The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Though spring was here the station of Avignon was a draughty place to argue about who was going to stay where. Finally the main party decided to stay with Lord Galen whose establishment was the most comfortable until such time as the house belonging to Constance in Tubain was ready to receive them. This would give them a valuable respite of a few days to organise the plumbing and painting which was undoubtedly quite necessary after years of neglect. It was astonishing even that the edifice remained watertight and with a solid roof after so many war years. But surely all this could be put right for a summer; in a vague way the notion recaptured some of the élan of that earlier holiday – situated in prehistory it would seem now – when they had all been young. Before the War?

  The kiss of Judas – the poisoned arrow of our history became something one could learn for kitchen consumption. Seen from the point of view of the City of the Popes it signified the truth of the matter – namely, that our whole civilisation could be seen as a tremendous psychic mishap. The baritone pigeons crooning among the tintinabulous belfries calling the faithful to prayer which had become a mere expedient, not a way of breathing.

  “I am writing a defence of Inklings.”

  going “Inklings of what?” dying

  going “Of the absolute, silly.” dying

  gone “And what, pray, may that be?” dead

  “An inkling.”

  SUT said: “I have taken another and less uncommon path. Ever since I founded my group, called Mercy-Fucking for the Hard-Pressed, I have never wanted for clients. The robot did it all.”

  Lord Galen, who had come silently into the room in order to bid them to dinner in the grange, pricked up his ears and said: “Did I hear the word robot? Why, you take the words out of my mouth. As you know I have great post-war plans for a rational deployment of my capital in several ways. One of them is going to be in marital aids. There will be a great need for marital aids. I am trying to arrange for some to be blessed by the Pope as part of the promotional campaign. The chances seem promising at the moment.”

  The two men, if that is what one can call them, congratulated him with unfeigned affection and followed him down to the vast kitchens where trestle tables had been laid out for them and the vivid odours of roast pork and ginger flew about like doves of promise. Of course there was constraint – Constance with her silent companion! The little boy had found the two daughters of the caretakers and sat between them happily. The rest disposed themselves around unfinished conversations and fell to work, served by the old farm woman and her youthful niece.

  How Blanford with his shyness and pain over Constance irritated the lady as he eyed her; she glared down at her hands, resenting his air of inescapable chasteness – the despair of a Prometheus chained to the bleak rock of his moral virginity. She hated him! What a self-satisfied little prig!

  “My yoga teacher told me that one of the great problems of the hermetic schools was to prevent the lama turning into a robot, to prevent him falling asleep at his loom. Don’t you think that is a fair comment on Lord Galen’s marital aids? After all, a simple kiss describes a trajectory through the human consciousness, for it raises the blood heat and adds to secretions like sugar and insulin. You may be sure that Judas knew that.”

  “Pity you emptied out all those notes over the valley. You will feel the need of them.”

  “I have them all here, night and day.” He tapped his forehead. “You will notice them coming up in my conversation because they represented my most intimate obsessions, problems I could not solve; and without a solution I could not advance in my heart. For instance, problems of form and style essential to my new book. I was much encouraged by the courage shown by Rozanov, and also by the jumpy hysterical jottings of Stendhal in his Souvenirs Intimes – half-intelligible as many were. They carried his authentic quirk, unmistakable turn of speech. They helped me in my search for a form. I said to myself that one does not look for great truths in a pantomime, but how refreshing if you found some in this form, no?”

  “I am a modern man,” said SUT, “and I think men wonderful in principle; but of all men the most wonderful seems to be me. I am sublime. Nature exhausted Herself in creating me. Other men – well, how easy to see that she ran out of ideas. They are tadpoles. Do you tell me that your yoga can cure such a conviction?”

  “Yes. As it cured my back pains. Relief of stress caused by pressure of an unduly swollen ego. It could lead to trouble in the long run.”

  “But you are talking as if I am real. Here I have been feeling so diaphanous and now you tell me I am tangible.”

  “As tangible as a marker in a hymn book; but you cannot sing any of the psalms, my boy.

  The pathos of metaphor will spell

  The secrets of your wishing well,

  Brainless as odalisques must be –

  The difference twixt thee and me.

  To catch a wind, put out a sail.

  To catch a mind, put out a soul.”

  The wine, a wonderful Fitou, was taking its toll and enlivening the talk. They found themselves liking each other’s company more than they had realised; only Constance and her companion lived in a cage of silence and ate with lowered heads. Lord Galen was joyful in his brainless way and Cade watched them all from under his drawn brows, like a mouse from its hole in the infinite.

  And that beautiful profligate, the choice companion of Constance, what of her? Sometimes with a hanging head she wept silently from pure joy at her lot, at her luck. Blanford watched her superstitiously and with unwilling sympathy. She wore vast golden sashes to match torrential golden hair and blue eyes full of humour; their constant gaze made them seem like the riding lights of an anchored yacht. Lips uncials of sweet compliance. But she was never quite present, always listening to the inward monitor of a restless mind at odds with itself. Yet watching her and remembering some of the things she had written in the manuscripts which Constance had shown him he realised with envy the truth of her beauty and her genius. Softly he repeated to his own mind, “I dream of writing of an unbearable felicity. I want to saturate my text with my teleological distress yet guard its slapstick holiness as something precious. To pierce the lethargy, indolence and distress of my soul. But the boredom of knowing the truth about things is killing me – the overturned cradle! You see, time, which we all believe in, becomes solid if it persists long enough. Time becomes mass in mathematics. For everything is obstinately and deliberately turning into its opposite. That is the nature of process when you get behind the law of cosmic inertia. The universe simply does the next thing; it has no programme, does not predict, knows not where it is going. A perpetual spontaneity rules!” He was jealous of Sylvie. She had no right to know so much.

  No wonder Constance had succumbed to the appeals of such a heart. And the epigraph she had chosen was apt for her state —the exclamation of Laforgue: “Je m’ennuie natale!” Yet he told himself: “I did not expect to be wholly original; secretly I did not think I was really in the Grand Class. But I decided to strive for the heights and at least make myself wholly contemporary, absorbing all the fads and poisons and truths of the age, fully aware of the danger of overturning my applecart by caring too deeply. Yet simply to go on without achieving anything of note – the idea was unbearable. And end up in old age ravaged by the terrible priapism of the very old – ineffectual, burning, solitary: and powerless against the pangs of diurnal lust. Not that!”

  Depth of focus is everything in passion as in prose. No more, please God, of those big-paunched invertebrate novels of yore, full of rose-water. An attitude to love which has taken the tang out of tupping. Prose style known to the French as genre constation de gendarme.

  Reality which seems completely merciless is completely just, being neither for nor against. Sometimes he caught sight of her profile, or the head half-turned towards the source of light. How munificent her deep gloating regard, the sumptuous swarthiness. (The dead are heaped around us in a state of failure.) The single imperative of the artist (eve
ryman) is bricoler dans l’immédiat, c’est tout! Reduce the work load of the heart, the tourist heart. Sutcliffe must have been following his thought for he said now: “Vulgarity in love is distressing, and for those who care about it, how vulgar Ovid is! He would work in advertising today, a laureate of Madison Avenue. Propertius, Catullus, autre chose.” He raised a skinful of wine to his mouth and drank. “Uncanny stuff, wine!” he said, putting down his glass. “I prefer girls of a territorial vastness whose centres of gravity are tellurian tits.” Blanford disagreed as he watched the other. With her long white neck she looked like a lily in tears.

  Someone commented upon the vastness of Toby’s helping whereupon he said huffily: “I have signed no contract with the Holy Ghost to abstain from pork in Lent.”

  The mansion of Lord Galen had been built in the grounds of an ancient tumbledown mas, the manor house of the usual Provençal style of which little remained except several vast granges or outhouses which had been turned into impromptu lodgings against the refurbishing of the newer (and rather hideous in a suburban way) houses. During the harvest and in winter the two further ones were crammed with agricultural machinery like tractors and harrows and combine harvesters. But the one in which they sat down for meals had normally been reserved as a workshop and garage for sick machinery. Exposed on the wall of this rustic dining room was a relic of this mechanical past which had been left behind as a wall decoration. It had great charm because it was clearly an explanatory poster which postdated the invention of the petrol engine by at most ten years. A famous make of automobile offered it to their clients as something which should be on every garage wall where the mechanic could consult it. It was a detailed diagram of a petrol engine extended and exploded so that its parts could be studied separately and their functioning grasped. Each member floated in the air separately, so to speak. This poster formed the backcloth against which Blanford and Sutcliffe sat, and Constance looking over their shoulders studied it with all the medical attention it merited – in the light of her avocation, so to speak. It was an embryology of the petrol engine – the foetal body with all its crude analogies to the human – arms, legs, as wheels, the vertebral column of the human spine. Sump, clutch, cloaca maxima lungs, guts …

  Some of this thinking was of course Blanford’s when he mounted his hobby horse about the flight of the ego to the West. Indeed she could hear his voice parodying her reflections. “Suddenly the human will metastasised, the ego broke loose, took wing in a desire not to conform to nature but to dominate it! A momentous moment, as when Aristotle put the skids under the shaman Empedocles and intellectually fathered Alexander the Great, whose tutor he was! Mind you, the alchemists of old must have known where this prodigious swerve of the human consciousness would lead, this obsession to hunt for the sweetness of traction. As you know, Tibet refused even the wheel – as if to hold up the business as much as possible. Obviously an ego cult fathered upon a driven wheel promised a total drunkenness – a fly-culture over which Mephisto would preside! Yet how irresistibly poetical the quest and how beautiful this racing human diagram in stressed steel, driven by a spark, breath, the cylinder-lungs, the oxygen burning, and the exudation of the waste in calx or smoke through an almost human anus. A fire-chariot woven out of mental stress and the greed of narcissism, self-love, vainglory. It has brought us the unbearable loneliness of speed, of travel, and lastly to the orgasm of flight. As you say, by their fruits shall ye know them. It has brought no peace while a displaced alchemical thirst for gold has attracted the most insecure, the Jews, and has brought us Lord Galen and the World Bank and the Marxist theory of value …”

  Then he would be visited by a gust of despair and add, characteristically: “O dear! I shall probably end in the condemned cell of some monastery counting the moons of Jupiter for my sins and manicuring my reputation by sonnets.” But the diagram would haunt her so that sometimes she was to dream of it, confusing it with an illustration from a medical work on embryology with diagrams of the foetus at various stages of growth, its detached parts all free-floating on the page. Yet her heart applauded him when he added: “But I deplore those who want to make a funk hole or a weeping wall out of the Vedanta, however despicable our present state and however desirable it is that we change our direction before it is too late. Yet destiny is destiny, and ours must work itself out in a Western way, carrying us all with it. Perhaps we could persuade the will to stop clutching; perhaps not. Personally I see no hope, yet I draw my optimism from seeing no grounds for it. I believe in a few things still. You are one.”

  She had never replied to this but just walked out of the room; but she had tears in her eyes and he noticed this and his heart stirred with conflicting confusions.

  But the gruff” comment of Sutcliffe was also apposite to the matter. “Crude antithetical thinking”, he said, “is the mark of the second-rate mind. It would be fatal to behave as if we had something special to expiate – that would be mere pretension. If you had ever seen a Kashmiri merchant or a Bengali bunia or a Hindu business man you would realise that the West has no monopoly in materialism and ego-worship. So there!”

  It was true, of course, and Blanford knew it in his heart of minds. His version was too pat. He put aside the latter for the moment. There were more important things afoot. He managed to get the girl aside the next day while Sylvie was having her siesta, a chemical sleep, to say: “You have been up to Tu Duc, and yet you have said nothing about it. I don’t even know if it’s still standing. I hardly dare to ask.” She flushed, overwhelmed by a sudden pudicity. She realised that the whole matter of Sylvie’s presence had begun to overcloud the question of them all returning to the status quo ante: could he bear to live with her under the same roof? It was unpardonable, what she had forced upon him, and she knew it. Suddenly contrite, she took his arm with all the old affection and said, “Darling Aubrey, yes, it’s all there and still in good repair thanks to the new couple Blaise left behind when they went north to a better job with less work. It is all as it was.”

  Aubrey gazed at her curiously and almost tenderly. “And is It still there-you know what I mean?” Yes, she knew; he meant the old motheaten sofa of Freud, the analytic couch which Sutcliffe had rescued from Vienna a thousand years ago. “Yes, very much so! There is one little mousehole where the stuffing threatens to come out, but I can easily darn it.” There was a long silence and then came the question she had been expecting and somewhat dreading. “Are we all going to live together, and if so how?” She herself felt somewhat reluctant to answer it immediately, abruptly, without a preamble of excuse – there had been so much suppressed emotion in his voice. “I thought of giving her Livia’s room for the moment. She seems to have fallen in love with it; and she has asked if she might have the couch in it, now she knows its history. She seems to have fallen in love with that too. Aubrey, these are stabilising factors, I am sure you will understand and help. Please say you will.”

  He gazed at her and nodded slowly. “I shall have to see if I can stand life with you – it’s provisional for the moment. But, darling, I can’t take up any definite position, I love you too much for that. But the whole thing has been such a shock. And I suppose Cade will have Sam’s old room?” She nodded: “If you wish.”

  “Galen won’t want to let us go; he simply has to be surrounded by people or he gets alarmed and lonely!”

  “I know. But soon he will have Felix and the Prince to compensate for us. Aubrey, I hope you can face it and be patient.” He said, “So do I!” but his tone carried little conviction; nor was there really any alternative, for he was not rich enough to make other arrangements. In his inner mind he swore and ranted at this turn of fate: all the more painful in that she had elected to undertake his treatment, including massage and yoga and electrotherapy. They sat in helpless frustrated silence for a while, staring at each other. She wondered whether or not to carry the story forward and tell him more about this dramatically unreal attachment which had come as much of a surprise to her
as to anyone else. But she hesitated. The dilemma was even graver than superficial appearances suggested – professional considerations were inextricably mixed in with them. So it was perhaps inevitable that she should direct her steps towards the lunatic asylum at Montfavet where so much had come to pass during the war years and where her friend Jourdain the doctor still reigned. She had phoned to say she was coming, and it was with smiling deference to her (for he had always loved her but been too shy (unusual in a Frenchman) to tell her so) that he sported his ancient college blazer to remind the world that he was also an MD Edinburgh. Nor was there any insincerity in his exclamation of delight at finding her younger and more beautiful than ever. “Flatterer!” she said, but he shook his head, and then pointed to his own greying hair. Yes, he had aged quite a bit, and was much thinner than when she had last seen him. “Sit down, tell me everything that has happened since last I saw you,” he said. And then, realising how impossible a task that would be, added, smiling, “Preferably in one word!” This fell most aptly; she was able to echo his smiling and relaxed mood though what she said was actually laden with sorrow. “That I can,” she said, “and the word is … Sylvie. I have committed a fearful mistake, and a professional misdemeanour of size. I am in a fix. I want your advice, I need it!”

  “Where is she?” he said. “With you?”

  “Yes. But as lover, not patient.” The sob in her voice startled him and he leaned forward to take her hands as he stared into her eyes with astonishment and commiseration. He whistled softly. “But after all the precautions? India? Really, I thought …” She shook her head and said, “I must explain it all in order – even though I can’t excuse this terrible and quite astonishing aberration. Where to begin, though?”

  Where indeed?

  How humiliating too after so many years to come back here, not for treatment, but for moral advice – to what Schwartz always called the “dingy baisodrome of French psychiatry”! Talk of being made to swallow toads! She laughed ruefully. “But what went wrong?” he said, his amazement quite unabated. “After all, when first the situation developed we all behaved with impeccable professional zeal. You were alleged to have gone to India and I took your place. Then she was transferred by you to Geneva and the care of Schwarz. Then what?”