffed reflectively before resuming his account.

  “Naturally I envisaged something very swift and decisive, a bullet in the brain no less. And I unpacked the old revolver, broke it, and checked the shells. Then I put it carefully in my mouth like the well-briefed suicide I was – God knows, when I was a young intern I had helped clean up messes of this kind when on duty with a police ambulance. Memories came back to me as I sat there, feeling and looking foolish, with the icy barrel of the revolver pressing upon my soft palate. I knew of course that revolvers throw upwards as they fire and that one stood a fair chance of error if one fired it through the temple – one case I recalled had shot out his two eyes without inflicting upon himself the death he sought. The only foolproof way was to shoot upwards into the skull via the soft palate. This is what I proposed doing. What, then, was making me hesitate like this? Partly for company, and partly for encouragement I switched on the time-clock of the telephone and sat there listening to the disembodied voice repeating: ‘At the fourth stroke it will be exactly … Au quatrième toc il sera exactement…’ Don’t smile! I just could not press that cold trigger. The seconds ran away like suds down a sink and there I sat, pistol in one hand and telephone in another, riveted. Another memory had surfaced – of a suicide who had actually done the trick classically, pistol in mouth. But the force of the explosion had removed the whole crown of his head like somebody’s breakfast egg. An appalling mess for a young and shaky intern. I vomited violently as I worked at the cleaning up. Naturally I suddenly felt that I could not inflict this upon our own ambulance people. I rose and hunted out an old skull-cap of mine and a prayer shawl. Draped in these I resumed my vigil with the telephone and this time I stayed there obstinately, urging myself to show the necessary courage to complete the act. I had already sorted my papers, cheque books, identity kit, etc. so that Lily would have no problems when she re-entered civil life; I had even written her a cheerful note of welcome to my flat which she would soon own.”

  In the pauses of his discourse you could hear the puffs as he drew on his cigar and formulated what he wanted to say next. “Constance, I found I could not do it. A new cowardice had come to replace the old. I laid the pistol down – it is where you will find it. I am substituting a peaceable injection for it. It is less dramatic but just as efficacious. Goodbye, darling Constance.”

  His sighs expended themselves on the queer silence, and one was able to imagine what he was doing from the tinkle of the syringe against the ash-tray. He muttered a short prayer in his own language, but it was perfunctory and full of disdain for God in whom he believed only intermittently. Constance listened to all this sitting with the dead man at her side slumped at his work-desk. Then she called the Emergency Unit.

  TEN

  The End of an Epoch

  IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT WHEN THE NEWS OF SCHWARZ’S disappearance from the scene was telephoned to Constance who had celebrated a few days of leave by staying at her town flat, thus enabling herself to see her friends and even play a game of pool with Sutcliffe or Toby. The telephone cleared its throat and set up its rusty trill. She recognised the voice of the night-operator on the switchboard and heard with sinking heart the first ominous words which spelt the end of her leave. “Dr Schwarz has been taken ill. The Emergency Unit has been asking for you, doctor.”

  “What has happened?” she asked, but the line had already been switched, presumably in the direction of the emergency intern, for there followed a garble of clicks and voices and finally she heard the incongruous voice of the negro stretcher-bearer Emmanuel saying hoarsely, “Mister Schwarz he dead.”

  “What?” she cried incredulously and the deep thrumming negro voice repeated the message more slowly. The import of the words sank into her – or rather she sank into them as one sinks into a quicksand. Surely there must be some mistake? “Give me the duty doctor,” she said at last, sharply, and as Emmanuel faded she heard the voice of the emergency intern, old Gregory, take up the tale. “I think you had better come up here,” he said. “I am afraid that the old boy has done himself in with an injection. At any rate he is sitting at his desk and his heart has stopped, and there is a syringe in the ash-tray beside him. But Constance, there are messages for you, and your name on the blackboard. I am reluctant to call anyone in until you have had a look at the scene for yourself. I can’t really evaluate it, and I don’t want to invoke the police at this stage. Anyway, perhaps you know why. Was he specially depressed?”

  She gave a groan and a hollow laugh and said, “When is a psychiatrist not a psychiatrist? God, Gregory, are you sure that – I mean, perhaps if you massaged the heart?”

  Gregory made a sound something like a groan and an exclamation of impatience. “We arrived much too late,” he said. “He is becoming marbly already – I want your okay to uncurl him and spread him on the couch straight away. Otherwise the rigor will cause problems.”

  “Do so if you must,” she said. “I’ll be there as quickly as a taxi can bring me.” But when she arrived they had as yet done nothing, dismayed by the scribble on the blackboard and the dictaphone tablets. Schwarz looked so normal and so homely that all at once she conquered her fear and her distaste, and was glad to sit down at his side and bend over to study the dossier which he had open before him and which he had been studying while he waited for the slow poison to uncoil, serpent-like in his veins, until it reached his heart. Gregory watched her for a while with sympathy and said, “Yes, she was probably the last person to see him alive, you will have to ask her. I have no doubt.” Constance reflected, her face wore
an expression of compassionate distaste. Gregory said, “She must have come here with her latest manuscript, and perhaps he told her why – unless you already know why.” Constance stood up and said, “Now please leave me alone to listen to these wax tablets – give him the chance to tell me why himself, for that is clearly what they mean. Afterwards we can decide what is what, and reflect on the role of the police in this affair.” Gregory nodded and lit a cigarette. “And this girl, Sylvie, who was quite a well-known writer – what of her? Was Schwarz in love with her?” Constance shook her head and said, “No, it’s more complicated than that; I started to treat her myself – she is absolutely brilliant but schizophrenic. She fell in love with me, whatever that means, and the transfer went to hell, so that he was forced to take her back on to his roster, and to pretend that I had been sent far away, to India no less, in order to release her from her obsession with me. Such are the hazards of psychology!”

  “Well, the best would be to leave you to examine all the data before coming to any conclusion about the matter; he was not one to cause mysteries. Besides, this whole dossier seems to consist of love-letters – presumably addressed to Schwarz.”

  “No,” said Constance, “that is the trouble, they are always addressed to me. Schwarz’s job is to post them to me in India – for he alone knows my address and will not reveal it to her – that is the cover-story which has enabled me to stand aside and switch her treatment to him. When I last heard she was enjoying a short remission from the malady – all the more cruel because she always remembers in sane periods what she did and thought when she was mad.”

  “I see.”

  “It is the saddest of all our cases because she is a woman of the greatest brilliance, her writings are quite marvellous in their poetry. I suppose I shall have to go and see her now and pretend that I am back from India. She will find herself quite bereft without him, her beloved doctor.”

  Gregory stood for a brief moment smoking a cigarette with a somewhat dispossessed air; then he said, “Well, I shall go back to Emergency and see what other calls have come in. If and when you want us just phone down.”

  “I will.”

  “Constance,” he said with deep sympathy, for he knew how much the old man had meant to her, “Constance, bad luck my dear!” And in his awkward way he stooped to kiss her face. And now she was alone with the stooped figure of her oldest friend, suddenly overwhelmed by the surging memories of all they had shared together – memories now abbreviated by something as momentous yet trivial as a cardiac arrest. “Ah, my dear,” she said under her breath, “why did you have to do the one thing you most despised?” She switched on the little recording machine and heard his voice etching itself upon the silence of the room as if in answer to her question. As he talked in that quiet, measured tone she examined the little phial from which he had drawn the fatal injection as well as the empty syringe leaning upon an ash-tray with two cigar-butts stubbed out in it. Everything had taken place quietly and quite circumspectly; the other suicide equipment, the revolver and the cap and prayer shawl were at the far end of the table.

  The dossier was familiar, though since she had last seen it it had swollen in size with a number of new letters, all neatly typed carbons – presumably the originals had been sent to “India”. Sylvie must have visited Schwarz and left it behind her. She recognised the dazzling alembicated prose which had so much impressed Aubrey. She had told him the history of Sylvie and shown him the early letters. She did not forget the occasion when she came upon him as he replaced them in the folder in which they lay. He looked up and his eyes were full of tears of admiration as he said, “Goodness, Constance, she has done it, she has done the trick, she has become it! Against this all my stuff is feebly derivative and merely talented! This is art, my dear, and not artifice.” And he had begged to keep the file so that he could read and re-read the letters. He was much affected by the story of her life and of her unlucky illness as well as of her poetic obsession with Constance with whom she had fallen so deeply in love. Sitting beside her old friend and mentor, listening to his voice recounting his last hours, she thought over these incidents with a tremendous weariness. All of a sudden, within the space of a few months, reality had taken on a totally new colour; it was as if the world had suddenly aged around her, washing her up high and dry on to this shelf in time where she sat in a sort of trance listening to the voice of Schwarz and resting a hand upon the immobile shoulder. But she must have affected his centre of gravity for all of a sudden the corpse began to slide slowly towards her – she just had time to catch and steady it. Then she realised that it must after all be laid out and using all her strength she lifted and dragged it to the sofa.

  It was something of an effort for her, although Schwarz was not a heavy man; but there was no evidence of the rigor mortis which Gregory had feared, and the corpse lay back with a supple easiness, though as she folded the arms upon the breast its eyes opened like the eyes of a doll and there was her friend gazing at her calmly and temperately from the realm of death! She drew her palm across the eyes to escape the disturbing vision. They closed and the whole face seemed to sink back into its new anonymity, a timeless contrition. She sat and listened to it expatiating upon the reasoning behind the act of departure, defending the self-annihilation which had deprived her of her oldest mentor, colleague and friend. From time to time she shook her head with reproachful resignation, or rose to change a waxen cone in the little machine. Inside herself the profound depression grew and grew, an enormous dismay which threw into meaninglessness her every activity, either intellectual or physical. The loss of Schwarz rose like a wall in her consciousness, almost as if he had been a husband, a mate, and not merely an intimate friend. Yet she was dry-eyed, composed, and kept on her features a sardonic expression suitable to such an ironic situation: but it was a pitiful boast and she knew it. The slow voice held her in thrall, the slow insidious argument unrolled itself in her mind, and she knew that reality had all but overwhelmed her, had shaken the basis of her inner composure. When at last it ended, the recording, she gave a sharp cry, as of a bird stricken by the hunter’s shot, and turning back to Schwarz saw with disgust that his left eye had opened again. The other remained shut. It gave his face the faintest suggestion of slyness. It filled her with distaste. Impatiently she closed it once more with the palm of her hand, and then pressed down on both lids at once for half a minute to make them stay shut.

  This time they stayed shut. She found a blanket and drew it over him. Then she set the room to rights, cleaned the blackboard, replaced the wax cones on the dictaphone and replaced some books on the shelves. The revolver and the impedimenta for the first suicide attempt she did not touch lest they might yield fingerprints or other data to interest the police whose turn it now was to evaluate the facts of the case. She took up the telephone and called Gregory to tell him about the confession of Schwarz and invite him to put things into motion. “For my part,” she said, “I am going to call on Sylvie to tell her that I am back from India, and resuming her case.”

  But it was a distasteful prospect and she felt on the border of tears as she set forth through the pine forest in the direction of the small modern pavilion in which the girl lived – had lived for years. It was indeed her principal residence, and she had been allowed to furnish and decorate it to her own taste, so that it felt anything but clinical and austere, being decked out with brilliant hangings and old-fashioned carved furniture of heavy Second Empire beauty. It was also full of books and paintings. Her old-fashioned bed with baldaquin was set against a fine old tapestry, subdued but glowing – huntsmen with lofted horns were running down a female stag. After the rape, leaving the grooms to bring the trophy home, they galloped away into the soft brumous Italian skyline, into a network of misty lakes and romantic islets. In one corner lay the stag, panting and bleeding and in tears like a woman. Sylvie herself was not unlike the animal, but the tears had dried on her lashes and she lay in the heavy damascened bed with eyes fast shut
though she was in fact awake. Moreover she knew without opening them who her visitor was. Her mind was slowly emerging from sedation to an acquaintance with sorrow and bereavement caused by Schwarz’s withdrawal from her world. “O God, my darling, so he was right; I didn’t believe him when he said you would return. O my only love, my Constance! I am impatient to hear about India – O how was India, how calm was India? Constance, take my hands.” She put out her own which trembled with the shock of their meeting.

  Love is no respecter of persons or of contexts – it vaults every obstacle to achieve its ends. The wild spiritual attachment of Sylvie had not changed, rather it had fed on the absence of the beloved personage. Now she was trying to swallow and digest the long blank in her life for which India stood as a sort of symbol, a penitential silence on the part of Eros – for during her moments of relative sanity Schwarz had discovered that she knew as much psychoanalysis as he did: and this was a wretched enough augury for a cure and a return to ordinary life (pray, what is that?). It was a paradox that when she was officially mad she was often more advanced in self-understanding than at other times. So India rang out in her conversation – her only way of reforging the missing link with her adored Constance. “Has it so much changed, then? Still starving and god-drunk and spattered with dry excrement? When I was there long ago, long before you, and my love for you, I felt the moon of my non-being become full. The smell of the magnolia remembered me supremely. The deep sadness seemed very worthwhile. To be a whole person discountenanced all nature. It is different for me now that I have betrayed my brother in turning to you; I am clothed from head to foot in a marvellous seamless euphoria. In my mind your kisses clothe me close as chain-mail link by link. Only he sent you away in order to save me, but it was my ruin!”