The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  Again he banged his fist upon the bed until the springs twanged. The whole confused details of his own apostasy, his own refusal of the body of Christ, the cannibal totem, rose up to choke him with a sense of his unworthiness, his insufficiency. He let out a groan. Blanford said rather primly, “I do understand a little bit. You mean the Philosopher’s Stone, don’t you?” But the clerk was plunged in his reveries and only nodded abstractedly, as if he were listening to some distant music too absorbing to allow him to shift his attention to what Blanford was saying. “But that is not the sort of treasure one finds in the ground, like a crock of gold containing a liquid rainbow … is it?” The question was useless and deserved for answer the silence it got. Quatrefages now whispered something to himself, quietly and confidently, nodding his head sagely and with resignation. Then he sank sideways on to the pillows cradling his heavy head in his hands as if it were a Roman bust, and fell asleep. Blanford watched him for a while with curiosity and sympathy; his mind seemed to burn with such pathetic intensity in his lean body. Now, sleeping there, with his long nose aimed at the pillow, he looked touchingly defenceless. His wrists were so very thin. As the light had already been turned off there was nothing left but to tiptoe from the room and down the creaking staircase.

  He paused to whisper a word to the sleepy night-porter who was putting his improvised bed to rights. Then down to the icy river and the bridge which steered away from the wakening city to the wide green hills beyond. He set out in a new burst of energy to walk back to Tu Duc. Everything on that joyful morning seemed to gleam like a new coin – a newly minted currency of vivid impressions. He felt words stirring inside his mind, like some long-hibernating species which a tardy spring had wakened only now, struck by the romance of the green swirling river and the cypress-punctuated hills he was approaching. To really appreciate a place or time – to extract the poignant essence of it – one should see it in the light of a departure, a leavetaking. It was the sense of farewell in things which impregnated them with this phantom of nostalgia so important for the young artist.

  He felt the lure of language stirring in him, like a muscle stretching itself, cramped from long disuse. He did not know how to contain nor what to do with all this happiness. He approached the sleeping house across the unkempt lawns, cutting the dew with every step and feeling the moisture soak into his tennis shoes. A black cat sat on the mat by the kitchen garden – just like in his first nursery-book. But more wonderful still; from the rumple of bedclothes which hid the secret form of the naked Livia he could only pick out one slender hand with its long fingers relaxed and extended – one finger yellow with tobacco stains. He stripped and crawled in beside the sleep-sodden half-drugged nymph and, glad that she slept on, set himself to studying every feature of that slender expressive face with its striking alignment of bones and planes.

  He tried to pierce with his eyes the very real bewitchment which transformed it; he realised that what he saw was not Livia but his own transfigured version of her – the reflection of his love. Beside the bed was the little box with the cheap wedding ring he had bought in Lunel from an old Jewish lady in a booth which sold lottery tickets and betting slips. He slipped it softly onto her unresisting finger and, like the unwise mooncalf he was, kissed it. He made love to her at her whispered request, though she neither opened her eyes nor in any way altered the disposition of her body; he moved her about as she lay there, quite limp, rather like one of those articulated “lay figures” that artists and dressmakers use.

  Their united spirits seemed to wash down the long river together, entangled in one another, and then far away out to sea – the deep sea of a new sleep. But in order to leave her undisturbed he took a blanket to the balcony and curled up on the stones in the vanishing dew, his sleepy head pillowed upon a damp towel. In the half-sleep of fatigue the whole gorgeous gallery of Provençal images unwound inside his mind as if on a giant spool. There were so many memories he did not know what to do with them. He heard Livia stir and, turning on his elbow, gazed through the open balcony door. Yes, she was sleepily awake and sitting up in bed; but he was not prepared for what he saw now. She was gazing at her ring-finger with a curious expression of horror he had never seen on her face before. It was the expression of someone who suddenly finds a scorpion on the lapel of a jacket they are wearing. Her lips all but cried out: “Who would have done this?” and with a gesture which combined anger with repulsion she snatched off the ring and flung it with all her might into the corner of the room.

  He heard its sour tinkle as it bounced about on the floor. It was quite a shock – something went dead and cold inside him as he took in this involuntary gesture of rejection. He too sat up now, to watch her sink back with a sigh into her bed and draw the covers over her head as she foundered into a deeper sleep. The ring! Blanford reflected on these mysteries and on the independence of Livia as he crossed the wakening garden and plunged into the icy waters of the lily pond; what did it mean? It was Livia who had entertained his callow addresses and his suggestions about marriage. She had shown no distaste for such a thought before. But here she was standing beside the pond, poised for a dive. “What has changed?” he asked her quietly, rather painfully, though he did not know what he might have to fear in her answer. “I was not ready for it,” she said, “Not yet. Perhaps I shall never be. We’ll see.”

  But then to make up for this disturbing hesitation she launched herself into the water and came swirling into his arms to kiss and embrace him anew, her body glittering like a fish in a net. So their peace was restored and their solidarity of feeling – yet in the heart of the matter Blanford felt the prick of sadness, of some unachieved intimacy which lay between them like a shadow. “I missed you everywhere, gipsies, Riquiqui’s, Felix, Quatrefages …” He smiled at her but he all of a sudden seemed to wake up with a jolt and tell himself: “She lies as simply as she breathes – about everything.” Later he hunted for the ring but it had gone. She had reclaimed it, then? He did not ask her.

  SIX

  Talking Back

  THE LONG SERPENTINE THOUGHT, AFTER SO MANY parentheses, came at last to rest in his silent mind. A very long silence fell, which seemed to both of them as if it might prolong itself unto eternity. “Hullo!” cried Sutcliffe twice, on a note of almost childish anxiety. (Ghosts always get alarmed when they are not in full manifestation – when they are off duty, so to speak – for it seems to them that they are in danger of ceasing to exist.) Yes. Suppose, I mean, that Blanford forgot to think of him! What then? It would be the end! And Blanford himself was, at that moment, bowed under the same thought, for he knew that once the ghosts, which together go to make up the collective memory, cease to care … why, one goes out like a light. Ask any artist! For a moment he was quite tongue-tied, he could not answer; in his imagination he had let the old-fashioned receiver fall upon the arm of his chair as he gazed into the fire with frigid intensity, for he had seen the face of Constance there, and it was curling up with the flames, it was disappearing. Sutcliffe could hear his uneven, heavy breathing. “For God’s sake,” he cried, “why don’t you say something, Aubrey?”

  But a sudden sense of helpless inadequacy had overwhelmed the writer as he wondered how to compress and condense into a few pages all the events and impressions of that short period which had come so abruptly to an end with the outbreak of the war. This brief glimpse of Constance had suddenly revived it all. It had been so extraordinarily rich, so bursting with promise; then abruptly the whole period had sunk out of sight, into the dark night of Nazi Europe. But what was he saying? For almost a whole year the war had actually been declared, though nobody had moved. The French lurked among their block-houses, wondering at the extraordinary paralysis which had gripped the whole of Europe. Meanwhile the life of Paris and London appeared to continue unchanged – the postal services were normal, for example, the telephone worked, the skies were as yet empty of planes. Yes, a few greasy-looking barrage balloons had appeared above the Thames. Somewhere, i
n some dim and amorphous region of the group-mind, feverish preparations were being made to forge a weapon which might contain the launching thrust of the German forces. But somehow nobody could believe in it. In all the soft paralysis there was a luxurious hopelessness, a valedictory sensation of the doom which must overtake the great capitals, one by one. Bye-bye to Paris and Rome, to Athens and Madrid.… One had a wild desire to revisit them quickly for a moment, to feel their living pulse before it was stilled forever. But even this was late in the day, after the formal declarations had been made. Yet for months, even years, before one could see some sort of war coming, see the horizon darkening. They had lived with this thing and knew that there was nothing to be done.

  Tiny incidents, mere crumbs, remained still in Blanford’s memories of that epoch, as if they had been simply markers to point the direction of the prevailing wind, the death-wind. How he had lent Sam the money to buy himself a uniform, while down in Provence Constance waited for him, for Sam, with a calm and smiling solicitude which so expertly masked the depth of her feelings. It was no time to decide to marry, but that is what they had done, and walking into his room at Tu Duc she came upon him awkwardly examining his fancy dress in the mirror with an air of rapturous astonishment. She did not actually weep but he put her head on his shoulders and began to laugh at his foolish expression. Meanwhile he said to himself, aloud, in the mirror:

  “If she doesn’t love me in this get-up she never bloody will.” The trousers had to be altered, the waistcoat set more snugly. And here Felix came to the rescue and found a tailor in Avignon. Sam had only a few days’ leave before returning to Oxford and the war. It was not entirely in bantering terms that he said: “I was really worried about being unemployable, and now look at this excellent job, so well paid. And bags of promotion, too, if one is energetic.” This was on the platform waiting for the train to Paris. Blanford saw Constance turn away to hide her emotion and he engaged his friend in banter to hide his own. The whole world was breaking up under them like some old raft. It was deplorable to be so callow, so undemonstrative.

  Yet there were certain modifying certainties, among them the general belief that the Germans would never penetrate the Maginot Line whatever their bombers might do to the cities. If there was war, even a long war, France would remain geographically intact, so that some sort of civilian life would go on until it ended. The famous Line was to France what the Channel had always been for the British. In the back of everyone’s consciousness there must have been obstinate archaic memories left over from 1914, stalemates on the Somme, and so on. Nobody thought about mobility, even later when it was clear that things had gone well beyond compromise. What then? Felix had received orders to stand by and aid the evacuation of British subjects should the storm break – and then to hand over his Consulate to the Swiss. And here came a remarkable and most welcome discovery. The three of them – Hilary and his two sisters – were of dual nationality and would claim Swiss citizenship. Their clever old fox of a father had had them all born in Geneva. Neither Sam nor Blanford, however, could claim such an immunity from action, while for his part the latter wondered whether he should not declare for conscientious objection. Felix offered him all the necessary documentation but he was gripped by conflicting uncertainties. The fate of the Jews had become clear, and while one could be against war in general one could not really turn one’s back on this one, when such terrible issues were at stake. Yet for the time he did nothing.

  And then somewhere in the middle of all this period comes a spell in Paris with Livia, a spell which ended in that fatuous marriage anchored by a wedding ring which was never to be worn. A disorderly, roughcast sort of student existence in the fourteenth arrondissement. A Livia who was always busy and preoccupied though he never found out what she was doing. But she was out at all hours in all weathers, and she talked in her sleep and drank absinthe with disquieting application. The little rented flat was a shabby enough place, but there was a table at which he could write so that one basic need was satisfied, though at this time he wrote mostly long letters. Yet stirring deep in the jungle he could hear the rustle of those animal doubts which came creeping upon him. He began to wonder what he had indeed done. At times when she was drunk her laughter was so extravagant as to be insulting. At times he caught glimpses of unusual expressions on that pale face – hate, malevolence, disdain. It made him feel fearful and sad, as if some vital piece of information was missing – the presence of a shadow which stood forever between them. There was. She had become so much thinner that her looks had changed. The head of the cicada had become narrower, the face an adder’s.

  Then his mother’s health began to falter and flicker and he was called back to her bedside where he gazed long and earnestly into that once familiar face, now pained to see that the long illness had altered all its stresses, composed it in new planes and lines, as if to copy on the outer skin the fearful loneliness and despair of the inner mind. She had things to tell him about her small fortune, and she had discovered that she could not trust Cade, the valet. He opened her letters and in general kept a spying eye out over her affairs. She had longed to give him notice but in all his other duties he was so perfect and so dependable that she had not dared. In this, as in all other things, she was lucidity itself, and even when she sank back into a last deep coma he did not think that she would die – indeed the doctor warned him that she might linger on a long time yet, so strong was her heart. Nevertheless he spent that day at her bedside, holding that frail hand in which the pulse continued to beat like that of a captive sparrow. In these long silences his mind went about its business slowly and densely. He wondered much about Livia and about his own future. His mother was leaving him a small marginal income, as well as the London house which could be let. There was also a small cottage on a farm outside Cairo where his father had spent many summers pursuing his entomological passion with silent assiduity. This was a mere shack, though, and there was hardly any land around it. Nevertheless, it was like a window open upon another country.

  Another problem: if she should by any chance wake, ought he to tell her that he was married to Livia, or was it better to keep the whole matter a secret? Already there was a sneaking premonition that he had embarked upon something which might become a capital misadventure. Sitting in that grey light of a suburban nightfall, trying mentally to align her ticking wrist with the ticking of the grandfather-clock in the hall, he wondered a little bleakly what would come of it all. In a sense it was good to have the war to think about – for it dwarfed purely human schemes, and one could shelve them temporarily. And yet he did not think there would be a war, despite all the signs; history was like some lump of viscid porridge sliding slowly down a sink, but with such an infinite slowness! Their gestures, their hopes and schemes, seemed to be somehow insubstantial, chimerical. Meanwhile the frenzy of Paris was still teaching, and he realised how pregnant were the lessons he had learned in this all too brief residence there – the capital of the European nervous system. So many valuable acquisitions: how total freedom did not spell licence, nor gastronomy gluttony, nor passion brutality.

  The old streets down at the fag-end of the rue St.-Jacques which smelt of piss and stale cooking were the mere folklore of life lived in a relatively waterless capital where the women did not shave under their arms, and preferred stale scent to soapy bath water. In summer the smell of armpits in the cafés was enough to drive one mad. Yet everywhere the river winds cradled the velvet city and one could walk all night under a canopy of stars worthy of grand opera – the brilliant glitter of outer space impacting upon the shimmering brilliance of a world of hot light.

  Appropriately enough she had given him a rendezvous (for the marriage) at the old Sphinx, opposite the Gare Montparnasse, where the respectable exterior – a family café, where families up from the country came to eat an ice and wait for their train – masked a charming bordel with a high gallery and several spotless cubicles. A simple bead curtain separated the two establishme
nts, but such was the pleasant naturalness of things in the Paris of that day, that often the girls, dressed only in coloured sarongs and with the traditional napkin over the arm like waiters (“no spots upon the counterpane, please”) came out to meet friends and even play a game of chequers with elderly clients whom time had ferried lightly into impuissance. “How marvellous,” she said when she came, “if you could take all this with you to smoky Euston.” He had told her about his mother, that she was dying; he would leave immediately after the ceremony, which was performed by a very deaf consul and duly entered in the Consular Registers. The Minister then offered them the traditional glass of champagne under the tactless portrait of an idealised Wellington. He was a kind old man but he could not keep his horrified gaze off the dirty feet of Livia in her sandals. Later, much later, when Blanford asked Livia why she had done it at all she replied with a contemptuous laugh: “It seemed so unimportant; so I made you a present of something you wanted.”