The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Now he is dead!”

  “Now he is dead!”

  It was as if the phrase resounding thus in echo somehow actualised the death and separation. Suddenly Constance felt weak at the knees, incoherent and shapeless, with all her joints floating with an ague. She sank down upon the bed and lay in the trusting embrace of Sylvie, aware only now of the tension of the counter-transference which she had tried to avoid by running away. The girl was kissing her with all the accurate passion of despair which was now turning to exaltation. With one part of her mind Constance was amazed at the strength of her fierce attraction for Sylvie. A whole gravitational field seemed to have grown up about this exchange, these sorrow-laden caresses. Their tears and sighs seemed to come from some vast common fund of loving sadness, and it was only when she felt her companion’s hand first upon her breasts and then invading her secret parts that she came awake herself, aroused and forced to face the demons of choice. Should she allow herself to slake the love of this beautiful young stranger? And even as she asked the question she felt her own nerves respond positively, her own kisses begin to ignite under Sylvie’s spell. So much for Narcissus! She was dismayed by the powerful emotions which swept her heart and only half-aware that all this was a reaction from the death of Schwarz. She had been driven out of control by it and from some depths of inner numbness had lost all power of evaluation. She was lost, washed overboard, so to speak. She clung now to the body and mind of Sylvie as if to a life-raft, happy to own this slender body, these graceful arms and slender expressive fingers. And to be loved after all she had endured was perfect heaven.

  So for a brief period of time these two defeated and exhausted women would band themselves together through love and unite their strength to face an unfeeling world. In their febrile ecstasy they were become deaf to the counsels of science and reason. How intrigued Schwarz would have been to learn of this fortuitous development caused by the shock of his death and by nothing else. It was love again in one of its many disguises. Sylvie was saying, “Won’t you go away now to get over it? O please take me with you! I can’t bear to be left again! Take me, Constance.”

  And this theme too was to become an echo in the conversation of her friends – the theme of departure. After all, France was free again, although far from restored to its former glories. Sutcliffe echoed the question, and then Aubrey in his turn spelt it out. It snowballed. Lord Galen also!

  The accumulated leave which Constance had coming to her spelt a whole summer and more, while Blanford was sufficiently advanced into convalescence to consider a southern holiday; Sutcliffe was waiting a posting … So it came about that they all met on the platform of the veteran express which served Avignon-indeed the whole eastern part of the Midi. Between them they occupied a whole section of carriage in the comfortable dining-car. “What price the Canterbury Tales?” said Aubrey Blanford. “The setting forth of the pilgrims, eh?” But as Sutcliffe pointed out sardonically, it was much more like an exodus of refugees. “No single complete unit like a couple, all broken up and fragmented, and in dispersion. A rebeginning of something, or an ending. This is the way that the seed leaves the sower’s hand.”

  But Blanford’s heart smote him with pain as he watched the two shy rapturous girls walking together, holding hands as they advanced along the platform, as if to give each other courage and consolation. Disgust and envy seized him, for he had been completely unprepared for this turn of events. Affad’s little son – that was also a surprise, for he was delivered to the arms of Constance by the old grandmother almost without a word. Yet there were tears in her eyes as she pressed her charge forward towards Constance. The little boy went hot and cold by turns, white and red, and he clenched his fists with excitement until the knuckles were white. He had never been seized with so fierce a happiness, and the two women cherished him as if he had been their own offspring. Lord Galen was retiring to his house to mature his plans for investing in marriages of the future. Cade and Blanford were setting off side by side, living on in a state of suppressed irritation with each other and yet unable to part. Almost every day the servant remembered some new little thing about Blanford’s mother – a small tesselation which enlarged the enigmatic portrait of her. Cade was sparing with these details, recognising them as part of his affectionate blackmail. Sutcliffe and Toby were supporting cast – so Toby said. They too were hoping for a restful summer in Tu Duc or Verfeuille or Meurre – they had a choice. But Sutcliffe like the others was a little plaintive. “I can’t help being angry because put upon,” he told Aubrey, “for, after all, what would you do if you were refused a specific and discrete identity, if you were forced to accept your role of etheric double merely, insubstantial and fantastic? Eh?”

  “Better than being a product of the old button-puncher à la Ibsen,” said Aubrey comfortably; he felt very much encouraged by this journey. “After all, Socrates was only the etheric double of Plato, he was not real so much as true, that is why he was so neurotic – all those fevers and fears and visions! Plato saved himself by shoving them on to Socrates’ account. He was absolved from the worst by his invention. I hope you will do the same for me.”

  “Synaesthesia!”

  “Yes.”

  “They will not understand.”

  “Nonsense! You will loom without a precise meaning like the statue in Don Giovanni, blocking the whole action, and gradually acquire symbolic weight because of your lack of personality in the human sense. Your speech is not that of a person but of an oracle.”

  “A semantic word – bazaar?”

  “Not exactly. You will make another sort of sense in using the same sounds.”

  “Is semantics more antics than semen?

  More suited to dons than to he-men?”

  “Precisely. You win first prize, which is a battery-driven chamber-pot!”

  “I shall apotheose into don.”

  “Cheer up, Rob. The Quinx be with you!”

  “Amen!”

  They sat, each following his private line of thought like a line of personal music. As for Constance, she now knew beyond a doubt, as a doctor, that man cannot do without calamity, nor can he ever circumscribe in language the inexpressible bitterness of death and separation. And love, if you wish. Love.

  Cade sat somewhat apart from them all, his head bowed over his hands as he carefully pruned and buffed his large sepulchral nails. From time to time he smiled broadly and looked around him as if he dared them all to guess his thoughts.

  Sutcliffe said, “And Aubrey, do you see an end to this bitter tu quoque – or will we go on forever?”

  “They say that Socrates spent the last night on earth in silent soliloquy, alone with his Voice, so to speak.”

  “Inner or Outer voice?”

  “Inner is Western and Outer Eastern. The Noumenon and the Phenomenon – reality turned inside out like a sleeve. It’s as clear as a donkey’s eyeball! Why aren’t you happier?”

  Lord Galen played with the stack of Order books which lay before him sheathed in rubber bands. They were full of orders for his Aids from thirsty, trusting Swiss couples. He was brooding on the marriage of the future – Adam with his great purple prick and Eve with her marsupial socket … Si vous visitez Lisbon envoyez nous un godmichet! It was prettier in English. “If you touch at Lisbon send us a dildo.” It was all very well for Robin to joke (“The Swiss lover has asteroids in his underwear and spiteful hair!”), but now the war was over one must really be practical and start rebuilding the future. His couples would be anointed by computers and married by voices. In the bordel he had overheard someone say cryptically, “Elle a des sphincters d’un archimandrite Grec!” and wondered if it might have any bearing on the new devices he was fathering, the distribution of which would be controlled by the obsequious Cade as a part-time task. The whole future of marriage was an absorbing topic (“toad in the whole” – the flippant Toby with his puns got on his nerves). Lord Galen burned to serve the lovers of the future. He was hurt by the ironies of p
eople who should have known better, like Sutcliffe: “Mon cher, it’s going to be a case of reculer pour mieux enculer. We will be able to have a fuck on the NHS, with nurses specially trained by Norse fishermen for low-calibre tupping – just clickety-click and the pretty turnstile does its work. They will call it Somatotherapy.”

  “Nature’s fond jock-strap I taught thee to pounce

  And spiral out your orgasms ounce by ounce.”

  “People are so cynical,” said Lord Galen to himself. “The lack of loving-kindness makes you very sad!”

  Blanford was scribbling some militant verses in his commonplace book:

  Blood-gulping Christian pray take stock

  I have doffed my butcher’s smock

  I have put away my cock

  Lost the key and closed the lock

  Of my passions taken stock

  Heard the ticking of time’s clock

  Heard the noiseless knuckles knock

  Toc Toc Toc Toc Toc Toc.

  He was thinking: If we could have a summer or two of peace and quietness one might commit another novel, a votive joy, a moonshot into the future, an Indian novel. “Why not?” said his etheric double accommodatingly, “If the harvest is good and the girls beautiful enough? Why not?”

  “Yesterday we devoted the whole evening to Strange Cries, Toby and I. We screamed our way into hoarseness with the macabre inventions of our fancy. We whorled and snibbed like a chapter of dervishes. Toby did the primal cry of all the nations while I toured the animal kingdom, ending up with a dog and cat fight which brought our Swiss neighbours tiptoing out on to their landings and balconies, wondering whether to call the ambulance or not. Nor did we lack invention, for after the prosaic we took to the fanciful and found sounds to illustrate abstract entities like, for example, the Magnetic Melon; some of these inventions took the skin off the Swiss mind. This morning I was in poor voice until my first drink. Last night they hammered on the door and menaced us with indignant policemen until we desisted. In the morning Toby decided to change his name to Mr Orepsorp which is only Prospero spelt backwards – though it sounds like the Welsh nickname of a man with an abbreviated foreskin. So we bade farewell to Geneva of hallowed memory, of hollow mummery.”

  “The ogres will be waiting at the station when we reach Avignon. Everything will start again when spring melts into summer. We will prune our books and re-set all the broken bones. As Dante once remarked to himself:

  See how sweet the stars are twinkling

  They have received the Greater Inkling,

  Silent, without presumptuousness

  They hang in Utter Umptiousness.”

  Some of these flights were to be attributed to the fine French wine served aboard the train. And while they joked the two girls sat with the little boy between them in silent rapture. Blanford thought bitterly, “L’Amour! Étrange Legume! Quel Concerto à quatre pattes! Viens cherie, on va éplucher le concombre ensemble!”

  It was grossly unfair to feel so bitter but he could not help it; ashamed, he hid in French. He was tasting the bitter fruit of sexual jealousy to the full, for he had planned to be alone with Constance. But if they were silent, the two lovers, the little boy had begun to speak as he watched the countryside spinning past them. “My father will always be watching over us from heaven. But he will not be able to come down to us except when we are asleep.”

  Sylvie kissed his head and squeezed his small shoulders to encourage his desire to confide in them, to relearn the freedom of speech.

  “I suppose you’ve heard about the Prince?” said Lord Galen to Constance. “The British have arrested the entire sect on suspicion of subversive activities and the Prince just got away in the nick of time in a Red Cross plane. He is coming down to stay with me until it all blows over. I know you will be glad to see him again.” It was a pleasant prospect indeed.

  “If Provence is herself again we’ll be able to tell, for all Spain will clamber in over the border to help with the grape-harvest. Spanish girls among the vines with names like Conception and Incarnation and Revaluation and Revelation.”

  “Not to mention Infibulation and Abomination and Peroration and Inflation and Deflagration and … Phlogiston.”

  “How ‘Phlogiston’?”

  “Just Phlogiston!”

  “Not to mention Adumbration, Marination and Abominable Secretion!”

  “The harvest is assured. As for me, I shall be thinking about the title for my autobiography. How about Last Will and Testicle or Parallel People or Catch as Catch Can’t or Out First Bailor Options, Inklings and other Involuntary Chuckles?”

  Cade poured out the wine. The train flew on.

  QUINX

  or

  The Ripper’s Tale

  inscribed to Stela

  A. Ghetie

  Contents

  ONE Provence Anew

  TWO The Moving Finger

  THREE The Prince Arrives

  FOUR The General Visited

  FIVE The Falling Leaves, Inklings

  SIX The Return

  SEVEN Whether or Not

  EIGHT Minisatyrikon

  … must itself create the taste by which it is to be judged …

  Wordsworth dixit

  ONE

  Provence Anew

  THE TRAIN BORE THEM ONWARDS AND DOWNWARDS through the sluices and barrages which contained the exuberance of the Rhône, across the drowsy plain, towards the City of the Popes, where now in a frail spring sunshine the pigeons fluttered like confetti and the belfries purged their guilt in the twanging of holy bells. Skies of old rose and madder, flowering Judas and fuchsia, mulberry and the wise grey olives after Valence.

  They were met by the long-lost children they called “the Ogres” accompanied by the faithful Drexel. They had come to carry out the long-promised plan of retirement to the remote chateau which the brother and sister had inherited. Here they were to bury themselves in the three-cornered love which had once intrigued Blanford and caused him to try to forge a novel round the notion of this triune love. Alas, it had not come off. The idea, like the reality, had been too gnostic and would, in the reality also, fail. But now they were happy and full of faith, the beautiful ogres. Blan greeted them tenderly.

  For their own part they looked rather like the members of a third touring company of a popular play – the two fair women and the boy, Lord Galen, Cade, Sutcliffe, Toby and so on. Be ye members of one another, he thought. If each had a part in the play perhaps they could also be the various actors which, in their sum, made up one whole single personality? The sunshine slumbered among the roses and somewhere a nightingale soliloquised. He had made one gesture which adequately expressed his feeling that this was to be a new beginning to his life. He had thrown away all his notes for the new book, shaking out his briefcase from the window of the train and watching the leaves scatter and drift away down the valley of the Rhone. Like a tree shedding its petals – slips of all colours and sizes. He had decided the night before that if ever he wrote again it would be without premeditation, without notes and plans, but spontaneously as a cicada sings in the summer sunlight. The fat man, his alter ego, watched him as he did so and expressed a certain reserve by shaking his head very doubtfully as he watched the petals floating away in a vast whirl just like the pigeons over the town. It would be like this after the atomic explosion, he was thinking – just clouds of memoranda filling the air – human memoranda. The sum of all their parts whirled in the death-drift of history – motes in a vast sunbeam.

  Cade suddenly laughed and struck his thigh with his palm, but he did not share the joke with them. Perhaps it was not a joke?

  Sutcliffe said with dismay: “But surely we aren’t going to let the ogres re-enact the terrible historic mistake which was the theme of your great epos – the heroic threesome of romance? Come! It didn’t work in life any more than it worked in the novel, admit it!” Aubrey did, but with bad grace. “Three into one don’t go.” Pursued his alter ego: “Though God knows why n
ot – we should ask Constance, for perhaps the old Freudian canon can tell us why. Anyway, if it was good enough for Shakespeare it is good enough for me!”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The Sonnets. The situation outlined in them would have made perhaps his finest play, but he fought shy of it because instinctively he felt that it wouldn’t work. We must really try to save the poor ogres from the same fate – not let them come round again on the historic merry-go-round with the hapless Drexel. Save them! History, memory, you promised to avoid all those traps: otherwise you will simply have another addition to the caveau de famille of the straight novel and Sylvie will remain forever in the asylum, lying under her tapestry and writing …”

  “She has been trying to write my book, the one I am just about to begin by marshalling all these disorderly facts into a coherent maze of language where everyone will find his or her place without jostling or hurry. But I realise now that if you don’t have the built-in intimations of immanent virtue as described by Epicurus, say, you will end up with an excessive puritan morality, and overcompensate by un-scrupulousness, even by sheer bloodlust, marked by sentimentality. At the same time one must tiptoe and with care, one must advance au pifomètre, ‘by dead reckoning’.” It was obvious to both that the sort of book they sought must not repeat the misadventure of Piers and Sylvie for what they wanted to refresh and reanimate was the archaic notion of the couple, the engineers of grace through the act. Actually it had happened, and thanks to Constance, her massage and her physical pleading had suddenly awoken his spine and with it the whole net of ganglia which revived and tonified his copulatory powers. Thaumatology! the death-leaps of the divine orgasm like a salmon: the two-in-one joined by an immense but penetrable amnesia which they could render gradually more and more conscious. To hold it steady to the point of meditation where it is blinding and then slowly melt one into the other with a passion which was all stealth … Who abdicates in love wins all! “The Garden of the Hesperides” is within the reach of such … The kiss is the pure copula of the vast shared thought. “I love you!” he said with amazement, with real amazement.