After they had walked in friendly silence almost to the gates of the old house Hilary said, putting his hand on Aubrey’s wrist, “I don’t want to pry, Aubrey, but what the devil were you tearing up last night? It lasted ages, like in Chekov.”
“Aptly said,” replied his friend with a sardonic downturn of the mouth. “In fact old notebooks, bits and pieces. I wanted to clear the decks before leaving.” He paused, and then went on a trifle defensively, “Even a bit of a novel. I invented a man I called Sutcliffe – for lack of anything better – and he became altogether too real. He started following me about like gravity, as well as riding on my back like the Old Man of the Sea. I had to stop!” Hilary laughed. “I see,” he said. “You should have left them to the Museum. The papers, I mean.”
They turned the last corner to find Blaise the carter standing proudly outside the house, on the balcony steps, chatting to Constance and Sam, for he had come up from the station to deliver the old leather sofa which had been sent them for safe-keeping by Pia. It had arrived! It was covered in a clumsy skin of thick brown paper. Constance gazed at Aubrey with narrowed eyes and said accusingly, “I thought you told me Sutcliffe was invented.” She held the end of the invoice which contained the name of the sender. “We will see about that later,” said Blanford evasively. Together they picked up the shabby object and placed it in the conservatory among the palms, where it looked not inappropriate. Blaise did not take part in this, but stood and coughed on the balcony until the girl came back with a tray full of brimming pastis glasses. This cough of his was no stage effect – he had been gassed in the 1914 war. Constance had managed to secure the services of his wife as a cleaner as well as laundress, which was a great help to them.
So they all chatted awhile in the course of which, inevitably, the subject of the war rose again to the surface. “The President spoke last week – quel con!” said Blaise without undue animosity. “He has never seen what war is. He spoke of freedom!” It was the usual mental rigmarole without any form of pith – how could there be any in a country where the leaders themselves were so confused and so pusillanimous? As for freedom … The Prince had indeed remarked at Lord Galen’s dinner table, “Freedom is an evanescent thing – you only remark it by its absence, but you can’t define it. That is why the British refuse to understand us Egyptians with our desire for freedom. We will make a mess of things, no doubt, but it will be an Egyptian mess, our own personal mess – and what a mess it will be! But an Egyptian mess!” He had raised his head proudly and gazed fondly around him.
Sam set about undoing the string and tearing off the wrappings in which the old couch was swathed. “It’s Emily Brënte’s sofa,” he said. “No,” said Hilary, “guess again.” Constance said, “No more impiety, please. It’s the chair of prophecy, the sofa of divination. I shall spend the afternoon reading my psycho-whatsit pamphlets upon it and praying for guidance.”
Blanford had collected a Poste Restante letter from a school-friend, bookish like himself, who furnished a bewildering description of a Paris not so much frivolous about the war as totally unbelieving in its reality. “Sitting at the Dôme you feel that it simply cannot take place, not in this century, after all we’ve seen. Yet the danger gives a strange unreality to everything—the quality of amnesia. Actions become automatic. Look, sitting here on the terrasse I am watching the evolutions of some hirsute porters in uniforms trying to hoist an appalling statue of Balzac by Rodin on to a pedestal; finally they have waddled it up, like a penguin on to an ice-floe, where it will soon be almost invisible because of foliage; this week it is the turn of Georges Sand whose bust will appear in the Luxembourg accompanied by speeches which give one gooseflesh. Such rhetoric! Yet so highly appropriate for a people which can solemnly put a notice Défense d’uriner on the railings outside the Chambre des Députés! They are the true inheritors of the Anc. Gk. sense of civic anarchy.… And yet, like a douche of icy water, reality suddenly steps in with a fait divers like ‘René Crével commits suicide’. (He is a poet friend of mine you don’t know.) I was bemoaning this tragic fact to a painter at the Dôme, but he cut me short, saying: ‘Ce que je lui reproche … What I reproach in him is that he had good reasons for so doing. C’est pas ça la suicide! C’est pas sérieux! He has brought suicide into disrepute!’“
Blaise the carter, rosy as the setting sun, took his leave now, and his cart crunched its way back towards the town. Sam cleaned the paraffin lamps against nightfall and cracked open some packets of candles which they would set up in old saucers on the terrace table. This week Constance and Sam had been elected to perform all those tasks which come under the heading of “fatigue” – and some of the fatigues like the blocked lavatory had been distinctly onerous ones. Sam groaned and swore, but it was rapture to be alone with her. “They lived forever after,” he said as they worked, “in a faultless domestic harmony which gave people quite a turn to see.”
They dined early that eve – entre chien et loup as the French say, to indicate a “gloaming” – and afterwards the boys grew restless and elected to go for a swim in the cool waters of the weir, leaving Constance the washing up. Nor did she mind this – she wanted to be alone for a while, and the mechanical actions soothed her and enabled her to think of other things like, for example, those enticing pamphlets, so many of them with their pages uncut, which lay beside her bed. Love had rather got in the way of her studies and she had a bad conscience about the matter. So once she had put everything to rights in the kitchen she went upstairs and secured a couple which she proposed to read there and then, and in the most appropriate of places: the verandah with the conservatory. This involved some juggling with candles to obtain adequate light, but once all was in order, she lay down with a sigh and plunged into the labyrinth of suggestions and speculations which had completely altered her way of looking at things – given her an extraordinary new angle of vision upon people, upon individuals and cultures, upon philosophies and religions. It was as if her mind had been released from its cocoon of accepted verities, released to take wings on this extraordinary adventure into the world of infantile relationships, of demons and gods of the human nursery, and bestiary. God, it made her rage to find how lukewarm everyone was about these matters – the insufferable conceit of the male mind! Sticky old Aubrey blowing hot and cold down his long supercilious Oxford nose; bigoted Hilary; silly Felix …
She read for an hour, listening abstractedly with half an ear to the noise of their laughter, and the splashes as they dived. Then on a sudden impulse she got up, took her pamphlets and a branch of candles, and mounted the stairs to her room, which was now filled with rosy shadows reflected back from the giant old-fashioned cupboard with its full-length mirror. She sat down upon the edge of the bed and arranged her candles upon the floor so that they threw their light forwards and upwards towards her. Then she slipped out of her clothes and sat upon the edge of the bed, stretching her legs to their greatest extent and keenly gazing at the slit between her legs as reflected in the tall mirror. With her hands she spread wide the two scarlet wings of the vulva and stayed thus, staring at this terrible scarlet gash between her white thighs – a horrible gash, as if hacked out by the clumsy strokes of a sabre. Her vagina, her vulva – what a horror to contemplate such a primitive and horrific member! If a man saw this, why, he would go mad with disgust! She gave a small sob such as a bird gives when the shot strikes its breast in mid-flight. “My cunt,” she said in a low voice, still staring at it, “O my God, who could have thought of such a thing?” She was filled with a barbaric terror as she stared at the red gash. He would never stay with her if he should once glimpse this terrible bloody sinus between her two beautiful and shapely legs. She craned back, spreading the scarlet cretinous mouth wider so that it assumed an oval shape with part of the hymeneal net still across – it gaped like a whale in a Breughel painting. Poor Sam! Poor Jonah! She felt quite weak with despair and horror. In her imagination she seized him by the shoulders and clutched him to her while her hea
rt cried out to him: “Hold me, suffocate me, impale me! I am dying of despair. What good can come of poor women with this frightful handicap?” She rose with such impulsiveness – gestures winged with despair – that she overturned the candles and had to plunge after them and set them upright again. She could have wept with vexation, but she thought it would be better not to let herself go so far until he was there to comfort her. Nevertheless she did weep a little so that should he come very late he would see the tears upon her cheek and realise that she had suffered from his absence. He would be very contrite. She would forgive.… She drew a veil over the scene of reconciliation.
At that moment Sam himself was experiencing a wave of despair of roughly the same calibre; a chance remark of Blanford had set it off like a firework. Aubrey had said, in his gloomiest tone: “The power that women have to inflict punishment on men is quite unmanning, quite terrible; they can reduce us to mentally deficient infants with a single glance, make us aware of how shallow our masculine pretensions are. With their intuition they can look right into us and see how feeble and infantile and vain we are. My God, they are really terrifying.” Listening to this wiseacre of twenty Sam felt a sympathetic wave of horror pass through him as he thought how superior Constance was in every way to himself. Yes, what good were men? The role of Caliban was the best they could aspire to! He hated himself when he thought of all her perfections – a whole Petrarchian galaxy of qualities which made her, like Laura, supreme in love. And now they would soon be parted. He jumped to his feet. Here he was wasting valuable seconds talking to these fools when he could have been with her. How like a man! What idiots they were! He took one last plunge and rose panting like a swordfish, with arms extended. How delicious the water was, despite the desperate fate which lay in store for men! How he longed to feel her in his arms once more! He must try to be worthy of her! He was so intoxicated by the thought that he fell over a tree stump and ricked his ankle quite severely.
And when he did arrive at the bedroom door it was to find her asleep with the marks of tears upon her cheek. How callous, how thoughtless men were! They were just ogres with a sexual appetite, and apart from that quite unfeeling, brutal, philistine! He crawled into bed with wet hair and snuggled up close to her warm body, stirring now in sleep.
Despite these emotional polarities he was at once soothed by the physical warmth of her, and like a diver immediately plunged back into those refreshing innocent dreams of his early puberty, which always figured, like some mystical mandala-shape, in the form of a brilliant green cricket-field upon which the white-clad players, like druids, performed their slow reflective evolutions until the evening bell sounded four from the clock on the pavilion. The deep grass which bordered the field was where the schoolboys lay with their books and cherries. A population of rabbits almost as numerous had stolen to the edge of the field to watch as well. (The same rabbits now on many a secret airfield had tiptoed to the edge of the mown runways to watch the Spitfires as they rehearsed, landing and taking off.)
He groaned a small groan from time to time in his sleep, and automatically she folded him in her arms without waking up herself.
Two floors below, a long-visaged and weary Blanford was completing the destruction of his loose-leaf notebook which seemed to him now insufferably priggish and threadbare with all its wide-ranging sonorities. “A throw of the dice must decide whether the mates magnetise or not, whether they click and whether their product is a clear-eyed love or a mess – a mess transferable to their children.” He sighed and watched it burn among the other slips, for he was using the fireplace for his auto-da-fé. Later they would scold him and force him to clean up his room. He had said as little as he could about Livia, it was too painful to discuss; as for news of her, speculations about her, and so on, he left all that disdainfully to Felix Chatto.
“Europe’s behaviour was appropriate for those who drank symbolic Sunday blood and munched the anatomy of their Saviour.” So thought Blanford’s Old Man of the Sea – about the C. of E. It was pungent stuff – was he himself as pessimistic as all that? He thought and smoked and thought again; and decided that he was, and that he had done well to cleanse his bosom of such perilous stuff.
Unhealthy couple full of sin
Witness the mess that we are in!
Then, further on, another note which was destined to have a longer life among his speculations. “If real people could cohabit with the creatures of their imagination – say, in a novel – then what sort of children would be the fruit of their union: changelings?” He laughed helplessly in Sutcliffe’s voice and took a turn upon the terrace. The night was fine, like blue silk, and the stars were on parade in force, twinkling away like mad upon the operatic blue dark.
He got into bed and sought his restless slumber, head buried under his pillow, which smelt of newly ironed linen which had been hung out in the rain. The rain! He was not awake at four o’clock – the dawn was just hinting – to hear the swish of a light shower on the trees and on the stones of the verandah outside his room. The summer heats, rising from the brown parched drumskin of the earth, had given rise to a customary instability of temperature – little summer fevers which suddenly produced large ragged sections of free-flying cloud, so low that you could almost touch them. They were quite isolated, surrounded by summer blue, and they bore small showers or sometimes even hail which slashed at the vines and drummed on the grassy ground.
Bang! The report was so loud that the lovers started up; so did Hilary and Felix Chatto who was on a camp-bed in the kitchen. “What the devil!” exclaimed Sam. Could they be shelling the city? And who? Bang! This time they were awake enough to orient themselves towards the sound; it appeared to come from the densely wooded knoll above Tu Duc where they had once been to hunt for truffles in a holm-oak glade. But who could have got a gun up that steep hill, and for what reason? Certes, the whole town of Avignon lay down below it, across the river, with Villeneuve at one side turning the sulky cheeks of her castle towards the left. It had sounded like a light mortar, but there were no answering shots fired and no sound of aircraft, so, puzzled and disturbed, they started to make coffee and question. “We must go up and have a look,” said Hilary in an alarmed voice. The wet grey dawn was breaking through the forest. “Of course,” said Sam: so they gulped their coffee, and during this time two more shots were fired by the invisible artillery. They hastened, bolted their drink and food, and started the short but steep climb towards the summit of the overhanging hill. It took a quarter of an hour, but when at last they emerged upon the green platform it was to find that the weapon was only an old paragrèle, or cloud-cannon, which was firing shells full of salt crystals into the black stationary clouds above them. There were two old men alone to charge and fire this small mortar with its cartridges – the charges hissed upwards into the clouds which were swollen like purses with rain; yet after half an hour the trick worked and a light rain fell like smoke upon the slopes. One of the old peasants uncorked a bottle of eau de vie and passed round a sip after the success of their last shot. A watery sun struggled out and turned their faces to grey and then to yellow. They toasted each other with an Eviva, and then one of the old men remarked in an offhand manner, “They have gone into Poland! L’après-midi, c’est la guerre.”
The cloud had burst at long last.
TWO
The Nazi
THE LANDS OWNED BY THE VON ESSLINS MARCHED WITH the sealine in a desolate corner of Friesland, but without ever actually opening out upon it. Thus they shared the high winds and foul weather without in any way sharing in its picturesqueness, its refreshing breathlessness of spray and grey cloudscape. It was brackish land, poor land, encircled by shallow ranges of low hill which gave a deceptive profile to them, hinting at their penuriousness and the pains which they must inflict upon those who tilled them. Hills bent like pensive brows; thick yellowish loam, poor in limestone, which clogged under the plough, being too clayborne for rich crops. Winter came almost as a relief here, the lan
d sinking back into its secret silence among the frozen dykes and ponds where the ice-cocked speargrass suggested armies of swordsmen. The trees dripped noisily in the night thaws, letting fall their icicles.
It had been theirs since the early seventeenth century when the first Von Esslin – also an Egon – had entered the profession of arms and won himself some dignities and a small fortune from a lucky marriage. The large, ugly feudal manse had in some way inherited two incongruous towers and a small moat, now in use as a duckpond. It was uncomfortable and impossible to heat. Moreover, as for most military families hovering on the margins of being considered nobility of the sword, finance was a perpetual trouble. The land offered them an income from two gravel pits and a seam of very fine white clay which they sold to potters in Czechoslovakia. The old General’s pension was quite substantial, while Egon himself found his staff pay just about adequate for the life he led, which did not allow him to indulge himself in gambling debts, horse-flesh or actresses like many of his brother officers of the same caste but with greater means. He did not regret the fact, for he was of a serious, almost pious bent, as befits a Catholic whose origins on his mother’s side had been Bavarian. But as a family they were stylised now as being of the Junker breed, and they had acquired some of the massive obduracy and obscurantism of that class – retaining, however, a special weakness, a seasonal weakness, one might say, for the music that took them each year in the direction of Vienna, a capital they had always loved and where they had always kept an apartment with lovely views out upon the famous woods. But Gartner, the family house in the hamlet of that name, was a grim place, a difficult place to love, and now that his mother spent nearly the whole year there Von Esslin himself had begun to feel the strain: he was rather ashamed of the fact that he felt almost glad when the army called him away to his duties and gave him an excuse to live elsewhere.
The Avignon Quintet Page 58
